needlessly_shitty raze someone called my house after 3:00 a.m. on saturday. they did it three times, in one-minute increments. the ringer was turned off, so i didn't hear it at the time. there was no message. i didn't recognize the number, but the caller ID showed a name. curious, i punched it into facebook and found someone i don't know but share quite a few contacts with. some of them are friends i've worked with recently. i thought maybe someone gave me the good old-fashioned drunk dial at a party. or maybe someone sober was trying to get in touch with me while hanging out at her place, and they didn't realize what time it was (or else they know about my sleep issues and thought i might be awake). or maybe she was an artist who expressed an interest in working with me to someone we both know, and they gave her my number. you never know. i've been doing a lot of collaborative work lately. so i sent her a message, asking if she knew what happened there. this was her response: "do not contact me again. delusional." that caught me off guard. there was nothing even a little bit inappropriate in my message. i wasn't trying to hit on her. i was asking an innocent question. so i took a picture of her name and number on my phone, and i sent it to her. because sometimes it's fun to troll someone who's shitty to you for no reason. 151026 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Perhaps someone else was calling from her phone? I don't have my own phone yet so I don't realize how people connect individuals with phones. Last week I called from someone else's phone once and was surprised (rather stupidly) when the individual on the other end called me by the phone owner's name. Of course there's no reason for this phone-person to write a nasty response. A simple "Must have been a mistake" would've worked. I thought this a bit similar: ...Today in choir the woman next to me was giving me what I thought was a thumbs up. Turned out she wanted me to sing the note higher. She whispered me when that line was done: "You were flat on this line." I was annoyed but tried not to show it. What came out of my mouth was, "Oh... we were?" rather vaguely. "We," indeed. Heh. But my mind wanted to hit her on the head with my choir binder. Thankfully, my mind doesn't have hands. Another part of my mind reacted to the aggressive (though handless) part by being shocked and saying, "If you're still thinking like that, just kill yourself now," which wasn't nice either. So I decided on: a) not killing myself b) not hitting people with choir binders c) thinking up more retorts in case good ones don't come automatically! 151026 ... raze thinking up more retorts is always a good plan! after the fact, i thought if i really wanted to have some fun i could have said, "so, now that we've broken the ice . . . you want to go out sometime?" 151026 ... past I think my pedagogical leanings can be interpreted this way. I believe in giving my (upper year undergraduate) students enough to succeed, but leaving it up to them to take it up. Then again, I also try to get the students who are unenthused about mandatory readings to read Tudor era novels while I support the ones who come in excited to read sci-fi. This is not a literature class. 151027 ... past that is, mandatory meetings. 151027 ... jane that was, indeed, needlessly shitty. did she write anything back to you after you sent her the picture? 151027 what's it to you? who go blather from