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Sometimes the bread slices from the sourdough that I get at the local bakery in the (college) town that I now live in are just a little bit too wide for my toaster, so I have to put them in a bit diagonally, or on end.
But, towards the end of the toasting process, I can re-orient them, and they suddenly fit!
Just that much water goes out of the bread, that they sufficiently shrink.
And (Italian) is pushing me over the edge.
Like, I started spelling the (Spanish) recordar with "ri-" at the beginning, and the other day I was talking with a (Guatemalan) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and instead of saying conmigo for "with me," I said con me.
I think that once in such a conversation I also said la tuya something-or-another, when trying to use the basic (Spanish) possessive construction with a feminine noun, and I've also started saying (Italian) day-names sometimes, like lunedi for "Monday" instead of lunes.
Conversely, I sometimes f*ck up (Italian) with other (Romance) languages, like instead of saying ho visto for "I saw," I always want to say something like "ho veduto" like the (Romanian) am vazut.
I suspect that people think I'm on crack, to the extent that they come across this.
...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, with the (vegan) (academically-employed?) (straight) couple who resemble the Lovers from the Saturday Night Live skit, her with sweeping silver curls and him with round glasses and a (nerdy) (curly) (salt-and-pepper) (vaguely Jewish) beard:
Them: [mentions something about events at a recently-reopened bar that is now more upscale, including an ad that they saw for a 70s night]
Me: "Like the music or the age group?"
Her: "Well, it's kind of both, now."
. . .
If you prepare a thought experiment where you travel back in time several decades and tell people to immediately plan for worst-case economic scenarios and shelve even cautious attempts at their dreams and to take nothing on faith about possible advancement or further opportunities and to flee as quickly as possible to any sort of guaranteed employment harbor that can't be hacked up and distributed over computers, and to lock down and save as much as possible and get plugged into retirement and housing as soon as possible, people would think that you were extremely cynical and that you were catastrophically paranoid and that maybe something was wrong with you, as well as that your thinking was clouded by severely unwarranted pessimistic thinking, almost kind of like you were a (Mormon) survival prepper, albeit without the cleancut chipperness or the conviction that things would come out all right on the other side.
But, it would have been solid advice.
It's like the only people my age I know who have done well immediately tracked into semi-specialized middling financial sector work or into state/local government jobs, or they went into medicine.
There's other outcomes, too, like law, but that usually involved heavy income loss and years of instability, where people finally pulled out of it finally, but not until after quite a number of years.
I almost feel like we're back in the days of where you need an in where someone puts in a word for you at the local factory, only, maybe you should aim for a job in the state or local government, where there's stability and benefits and maybe a pension.
Otherwise, with debt so high and employment so risky, especially with outsourcing and weak labor laws and stagnant wages with the bottom rising, why would you bet on investing a lot of time and money in your education?
If you did get a good scholarship somewhere or a reasonably-priced education at community colleges or regionals, you'd have to be very super, super savvy at picking sectors and trying to get internships, hopefully in a growing sector like eldercare or maybe green energy where you could ideally set yourself up for mobility and in-demand jobs.
Recently I saw two observations about planning for tenure-track jobs.
Like, one person was reflecting that timing is super important, like you finishing right at the right moment right when a job becomes open.
And, someone else was saying that they had received professorial advice that basically you have to wait for someone somewhere to die, otherwise there's no permanent employment.
Just a world of difference from back two decades ago when I embarked on that path, back when you had to make sure you were at a tippy-top program and did a bit extra (a peer-reviewed article, designing a sexy course or two).
Why in heavens would you ever want to put time and energy into this "profession" now, unless as a respite from sh*ttier jobs somewhere else and a hope you could maybe jag over into another career after having fun?
And, that's more of a vacation, not a profession at all.
It's done, just an ignoble death where the remaining tenured folk continue their circle jerk till the heart of the last one stops and they've all dropped dead.
"Here, spend six or seven or eight years, and maybe hope that it'll be timed right on the other end, c'mon, try to join us!"
Like a month or two ago, I caught up with a colleague from my doctoral program who has done some popular writing and has been successful at it.
She mentioned that one publication that had recently been started up a few years ago out of a university, is already shut down. A little staff turnover, and bam, it shut down (did that staff turnover trigger it, or did staff leave because the writing was on the wall? - who knows).
Also, the president of a civic organization that I'm a part of recently mentioned to me that a friend of his who's a journalist had an entire article written for a place, and then the publication was shut down before he got paid, and he had this entire thing written and he was stuck with it, after putting all of those hours in.
