14 Nov 06

Time:

Got off the train at Union Square 819, on treadmill 839, headed back upstairs and out of the gym 934 (it was just a half-hour run day).

Money:

$12, the old lunch from the old place (even though they were out of portabellos, which should have been a clue to skip it).
$4, iced mocha, campus Starbucks.
$13, my excellent philosophical noodles, Thai place on W. 4th (which is called something involving a bunch of g's... the letter, I mean, not the kids who think they're cool.)

More interesting things:

Saw an elkhound of one Nordic persuasion or another - I can't keep the Swedish ones straight from the Norwegians - and a nice furry golden retriever, both of whom reminded me that I also collected my first Gordon Setter sighting yesterday.

Found, as I walked along Washington Square East, that fall is really and truly here, even if it was too warm for the long black coat I grabbed to wear over my sweater in my mad dash out of the house this morning. I think the rain has accelerated the leaves' dropping process, and between that and the cool breezy gray, it seemed like I should have been on my way to Dr. Rieger's office for a dreaded check-up rather than headed for meetings with professors.

Enjoyed an unusually large number of said meetings. It started out with a short but relatively interesting one with Professor Bravo, who gave me one lit-review-type assignment and one that involved collecting stuff for our website, due not next week or even the week after, but the week after that, thereby freeing up my time-constricted Tuesday morning gym trips for awhile. I continued on my odyssey of chats with faculty quite accidentally, because Anne needed to make copies and ask Professor Number Four a question, both of which involved spending time on that floor. I don't quite remember the sequence, but I do know that I talked with (and was laughingly harassed by) Professor Number Five, added quickly to the information I began collecting yesterday when Professor... well, the one whose office is between One's and Five's caught me to talk about an email she had from one of her former students supporting my hypothesis about that research question I'm working on, and rounded it out with a lengthy and highly enjoyable conversation with Professor Number One herself. The three of us covered the distastefully but necessarily politicized nature of Number One's dinner-party invitation strategies, my "helping us up the professor cliff" metaphor, the difficulties involved with student-teacher supervision, the insane scrappiness running through the process of choosing applicants and assigning money, and more dinner party plans - this time including us students, which of course already guarantees that I have an appointment with a sweaty door-knocking hand next semester but sounds extremely cool anyway.

Hit my meeting with Professor Alpha at the appointed time and, maybe needless to say, enjoyed the whole thing, even if it did start out with organizing "all the shit on the windowsills." On discovering in one of the piles a copy of the middle-school journal from just after September 11 in which the P-ster featured prominently, I mentioned that we all were very fond of him and somehow alluded to just how fond some of us were, whereupon I learned that "young Bob... oh yeah, he slept with everyone at those conferences." This was improved upon only when the forthright Professor Alpha added, "Well, I mean... I shouldn't throw stones at poor Bob when that's what I did. I mean, that's what we ALL did," and then, "Well, I don't do it any more, of course, and he doesn't either, I'm sure... well, you know, maybe he does!" So let me just say: Ho. Ly. Crap. And oh my Lord. I can envision this bad-ass crew of appropriately deep-voiced, poetry-loving, broad-shouldered E.E. pimps roaming around these conferences bedding the other attendees, who, as we know, are largely 17-year veterans of some minute school district in, like, Indiana, where they don't have that many people who manage to possess both a command of the quatrain AND a willy all at once. It would not have taken, I suspect, much more than something like "young Bob"'s comment involving the phrase, "When I read poetry, with a woman..." to get denim jumpers practically leaping to the floor (and I wonder if Professor Number Four, in whose class at Amherst Alpha told me the P-ster was as well, learned/worked this stuff too.) All this was compounded even further, if such a thing is possible, when I asked about one of Alpha's co-authors and learned, in what was really just an explication of something I had for some reason sensed way back when I was doing some decision-informing reading in Norman Hall, that she wanted to marry him and hasn't talked to him since, I guess, he told her no. Oy. The humanity is seeping upwards from the ground pretty quickly at this point, and it's all I can do to a) fit it into a large picture with roots in history and branches in the future and b) keep track of it all here. I know it's not my most readable stuff, but... where else am I gonna put it?

Walked with Roey to our train, and was told that "sociologists are really doing stay-at-home anthropology." Poor sociologists - but I think he's right....