~Monday~ There was a slight drizzle of rain at the bus stop this morning, and when I walked up a young African-American guy was there holding his book bag over his head.
I watched him from under my umbrella-ella-ella (sorry—channeling Rihanna there for a second), and at one point he put the bag down, reached inside, took out a hairbrush, which was a short flat one—not unlike the kind of brush you scrub your nails with or the one I have to clean mushrooms with—and he rubbed it all over his head.
Two things amused me about this:
- The guy was practically bald. I mean if his hair was even ⅛ of an inch long, I’d be surprised.
- He put the brush away, and put the bag right back on top of his head.
Before the bus arrived, another guy walked up, the same Asian kid I mentioned on Friday. I had a flashback to The Mod Squad considering the racial make-up of the bus stop now—one white, one black, one yellow. Well, technically, the Mod Squad’s “promotional hype-line” was “one white, one black, one blonde.”
And then I wondered if considering an Asian person “yellow” was racist—convincing myself not, as an Asian person is as yellow as a Caucasian person is white as an African-American person is black. I guess. It’s all so complicated.
Today’s bus driver wasn’t the regular 8:15 driver, who usually says hello to people when they board. This one just looked straight ahead, mute. As I took my seat, I considered today’s driver and wondered what kind of bus driver I’d be, deciding that:
- I would greet people as they came on and left the bus.
- I would run the A/C almost all the time.
- I would not wear a jacket.
- I don’t think I’d wear driving gloves, but I’m open to the possibility that I would.
- I would win the annual “Bus Driver of the Week” award whenever they give it out.
There were three “house ads” about detours on today’s bus, two in English and one in Spanish. The one in Spanish said, “Desviado de la Fayetteville St. Empezando el 10 mayo de 2010.” I have only the vaguest notion of what that means, but the most interesting thing to me is that, evidently, in Spanish, the names of the months are not capitalized.
I had a morning free of work meetings, and at just after 1:30, I made my way over to the Avent Ferry Technology Center, having to allow a little more time as there is very limited bus service this week, with regular service returning next week at the start of the first summer session.
I spent an hour-and-a-half with a colleague and we worked on debugging some Drupal table issues and designing the navigation for her website redesign currently in progress.
I caught the 4:05 #11 Avent Ferry city bus (because that route’s Wolfline bus is not currently running), which means I had a good walk home from the intersection of Avent Ferry and Gorman Street. It’s not a bad walk at all, but the addition of a heavy laptop bag around your neck, really does make it less enjoyable.
At home, I did another hour of work, mostly spent debugging one of those Drupal table issues, which I’m happy to report I was able to fix.
I really, really, really had to talk myself into going to the gym tonight. I decided to go and just walk on the treadmill for an hour, nothing too strenuous. Once there, however, I elected the crosstrainer elliptical machine for 30 minutes instead, for a 545-calorie burn.
I listened to just a couple of podcasts on my iTouch before my left earbud got saturated enough that I couldn’t hear through it. I didn’t bring my “workout headphones,” since I was planning to do the treadmill on which I wouldn’t have sweated nearly as much. My workout headphones clip on the back of my ear instead of being inserted into them to avoid just what happened with these earbuds.
The first podcast I listened to, I absolutely loved. It was about “texting etiquette,” which really can be generalized to “cell phone etiquette,” and it was entitled You Can Text Me Now: The one simple rule you need to know to have perfect texting etiquette. Totally worth the read or listen. It’s all summed up by what the author calls “The Bathroom Rule.”
The other two were from the NPR Story of the Day podcast series, and I found the first one, entitled Secrecy Around Trade Agreement Causes Stir, only marginally interesting. It was actually about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which the author argues is really not a trade agreement at all, but is categorized as such by the government solely to be able to keep the proceedings confidential.
I found the last podcast fairly compelling, and it was entitled Is the Bible More Violent than the Quran? Bottom line? It is. Organized religions never cease to amaze me.
On the way out of the gym, I picked up the summer edition of “Crazy Coupons,” which is the one that always has coupons for a $6.99 haircut at Great Clips, but this summer edition doesn’t have one in it. 🙁
At home, I had a nice instant message chat with Robert, made several moves in several games of Scrabble, and had a freaky incident occur with my friend Joe while we made a hotel reservation for a weekend in Wilmington in mid-June.
He was logged in to a hotel website, for which we both have an account, and sent me a link to a reservation he was considering. When I clicked on the link, it showed me logged in as him. We agreed to put the reservation on my card, and so I hit “Log out,” (presumably from his account, which was just wrong that I was in it to begin with), and then I clicked login and logged in with my account.
All of a sudden I got an instant message from him with all kinds of exclamation points in it that he was now seeing me logged into the site in my account on his screen. I’m pretty sure that that’s fucked up and shouldn’t happen.
I got off the grid early tonight, and trudged along in The Blind Side. Although, I hate to admit, it got a little better, at least for the stretch of reading I did tonight.
I eventually doused the light in hopes of a nightmare-free night.