~Thursday~ I was at the city bus stop at 8:15, and the bus arrived at 8:26.
A ways into the ride, a lady started talking incredibly loud on her cell phone. I’m not quite sure of the thought process that makes one yell louder and louder on their end because they can’t hear the person on the other end. She kept yelling, “HUH?” more and more loudly.
By the third call, I decided this woman was just lonely, and the people she calls know this. “NO! I’M ON THE BUS! OH. OK. WELL CALL ME WHEN YOU GET ON A BREAK OR SOMETHING.”
A lady in a McDonald’s uniform got off at the stop by the McDonald’s at the corner of Gorman and Western Boulevard. There’s just nice closure to that for me.
I had a work meeting in another building from 10:30 – noon, and I hitched a ride over with my colleague, Sarah.
My boss and our intern had a “working team meeting” in the afternoon, during which I showed them both how to use NC State’s Survey Builder application, which I just love and have found to be one of those rare tools in which things actually work they way you would expect them to. I believe they call that “intuitive.”
My friend and colleague, Larry, dropped by just to say hello, because he was in the basement. That’s one of those implicit affirmations.
On the way to the gym, I swung by a store at the Avent Ferry Shopping Center to pick up a greeting card. A lady in front of me, driving an SUV, just stopped in the middle of a T-intersection, with her left turn signal to turn towards the top of the T. It was bad enough that she was stopped in the middle of the intersection, but to her left was the curb in front of the store, with bright yellow paint on the ground that said, “No parking. Fire lane.”
After the car coming straight passed by, she parked right on top of the words “No Parking” and got her fat ass out of the car. And I mean that literally—she had on stretch pants whose back pulled down to expose her nasty crack. How freaking lazy can you get? There was a legal parking spot no more than 15 feet away from where she was.
At the gym, I did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, followed by 30 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine.
People kill me with their “fashion.” One guy in the free-weight area lifted his t-shirt and pulled up his sweatpants, only to then shimmy them down his ass so that they exposed his underwear just so.
Another guy walking around had on a polo shirt with a collar, which he had hiked up and kept fiddling with to make sure it stayed erect. Okay, first of all, a shirt with a collar on it to work out? Really? And second of all, hasn’t that turned-up-collar fad way passed?
Get a grip, people! “You got to focus.”
I listened to Fresh Air on the way to Durham, and Terry Gross was interviewing neuroscientist David Linden (adorable, not that it matters) whose new book is called: The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good.
The interview was so, so interesting, and I only heard a part of it. You can listen to the 35-minute podcast of the episode here if you’re interested.
I met Robert at Manbites Dog Theater, where we saw their current show Buddy Cop 2. In general, you can count on Manbites Dog productions to be either thought-provoking or quirky (and sometimes both), and this one was no different—coming in on the quirky side.
Watching it, I was reminded of Fargo a little bit, and the female lead character reminded me so much of my friend Sharon—in terms of the way she thinks and reacts, as well as her mannerisms. I even thought her face physically resembled my friend Sharon’s.
Back in Raleigh, I stopped by The Borough for a drink and took a seat at the bar next to Haywood and his friend Phil, whose birthday it was. After a few minutes, a guy named Davis took the seat to my right, and after I made some comment about his drink, we started talking.
This was one of those rare instances when you meet someone with whom it’s so very easy to talk that before you know it you’re two strangers talking about things that matter. It was quite remarkable, really.
Early on in the conversation, he told me about a bourbon called Basil Hayden, which I’d never heard of, and about which he said, “This bourbon will change your life.” For the record, this was before we started talking about things that mattered, which is just to say that I do realize that the taste of a bourbon does not fall into that category—even this one.
From there, I dropped into Flex for Trailer Park Prize Night, where much to my surprise I found “the twins”—which means it’s “pageant time” in Raleigh. Their friend Jay was also there, and after a little while, Bob arrived.
A fun night ensued, and I left later than I wanted to—and later than I should have seeing that I had to work at 6:00 in the morning. At least I was working from home.