Celebrity.

So, outside the deli across the street from my house there's this one older homeless black dude with drugged-out eyes and a big pot belly who always is asking people for money, and since I have to pass by him everyday on the way to school, he always says hi to me, and sometimes he calls me 'big guy', like when he sometimes slurs out, "How you doing today, big guy?"

Anyhow, when I was coming home yesterday, he was like, "How you doing today, big guy?" like he says a lot, only all of a sudden he said, "Hey, you know you're in the paper?", and when I tried to tell him I wasn't, he walked over to a nearby trash barrel, pulled out a paper that was lying near the top, and flipped it to some page and showed a picture of me coming out of an Obama regional office with another canvasser from the first time I went to go canvas for Obama in Indiana, which is already over two months ago.

(I forgot there was a student photographer along on the trip - for some reason the story with the pictures he took only came out in a quarterly student magazine published this week.)

After he showed me that, I was like, "Well, shit," and he immediately was like, "A small coffee would be nice, you don't know how hungry I am," and so I took him in the deli and bought him not only a coffee, but also whatever sandwich he wanted, and he got a cheeseburger, and added in fries too, which I found out when I went to go pay for everything.

Some of the black people in the deli knew him, too, and he kept showing them my picture and being like, "This man here is a celebrity, he works for the Obama campaign!", and they all smiled and nodded appreciatively at me.