Unsolicited Advice

The somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor  reminds me of me a lot. It's a mix of "huh, so that's what that looks like from the outside," and "there, but for the grace of God..." I've told him this, too. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually voice -- you never know who will take it as a compliment and who won't -- but he made one too many comments about being a space alien, and I couldn't quite tell from context if it bothered him or not.  It's mostly entertaining. Every time I start a conversation and have to watch him drag himself out of whatever's happening in the back of his own head, I smile a little in sympathy. He is emphatically not bothered by me "knowing" things out of nowhere, because he can follow the deductive process that got me there. I commented on the age gap between us once. Mind you, he's never told me how old he is. What he did do was put the year he started at our studio in the bio he gave us for th

Last week, I lost the old man rat. Tseng told me he was done on Thursday morning, and I took him in that afternoon. My beautiful monster is gone. Tseng was a lucky rat. He was originally destined to be snake food, but the snake got picky. Snake Mama had nowhere to keep live rats, so she offered him and his female cagemate around on Facebook. I got on a commuter train in the middle of a pandemic, rode all the way up to Lowell to meet some random lady for two minutes, and got right back on the same train to come home, two rats richer. My then-roommate took the girl, and I got the boy.  I had two other older rescues that I'd re-named Rude and Reno, so the wiggly little Siamese was christened Tseng. Snake Mama told me he was six months old, which was patently impossible; he might  have been four months old, but unless he was a dwarf variety, he was far too small for six. I was vindicated later when he grew into an absolute behemoth. The girl was, predictably, already pregnant, so we ju