Too tired to sleep, I am musing on the blog but what the random kids at the corner store said was: “Wow! You have cool shoes. Your whole atmosphere — you don’t seem like someone from here!” Why not I asked, and they said, “Because you have so much energy, and such a calm energy!”
They don’t realize what a compliment it is because really I have a splitting headache. Yet I am still reaching my politically incorrect goal, to radiate positive energy and move with ease.
Another vignette from another corner: at Angola Sunday a random prisoner started querying me about the state of my soul, ready to convert me to Christianity. He had told me that he was there for murder but should not be, since he had committed the crime after someone slipped him a mickey and he did not become lucid again until it was done; now God had set him free.
He was glad to have come to prison so that could happen, yet also resentful that he had done so much time for a crime he did not feel he should have to own. Listening to that I had already figured that if he got out, he’d be back soon; according to him, God had saved him.
I: I do not need God to keep me from committing crimes.
He: You come from privilege, so you can believe the world is good.
I thought his arguments thin. But I am guilt ridden about not being able to take care of all aspects of my job well enough, because there are too many of them; and the reason I rail about academic advice is that this cannot simply be managed through the delegation of tasks, a good use of time and an awareness of when your brightest hours in the day are; the advice given presupposes a situation we do not have. If the advice were truly good it would have worked for at least one of us by now, and that person would be swimming beyond the breakers.
The problem with the advice is that it makes everything a question of the advisee’s wily competence; this, I discern, along with the wolf at the door and the cognitive dissonance, is why the sufferers suffer.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
He’s wrong, I think. He exaggerates your privilege, and he discounts the gender gap. He was able to act out to the extent of committing murder and yet he lives on and has your attention. You might ask him how the women he has associated are doing these days.
Associated with, I should say.
I told him he was the more privileged one. He was a jockey, raced horses, and even now his parents in Houston own rental property and have a house waiting for him for when he gets home; he didn’t get the death penalty or life without parole. *My* parents have not bought *me* a house in Houston.
What does he say about this? “I don’t want to limit myself to living in that house in Houston – I want to see where He takes me.” A real con man and more, is what I have to say about this individual.