Talks with the local mailman (2 of 2): Women.

Like last week, my one local (West African) mailman was saying how strange people are with what they can believe, and I shared with him two of my dad's pieces of wisdom:

1) "People sure are different."

- and -

2) "Sometimes women just hate other women."

And, that last one him got him agreeing, and he said that he saw that a lot in his youth back in (West Africa), and I asked him how many women were in his family, and he said that after his dad left it was just him and his brother until his mom got married again to his stepdad, but there was like 20-30 women in his household, since his grandmother used to regularly really put herself out there through charity, where if there was a woman on the street, they would bring her home, and then she would sleep on the floor and the woman would have the bed, and the woman would end up living there, and this would happen over and over and over again, even with women that they had just met on the street like ten minutes earlier.

"Wow, she sounds awesome," I was like.

And, he said that she was, but also that some of the women didn't like the other women, and sometimes things would just blow up, and it was just him and his brother in the middle of all these women.

He also said that women can be "brutal," like what he saw in his mother when his mother and father broke up, like how his mother took back everything she had ever bought or given his father, including the shoes straight off his feet.

"Wow," I was like.

Then, I said that if I ever saw him walking around the neighborhood barefoot delivering mail, I'd know what happened.

"Oh [informal version of my first name]," he was like, "If that ever happened, the post office would give me shoes, I know."

Talks with the local mailman (1 of 2): Missed event.

A bit ago when I was mentioned my one event that my one (West African) mailman said that he was going to come to with his wife but didn't -- I just raised it incidentally, not in that regard -- he was like, "[Informal version of my first name], you have to remember me!", and then he said different variations of "remember me," about how he can never remember this or never remember that, unless people remember him multiple, multiple times, including right up to the day of whatever.

Basically, he was using the word "remember" like it's "remind."

I wonder if that's something from whatever his native (West African) language is, where you can use the same verb intransitively for "remember" and transitively for "remind," kind of like in English "the pot breaks" but also "he breaks the pot."

An observation on academic employment.

Whenever I have contact with people still employed in academia -- especially tenured professors, I think? -- it's really astonishing to me how much of their lives and mental space is spent on thinking about individual people and the ramifications of what they are or aren't doing, in all of these elaborate shades of details and speculation.

Like, what the Dean is doing, or what program is coming down in their department, or how badly things are organized under so-and-so, and it's just sort of like that ad infinitum.

Like, even if I wanted to, I just could never talk that much about any individuals at the resthome where I worked or at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, even about the people who are annoying or a bit conniving or who do sh*t that kind of derails my job a bit at very sporadic moments.

Why?

Because pretty much everyone does their job, and even if it's not ideal, they're still pretty much doing their job, and they really don't have time for anything else.

With the academics, the amount of "he did this, and he did that" is almost like a middle-school girl talking about her crush, only it's some kind of sick and abusive crush, because so often it doesn't seem like they even particularly like all these people who make them think so much about them.

This kind of gets back to what my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) observed, that from what she's seen, so much of academic employment is "busy work" that really doesn't produce anything, from all the time and energy that gets sunk into it.

More reflections on the election aftermath.

Versus 2016, the results of this election are a lot more tolerable.

It's not only because in some ways we've been here before and we have some inkling of what things could be like and we know how we made it through -- something that the one (lesbian) sister of my one former assisted living client with (disabilities) observed -- but it's also because I'm in a lot more stable day-to-day environment.

Back in the city that I used to live in, a lot of affordability and a lot of paths to economic advancement got lost in the wake of the 2009 economic crisis, only the permanency of that loss didn't get realized right away...  It was like my one old (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker said, after 2009, you kept waiting for things to get better, and they would a bit, but then they'd worsen in other places, and then they'd get better in some ways, but get worse in others, and it was like that over and over and over, and you never really went back to the way things were. So, you were trapped in this cycle of dashed hope, without exactly realizing what that was, and always in fear that things would slide again, but always in the hope that just maybe just maybe, things could re-stabilize back in the old affordability, if somehow the right things would just happen.

Now that I'm back in a very affordable place to live where I can save money without thinking -- and that not even working full-time! -- that instability of daily life has largely been removed. Sure, expenses may be creeping up a little, and the homelessness problem around town is gradually getting worse, but those problems are just at much lower levels, and they really don't impinge on your everyday life so much. At worst, it's something to be a bit aware of, but it's nothing in-your-face and anxiety-provoking.

A small bit of election aftermath.

Like a week after the election, I realized that I couldn't find my library card for the local university, even after tearing apart my cottage to look for it.

I had had it with me at the local public library the day after the election when I was doing an incredible amount of "housekeeping" tasks -- some requesting books through the university's online catalog, some downloading articles, some printing, some writing emails on their desktop, online renewal of my driver's license, etc. -- and so I ended up stopping through there to see if I had accidentally left it there, since I had had it out besides their desktop in order to type in my (long) ID number and access the university's online catalog.

And, it turns out that I had indeed left it there!

I've never done something like that before; I guess it just goes to show how out of it and not myself I was, that day.

Three random things:

1) When I had texted them each a crack that my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones had made when me and her were working together, both my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker loved how I ended the text with not only crying-from-laughter emojis but also "5555555555," which is how people text laughter in (Thai), they had told me, since their word for "ha!" is a homophone of their word for "five."

2) Working on a data set of three -- the one (gay) (Colombian) (graduate student) who I know from around town, and a (younger) (Colombian) (faculty) couple who came into the restaurant once and who I talked with quite a bit -- I have to say that (Colombians) seem to be a very unpredictably touchy people, where they have these small lines that you can easily step across, although their saving virtue is that they all have very transparent faces, so you can easily tell when you've done that, just like you can easily tell if they have a very strong opinion on something you've just said (something that happens quite a bit), even if they're choosing not to express it at that time, although quite often they proceed to do just that, they say exactly what they've been thinking, right then and there, and in very direct and no uncertain terms.

Also, their food seems very bland.

3) A(n awkward) (white) (computer programmer) guy who I know from around town has been unemployed for several months because his firm's recurring government contract got strangely and unexpectedly outbid, and he says from what he's seen of the programming market, he fears there's a recession starting or a silent recession going on... When I told him that I had heard mention I think on the radio of a "white collar recession," he was like, yeah, and he agreed, that's what he sees happening, too.

Two more signs of increasing local homelessness:

1) The other week when I was taking a late afternoon walk at the lake park just north of my house, there were some blankets laid out on a flared-out-so-you-can-stand-there-and-fish-from-it part of the bridge that crosses a section of the lake, where it seemed like someone might be sleeping there at the moment or planning to bed down for the night.

2) The other week when I was leaving the local library and standing on the front steps and beginning to make a phone call, a (slightly tall) (thinner) (darker black) (young-ish) (dreadlocked) guy came out behind me, and as I stopped and stood there to dial, he came up beside me and was like, "Hey man," and he started to say something like he was hitting me up, but then he held out his hand for a handshake and so I shook his hand without thinking and said hey, and then he held out his hand there like a fist and so I did the same kind of thing without thinking and fist-bumped it, and at that he suddenly got very stern and looked at me directly and intensely and was like, "That," and I was like, "What?", and he was like, "That, that what you did, you never, never do that again," and then he went to turn and leave and so I went my way, and he did his, but I made sure to keep looking over my shoulder behind me, just in case.