Martinis w/a Belgian.

So, on Thursday night I went with a Belgian student I know to a local ritzy restaurant that was doing a coupon-deal all this week where you brought it in and everyone at your table would get a free martini the place created in honor of Michelle Obama.

The place, it turns out, was packed with a reception for a local school board, and pretty much all the custumors beyond even the reception were black, which was a lot different from the one time I was at the place like a year ago (then it was more mixed).

This time, I particularly appreciated how black the music was that they had playing over the sound system... Something really black was playing when I came in (slips my mind now what, though), and later I heard a lot of R&B, and right before we left, Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out", which a whole table of 50-something dressed up chunky black ladies were lip-synching and bobbing their heads to.

Anyhow, the Belgian student I know has been dating an Asian undergrad with fat cheeks for over half a year now, and since she's a vegan and they're practically living together, he's become vegetarian, and he broke this to his mother like last week, and she started crying because he has de facto repudiated Belgian's meat-based cuisine, and it hurt her.

That said, he said he still couldn't make up his mind how much of a vegetarian to be, so I said it was an admirable move, but it's nothing to be dogmatic about, so I ordered mussels in wine sauce for an app to share since he had mentioned he really liked mussels, and he ate a ton of them.

I then shared the story of how many desert fathers who used to live on like half a pound of lentils a year and water they licked from a crack in the stone walls of their cells would be reprimanded by their bishops if they refused what was put in front of them when they travelled.

"The moral of the story," I was like, "is eat what's put in front of you."

He then said that he's always liked the story of two buddhist monks who were travelling and one took a girl on his shoulders when they were crossing a river because she asked them, and like an hour later, the other monk had said that that was wrong (i.e., because of contact with the opposite sex), and the first monk said something to the effect that "I put the girl down an hour ago, but you're still carrying."

"I always liked that," the Belgian guy said, and he said he read a lot about Buddhism in his teens and would have become one except he can't bring himself to believe in reincarnation, though otherwise the system makes a lot of sense.

He also added when we left that it makes sense not to be dogmatic about vegetarianism.

Orange.

The other day after getting out of the movie with a friend, right after leaving the theater, I was hungry and so started to peel an orange that I had in my bag, and I offered it to a friend that my one friend had run into and sat with us, and the guy was like, "No thanks," so I turned to my friend who I had come with and was like, "So do you want some orange?", and since for some reason my accent came out strong when I said that, I realized all of a sudden that I sounded exactly like my mother, both in the way her voice sounds and the actual words themselves.

A joke from an economist.

Q: How do you know that macroeconomists have a sense of humor?

A: They use decimal points!

Got my hair cut yesterday.

I had my haircut yesterday. Because last time Tennille had given me free pomade on my birthday, and had said her birthday was in February when I asked, I gave her my commemorative Obama mug and some coconut rooibus tea I had gotten on clearance this weekend, along with a heart-shaped ginger cookie with raspberry jam in the middle, which, I said when I gave it to her, is "Because you're such a sweetheart."

When she got it, she was like, "Oh, this is so nice, someone loves me!", and the other salon workers said no one ever got them anything.

Tennille then started to cut my hair, and somehow we started talking about celebrities and what bad role models they are, and she asked me if I had heard about how Chris Brown beat up Rihanna. I had but hadn't really heard anything much, and she said that she had heard it was because she had given him herpes.

"But she doesn't deserve that, even if she did give him herpes," she was like. "No one does."

Later, we were talking more, and she was saying she's going to take her time off this upcoming month to start thinking more/formalizing a plan about opening up her own salon, which she's been thinking about for years.

She also mentioned that a lot of her clients from the real ritzy part of town where she used to give minimum $40 men's haircuts have followed her here to this job, too.

Story 2 (2 of 2): Italian.

So, that one Italian professor also presented strong evidence that the Christian exegete Origen was a greatly-admired philosopher, even among non-Christian neo-Platonists, and when I asked her in the Q&A period if his reputation showed the professionalization of philosophy among Christians, she agreed to that description, and said that within 150 years it was all over since the growing ecclesiastical power of the church cracked down on theological investigation/research.

That night at another reception I ran into my one Dutch prof, who was only able to attend the first half of the lecture, and when I told her about the professionalization-and-decline narrative, she was like, "That sounds very Italian," and when I laughed, she was like, "But it does, you have to remember, they have to deal with the Vatican."

Story 1 (1 of 2): Arab.

So, that one Italian professor mentioned in her lecture that she sided with the controversial side of the very circumstantial evidence that Philip the Arab was a Christian, and thus was the first Christian emperor (he was before Constantine).

I didn't even know that some people thought he was Christian, and I asked a couple other students if they had, and one was like, "Yeah, but he's obviously a Muslim, just look at his name."

My shit this morning.

My shit this morning was tarry, a bright reddish-brown, and rather voluminous, though only in thick ropes than real logs, and it smelled like no other. I think it has to do with the leftover red-spiced fatty roast chicken bits and strips of roasted, still-a-little-on-the-raw-side I took home from the departmental dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant on Friday, and reheated some of to have with dinner yesterday. I haven't had a shit like that in a long time, I've been so consistent lately.

A thought about the pope.

This is what my one dean (the one who's not a black woman) said when I was talking to him about Benedict the Sixteenth at a departmental dinner on Friday --

For the pope, he's worried about people to the right who are not aligned with the Catholic church (e.g. the SSPX) but not the left (e.g. Hans Kueng), because the people on the left aren't organized and are more a disparate group of radical theologians, whereas the people on the right appeal to councils and authorities and say that *they're* the true church, which the pope sees as a dangerous claim to have floating out there, since he makes the same kinds of appeals to councils and authorities and hierarchy, and it's both threatening to him and strikes him as deceptive and troubling to the kind of religious people he wants in his church.

This is in addition to the widely-recognized thought that the Pope is more sympathetic to the right anyhow, and that's why he's worried about including them in the church.