28 Mar 07

Time:

?

Money:

$5, muffin and coffee, lunch place.
$8, regular lunch (but a new and particularly tasty incarnation thereof), regular place.
$3, some not-quite-nasty almond-soy milk (?) and a Clif bar, lunch place.
$0, Cuban dinner (since I think maybe we're gonna take turns doing the dinner honors), I forget what the place is called.

More interesting things:

Read the article for Professor Number Six's class pretty much just in the nick of time; if I'd had to get through it any quicker I wouldn't have had time to double-check the pretty interesting claim the authors made and therefore discover what turned out to be a typo. At the time, though, I didn't know if it was that or more an issue of not knowing what "cumulative percentages" are (I do, as it happens, know what they are), so I pointed that out right at the very start of class and got an amusing response. Number Six came around from behind the table with a sheaf of papers shielding his chest and yanked me into an exchange about whether this had been planned or if we'd met beforehand. Of course I replied that we had not done either (not before turning a little red, I don't think) and then found that he had in fact made up a whole sheet detailing the cumulative percentage thing. (The other hilarious part of all this - because there is more - was that one of my classmates seemed to find it highly amusing, highly surprising, or both that I had checked, which I appreciated by itself; that Brenan then spoke up behind me to assure me that it was in fact a typo let me know he had checked too, which was just one more pleasant item for the hour.)

Waltzed back to my desk after a coffee break with Anne and Marisa and left them chatting in the lobby while I went to find out whether Professor Number Seven had resolved the bizarre email-the-associate-dean's-secretary-for-meeting-food difficulty of earlier in the day (the secretary in question actually called when I was standing there; apparently the extra but largely uninformative words Number Seven added to her own reiteration of my email was enough to jog this gal's memory [I think the particularly relevant word might have been "Professor" - very classy], causing her to tell Number Seven, "Dear, I don't do coffee," but even that - and the amusing response Number Seven had when I pointed this phraseology out - is not my point). No, the part that was entirely pleasant - and quite amusing - came when she announced she'd been looking for me with iTunes problems involving a laptop, a desktop, and an iPod, so I plunked myself in her chair and set to it. The catch-as-catch-can method I started out with on my own version of this task is a drag, though, particularly when people are watching you miss it time after time, so together Anne and even the prof herself and I figured out how to hold the iPod open. I said something about hiring myself out, as J. Hardy is already a good customer, and she laughed about 25 bucks an hour and then, in response to Anne's suggestion of dinner, said, "Hey, that I can do!" The great, funny, nice, painful-'cause-I-know-it's-on-its-way-out thing is that if she hadn't had to meet a couple of teachers tonight, she really would have done it. Man.

Walked towards the restaurant past my favorite chess spot. This time the weather was so nice that they were sitting at tables on the sidewalk, and I loved having the opportunity to confirm my earlier judgement that it really is all kinds, colors, sizes, and genders of people playing. It's not everyday - at least not anywhere else I've ever lived - that you see an elderly white guy in a flat cap hunched over the same game as a young, pierced-up black guy.

Headed toward the subway after dinner, past all the comedy clubs and bars, and listened to what I really, really hope was a pair of out-of-towners: "Man, this is Bleecker Street! Bleecker!" Okay, so: a) I once thought that in appropriating that title my drama classmates had come up with the world's dumbest soap-opera name, b) now I realize just how not-dumb it is, and c) I walk on it all the time. All the time! Unbelievable. (So you know what? Maybe they weren't out-of-towners, and maybe I actually hope they weren't.)

Passed Peculier Pub (the thought of which, incidentally, had caused some peculiar needs to look away from the head of the table during Professor Number Four's rendition of Professor Alpha's class today...) and a guy standing around outside it with a Gator ski hat on.