Sights on a walk over to the bikeshare station the other morning:

1) An empty Corona bottle with a lime wedge in the neck.

2) A (white) (male) student zipping along on one of those motorized singlewheel skateboard things I had seen a(n Asian-America) (male) student use several months ago (I guess it's a trend with students from the nearby engineering school?).

A nickname for Nancy Reagan.

My one art school colleague who wears women's clothes always calls Nancy Reagan "half cup of salad."

"Just look at her!", he was like, "You know she always just eats a half cup of salad."

Then, he added, "And maybe a quarter of an egg."

A deep ecological sadness.

The other week it was so cold out, and I not only got strawberries and sweet green grapes at the store, but I went back on a second trip and got more grapes, they were so good.

I loved them, but it made me sad that they were available in winter, and for so cheap.

Two sights from my apartment:

1) I wake up and roll open my Venetian blind and look at the wall like 3 feet away, and I see a single snowflake drift across it, and that's how I find out it's snowing.

2) I sit in the deep ledge of my front window, talking on my phone for better reception, and I see a small brown mouse scampering on the curb outside, and then down off of it, and then run across the street and down the steps of a house opposite.

Quiet student lounge occurrence:

The other day on campus around lunchtime I went to the extraordinarily quiet student lounge people use in this one campus building basement, and like always there was a handful of very quiet people in there with me, eating lunch and doing work.

Then, like after twenty minutes, I hear a loud smacking sound, and it keeps going and going and going.

It was coming from behind a column, and it was time for me to go get to class anyways, so I packed up my stuff and left, and as I was leaving, I made sure to look where my vision was obstructed by the column to see what was going on with someone smacking so noisily.

And, it was a (college age) (Asian) (male) student, doing something on his laptop with earphones plugged in, and he was chewing gum with his mouth wide open, just smacking and smacking and smacking, completely oblivious to the inappropriate food sounds he was making so loudly.

Odd sight the other day:

The other day I parked my bikeshare bike outside the gym, and as I was walking over to the library on campus, I saw a(n older) (white) woman with her face bundled up in a scarf, with a bike helmet on, buzzing by on her bike on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

She looked exactly like my one friend the retired nurse who I knew from the library security guard, who died years ago without any real family and who I had arranged a small memorial service for.

Stories of Puerto Rico.

The other week at a new bar up in the yuppie/bro neighborhood, I was chit-chatting with the bartender, this (slim) (young) (recent Puerto Rican) immigrant (guy) who was into poly and bought me my 2nd and 3rd beer on the house.

He used to run a computer store in a village, and he said one of his biggest sellers was surge protectors, since the way the electricity would come on and off, people's computers would get fried if they didn't have them.

"Ah, just like I thought Puerto Rico would be," I thought to myself, though of course I didn't say that.

He also said that he misses the village sometimes, because the big city is so cold and impersonal.

"It's like if you're at the gas station and someone pulls in in front of you, you think twice about giving them the finger, because you might see them there the same time the next week," he was like.

When we talked more about poly, he said it was pretty new for him, but his girlfriend has a small brain tumor, so who is he to restrict her life when she might not have much time left.

"The first time when she was out with another guy, it was hard," he was like.  "But I had to learn it was about me.  It's a process"

I also found out he knew this poly/BDSM guy from that one documentary series I used to go to, interestingly enough, though I guess it's not so surprising.

Those kind of people always all know each other, since there's not that many of them.