Ex-frat boys (now current businessmen) on the subway.

Ex-frat boy #1: "Dude, have you ever heard of this thing, I was reading about it the other day..."

Ex -frat boy #2: "Dude, what?"

Ex-frat boy #1: "A 'food desert'."

Ex-frat boy #2: "Yeah, I think I heard of that once."

Ex-frat boy #1: "I saw that in some magazine, and I was like, 'What?', I had to figure out what it was."

Massive book confusion.

Like last year or the year before that, I bought an old cheap paperba

Publish Post

ck of Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior" at a booksale for 25 cents.

And, I read the 1st chapter, and I kept thinking, "When does she start talking about the zipless f-ck?".

And then I realized I hadn't bought Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying".

The punchline...

...of the titillating ellipsed quote from the first few pages so you'd buy the book to read it:

European men are color-blind in love. They don't care what color a girl's skin is, so long as she is worthy of his love.

And later on in the same chapter:

In the days of the Old South it was the plantation owner who raped the beautiful slave. The mulatto baby was the white man's creation, not the Negro's.

As a Negro I have no burning desire to marry a white. But at the same time, the thought of marrying a white doesn't revolt me. Everything depends upon the individual.

What would revolt me would be to have my sister marry a white with the mentality of a Faubus or Wallace.

End of chapter.

My toilet nerdiness.

The other day after getting a Loeb Classical Library copy of Aristotle's Poetics off the shelf for research, I suddenly had to take a massive shit...

So I went to the library stacks and took my massive shit, while reading my Loeb.

People admire my bravery, including a Spaniard.

So, yesterday in the library I saw my one friend from Buffalo, who was studying at a table with that one Spanish guy I know ("Jesus"). She had given me the restaurant recommendation for the place I was at the night a homeless guy tried to rob me on the subway, and though I had texted her about that and she had heard my story from a friend of mine, I hadn't seen her till then, and so I told her and Jesus the story more in depth.

"Wow, that is so brave," she was like, where I told the part about mine pushing my way past the homeless guy and running out the door and getting myself to an emergency button.

"You think so?", I was like.

"Yeah," Jesus was like.

"Wow!", I was like, "Do you really think that? Estoy - no no no! - SOY - mui fuerte," I said, very dramatically and nodding my head in earnest.

"No no no," Jesus was like. "El mas fuerte."

Then, he added, "And you should be a novelist, you have such command of the language."

Conference shock: Original languages.

This past weekend was the regional conference where I gave a dry-run of my Coptic paper (which went pretty well). Other students from my program had kind of mentioned before that the papers presented there tended to be of a very low quality and couldn't hack it at the national conference, but I thought that was just them trying to put others down so they could feel better about themselves...

Until I saw a presentation where the speaker seems to have just worked off of the English translation and not the original Greek, and not looked at textual variants that her argument should have taken account of.

A colleague of mine asked a nice but pointed question about the textual variant thing and felt like a dick, but this young prof who had graduated from our program said later over beer that questions like that are fair-game for conferences and a service to the field, since scholars should be thinking about these points, even if their training didn't force them to.

A random old story about my one Dutch friend...

Back when his (warfare-trained) (Israeli) wife was pregnant and crying all the time and saying he didn't understand her and what she was going through, he would be like, "But you do not understand me, I too am giving birth - to my dissertation!"

Then, he would tell her how it was actually much worse to be giving birth to a dissertation, since pregnancy was something you just put up with and had to get through, whereas a dissertation required active effort.

Recent movies.

I loved "The Social Network", "True Grit" devastated me by the end - I couldn't talk for like 30-40 minutes afterwards about the movie without choking up - and "The Illusionist" was so good that it put me in melancholy headspace for like ever.

I can't remember the last time I've seen so many good movies in such close proximity to one another!