2 Apr 07

Time:

?

Money:

$5, muffin, water, and D.P. (lime, which was not what I meant to do - a subconscious consideration of Professor Alpha, I guess!), lunch place.
$too much (and they're even being assholes about the voucher), ticket home for Easter etc., JetBlue.
$8, pasta salad and soup, lunch place.
$11, D.P. (the right kind) and water, Gristede's.

More interesting things:

Realized as I got ready to leave my house that if I stood in one specific square foot of my room, Essence of East Rockaway House drifted past my nose. If I moved, it disappeared, but if I got closer to the floor, it got stronger, and finally I decided it must have been carrying in through the window. Wherever it came from, though, it was not something I'd experienced before (here, I mean), which makes sense since of course my window is usually quite closed.

Decided that today was finally the day to write about my love for the subway jackrabbit posters. They occupy the long skinny cases which used to hold those weird but only somewhat interesting arm-hand-and-landmark-ring posters, and I have been considering for awhile why I find the new ones so appealing. My conclusions: a) the rabbit's passengers look like they're dressed for spring, which I always like, and while one of them is sitting comfortably against his tail, another is leaning casually at the trail fan ear notch; b) he's leaping past the Twin Towers, apparently on his way to the Washington Square Arch; c) you can see the paws of two of his compatriots, one on his way across the Triborough Bridge and the other over the George Washington (I think - but I should check on that); d) he's clearly smiling; e) the colors he and his surroundings are rendered in remind me of the picture books I was so enamored of in that class - bright but soft; and f) above all, I think, he's wearing a nice little racing cape decorated with all the subway (rabbit) letters, which the artist carefully made sure would stay on even after the turns coming out of Grand Central by painting in a belly strap and a neatly snapped collar and which looks both comfortable and professional. (Speaking of "professional," this entry probably makes it seem like I need to see one, but that's not it. I do really love this picture, and maybe even more I'm glad I feel well enough these days to think about that!)

Called Dr. B. (for the third time - it was his birthday on Saturday) and had, as usual, a really lovely conversation centering on academic life, basketball (particularly how Georgetown, Ohio State, UCLA, and Florida making it to the Final Four boded especially well for us), his conversation with another old friend, my freshly rediscovered "sprightliness" (hey, I wasn't feeling too hot the LAST time we talked), and his wife's trip to Rhode Island this week, which spawned its own teasing back-and-forth about who made the plans for someone's birthday weekend and, in turn, the observations that I "know [them] so well," that I'm the only one he can quite talk to this way, and, finally - this is verbatim, now - "..., I love ya!" We usually think of missing people as an unpleasant experience, and of course there have been times when that was how I felt it. But somehow I've been unbelievably fortunate, fortunate enough that I always have someone - several someones - to miss very much, and luckier still that when a conversation or an email or whatever reminds me of that feeling, it does a lot more to make me happy than to make me sad.

Checked the rabbit bridges. The big red one (being crossed, reasonably, by a rabbit, since it's not a car bridge) is the Hell Gate Bridge; the tall skinny one is the Verrazano-Narrows (which shoud be easy to remember - skinny? narrows?); and the one behind the arch with the fancy crosspieces (or whatever the proper engineering term is) is the Triborough. These are things I should know, so I'll practice.

Cited, in my paper, someone who cited someone else, and discovered tonight that the someone else cited Professors Alpha and Number Four. This morning I had a little conversation with Number Four, because... well, I don't know exactly what my question was. I knew that it had been making me feel kind of weird to see the same big names over and over again in my candidacy-related travels, and weirder yet by a long shot to think that I could ever get away with just, like, insinuating myself into their conversation uninvited. And here I find that an authority quoted by an authority quoted by an authority quoted by me is a gregarious two-headed monster who gives me books and big fuzzy hugs and who I know I can stand next to at this party. I don't remember reading about that in the literature I pored over trying to make my decision, but it should have been there.