~Wednesday~ The city bus stops for me at a stop that is right after turning left onto Kaplan from Kent. This morning the bus did something I’ve never seen it do before. While it was stopped at that intersection waiting to turn left, where there’s a stop sign, it opened its doors and let someone on. I mean that’s 100 feet or less from the stop.
Sci-Fi Fantasy Man was on this morning, and I took the seat in front of him, knowing full well that doing so would make it difficult to confirm that the book he was reading was a science fiction or fantasy novel. The best I could do was sort of turn and face the window once, and glance over the back of the seat.
Luckily, he was at the beginning of a new chapter with a title of, “A New Beginning,” which I could easily imagine alluding to some new world in some yet-to-be-discovered galaxy that had just big-banged its way into existence. That’s got to be science fiction, right?
At a subsequent stop, a man got on with what could’ve potentially been a dangerous combination: wearing gloves and with coins in his hands for his fare. All went well, though. Each of the coins made it into the slot on the first try.
At the McKimmon Center stop, an instantiation of the racial divide took place as both a Wolfline bus and the city bus pulled up to the stop at the same time: All the white and Asian people walked up to the Wolfline bus, and all the Hispanic and African-American people walked back to the city bus.
I received the most thoughtful sympathy card in the internal campus mail—extraordinary for two reasons:
- It was from Jackie, the student leader of our Gulf Coast Alternative Spring Break Trip, who I’ve only met in the last couple of months, and
- It was totally homemade, including cut-outs, glue, and ribbons, and complete with a stamped “J” on the back of it.
I was very touched by the gesture.
You may remember that I was not able to deposit that wad of cash I’ve been carrying around for too many days yesterday, due to the robbery-in-progress at the credit union. I saw a failblog.org (40-second) video entry that made me wonder if any grannies were in the credit union at the time:
But I digress…
I considered two “funnies” for my stop in today, but ultimately thought that the timing would be really bad:
- Saying as I walked in, “Y’all look so tense!”
- Saying as I plopped down my ten 100-dollar bills, “Yeah, I found these yesterday on a sidewalk on Dan Allen Drive. They were just laying there like they’d fallen out of the bag of someone fleeing.”
Class was interesting enough this evening. We spent most of the class discussing the two readings for tonight, 12 pages from The Wisdom of Crowds, and 32 pages from Conversation and Community.
We spent the last 15 minutes sharing our knowledge, observations, and experiences using syndicated content, with a major focus on RSS (really simple syndication).
Dancing was fun enough, although the bar was essentially dead. Bill was absent, and I don’t think I two-stepped all night long.
The good news was that I got some cardio in line-dancing, though.