A child's fascination with rule-breaking and perhaps evil.

The last time I hung out with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) and her family, it was interesting to play with her 3 year old daughter.

Like over a year ago I found out that her daughter likes this one I guess pretty popular kids book "No, David!", which details all the ways that a little boy gets into trouble, before at the end of the book his mom or whoever gives him a hug and comforts him and is like, "Yes, David."

"It's total wish fulfillment and fascination with what you're not supposed to do," my friend's husband was like, when we were discussing the book then.

Anyhow, on this most recent trip, I was playing with her, and she had this wooden pizza where you could velcro the pieces together into a whole pie and velcro different toppings on top of it, so after we had arranged the toppings on the pizza and put it on the dining room table, I took her baby doll that she had handed to me and pretended to have it crawl towards the pizza.

"The baby wants the pizza!", I was like.

"Oh no, the baby wants the pizza!", her mom was like.  "Can the baby have pizza?"

"No, that's adult food," her daughter was like.

"So better go grab the pizza!", her mom was like, and her daughter ran over and got the pizza off the dining room table from in front of the baby doll that was crawling towards it.

"Oh no," I was then like, making the baby continue to crawl, "The baby's going to fall off the table!", and I had the baby keep going and going straight for the edge of the dining room table.

"Oh no, the baby's going to fall!", her mom was like, "Go help the baby!"

And, her daughter looked around nervously and wasn't sure what to do, and since she was still holding the pizza, her mom was like, "Here, give me the pizza, I'll hold it so you can go help the baby."

And, after her mom took the pizza, suddenly her daughter looked very distracted, first looking one way and then the other, and then taking a few very slow and very halting steps towards the table, and it suddenly became very obvious that she was purposefully dawdling, probably because she wanted to see what would happen next, if the baby doll fell off the table in my play scenario.

But, her mom encouraged her, and she ran over to help and then we told her that she did a good job, because she saved the baby.

But again later, I played that game again and had the baby doll hanging off the table by one arm and I had my fingers on its hand to keep it dangling, and when I said, "Oh no, look at the baby, the baby needs help, he's going to fall, he can't hang on!", she ran right over, only instead of helping the baby, she went right for my fingers and tried to pry them up.

A story of a child growing up.

The one (wheelchaired) guy from the (South) who my one former assisted living client with disabilities is now dating has a couple of kids from years ago, and he was saying that when his one son had first moved out, he had an upper floor apartment in the one (Southern) town they were living in that had an outside staircase to get up to it, and since he was young and had just moved out on his own, he was pretty much living on pizza, and not only that, but he would also pile up the old boxes outside his door and the squirrels there would ransack them to get at the crusts, which he would leave in the boxes since he doesn't eat them.

"One time me and his ma decided to take out the boxes," he was like, "And those damn squirrels were chittering chit-chit-chit-chit-chit and throwing shit at us from the trees, because we were getting at their food!"

And, at that he chuckled and shook his head.

"Those damn squirrels," he was like.

Three residents at my now-quit job:

1) A (pleasant) (very thin) (ninety-year old) lady who can't keep food down anymore, who was married to a nuclear plant operator, who is wasting away and knows it, but doesn't know when she'll finally die.

(I won't be there for her death, now.)

2) A (hunched over) (very sweet) (dyed red hair) hoarder who has piles of stuff on her chair and bed and around her room, and who often keeps food on her table, who was married to a local laboratory sciences prof, and who was always chit-chatty to talk to when I would come in to take her vitals, and who would always say, "Oh, hon."

3) A (thin) (big-eyed) (older) (white) (woman) with a tendency to get overemotional who I met once to take vitals for, and who I assisted on my second-to-last shift, who had one or two full shelves of hippo cookie jars in her room.

"Now why do you collect hippo cookie jars?", I was like, and then she told me that when she was young, her dad went back to school for art and was required to make a sculpture of some kind of animal, and so he did one of a hippo, playing.

Since I've moved to the college town that I now live in...

 ...I've seen two nearby buildings completely destroyed:

1) A shuttered hotel up on the main road a little bit north of where I live; and

2) This duplex business place with wooden siding where a sewing shop and a small church used to be, that's now just this levelled field of dirt with a tall metal fence around it.

Nice library occurrence.

Like last month when I was on campus to go to the university library in the college town that I now live in, I had to go do some printing, and so I popped by this one auxiliary library that's right next to the main library.

And, I had heard that it was closing because they're doing a massive rearrangement of library spaces this summer, but I didn't know that that was the very last day it was open.

So, just randomly, I happened to be among the very last patrons of this one legendary campus library, in the last few hours that it was open.

House mystery:

This huge bright area of light way up on the second story siding of the north face of the front house that's in front of my back cottage that I saw the other early evening when I went to go out for a walk, and which didn't seem to come from an overhead outdoor perimeter lamp or anything like that, and which showed the faint outline of the shadow of a tree trunk from a few feet in front of it, and which made me go up the street to see if I could find out if there was strong light coming in somehow from somewhere to the north of it, since that'd be the only thing that could cause it that would make any sense at all, in terms of what I could see that was happening.

And, a building a few houses north had a lower-level apartment where someone had turned an overhead lamp on, but that was way too faint a light source, so I walked just a few more feet north, and suddenly I could see that a huge bright ray of sunlight was reflecting off a second story back window on the south side of that same building.

So, I then walked south and down the next street, to see if I could see how the ray of light beamed in, and despite all the high trees all around, it became clear that there was this one angle in a tree gap that allowed a huge ray of light from the setting sun to come straight down the alley, reflect off that one window, and then come onto the north side of my house where I had originally seen that bright spot of light that had caused me to start my whole investigation.

When I was just upon the point of discovery, too, I bumped into my one (scrawny) (hispanic) (undergraduate) neighbor, coming down the street to come home.

"Look at that!", I was like, pointing to the patch of light, and then I pointed at the overhead lamp in the one apartment, and he agreed that it was too faint to cause the light, and then I walked a few steps north and saw the reflecting window thing going on, and he agreed that must have been the light source, too.

"People really do have more time here," I was like, to him. "Look at me, I'm kind of wandering around the neighborhood trying to figure out what's causing a fucking patch of light. Like, what the fuck."

Stray comment of a bar patron.

This one (old) (hyped up like on cocaine) (bearded) (scrawny) (white) dude who goes to the sleek-ish brewery near me and had struck up a conversation with me about my research this past week, was saying to the (younger) (white) (female) bartender that I'm a "pure academic," when I was coming back to the table when I was coming back from the bathroom.

It's amazing how much recognition and respect I get in this town, like automatically and soon on in relationships.