26 June 07

Time:

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Money:

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More interesting things:

Celebrated exactly one year of heading for the back right corner of East. I was going to describe it as "noting," since on the outside that's probably all it appeared to be, but in my head it was in fact quite a lot more than that. I mentioned the day's red-letterness to Professor Alpha in combination with the phrase "scared shitless," to which he responded, "Well, it didn't take long get over THAT, now did it?" Heh.

Yawned, it seems conspicuously. Professor Alpha asked, in that thick from-under-the-eyebrows voice, "we keepin' you up at night?", with just the right suggestive lilt to reduce me to a snorty "uhh...."

Caught an elbow in the side as I waited for copies to finish. Professor Alpha was letting me know he was headed out to lunch but would see us after class. I love a guy who keeps you up to speed without even making you work nosily for it; I especially love a guy who does this kind of thing because he expects the same in return.

Got out of Professor Alpha's class five minutes early, which was useful because my dash from campus to Shun Lee required stops at the ATM and the Gap along the way. We stopped near the restroom so I could finish listening to Alpha's description of his arrival time for the next day, I leapt back out as fast as I could, and... skidded to the elevator just in time to wait for it with Alpha himself and encounter a question with the easiest yet most paining moral answer I've had to come up with in awhile: "Wanna grab a bite for dinner?" Holy crap and no fair, since I had to answer that I was on my way to Shun Lee with the grandparents. His response was entirely supportive, of course... but DAMN. IT! (Not that I didn't have a great time at dinner, as we shall see momentarily.)

Raced, unfruitfully, through the Gap, all the while listening to my mom talk about the officiating powers of notaries public at the weddings of their relatives and then - oy - a conversation in which she told my youngest sister, for the second time at least, that I would probably marry someone who is a) a professor and b) quite a bit older than me. Ha. This lasted pretty much all the way uptown, interrupted only for a second to text Professor Alpha with a request for a raincheck, which was positively received. Anyway, when my mom said all that stuff again, I decided that it was just too mean to keep the joke from her, and admitted that I had been talking to this nice guy from my class last term with whom I planned to go out once he'd returned from vacation. "And he is, in fact," I added in a slow growl, "a professor." At that point, I had to stop talking because of the shrieking laughter coming at me from 1300 miles away; the next obvious question I responded to first by asking whether she would have a heart attack and then with the not-surprising number of 53. "That IS older," she answered reasonably, "but... not really. I mean, YOU'RE 53 inside..." so on and so forth. Clearly, this conversation could have gone much worse - it had, in fact, gone quite well and did not make me feel funny, which was a pleasant surprise - and I was, as much as it bemuses me to say so, glad to have engaged in it.

Heard, to the feigned dismay of my grandmother, a gonorrhea joke. (The part that was supposed to be dismaying, I hope in light of her sex-with-students comments, was that it was my grandfather relaying it and a very expensive dinner table over which it was relayed.) It was something goofy about Big Louie or whatever, but the key here is just that I got it in the first place. My grandfather's a pretty cool character.