29 Jan 07

Time:

?

Money:

?, although it involved the regular breakfast, Starbucks twice, the regular lunch, and Johnny Rockets.

More interesting things:

Listened, from my seat on the local, to people being shepherded around the Grand Central platform by a large voice which I started out thinking belonged to an MTA person; when the directions for this one to move to the left and this one to move to the right and this other one just to move concluded with, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am not no size seven, I am a TWENTY-SIX PLUS, and you need to go on and get out of my way. There's room in there! I need to get on this train," I was able to gather that it was in fact a politely - and amusingly - assertive passenger.

Sat finishing breakfast after Roey'd had to take off, and talked with my mom and then with my dad. They both sounded quite well, which is (needless to say) terrific, but one particularly cool aspect of this phone session was that just as my mom and I were ending our discussion of how utterly lovely my daily life really is, Billy Joel came on the radio with... "New York State of Mind," of course.

Benefited from an unusually warm and fuzzy series of interactions with Professor Alpha, the recounting of which must be prefaced with the observation that Alpha is almost always warm and fuzzy, so that Monday stands out is really saying something. It began with a high-five - what else is new - that eased into a hug especially pleasant because it was accompanied by some goofball commentary on the contrast between my tape-related arts-and-crafts ability (not that great) and my "brilliant thinker" status (yeah, right, but complimentary anyway.) It continued when I was directed to move a bit to the side and thus out of the way of Alpha's drawer-opening not with an "excuse me" but with a tap on the hip. And it wrapped up with another hug, although I can't quite remember the context of this one. (Damn, but I'll live because I certainly know it happened....)

Met with the person who works most closely with Professor Number One in the coordination of the sequence of courses in which I'm teaching. I wanted to find out more about the syllabus (which, you might argue, could be a useful thing for the instructor of a class to do), and I did, but I also enjoyed a very nice conversation including comments like, "Number One can't say enough about you" and "When we had that first meeting, I thought you were very professor-like - not in a boring way, but like, you know, like Alpha, engaging and with a strong presence" and so on. The thing is, I know this person likes him as much or nearly as much as I do, and if I ever said something like that to someone... well, I'm not sure what I could say after that!

Wolfed out Marisa's honey vanilla spray. I mean, it's certainly true that my sense of smell is quite sensitive and, maybe more importantly, attended to only a little short of the level required from the blind kids at French perfume schools (almost), but it definitely cracked me up when she was so surprised that I could identify not just the scent but where it came from; I believe she compared it to the difference between knowing a pizza has wafted through and knowing that it was a Patsy's thin-crust with mushrooms or something. The thing is, I HAVE that smell, because it's one of my favorites, and the reason it's one of my favorites is that it's not just vanilla, which I don't particularly like to wear by itself, but a very distinctive honey scent, too. It's hard to miss, but I'm glad it gave me the chance to do a wolfie-version party trick.

Sat in class and had occasion to think about thinking. Well, remembering, anyway, which is certainly a kind of thinking. Professor Alpha was telling us about the seventh-grade class he taught, less than deftly, for his internship year, and in recalling names and stories he sort of gazed off into what would probably be described as the "middle distance" if it hadn't been enclosed by a classroom wall; I wondered what he was seeing. I can remember things so intensely and pleasantly that I'm practically there, but when I do that what are my eyes doing? Or not my eyes, even, but the places on my brain that usually receive pretty much real-time conceptions of what happens to be in front of me at the moment? Are they resting? Are there synapses firing between those regions and wherever we keep our long-term storage items? Was I really looking at Alpha - because that's what I noted: looking/what's he seeing as he thinks - or was my brain too occupied with this unseeable stuff? (I'm not real fussed, as the LTC would say, about my lack of answers for these questions, but they ARE undemandingly persistent, and certainly interesting.)