Just in the last couple of days I've switched over to going to bed at midnight on the dot, and ideally waking up at 8AM on the dot. In reality I've been waking up sooner for some reason, but I'm sure I'll get it ironed out.
I've been spending too much time too tired to do much but stubbornly staying awake even while starting to fall asleep in my chair, and decided to stop fighting it. The kind of night-owl schedule Ken follows may be natural for him but I've been both an early riser and a late one, and I think it's come to, at my age, being a regular daytime person will be best.
Let's see, I deposited my pay check on Friday and my number and the bank's only differed by a few cents so that's good.
Saturday was the big adventure if it can be called that. I've signed up to take a French class from a place called Alliance Francaise, which seems to have offices all over the US even back in Hawaii but most importantly for now, here. Where "here" is a mere 20 miles away or so, considered a tiny distance here in the Sprawl, in Los Gatos.
Since the weekly class starts this Monday night, but the office is open 10-noon on Saturdays, I went over there to make sure they've got me on their roster and to pick up the text book and work book. The books are funny in that they're $50 or so online but $25 or so directly from the school.
It had gone down to the mid-30s overnight and really only got up to 40 or so when I left, so it was a cold day to be out riding a bike. So, I just rode over to the light rail station and took the green train down to Winchester station. The trouble with taking the light rail at 9 or 10 in the morning on a Saturday is, almost no one's on it but bums. So yeah, there were bums. Oh well I was among plenty of bums taking the light rail to and from the last class I took, and they just do bummy stuff but so far have left me alone.
The place is easy to get to; just go South on Winchester from the Winchester station, turn into the Vasona Station strip mall and it's right there. I popped in, the lady there with a couple of students looked me up and for some reason while there was a stack of text books with students' names on them there wasn't a set for me but she went in another room and got a set for me and that was that.
After that cold bike ride I really wanted something to eat and there's a small cafe called the Purple Onion there, where I had a bacon and egg and cheese sandwich and some coffee. It was really good and less than $20 with the tip which is doing well these days. I guess the place is popular with runners because a table nearby was full of 40 or 50 something gals talking about their last marathon and their next marathon and so on. And some fit older guys going in and out of the place.
After all the bums on the light rail, and it having warmed up a bit and being a nice sunny day, I decided to just ride back. That was OK but it's amazing how much riding the train replaces. It was a long ride.
I stopped at the big Goodwill on San Carlos and didn't find anything, and checked out the chef store and they're all out of plastic "thank you" bags except some overpriced, thin, green-tinted "biodegradable" ones. I opted to get a roll of pretty nice "vegetable" bags, just as many for half the price.
Plastic bags are becoming only a memory. I think I might set up something to support a "vegetable" bag and use that for organic/wet trash, and put dry stuff into the regular trash can, lined with a proper bag, and that way it can be emptied into a paper bag to get rid of the stuff.
After getting back here I listed 25 things on Ebay and called it a day.
Today I packed things (which sounds easy but some of the things can take a lot of time to find) and sent them off via FedEx. After returning from that trip I dropped off the trailer and headed back out again. I went to Dai Thanh and got 6 cans of pate' which last time, they charged me $7 for, a real mistake. This time I was charged $21 which is the proper price.
I got a couple of shirts and a pair of sweat pants at Ross, and got back here.
OK so pardon my French but why the fuck do I want to learn French? Well, part of it is what I call escaping the Anglosphere. With various cultures come basic assumptions about things, and the Anglo, or English-speaking, culture seems to be almost uniquely hyper-individualistic and, well, nasty and mean.
My getting sucked into the self-promoted bubble about that particular ethno-state in the Middle East started in high school when I wrote a paper on Albert Einstein. The book I read about him stated at one point that "It was a custom for wealthy Jews to invite a poor Jewish student to their Friday night dinner, the most sumptuous meal of the week" and reading that almost made me fall off of my chair. In the Anglo, WASP culture I was used to, rich or even moderately wealthy, or hell, even "doing OK" people don't want anyone poor within miles of them, even if they're family. It's just assumed that in that culture that a poor person, even if a sibling, is as welcome as the smallpox virus.
So I was shocked, amazed, in a good way. But it turns out that in any normal culture, people help each other out. Anglo, Protestant culture is, like the culture of the Iks, an outlier.
(And it turns out that Jewish culture is not as lovely as it would like people to think it is. Not by a long shot.)
So, just being able to read news in a different language, of a different culture, would be really interesting. Spanish doesn't interest me as it seems to be an even dumber culture than white American culture. I started, but dropped, a German class decades ago in community college, not because it was too difficult but because I felt I had too much else to deal with. And German's not found that many other places in the world that are not Germany.
But French is found everywhere. Viet Nam and French Polynesia and Canada and a lot of countries in Africa and even, despite the US's efforts to stamp it out, in New Orleans (where French was banned in schools in the 1920s and may still be banned now).
No comments:
Post a Comment