~Friday~
A non-regular rider was doing a Sudoku puzzle in my line of vision on the bus this morning, and I had the following thoughts watching him:
- I just never have been engaged by those.
- I would much rather be playing with words in a crossword puzzle, as I prefer words to numbers and at least you’re potentially learning something new doing crossword puzzles.
There’s a guy whom I may have to name soon as this is the second time I’ve called him out and for the same reason. I think he’s going to be Card Slotter. He gets on at the Gorman St./Western Blvd. intersection, and he’s the one that some time recently dipped his fare card into the slot reader before that one bus driver could cover it to force him to use the slide reader.
He got on today at the same place and did the same thing, and the only thing today’s bus driver said was, “Good morning,” like she always does to everyone who says it to her. I had these thoughts:
- Obviously the machine still reads the card in either reader.
- This bus driver either doesn’t give a shit which reader people use, or she knows it totally doesn’t matter and has no control issues.
A lady to the right of me was holding a partially folded newspaper in her hand but I could see enough of the first page to see that it was the National Enquirer, with a headline at the top of the page that said, “I killed my baby,” and underneath that, the top half of a picture of Tiger Woods. I had these thoughts:
- I wonder if that headline and that picture are together, like maybe one of the ladies Tiger prowled around with got pregnant and aborted the baby.
- Or, if those are two separate stories, like some lady having been impregnated while abducted by aliens and aborting it, and the picture going with a Tiger woods story about his purportedly being seen recently checking into a sex clinic.
- Enquiring minds want to know.
When I got off the bus in front of the credit union, I took a moment to get out my weekly $100 spending money, and I had these thoughts:
- Once I had the cash in my hands, “I feel like a hundred bucks.”
- Which then made me think of one of my favorite jokes:
A man walks into a bar and sits down on a barstool taking out a cigarette. The guy next to him pulls out a lighter and offers him a light. “Wow! That’s the longest lighter I’ve ever seen,” said the man. “Where’d you get it?”
The guy says, “Oh. I have a genie that can give you only one wish. Would you like a wish for yourself?”
“Sure,” the man says, and the guy produces the genie for his wish.
The man closes his eyes (why, I don’t know) and thinks to himself, “I wish I had a million bucks.”
All of a sudden, there is this huge clamor out in front of the bar. Both men go to the front door, open it, and the man exclaims, “Oh my god! I wished for a million bucks, not a million ducks!”
To which the guy replied, “Oh. I thought you knew my genie was hard of hearing. You didn’t think I actually wished for a 12-inch Bic, did you?”
I had one meeting at work and it was our first Student E-mail Implementation Team meeting since making our “Google is coming to NC State” announcement. After some thanks-yous all around for a lot of good work leading up to this moment, we jumped right in to the ton of things that need to be done in the next six weeks in order to meet our commitment of starting a beta service “mid-semester.”
In the afternoon, I received a professional affirmation in the form of a phone call from one of the professors, Cat Warren, in the English department saying that I’d been recommended by two other professors (Drs. Susan Katz and David Covington) to be a guest speaker in Cat’s Editorial and Opinion Writing course. She would like me to talk about “best practices in blogging.”
Casey and I met Robert at The Borough for dinner, and it was so incredibly crowded and loud in there at around 6:45 when we arrived that we left and went over to The Diner, where we had about a ten-minute wait to be seated.
I had a delicious hamburger with mushrooms, Swiss cheese, and jalapeños on it, with cottage cheese as my choice of a side. I’d forgotten how much I like cottage cheese. I’m going to get some on my next grocery run. Robert had their Po Boy Shrimp sandwich, and Casey had the meatloaf.
After dinner, we stopped back by The Borough, where we said our goodbyes to Robert, and Casey and I dropped back in for a drink or two. Well, a drink or two for me, as Casey doesn’t drink alcohol as I mentioned earlier in the week. The crowd had definitely thinned out, and we took a seat at the bar, after which Santiago came up and talked to us.
He and David have parted ways, amicably (and in fact are living together as of yet), and he spent a good amount of time wooing Casey—all to no avail.
After a couple of drinks, we headed back to my place, as I have an early start in the morning.