There is an Extinction Garden here full of local plants that are extinct everywhere else so only a few individual plants remain in the world.
We humans suck…
Little girl to her even smaller sister – don’t touch that, don’t touch that – might be electric wire.
Apparently this city is commonly referred to as “Mother City”.
So, yeah, Mother’s Day in Mother City.
Also, “rainbow nation” – and that was invented by Desmond Tutu and not by some marketing copywriter, so it’s more real.
Typical – I feel thoroughly uncomfortable and awkward in places like this even on normal days, like an impostor.
Especially today – when it’s Mother’s Day, and it’s full of locals with their grandmothers and toddlers, and I really should be home, so instead of being in the beautiful now, I am looking at Nest cam app at L sleeping in the dark room half way across the world.
Two long nights in a row spent on a plane made me strangely hyper emotional like I’ve never been before. Also, this is only second time in my life when I’m in a place with exactly zero people in any direction for many thousands of miles who have ever heard of my existence.
I haven’t felt this lonely in I don’t know how long. Literally weeping when seeing people with their beautiful multiracial toddlers because I miss L like something crazy.
And angry (rather than ashamed) when seeing benches outside the courthouse (evidently left over from the old days) marked “non-whites only” and, next to it “whites only”. This awfulness ended only half a generation ago here… Why are all these black people in the hotel and Uber drivers so nice to me? I’ve never seen black people being this nice to me.
Thought I had it all figured out but no.
Instead, this morning I found myself in Africa.
I know what I need to do
Not helpful
Tonight’s coop shift was pretty much all people working in tech companies.
Things I learned:
– philosophy majors are especially adept to learning programming (it’s a similar part of brain) and that’s what many of them end up doing to pay off all that 6-figure Yale debt
– similarly, someone who was an art major can make a pretty good living working as a UX designer. But academia is a sh.tshow – so avoid it if possible.
– US Treasury department morale is at all time low (thanks to Trump and his promises to get rid of Dodd Frank)
– people who trade derivatives are still clueless – even more so than before. Most of them still have no clue how they work. Another 2008 is pretty much inevitable (also, if they keep dismantling regs)
tinfoilparachute 