I no longer have a job; it ended when my student took his final exam. He passed: I don’t know whether I should be happy that he passed or saddened that I helped his mother to further her designs over his life. My positive experience teaching this young man has led me to apply to more teaching positions; on the other hand, I also recall dealing with my mother and, after her death, my father-in-law – I know how it feels to have someone plot your life and choose your career for you. I don’t believe his mother would be willing to cut him off should he defy her wishes for his education and career. I do hope he might find the time to study something he’ll enjoy while he has the time and leisure of college life.

Several of you pushed me to ask for better accommodation; to that end, I complained to my student’s mother, my employer. It paid off on my last night of employment when I was checked into a much nicer hotel that cost about the same as the one I had originally been booked into—the only major problem was that the new hotel was far further from the city, a four hour commute to be precise. Still the new hotel was much nicer: it was clean, had working wi-fi, and had a large number of channels to be watched on an obscenely large television.

I was able to watch the film Amsterdam in the new hotel. I had wanted to see it last year but wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital while it was still in the theater. I gathered it was something of a fictionalization of the Business Plot (c. 1933). I found it to be an unfortunate mediocrity—neither was it good enough to be rewatched, nor was it bad enough to warrant the same. Christian Bale’s refrain, “For the veterans,” became grating after being repeated a few times. It is lamentable that another treatment of the Business Plot probably won’t reach mainstream popular culture for many years because David O. Russell decided to stick us with this crap.

I must say that while I found my employer, though not my student, to be utterly unpleasant, her promised, though as of yet unrealized, recommendation should be a huge steppingstone toward finding more permanent employment. In speaking with employers who have rejected me, I have found many employers refuse to consider foreign references. The few that did bother making phone calls were not impressed by minor functionaries of foreign communist parties. So, the recommendation of someone respected among the bourgeoisie of this country will be of great benefit moving forward in my job search.

In seeking housing, I’ve signed up with two organizations. The first, the Haymarket Center, requires little of me but housing placement and employment assistance may take a year or longer; they are decent people doing their greatest good with limited resources. The second, a quasi-religious organization which I will not name, requires the completion of a program of their own design and spending at least 32 hours per week looking for work, but “promises” housing placement within three months to one year.

The courses of the second organization’s program range from tedious to completely patronizing, with one exception—their financial literacy course. I am middle aged, or very nearly so; I have spent all but two years of my adult life living and working in socialist countries. Upon returning to the US, I was struck by the cost of things in general. I found luxuries to be utterly out of reach because my savings were consumed by necessities and mundane things of modern life. (I am uncertain as to whether things have grown far worse since I left, or whether they merely seem that way because I was remembering things through the lens of my youth.) Through their financial literacy course, I have learned to plan the spending of my, still mostly theoretical, income.

The substance abuse resistance course is one of the most annoying things I have ever had to tolerate. The course is abstentionist, as the instructor put it, “from caffeine to cocaine.” The content of the course is objectionable; the instructor may have a disability or perhaps a severe fear of public speaking; and the course materials were clearly appropriated from outdated D.A.R.E. handouts. At one point we were told not to mix ground coffee and strong liquor, let it set for a few hours, and then filter the resulting mixture. I don’t drink alcohol and rarely have coffee, but I felt compelled to try making the drink specifically because I had been told not to. The point being: not only is the course full of prohibitionist bullshit, it’s also poorly done.