Transpo issues.

When I moved to the college town that I now live in, I knew that it'd be more affordable, especially if I could set up my life without a car, but I did know that every once in a while I'd have to compensate for not having a car. Like, when I had to get a taxi back from the mall with all my shopping and my home goods that I had bought, since a new rug for my apartment was too much for me to get back by bus. So, it turns out that the state exam isn't administered strictly locally, but I'll have to take it at a community college in a smaller town like 30 minutes east of here. I checked, and there's like a $7 bus that you can take that picks up like super near me, but with Covid-era schedule cutbacks, it won't get me there in time for the morning exam. So, I'll be taking it the day before, and getting a cheap hotel near that downtown and the exam site... I could maybe hitch a ride with another student, but that's a lot of coordination, and people have car problems and family issues and whatnot that can make them late, and my attitude is, why risk it, especially since I'd have to chip in gas money anyways, and it'd be just like $70 to get there by bus and get a hotel, and it's like $50 just to reschedule the exam if you don't make it there in time... Much better to be there the night before, get set and organized, and be there fresh at 9am to take the exam, it's just one of those one-time expenses that I have to deal with from moving here. And I can always hitch a ride back and split gas money with somebody then, but on the way there, it seems better not to.

Final day of the healthcare class.

On the final day of the healthcare class, our one (older) (African) instructor told us all that we had passed, and her and the other instructor passed out practice state exams that we could work on, while they called us up individually to finish the paperwork showing that we'd put in the required number of hours and attained sufficient skills. "And then you can go," she said, "And get leet" ('lit'). "I'm going to go in my uniform!", the one (pink-haired) girl with the LINK card was like, and our one (African) instructor just laughed uproariously at that, it must have struck her so funny. . . . (Years ago, an acquaintance who did Peace Corps in Senegal told me to be prepared for different senses of humor before my trip to West Africa, and I've found that that observation is true, and for a broader region as well... It's not like the sense of humor is necessarily different, but the level of response to the same bit of humor can be wildly varying.)

Addendum.

My most unsettling moment from the first day of clinicals was how this one nurse in our unit, this (older) (fatter) (late middle-aged) (mildly warty) (dyed brown-haired) (white) woman who seemed very know-it-all and had her mask resting under her nose all the time, and who didn't seem all that interested in anything at all, but who also was always on the warpath about something, overheard me speaking to someone right at the end of the day, and was like, "What's your story? You don't belong here," and she said it in a really decisive, authoritative way, but also a genuinely curious one.

Healthcare licensing class disappointment.

After our first day of clinicals at my one healthcare licensing class, some of us were chatting afterwards as we walked towards the parking lot, and then stood around chatting a bit afterwards. And, after a few (women) finished bitching about something from that day, I was like, "And worst of all, there was no Taco Tuesday!" And, at that, "I hate this f*cking place," my one (shorter) (light-skinned) (mildly eccentric) (black) classmate was like.

What's up with these typos in books lately?!

Just finished reading a new tied-into-the-film edition of Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile," which was super sloppily edited: 1) A sentence that appeared after a newspaper article quoted in italics got glommed onto that paragraph, so that it appeared in italics, too, like it was part of the newspaper article that was quoted. 2) They had "it's" for "its" at one point. 3) In one short sentence of dialogue, they omitted the word "said." 4) At one point, a character's last name that began with "B" started with an "R" instead, making me take up my pencil and connect the lower legs of the "R", to kind of make it look like a "B".

A dream of karaoke.

A few months ago I dreamnt- I was at this dinner with a quite broad rectangular table and cream-colored table cloths and a lot of food heaped up on bronze trays all around it, and there was a karaoke portion where people would rise from their tall and blocky and somewhat throne-like wooden chairs and sing half-jokingly to all those around, and then, at the encouragment of some other diner, I stood to sing, and I began to sing a new Katy Perry song "Purple Flame," and then somehow I was with her running at a trot from the dining room and going through like the entrance tunnel that goes out into a stadium only it came out not into the arena floor, but out onto the side of the stadium seating, and she was singing the song into her microphone as she jogged, crowds hanging down over us, and then with the crowds on our sides as we trotted in the broad space like an aisle between seats, running in a circle around the middle of the stadium seats of the stadium as she sang. And, then, I woke up. . . . (A number of months ago I read a news story invovling the "Violet Flame" of the I AM Movement, and perhaps my sleeping brain combined that with Katy Perry's New Age dabbling, and some tweets about a new song she has out with some other artist.)

Initial squirrel aggressiveness.

Back like almost two months ago like right before Christmas when I was waiting for some packages with books shipped in from abroad to come in, my one neighbor upfront had had some big envelope delivered and wasn't picking it up, and then a few days later when I went to go check for mail on the front porch, it was totally ripped open, which got me totally freaked out, since someone was maybe stealing packages or ripping them open to check in them for money that they could take. And, as I was noticing this, the one (skinny) (Latino) undergrad from upstairs who wears a leather jacket was coming out the front door, and I showed him that, and he said that it was probably the squirrels, and he said that once his roomate had had some food delivered and the food delivery man had left it out on the broad front porch rail at the front of the porch, and when his roommate didn't come down and pick it up right away, the squirrels got into it. Then, he went and looked around and there was this empty plastic chocolate tray that was all mangled at the front end and he was like, "See, they probably chewed it open and dragged this out," and as he said that, he leaned slightly forward and held it up and out with his right arm at a weird angle in a very emotional way, like someone would hold a tire iron to attack someone coming at them to hurt them. And, I thought he was on drugs, since I hadn't yet seen what the squirrels around here can do. A few weeks after that, too, one of my books shipped in from Germany had a cardboard section of its weird way that it was packed partially ripped out, and so for a while then I really thought that someone was getting into all of our packages. (I now think that that second thing that happened was just an accident of delivery.)