Items and activities

1. E-mail from the office oddball: "Congrats on achieving another year of wisdom. Or perhaps, it's surmounting another year in the realm of disorder." I really like this description. It followed me home. Can I keep it? Year aged, check. Disorder surmounted, check.

2. One of the things you have to do if you want to help people learn to read is sit in on other tutoring sessions. I was shadowing a session with a very advanced student today, a woman whose native language is Russian, and we were talking about various idiomic uses of the word "cat." The book she's learning from is very old. Example sentence, "Men are never called catty, and women are never called cats."

Her question - "So where does "cathouse" come from, if women are not called cats?"
Her tutor - "I have no idea! Maybe because men/cats attend them? And it is not really about the women?"
Me - "Well. I can think of one very rude possibility."
She - "I work in a prison! Continue!"
I: "Well, umyouknow, women have cats."
She - "Of course! A pussyhouse!"

My Polish grandmother will not teach me how to swear in Polish (even though she curses in English) because in Polish it's actually too filthy for her. I bet this Russian woman would help me.

3. When you work at a newspaper, you sometimes have to know more than you let on. So when you print the obituary of someone who - you know because you have a police scanner - shot themselves in the head the week before, whose house you photographed the very same day, whose sorrowing relatives you tried not to photograph...and you finally see their picture and read about how much good they had in their lives, it's kind of a head trip. I suspect we are not supposed to know this much about people we don't know at all. Being on the edge of, but not being personally involved in such a great deal of grief is awkward, uncomfortable, slightly obscene.