Jury duty.

I was notified and I'm in the pool for two weeks, and on the very first day after the morning orientation, I was randomly selected to come back that afternoon for possible seating on a domestic violence case, and then out of the like 35 possible jurors, I was randomly selected as part of the 1st 14 that they quizzed.

My problematic (?) answers: 

- I might have known someone who was a victim of domestic violence (a hometown friend's little sister who had bad boyfriends and who I didn't pry about and so never really heard the details, but in any case it never reached the courts, and she died years ago).

("I'm very sorry for your loss," the district attorney was like.) 

- I have an advanced degree, and they asked me about the field and any overlaps and I name-checked an article that I did involving legal topics  and cults like the R. Kelly "sex cult" and NXIVM, which involved abusive treatment of many women.

("Interesting topic and I want to know more," the district attorney was like, "But I don't think the judge will allow me to ask all day about it.")

-  I don't have a medical condition that would affect my ability to serve on the jury, but I still wear a KN95 mask.

(The defense asked me and another juror about this, although he said we don't have to disclose why we wear them; although  I didn't say it, I just don't want COVID again, and I was actually super glad that I wore it to the morning orientation, since the room had over a 100 people in it and it was kind of stuffy in there and we were in that room for like an hour.) 

- I knew someone else on the jury (a nurse-practitioner who's part of the practice of the family doctor that I go to).

(They didn't ask us to divulge why or how we knew each other, but just whether it would affect our decision-making, and we both said no.) 

- I've been the victim of a crime like years and years ago (attempted robbery on subway) and last summer (attempted break-in to my cottage), although neither reached the legal system.

(They didn't ask what happened, but they did ask if it left me with any feelings about police or would affect judgments made about accused criminals, and I said no.)

So, overall...  Dismissed from the case!

Someone nixed me, although they didn't nix the nurse-practitioner, who they also had asked about what she has seen when being a nurse.

Interestingly enough, a hometown friend works in the domestic violence area and has for years, and I sometimes talk with her about her work and research and I have a continuing (minor) giving history to the shelter that she used to be the head of, and both of those facts never came up during questioning.

At one point, they asked if there was anything else about us that would affect our ability to be neutral and I thought of mentioning all of that, but in my personal evaluation of myself it wouldn't actually affect my ability to be neutral and hear the facts of the case, so I didn't offer it up, since it didn't meet the threshold that they explicitly asked about.

Just quite the experience, and all on the first day.

I still have to call back every night, too, since they might call me up again during that 2 week period. 

So, I might go through this again? 

On characteristics of friends.

The other week I was talking to the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living) client with (disabilities), and I was saying how I wanted to try to make it to this one upcoming beatification mass in a city like a half day's trip away if I could get it off work, since it's something that doesn't happen very often and it's such a major thing and it would be cool to be there to see what happens and what it's like.

"Oh, of course," she was, quite seriously, and you could tell that she was fully behind the idea, even though she isn't (Roman Catholic) and has no substantial ties to it that I know of.

Rather, her response came from her openness to and curiosity about the world, and a love of new experiences.

You can see why we're friends. 

A recent dream, of hair.

Like last week I dreamnt -

I'm in my bathroom looking in the mirror when I get up in the morning, and the front of my hair is like bleached blonde and tufted up and it looks all coarse, all from the lemon juice that I put on it "on the reg."

And, I think to myself that that lemon juice that I had put on it the previous day must really have been in the direct sun a lot, to get my hair looking that blonde.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(. . .) 

"Up there."

When I recently went to the website of an every-four-years academic congress to check out the presidential address for possible inclusion in a paper that I'm writing, I stumbled on a draft of the relevant bibliography summarizing work in that field over the past four years.

And, my work wasn't included, although I reached out to someone and found out who wrote it and I emailed that other person my relevant articles as well as a book review, since I had noticed that someone else had listed a book review, too, so why shouldn't I list the one that I did.

And, the amount of stuff I've done puts me right neck-and-neck at the top of the scholars working in that field just in terms of numbers of publications, not even in terms of the magnitude of the findings, like two-and-a-half of which are relatively big and which don't seem to be matched by anything else that anyone else seems to be doing.

Funnily enough, one of the few other top people is someone who works as an independent scholar, too.

Just because you're dedicated and do good work doesn't mean that someone will throw you a bone, in an atmosphere of scarcity. 

Two perspectives..

...from my one (Mormon) colleague who teaches at an R1 state school:

1) He says that he's pretty much given up on the integrity of online courses over the past 2 years because there's no way that you can do assessment without in-person anymore, and he's definitely kicked this concern up the chain-of-command in a very vocal manner multiple times, but admin keeps putting the courses on simply because they want the money.

He also starts each online course telling students that he hopes that they use this opportunity to learn, because they can learn that way, if they choose.

Otherwise, he just phones it in, and turns his attention to in-person classes, where at least you can control things.

2) He also says that it's not like when we were in high school back in the 1990s, nowadays kids can't even get summer jobs anymore, at least in a lot of areas, so it's like they apply and apply and apply and never even get call-backs, not even from fastfood places.

So, like his kids have spent theirs summers volunteering at a wildlife place, but that's only becausa they couldn't find any jobs.

He also says that the typical "summer jobs" that kids used to have like supermarket checkout clerks are now filled by older people who can't afford to retire, at least in his major metropolitan area that he lives in in the Southwestern United States. 

. . .

(Imagine kids now, going through that application mess in high school, and then resume-hell again for college internships and afterwards, just endlessly, and all for reduced opportunities.) 

Does shit get moldy?

Does shit get moldy?

Like, if you took a big wet runny dump and just let it there in the same place like where food left out would get moldy, would mold develop on the shit? 

If shit does or can get moldy, why don't we see like moldy dog turds out in filthy dog-parks, or like a layer of mold at the bottom of an outhouse or an over-filled Port-a-potty where you can see all the shit through the hole where you shit?

Like, imagine a filthy Greyhound bus where there's shit caked on that little metal flap thing that's like a trapdoor down into the deodorizing-liquid holding-tank in the bus's underbelly. 

Like, why isn't there a layer of vitiated grey-blue mold on that caked-on shit there?

Someone should ask an expert in fungi.

And, some fungi expert should do a whole lecture on this, in their Introduction to Mycology class.  It would be legendary. Just think of the slides!

Time-sink.

Studying that one notoriously hard language for dual citizenship purposes is such an incredible time-sink for me, right now.

I do DuoLingo for like fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day to practice paradigms, but the big thing is just memorizing a shit-ton of vocabulary, since it’s not related to anything you would ever know and there’s not really all that much borrowed vocabulary from common languages with international impact.

And, that’s like forty-five or fifty minutes of time a day, though it’s growing increasingly less as the vocabulary settles in, per the algorithms on the flashcard app that a programmer friend who’s into languages helped me set up on my laptop and on my smartphone.

I can see progress – like, I read a sample sentence from a newspaper article that I tried to get through months ago, and now I know a lot of the vocab there – but, still, it’s just so time-consuming.

By the time I have breakfast and get ready and then turn to language study, it turns out being like a two-hour chunk of my time every day, since I have to have breaks in between different sections of study, like between DuoLingo and flashcards and then between memorizing new vocab and practicing old vocab.

I’ve heard that it’s more effective to study languages in small doses, like it’s better to study twice for fifteen minutes than once for forty minutes, but, it’s hard to schedule my day and get that regular study in without doing it all upfront.

Like, the few times that I got interrupted and I had to do some at night after work, my recall rates were truly horrible.

Just such a time-suck, though, when I have so many other projects that I could be focusing on.

Sigh.

But, there should be only a few more months of memorizing base vocab, fortunately.

Why did I buy those cabbages?

After a short trip in July, I got back early and ran to the grocery store before work, to get some watermelon and also to restock on avocados for my morning avocado toast that I have every morning.

And, an eighty-nine cents a pound sale led me to get two cabbages, too, for making meals or for sauerkraut.

Only, the next morning at the farmer's market, larger and nicer cabbages were in season everywhere, so I immediately wondered why I hadn't thought of that before I got the ones at the supermarket.

And, I also realized that it was a mere ten days before I left for a two-week vacation to go visit my parents, and so it's not like I'd be able to cook up the cabbages into anything before then anyhow, and so they'd just take up room in my refrigerator for like almost a month. 

At the farmer's market, too, I circled back around and got carrots with nice big long carrot-greens from the one (classic rock vibe) (Harley Davidson-ish) (older) (white) guy who does organic gardening, and I told him that his carrots were tempting me too much and so I had to come back for them and buy something from him a second time that day, and I added that my one major addiction was to buy too much at the farmer's market every week.

"In terms of addictions, it's not a bad one to have," I was like.

"And we like it!", he was like. 

Light fixture and roofing problems.

On a day when there’s tornado sirens in the morning and then again in the evening as a second line of storms push through, I come back up from the basement of the front house and turn on my overhead lamp inside my cottage, and automatically it’s a bit dim, and you can see water at the bottom of the fixture.

And, I had the light on earlier that day, but nothing like that happened, only after the second, stronger storm system with the high winds.

And, the landlord passes all that on to the (older) (white) (townie) roofer, who comes by a day or two later and who I see walking around in the yard, and so I come out and he says that wind from certain directions can push rain up into cap shingles that run down the roofline, and that’s probably what happened there because the roofline is right over where the lamp is on the inside and look, you can see the gap from here, it’s those places where you can almost stick a pencil up in it, and he doesn’t like to seal that with silicone, but that’s what you’re going to have to do, with this one, and then everything should probably be all right.

And, he adds, LED lights “don’t give hardly no heat,” and if you get water in a bulb like that, older bulbs would dry that up, but not these ones.

Two odd customers…

…in one night, at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

1) A (somewhat hairy) (college-age) (autistic?) (lesbian?) is in with two (Chinese from China) students and this other (white) girl she holds hands with under the table, and she wants “soda tonic,” so I ask her if she wants soda water or tonic water and she asks what’s the difference, and I say that I honestly don’t know, and the (Chinese) girl says tonic water is more bitter, and so she says, “Okay, tonic,” and then when I repeat their beverage order back to them, she says, “I said soda water,” and a bit later she also wants to know what kind of cheese is in the cheese curds and so I go find out and tell her white cheddar, and she says in a flat but also kind of perky tone of voice “We’re good!” and so I ask her if that means that she wants them or doesn’t want them, and she says no, she doesn’t want them, and later with her huge grilled chicken sandwich she asks can she have more bread since it’s too much meat and not enough bread and I go get her a toasted hamburger bun, and later she has very very specific questions on the desserts, too, everything is just like informational and oddly miscalibrated, interpersonally.

(Tip was in the 15-18% range.)

2) A (dressed-up) (slightly cowed) (African) man and a (fatter) (African-American) woman who must give him pussy come in and the woman pushes to sit at a big table in the window even though it’s just the two of them and I relent after she asks again when I say it’s usually kept for larger parties, and they go back and forth over appetizers, adding and then taking off stuff and skipping around from medium-rare to well-done to rare on the tuna, and they ask about some substitution on the special sandwich, and finally when it comes out she’s like, “It’s fried, and he wanted grilled chicken,” and so I bring the menu out and show them how it says grilled chicken right in the description portion where they had questions about substitutions, and the guy says to keep it and not throw it out, it’s fine, when I offer to replace it if they want me to.

(And, she totally wanted to send something back in the restaurant because that is how you behave at a restaurant in her mind, I knew that she would try something like that as soon as she pushed for the bigger table in the window and was pushing into all of the parameters of everything in the order, some [lower-class] customers are like that, it’s like it’s primadonna time and they get a sense of self-worth from it.)

Addendum.

People at this new job of mine at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel certainly can get snippy with one another, a lot more overall than at my last workplace, the one (male) (Thai) owner excluded.

And apart from the behavior of the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) (goateed) bartender with (mental health problems), it’s in the bounds of normality, but it still is unpleasant to be around, nonetheless.

I think I’ve gotten an apology from someone and once when I was snippy I apologized, too, so I guess that’s just how it is there, and people do tend to work as a team and help each other out, so it’s just one of those workplace personality things that are like momentary blips and downsides.

Still a hell of a lot better than toxic behavior from the one (husband) owner of the (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at, though.

I think a big difference is that this is behavior among peer employees, versus top-down from someone above you in the management chain.

At this new place, too, the owners and all of the managers are all pretty nice, and if a mistake happens or something they’ll teach you the right way to do it without blame or judgment.

The clique-ish behavior is also a little offputting, but that’s only really like after work and not during the workday, and several people from it are leaving soon, so that’s vaguely unpleasant but it doesn’t really bother me and it will also probably be shifting soon, when some of the more self-uncomfortable people finish their academic programs at the local university and move on.

Some moments from the biggest sales day ever…

...at the current location of the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I now work, on this parents-day weekend thing at the local university:

1) The one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) turns the corner by "dish" with a big spoon covered in buffalo chickenwing sauce in his hands, and he turns into my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manager) coworker and gets some on her, leading her to exclaim in surprise and me to be like, “And just when I thought [her first name] couldn’t get any hotter!”

2) Later, since I am a “floater,” I am passing through a room and see two ladies starting their full-size dinner-portion salads and so I check if everything is all right and if they need anything else as I pass through because it’s something else that I can take care of right then, and my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manger) coworker sees me and outside the room is like, “I just checked with them! We’re overserving,” and she says it in a brusque tone of voice.

3) When I go to get water glasses from by the bar dishwasher because we’re running out of water glasses, I ask my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military) if there’s any ready, and he says there’s half a rack, so I’m like, “Half a rack is better than none,” and then I hear what I say and I pause and I say to him, “That’s what you tell yourself when your wife gets a mastectomy,” and later I repeat that joke to my one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker, and she loves it.

4) When the bar is full and I go to put glasses on the edge of the bar where we keep them when the tray-rack below is full but not put in the dishwasher yet, the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) instructs me a bit snippily to put them on the bar mats on the bar island, since we always do that “when customers are present.”

5) When I take a tub of dishes to "dish" and am sorting them out, the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner asks people to start running food out to a gigantic table because it’s all coming out and there’s no room on the island, and I ask my one (white) (young) (gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker who’s temporarily on dish if I can leave the tub there and come back to it, and he says yes and so I do and go help with food, and I come back like five minutes later and he’s like, “Please don’t ever do that again,” and he says that he didn’t hear what I said and I kind of politely shrug and say I asked, and he’s like,”Don’t ever do that again,” because I guess other people came back and started putting dishes down there too and leaving them or whatever.

6) As we cut down shift, my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker comes out with a big bin of silverware that he’d folded, and I go to break it up into the staging baskets that we keep at various locations throughout the restaurant, and then I point to the half-empty bin and put on a voice like I’m f*cking with him and am like, “Excuse me, sir, but this is not full.”

“Yeah it is,” he’s like, seemingly seriously. “It’s beauti-FULL.”

7) At the very end of the night, I see the one (older) (white) (tatted) (free-thinking) (female) cook step out from the grill, and I’m like, “Holy fuck, you’ve been here all night?”, and she said that she had noticed my name coming in on tickets but had never seen me, either.

8) After a lot of parents leave and it’s the end of the night and the restaurant is quieting down and there's really no diners there, there’s a big group of “those white lady” businesswomen in and they migrate from the bar where they’ve been drinking to a table that we set up for them, and then without asking one of them pulls another table to put it on the end and it blocks the aisle over there, and I check if everything is okay and they say that someone else is coming to join them, and one of them puts stuff at another table and another one puts a menu she doesn’t need anymore on yet another table, so that’s one moved table and two more tables they’re just throwing stuff on, and later other people join them and they’re at another nearby table with chairs splayed out blocking everything, and as I pre-bus stuff one tosses her head back and actually hits my hand as I’m walking by her.

9) As we’re going to clock out one by one, they announce the owner is buying everyone a free cocktail after work, and so I give my order and then go down to get my stuff from the breakroom, and when I come back up, it’s like this clique of four people – my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) bartender with (mental health problems), my one (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker, and my one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress coworker – and it’s like me and my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker standing around the edges, and it seems like everything is breaking up and the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) is mixing shots and so I linger but nope, they’re for the clique and they're drinking them in front of us, and there’s mention of going to a bar but neither me nor my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker are really included, and so I kind of down my drink and excuse myself and go to go home, because some people are like that.

Preempted snippiness…

…from the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I work, now:

At the end of the night, I put the soup on the back kitchen counter and turn to go get the container that you dump it into, and he’s like, “Hey, don’t leave that there…!”, and at that I say truthfully but hyper-innocently that I was just going to get the container to take care of it, and he catches himself, and he says that he just wanted to let me know that you can put the lid on askew so it looks like a Star of David, that’s the best way to put the soup in the refrigerator to cool.

An evening of a storm, at my new job.

1) “Fucking lipstick,” I start saying as a schtick to my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), pulling up dirty paloma glasses with the red spice still around a bit of the rim in a big blotch that somewhat resembles a gigantic lipstick stain.

2) Before I’m set to clock out as the restaurant is closing, the storm alerts go off on all of our phones, and then the sirens start, and the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager asks me if I want to leave right away to get ahead of the storm and she can call me an Uber because she knows that I take the bus, but I think and I text the nearby bus stop for arrival times and there’s no reply and so I say it’s better to wait in the basement breakroom and I just have a few more minutes of work so I can finish it up and clock out and go wait there.

And, I do, and I chill out for like 35 minutes and do shit online on my phone as I eat some macaroni-and-cheese and Southwestern corn salad that had been left over from a reception and that they put out in 2 big trays for all of us.

Some of the building residents from the upper floors are in the basement social area, too, and I see the one (older) (Latina) (hostess), who turns out to live in the building, which I did not know.

She says she never knows when we have food “back there” (i.e. in "the server alley" when she's working), so I promise the next time there’s food, I’ll come up to her host-stand and let her know, I didn’t know that that was happening and I would have come up earlier that night and told her if I had known that she didn't know it was there.

3) When I come up and text info for the bus, it still doesn’t return info and I wonder if the bus lines shut down during a tornado alert or warning or whatever, so I walk over to the nearby transit terminal and what do you know, busses are running and mine comes soon, and the driver says wind might have made their system at the bus garage go out, and when that happens it cuts out stuff like the texting and this app that they use for paychecks or schedule or whatnot, too, so that's probably why I couldn't get arrival times on my phone.