Thursday, Early Friday

It is 2:51 AM on Friday morning, the 23d.

 I made the bus on time - just barely. Work went well enough, even though I was sent back to a different area. No trucks to unpack today. 

The PO showed up at lunchtime. He was his usual self, with the usual questions. Except for one. We got into it a bit abut the next polygraph. I asked why he had not told me he had told the polygraph operator not to move the date. I believed I told him I had no transportation but taxi, and he said that he had not heard that. Now, I got annoyed, he cautioned me about the volume of my voice. That he thinks my obsession is one thing when it has always been money remains a mystery to him. CC could tell him how I feel about people getting into my pockets. That my knee was aching did not help my mood, either. After the usual questions plus the new one. He asked if the counselor and I talked about the counselor's diagnosis. Not having heard a diagnosis, I asked what diagnosis. He said that I had a particular psychological disorder. I said that I had never heard of that diagnosis, that no one had made such a diagnosis before. About this time< i had a sharp spike in my eye. He left, I went back to have my lunch.

I bought a red velvet cake for the crew, it being Christmas. I ate lunch, then I made a call to the counselor about this diagnosis. It was not made by my counselor, but by the person doing my intake - an intake done over the phone - and he would look into it.

Later, when talking to my sister, I realized the PO has yet to speak with my counselor.

The pain in the eye threatened to become a migraine., Something I have not had in ages.

I worked till three. The headache kept just below the line of becoming full-blown. I was not in a good mood, wanted to talk to some people, and stayed for the money. From work, I walked down to Cowan Road to get the 3:15 bus. No bus. I walked down to the Shell station. My counselor called, the intake-as-diagnosis was being changed; I did not meet the criteria of the particular psychological disorder. That was a bit of a relief. At the Shell, I got a Coke, then along came the bus.

I called K from the bus station. Told her about the meeting and the diagnosis. She disagreed. That was reassuring.

It was actually rather warm and misty, not bad weather at all.

I got back here close to 4:30. I ate, I piddled with the email; making free with the delete key. Then I had enough. My back hurt, my knee hurt, my headache remained. I got about 90 minutes in when I heard the phone ringing. (Two dislikes of the current phone: it keeps slipping into airplane and the ringer goes silent.) It was KH. We talked for a while. I looked outside, it was snowing.

After talking to him, I walked down to McClure's for a re-supply of tobacco. After that, I was in. 

I got an email from my sister. It looks like I have made an ass out of myself, again. I thought the polygraph was the 4th. I forgot to ask when I had the operator on the phone. Now I need to find out the correct date. If it is the 6th to the 8th, I have been an idiot. She called me, and we talked a long while about the appointment and other things.I will call the operator during business hours.

My right arm started hurting, so I quit fooling with the computer. I had done a little reading.

From Jacobin, I read We Need a Pro-Worker Transition to Electric Vehicles, where I learned and a few things, and came away thinking the ideas propounded were sound:

While electric vehicle production is not free from environmental problems, the use of these cars over gas-powered ones would certainly be better for the climate.

But without broader changes to our industrial policy, the transition to electric vehicle production will not necessarily be good news for workers in the automobile industry.

As a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute outlines, without increased domestic production of electric vehicle batteries and other power train components, the large-scale introduction of electric vehicles could result in the loss of over two hundred fifty thousand jobs in automobile assembly and parts production. Currently, 75 percent of power train components for gas-powered vehicles are manufactured in the United States, as compared to just under 45 percent for electric vehicles.

The assembly of battery-powered electric vehicles is less complex and requires fewer workers than vehicles with an internal combustion engine. These job losses can only be offset if two conditions are met: a significant strengthening of domestic industries in the electric vehicle supply chain and electric vehicles rising to 50 percent of domestic automobile sales by 2030.

The Economic Policy Institute modeled various scenarios for the large-scale introduction of electric vehicles in the US market. In a scenario where electric vehicles reach 30 percent of the market share with current domestic production levels of electric vehicle power train components, around twenty thousand assembly jobs and twenty-five thousand parts jobs would be lost.

However, if an increase in electric vehicle market share can be matched with corresponding levels of power train production, over a hundred fifty thousand jobs would be gained.

Catapult published Labor Had a Pretty Good Year. Which I think goes well with the preceding piece.  Interesting thing about my current job, everyone thinks the place would close if unionized, there is a shared recognition of poor wages, and several voices do not like unions.

From CrimeReads there was A Survey of Hitchcock Films Not Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and My Favorite Con Artists.

I skimmed Brittle Paper's We Reviewed 45 African Books in 2022 | This is What We Discovered. It is long, looks interesting, makes me wish I ahd more time.

Indiana’s parks are a jewel that continue to grow was read, but ti was short. 

I finished Solenoid – Mircea Cărtărescu from Full Stop after my latest awakening:

Structurally, Solenoid is presented as a group of notebooks written by the nameless narrator (presumably Cărtărescu himself, at least at first). These diaries—referred to always as a “text,” because “book” implies readers—comprise a loosely woven chain of themes and plot points that could be read as a distant, more playful cousin to the Book of Disquiet, or an updated Tristam Shandy. It’s almost episodic at points, digressing to follow other teachers at the school where our main character works, or to talk about the decay (both literal and metaphorical) threatening the heart of the city of Bucharest, or to introduce a growing protest movement against the very concept of death.

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Ultimately, contradictions are baked directly into the foundation of the book. Cărtărescu is considered by many to be Romania’s greatest living writer, and with Solenoid, he embarks on an attempt to write strange diaries for nobody. Solenoid is an insider’s attempt to make outsider art. Cărtărescu creates a fictionalized version of himself where he might have been a figure more like Kafka, who was a lawyer by trade, and almost entirely unread in his lifetime.

Kafka looms especially large over Solenoid, his shadow cast over everything—the epigraph, its diary structure, its mercurial surreality, the quiet humor of its grimness, and the recurring appearance of bugs. Aside from the lice at the beginning, the political sects recruit members using bugs, and there is also a section wherein our main character imagines that he is a mite. In effect, Solenoid imagines a world in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find that he is still a human being after all, and this is somehow worse.

That makes go hmm, but where is the time? I am not getting any work done.

I started Remembering the Forgotten: The Space that Remains, thought of my father, and was about to skip it until I skimmed a little further. This one I think I will come back to.

Daily Kos' More than 150 faith leaders condemn Catholic governor's anti-immigrant attacks as 'inhumane' seems self-explanatory. What does not is the Republican Party's need to fan hatred. I am not sure that there has been anything like it since the Know Nothing Party. Yeah, I skipped McCarthyism since that was demagoguery about an idea, and the Red Scare of the Twenties for the same reason. No, this feels like hatred for people being people.

When I woke up 2 hours ago, I looked out. More snow, colder. Some snow blow in under the door. I have a towel there now. I heated up the heating bag and put it onto my hip. Twice I did this. It feels better. 

Well, I got this caught up. The alarm is to go off in an hour. So much for getting a full night's rest. I doubt the cleaning crew will be coming around, but who knows. I think I will reset the alarm for 8. Give my eyeballs a rest.

sch 4:00 am