Last night another drunkenly beautiful carouse at the Beer Garden around the corner from my house, the stagger home always the most brilliant stretch in all Astoria, vaguely residentio-commercial, but in a non-threatening way, with the TriBoro bridge always suddenly looming, luminous in the distance. This time with Bessie--that frankness sipped by sipped, and after a day of hanging out, toying more and more with the possibility of going to law school as being a more effective way of reaching strangers, more effective than this current teaching business, which reaches only no-longer-strangers, but can't yet shover the system further where it needs to go--after a year, I'm still idealistic (though, as the old phrase goes, "certainly not wide-eyed"), but it's unclear how long that can last in the face of unsympathetic changes to the system and an economy that's less and less friendly (more an issue for my students than for me, me with my iron-rice-bowl, as the phrase goes). The only issue is a matter of usefulness--I feel useful now, but to wait three years after the two I plan to spend still teaching before being greatly more useful is a strange thing. But I won't be covering any rich ass... Too early to tell, I'm probably just heady on the enthusiasm Bessie always brings, and vaguely dissatisfied with my current idleness. I guess I've been thinking back to that time I went and helped my brother out with his legal-type troubles with the school administration. It was then, more than ever, that I somehow felt indispensable, and as if I was actually bringing to bear all the math, philosophy, and prose that had, until then, merely been disconnected elements. And we kicked some major whitey ass. That was just a defensive action, though. Time to get more offensive...

Speaking of offensive, though my Spanish spelling is poor, I am often reminded of the idiom, "fumando como un chino en kiebra," which means, roughly, "smoking like a bankrupt chinaman." That's me.