A Friday night unlikely to inspire a pop song UPDATED

Bus to the train to the other train to the shuttle. Lags almost each step of the way. It's almost as if I don't really live in greater New York, is what I start to think on such occasions. Princeton's a suburb, but one where you need to sign up years (!) in advance to be able to get a parking spot at the train station, and where overnight parking is permit-only regardless. It's certainly suburban, but what exactly is it a suburb of? Philadelphia radio works here better than NY radio, which maybe tells us something.

So yes, slightly tired, even though none of this was today, even though I just had a jumbo cappuccino* at the (fabulous) Viennese coffee shop in town. Commenters who believe my linking to a story about French anti-Semitism makes me a fascist (!!!) can expect snippier and shorter responses than the usual graphomaniacal graciousness to which they've grown accustomed. (And, uh, no further responses. Tapped out when it comes to that sort of thing.) Great ambitions for the evening include remembering where I parked, driving home, walking my supermodel dog, and... that's probably it.

*Caffeine, wonder drug. I tend to forget, because the coffee I make at home, no matter the method, no matter the beans, never seems to have much of it. Meanwhile, thanks to the hugeness of this outside-coffee, I finally figured out this thing I've been trying to write, finally. And no, I'm not referring to this somewhat phoned-in blog post.

UPDATE

So the evening ended up more exciting than planned - I ran into some astrophysicists and ended up seeing Saturn through a telescope. And before that, parking someone I don't normally park led me to pass by the... Japanese language school of Princeton. I had no idea such a thing existed, but now know its fees (not bad!), when the intro class meets, and when I'd need to have signed up by. Technically Dutch is first on the new-languages priorities list, but there's the small matter of it not being taught anywhere outside the countries where it's spoken. (I exaggerate, but slightly.) Also of being able to get by in Belgium in English or French, whereas if I ever do make it back to Japan...

In ascending order of seriousness

-Because all roads lead to Sunrise Mart, I now have nigari tofu coagulant. In liquid form, because that was what they had. Not sure what that'll mean for the recipe, but this is on.

Only the essentials. (Wall of DeCecco not pictured.)

-NJ Transit has basically given up for the summer. They seem to have put all their resources into keeping the train refrigerator-cold, and exactly none into such things as having trains match up with other trains, or arrive at something like the time indicated. I think this may be my first time experiencing "As a New Jersey taxpayer..." thoughts, but there it is.

-I don't do Middle East on social media. (By which I mean, Facebook or Twitter.) I observe. I read what friends and journalists and such post, and am definitely getting a wide range of at the very least Jewish opinion, ranging from the Israel-was-a-bad-idea-in-the-first-place perspective (yes, there are Jews who think this - maybe worth noting if you're hoisting up a placard against The Jews) to it's-all-Hamas's-fault (gosh, not all, but even if that were the case, these deaths are plenty upsetting), and, thank goodness, lots in between. I do plan to write on this at some point, but not in 140-character bursts. I don't think my views on this lend themselves to sound bytes (I do go on), and my reaction to the situation is more sadness than outrage, and it's the latter that's expected in such forums. If you're not outraged, you can't possibly care, or something. If I did enter a thread, I could probably summon some outrage, although depending whose thread, it could be in any which direction. (Well, not any.) And I'm not an amateur military strategist, which is the other approach that seems to lend itself to social-media weighing-in on such topics.

But I did pass along the Tablet stories about the French synagogue attacks, because that's sort of my beat, and because... ugh. One way to think of it: Let's say you believe Israel is 100% in the wrong, and get all Godwin about it. How does that justify attacks on French Jews? Ah, but they may support Israel! They may have family there! Think for a moment about where this logic leads. Oh right: stuff like internment camps. Was Japan on the right side of WWII? Not so much. Did that justify internment of Japanese-Americans? No, it did not. And no, it's not a perfect analogy obviously, for so many reasons, but I think the connection is clear.

Weekend excitement

From the newspaper:

-The awfulness of Penn Station is difficult to convey, but Lawrence Downes has done a fine job of it.

-One step forward, two steps back: parents are urged to tone down their bragging about their kids... and to do so by adding caveats, ala, "My son is on the honor roll (but still wets his bed)."

-When does a civil-rights issue get classified as "Styles"? When the rights-seekers in question are gay and French.

From the Whole Foods:

From my spam folder:

-"No risk Natalie Portman." Is there any other kind?

A feast for the senses

Today, in the alleged quiet car, these two dudes behind me held forth, I mean held forth, almost the entire way from Penn Station to Princeton Junction.* Something about golf. Something about Chanukah cards. I don't know. The conductor told them twice that "this is the quiet car," but they only quieted down once they ran out of brutally dull topics to drone on about. It's one thing if you don't know - I once got on the quiet car on Amtrak without knowing I was in a quiet car or on Amtrak (I was shooting for normal-car NJ Transit) - but another if you know but find the very concept hilarious.

I finally got around to reading Tim Kreider's essay in praise of the Amtrak quiet car, but not before hearing it mocked (successfully) on the Slate Culture Gabfest. Kreider's nostalgia is a bit much, especially where he expresses regret that "ladies" no longer exist. And the ending... let me just provide an excerpt: "We’re a tribe, we quiet ones, we readers and thinkers and letter writers, we daydreamers and gazers out of windows." Well how wonderful.

Nobody in the quiet car is writing a letter. The quiet car, from what I can tell, on the less-glitzy-than-Amtrak NJ Transit, at least, is for the oh-so-intellectual pursuit of napping. It's not that no one ever reads or does work, but in the morning, certainly, eyes are shut. And a quiet car happens to be the one that lines up properly with the station exits I need on both ends of my commute, so I end up in it more often than not.

But I'm ambivalent about the quiet-car concept. I'm hardly the first to note this, but a loud space is often less distracting than a quiet one, the library more grating than the coffee shop. When you expect silence, faint noises are distracting. When you don't, you zone out whatever it is, the background noise if anything keeping you awake. I can do work just fine in a normal car, but end up desperate to shush the non-silent exceptions... only to remember that I am in fact the least-intimidating person to ever ride public transportation, and if the conductor can't make it happen, I'd best not bother.

What I would like, what I would love, is a fasting car. Not a fast car - they do all kind of have to move at the same speed - but one in which no one is eating. Why do we cater to only the one sense? Yes, I'm talking about the artificial-butter popcorn smell, which, if I'm ever held political prisoner, would cause me to give up whichever secrets in no time. Also anything "ranch." Also plenty of foods I wouldn't find problematic except in a penned-in environment (thinking of you, Mr. Hotdog). Odor in tight spaces is so much more offensive than sound.

I suppose for anyone to sign onto my request, I'd need to frame it as nostalgia for the days of yore, when people ate three square meals at the dinner table with their families, and weren't such cochons as to snack at every opportunity. But that's not my complaint. I don't want to snack-shame, just not to be right flush up against you as you're inhaling whatever it is. And yes, I occasionally eat on the train, steering clear of the stinky (do chocolate-chip cookies count?), but I'd sacrifice this with no regrets if a no-food car were an option.

*I'm almost certain people have hidden my updates on Facebook because of my commute-related grrs. Or if not, they might want to consider it.

The day thus far UPDATED

-Car and train trouble, both likely weather-related, but somehow made it to class on time.

-Not just in time, but with time enough to inhale a chocolate croissant from the convenient bakery. The very Old New York (pre-tip-jar, pre-hipsters-make-your-food, pre-good-coffee) one, which appears to cater mostly to elderly gay men who've had this routine since forever. The Margot Patisserie of the Christopher Street area. I like the idea of it, although the pastries themselves are borderline utilitarian.

-It had been a while since I'd taught, and the class-presentation visuals these days are higher-tech than I'd remembered. I allotted 15 mins for each 8-10 minute presentation. Had to hold over one presentation till tomorrow. Hate doing that. On the plus side, my students now know the conditional.

-Bought - finally - a winter hat without pom-poms. I somehow always end up with pom-poms, always spend the winter walking around feeling ridiculous, always find bits of pom-pom on the floor, poodle-related or otherwise. The new acquisition: an intentionally nondescript piece of cloth from American Apparel, because that's what's between where I teach and where my office is, and is exactly how much I could be bothered.

-Contemplated future wanty: A red (cashmere? non-itchy?) scarf, like the ones French men wear. One of those illuminating undereye concealers that make you look awake. It's the point in the semester when I might be awake (thank you, Oren's) but definitely don't look it. Does it need to be the $40 YSL one? Should I compromise and go with a $20-ish one from one of the lesser Sephora brands? Or at that point is it drugstore time? Is it 9 hours sleep or is it Maybelline? Also sought: a professional haircut.

UPDATE

After quite the marathon of grading, I spent a while (20 minutes? an eternity?) browsing Sephora in search of under-eye illumination. The thing with skin-color makeup, which I'd noticed before, is that it only comes in a series of shades that range from somewhat tanned white person to very tanned white person.  Useless if you're dark-skinned, but also, without the political implications, for the very pale. I kind of think a product I don't want to use as concealer is one that would, on me, be a bronzer. I remain not remotely luminous, which, for a weekend in the woods, is just fine.

Serge Gainsbourg is not my style icon

Day 1 of 2 of oral exams. Most are today. Stamina so far so good, to be improved with (more) caffeine. Happier than usual not to be a Mormon. Below, the extent of my non-oral-exam-centric brain currently functioning:

-Hadley Freeman on curve-flaunting. Spot-on: "curves" can mean a woman is (well, stands accused of being) fat, that an individual is not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman, or that a human is of the female post-pubescent variety and simply existing. As in, I flaunt my curves when I walk my dog in sweatpants, sweatshirt, and overcoat.

-Into The Gloss shakes things up, interviews a Frenchwoman whose approach to beauty is to wear no makeup, smoke a lot, and use fancy moisturizer. I cringed when I got to the part about her style icons being Jane Birkin and Serge friggin' Gainsbourg. Enough with this predictable performance of Frenchness for an American audience. A baguette-and-beret routine would, at this point, seem fresh and exciting. But my specific beef with Isabel Marant is those 90-euro white cotton t-shirts.

-Exceeding ITG in predictability is NJ Transit, which as of this month has decided not to grant my request for a monthly student pass. I may be ancient (clinging to my 20s by a thread), I may teach rather than take a class, but according to the registrar and other powers-that-be, I am a full-time student, and thus have damn well earned my right to a $344 (still kinda pricey!) monthly train fare. The reasons given: 1) My ID says "student," not "graduate student," rendering my claim of being a graduate student suspect. Never mind that I've never heard of a special graduate student ID at my university. 2) NJ Transit is having issues with "NYU graduate arts" students who according to the registrar count as full-time, but according to NJ Transit do not,  so [insert incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon here]. 3) NJ Transit translates "full-time equivalency" to mean 'random commuter sneakily trying for a discount on our precious and not-at-all-crappy trains.' Sorry I can't tell them how many hours a week I'm in class. That's not what my student status refers to. 4) I was taken to task for not having the "letter" one is apparently supposed to have to get this pass, a letter I didn't have when getting a pass in September, October, or November, and that's apparently not the same thing as the form I had stamped at the registrar.

After - yes - speaking with the manager, I left the Penn Station window empty-handed, convinced that there's some kind of larger and more profound beef between NJ Transit and either NYU in general or liberal-arts grad students in particular. I had been noticing, lately, that every time the conductors would check my ticket, I'd get this kind of skeptical look. Which I'd assumed was because I'm a bit haggard for "student," but I now realize is because NJ Transit is under the impression that student-commuting is an elaborate scam.

Given that I only teach for half of December anyway (and not at all in the spring), and wasn't entirely sure that pass made sense (the NJ Transit website seems to have gotten rid of the place where one can check how much regular weekly passes cost, because having that up there would be far too convenient), this is likely a case of the principle of the thing.

Until further notice

It was Monday, October 29th in my French class (and all students showed up!), is Halloween in New Jersey, and is evidently November 5th on the calendar.

The morning train, which I'd been dreading, could have been so much worse. I, like everyone, left earlier to arrive later, but this was to be expected. I also stood for most of it, ahem, being evidently alone on NJ Transit in thinking one is supposed to get up and let a woman who looks about to give birth sit down, a woman who once seated started iPad Googling, what else, nanny murder ny. And it was all very Louis C.K.'s monologue, minus the bit about the life lessons. Yeah, I paused, didn't leap up, but quickly remembered that this woman who was like twelve months pregnant had probably also not had power for days, and yet was commuting into work. And then I stood crowded-subway-style for five years as the weekend-schedule-with-delays train crawled into Penn Station. Yes, I'm a wonderful person. But if one of the many people my fellow passenger had already walked by had gotten up first, I think I'd have been OK with that.

But at least I got on the train. That, these days, is no longer a given, and on the trip back (and I didn't even go at rush hour!), I very nearly did not. That leg of the journey confirmed that people used to the comforts of driving are very often useless on public transportation. Their idea of personal space is such that sardine-style is unacceptable. So there will clearly be room in a car, but it's very "I-can't-spare-a-square." Car after car was like, sorry, suckahs, until the last one had some reasonable people who let me (and some more) squeeze on. Then, not long after the first stop, I got a seat, using the time-honored NJ Transit method of not being afraid of sitting next to a black man.

It does not take much to feel like the gold standard for human decency on NJ Transit, I will say this much.

Class, politics, class

All is back to normal-ish in these parts. Tree limbs are looking a bit less precarious, and I've calmed down some from my maniacal cooking-and-baking-because-OMG-electricity extravaganza. The storm's truly minor inconveniences are now making themselves apparent, most notably that all this happened when I was on the cusp of getting a drivers license. Parallel parking for hours on end becomes kind of a silly use of fuel, given current limitations, not to mention that the streets are tough enough to navigate (branches, debris, lack of traffic lights) for experienced drivers. I'm now day-to-day focused on the various challenges, for myself and my students, of getting to class. (NJ Transit on a special schedule should be... interesting, but at least it's now running? And walking from Penn Station to NYU isn't so far, right?)

So, the election. Polling places have changed in Princeton and elsewhere due to the obvious, and unless you happen to have/pick up a land line and/or have with-it friends posting about this on Facebook, you will go to the wrong spot. This, along with the number of others on Facebook unsure if they are even registered to vote (and I'm thinking they may be thinking about this too late), is somewhat distressing, when one considers the larger-scale implications. It seems entirely possible in this day and age to seem politically aware, yet for one reason or another, not vote. Oh well. I'm not sure I seem anything-aware, post-storm, but unless NJ Transit screws up in some unanticipated way, I'm voting on Tuesday for sure.

Anyway, to my storm-addled mind, some of the storm news stories brought to mind the nanny-murder coverage, especially the one about the crane accident "at what is supposed to be the city’s tallest building with residences and which has become a trophy address for some of the world’s richest people." Although with $90 million apartments, and with the story being quite different (not about singling out individuals but rather a building itself, and no mommy wars), this I didn't find so controversial. But the location of the storm brings up "coastal-elites" anxieties. Was this a story about nature as the great equalizer? Or was it one about disasters being only disastrous for the poor?

The reality is, of course, a bit of both - there are many times when it helps to be rich (loss of a summer home =/= homelessness), or not-poor (the option of occasional meals/coffee out when electricity fails at home but not in town nearby), and others (the falling-tree-limb example comes to mind; as does the difficulty of fleeing from anywhere, upscale or not, if roads are closed, trains aren't running, and fuel's in short supply) when it does not. The SNL bit about white people in NYC being upset that they can't watch HBO started clever but ultimately in poor taste, not to mention inaccurate (Staten Island, ahem). I can see this mobilizing people over the 1%, or the 0.001%, but my guess is the Conversation to come out of this will be more about infrastructure and climate change. This storm showed that the butler-will-deal-with-it class contains not so many people, even in the coastal Northeast, after all.

Report from the woods

Mooching, legitimately, off some Ivy wireless. Still none of that at home, although it turns out I miss hot water much more. For the obvious ugh-cold-showers reason, but for the obvious-in-retrospect one that the kettle-and-torch method of doing dishes isn't so effective. 

Not that there's all that much cooking going on. No electricity meant no sentimentality about near-full containers of jam, not-yet-finished ricotta, if-the-milk-is-still-cool-and-doesn't-yet-smell-is-it-OK-to-drink-the-answer-is-no. Pasta arrabbiata. Oatmeal. Rinse (in cold water, in cold apartment), repeat. There will be chickpeas, quinoa. There have been almonds, raisins. It's all so very vegan. I even had this brilliant plan to have individual-size boxes of soy milk, which would be cool enough in our kitchen and inoffensive enough to moisten cereal, but the rest of Central NJ thought of this first, so never mind.

One of the main streets outta here, yesterday morning.

It could, of course, be much worse. Thankfully no personal tragedies, and as far as I know none of the many giant fallen trees I've seen had hit anyone, or even anyone's home/car. Scary, but so far so good. Chris "don't be stupid" Christie is apparently staying down the street, watching over us in his informatively-embroidered fleece.

The snow-dayisshness has kind of worn off, though. Woohoo, no NJ Transit commute has quickly morphed into, how on earth will my students ever learn the imparfait... before their test, now I'm thinking, before they move on to Intermediate... knowing full well this will be the least of the university's problems. 

About those napping Greek islanders

Well good for them. Olive oil, sure, wine, why not, longevity, OK. No goats'-milk for me, thanks unless it's been turned into a cheese. Makes for a good most-emailed, I suppose, for there to be an entire island full of people's grandfathers who smoked like chimneys and nevertheless lived to be 100. Until the time comes when we learn they're all actually 45 but smoking didn't do wonders for their skin, let us congratulate them for their paradox-ness.

But I'm more interested in the fact that these people are not waking up while it's still dark out to meander their way through a total of seven legs of transportation. They don't leave their offices before 5 in order to make a train that gets them to a train that gets them at shortly after six to another train, connecting in turn to a shuttle, all of which gets them home close to 7pm, leaving approximately three hours until the too-tired-to-not-be-asleep feeling hits. They don't gaze out the window as Central NJ becomes Northern NJ and vice versa, scenery you could show to someone who's life goal was to visit the United States and they'd be like, meh. They don't run out of podcasts and end up laughing along to something about British politics without even getting the references. They drink lots of coffee, yes, but they don't put it into a thermos, forget to close that thermos, and discover that the odd drip, drip, drip on NJ Transit is coming from their backpack.

Are you being served?

-The tipping wars have been rekindled, with a horde of commenters furious at a stingy blogger who had the gall to confess to only tipping a meager 20% at a restaurant. "There’s a word for anyone who tips 1.52. It’s ‘douchebag’."

Not to defend douchebaggery, but maybe this depends on the bill? Like, maybe this tip would be unacceptable if the meal were $15, but would be a lot for a cup of coffee? Or does the fact that food-service has happened mean anything short of transferring the contents of your bank account to the server makes you unfit for human interaction? Is it so hard to imagine that someone who can once-in-a-blue-moon afford $9 for a meal out might earn less than a server? Or is the simple fact of being served in this one instance evidence that you are a fur-and-diamond-encrusted villain from an 1980s movie? Whatever the case, apparently if you fail to tip at least $1 per coffee at a place where you order at the counter and get a drink to go/bus your own table, you're asking for bodily waste in your cappuccino. Noted. Thrilled with my newish thermos, by the way. Bringing us to...

-Let's give another suggestion to NJ Transit: eliminate the quiet car, and instead institute a loud car, the default being quiet. There are rarely enough loud people to fill one car (being that most everyone is a sleepy solo commuter), and the current state of affairs only means that businessmen (never women who do this - is this a macho thing about the size of one's inbox?) keep their phones on the setting where they beep every time an email comes in. Let the ding-new-email folks, the occasional tourists, and those who feel alone in the world if they don't cellphone-chat for an entire 90-minute ride all sit together, and let the rest of us nap in peace. (Will not overanalyze what it means that a travel article about the place I live includes mentions of not one but two naps.)

-No transition from the previous item, but anyway. I liked Alessandra Stanley's article about the new female protagonists who shun weight-think. I'm mystified, though, by the Jezebel critique. If it's unacceptable to mention the size of actresses, why a post doing just that? And isn't it clear that Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling are "larger" as in larger than the usual TV waifs, not as in larger than the average American woman? Not sure whether they are or aren't larger than the typical women of their characters' age/education level, in the urban environments depicted, but it's likely that they would not be considered unusually slim in hipster/doctor circles, respectively. So here, too, "larger" holds without either woman being, well, large.

Given that the TV default had long been, skinny actress portrays "fat" character with weight neuroses, I'd say we're at least headed in the right direction. Heading in that direction, I suspect, because when women themselves are creating these shows, the shows end up depicting women who are more active than passive, not necessarily assertive, but who are doing things rather than being looked at. (Still only seen the first episode of "Girls," but that plus the "The Mindy Project"* give that impression.) And there's no way to comment on this development with no mention of Dunham or Kaling's physiques.

Kaling and Dunham are both women who are where they are for reasons other than what they look like. That doesn't make them unattractive, certainly not. But officially, unanimously-agreed-upon "beautiful" isn't the main thing every young woman needs to be in life. I suspect most of us women are where we are professionally primarily for reasons other than our looks. That's a good thing, and all the better if women who star in TV shows have that option. So yes, what these new stars look like matters, and if we insist that they're super skinny and gorgeous, we're missing the point.

*I mean, kind of? From the show's website: "Mindy is determined to be more punctual, spend less money, lose weight and read more books - all in pursuit of becoming a well-rounded perfect woman...who can meet and date the perfect guy." A feminist anthem for our age. Sounds familiar.

With age, the freedom to frown

Today I have: sat next to the smelliest person ever to sit in the NJ Transit quiet car; heard a slender female passerby of a certain age telling her male companion, "I feel like I weigh 300 pounds"; seen a homeless man in a "Team Goldman Sachs" t-shirt; bought groceries at the Greenmarket as if I live plausibly near Union Square (but at least the late-season basil may cancel out the smell should I get the same seatmate as during the morning rush).

What hasn't happened today - but used to happen all the time - is the following: "Smile, honey!" That strange men on the street or, worse, on public transportation no longer ask me to smile has to be the best thing about getting older.  Autumn links to a post complaining about this very phenomenon. What's so off-putting about "smile"? Maybe that it's a catcall disguised as a first-world-problem or whambulence accusation. It's unlikely that someone sobbing, or with an expression suggesting genuine woes, would get a "smile" - just someone stressed about upcoming midterms. (There is some class specificity here - more than other catcalls, I found, this tends to be the lowest-socioeconomic-status men harassing higher-socioeconomic women. But I have not formally studied it, folks.) So there's this element of, is this a catcall or is this someone telling me to get over myself? Because who among us shouldn't get over herself? Or maybe just that it's a catcall that's a criticism - "neg" avant la lettre. Or maybe this is entirely subjective, and because "smile" is the one I got constantly, it's the one I found the most irritating.

Whatever the case, if you're going to holler something at a young woman, "looking good" is probably preferable to "change your facial expression to suit my preferences."

If I were dictator of NJ Transit, I would:

-Lower the prices by so very, very, much.

-Insist on a week-long orientation in public transit, during which commuters ride the NYC subways at peak hours, to learn that public transportation is not your own car. By which I mean, for example, that I'd...

-Ask that the passengers be just a little less vigorously flatulent in the mornings. I'm not a gastroenterologist or an expert in Central NJ dining habits, so I don't know exactly what's causing this epidemic, but seriously, folks. You're not by yourself, or with a forgiving loved one.

-Institute some kind of rhyme or reason to filing onto and off of the trains, so that this isn't a chaotic stampede every morning and evening. It should be clearly marked on the platform where the doors open, and there should be lines, first-come, first-served. And when you arrive in Penn Station, the escalator should work. And there shouldn't also be a train leaving from that platform or the one across from it, leading to stampedes in both directions, and making it so that a good portion of the commute, time-wise, is just getting from platform-level to station-level. 

-Make it known that the world will not end, non-black passengers, if you spend 30-90 minutes sitting next to a black person. Stop being such racists. I mean, I know, that black guy in a business suit going to work at 7:30 am looks soooo menacing. Ugh.

-Instruct passengers to - as the NYU posters advise - "cover your cough." Yes, that would be you, dude sitting across from me, showing your obvious concern for humanity by coughing in my face and littering below your seat. 

-Ban the sale of artificial-butter-flavored popcorn in the stations. It's currently all over NY and evidently Newark Penn Station. At the very least, ban its consumption on the train itself. This is the worst smell known to man and is actually - vindicated! - toxic. 

-Give people who can't get over the fact that Newark and New York both have train stations named Penn, or that the earth is round, a five-minute window during which they can express their wonder at the world, then they must find some silent (but not deadly) activity.

-Ban outright large groups that get on, read aloud the message about how you're supposed to "speak softly and be considerate," laugh and shout about how that's not their group, haha, oh no, then go on to shout at ever-louder volumes all manner of who knows, everything from football news to wondering aloud what 9/11 was (a terrorist attack, some of the older-and-wiser members of this group agreed, evidently committed by Muslim polytheists whose gods wanted it), to mocking New York accents in the form of incredibly exaggerated Chicago accents, to wondering aloud more loudly still, again again and again, why the train is moving backwards (helllloooo, that's how the seats are, that's how it goes on a train, live with it!, I did not say), to playing Britney Spears on a device without so much as a pretext of headphones. Let people constitutionally incapable of riding a train find some other route to the airport. 

"[T]hey really cut out a lot of the hard work, time and sweat that I put into D.J.’ing."

I now have exactly the cold I should have seen coming given my invincible approach to public transportation (deciding hand sanitizer is all hype) and doing ridiculous things like thinking a five-second rule applies to pastry consumed outside the home. (I was really, really exhausted at the time, and now, accustomed to waking up and getting moving before 6:30, retrieving fallen baked goods no longer sounds reasonable.) Old Savage Lovecasts got me through the train, teaching-adrenaline and iced coffee from the place that adds espresso to that got me through class, but now comes the predictable crash. I was totally going to hold forth on something all kinds of profound, but instead, some links:

-One of the best articles yet about unpaid internships.

-Quite possibly the least news-containing NYT Styles story of all time. Next, perhaps a story about how instead of saying "socialite," we're meant to call them "socials" or better-yet, "handbag-designers."

- Says Gail Collins:

The fund-raiser, a $50,000-a-pop sit-down dinner, was hosted by Marc Leder, a financier who The New York Post reported as having a “wild party” last summer in the Hamptons “where guests cavorted nude in the pool” while “scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms.” You cannot blame Romney for that. If presidential candidates had to avoid all multimillionaires who held parties with naked guests and Russians on platforms, there would be no money for misleading TV commercials. 

-Is having a big chest and small waist something to complain about? Evidently.

A full day

-Pastry success: this morning's croissant did not (as far as I know) make contact with the floor. Next stage of becoming an early-morning person: figuring out some way to consume food and caffeine before teaching that doesn't involve shelling out $6. Coffee out seems non-negotiable, unless someone can recommend a thermos that could keep coffee hot and in-thermos on the bike-train-train-train route.

-No, young man in the building where I teach who asked, I'm not a freshman at the business college. For so many reasons, you've got the wrong person. (Yet the "are you Jewish?" Hasids have been leaving me alone.)

-Even if the textbook hasn't yet gotten to être, the students need être. Otherwise they get confronted with "nous sommes" and... explaining what this means not in relation to "je suis" just leads to problems.

-Had vegetarian (but coulda fooled me - visually, at least) duck basil stirfry (pad gra prow, mmm) at Galanga and Amy's Bread dessert (lemon layer cake) with an NYU friend, leading to possible culinary jealousy on the part of a certain NYU-grad spouse. Goals for the semester include not spending what I make teaching entirely on lunch, so maybe this won't be an everyday thing. But with a Dos Toros taco (sorry!) a mere $4, sushi from Sunrise Mart about the same, there is hope.

-Saw a woman "smoking" an electronic cigarette on the subway. No one else seemed to notice, suggesting that this could well have been a thing on public transportation in the city for a while now, and it takes a country girl like me to pick up on it.

-Somehow ended up schlepping home a pound each of Murray's mozzarella and Oren's coffee, because clearly the state of New Jersey sells neither this rare cheese variety nor this obscure caffeine-having bean.

On having lost the capacity for embarrassment

Today, I insisted that I could totally feed and walk Bisou before leaving in the middle of the night (or so it feels like) to go on the bike-train-train (or train-train-train, depending) trip into the city. It's possible that this will be better when I'm more on this schedule, and today, all went smoothly until, promptly after buying an almond croissant, I grabbed it from the wrong part of the (incredibly symmetrical!) bag, and dropped it right on the floor of the coffee shop, in front of a long line of super-posh morning-rush workers. I made a mental note of what part of it had touched the floor, considered that the floor of this particular coffee shop is probably cleaner than the kitchen of the place I'd gotten lunch at the previous day, picked up the thing, and went on my way. OK, I briefly scanned the line for any of my students, to see if I'd need to refer to this incident in class, but that was it.

It was only after all this that it occurred to me that I'd just been in an embarrassing situation. The stuff of teen-mag letters. I'd not only dropped the thing, but picked it up again (it was $3! the floor at this place in the early morning is spotless! and who knows where anything you buy outside has been!), which, yeah, might be interpreted as a George Costanza move. (Getting a dog has cured me of all germophobia. What use is hand sanitizer when a creature that licks everything surprises you with kisses?)

In any case, that café is by far the most expensive of the three possible morning pit-stops, so maybe it's just that I already had in the back of my mind that I wouldn't be back any time soon. The (middle of the) almond croissant wasn't anything special. Maybe I do still have a capacity for turning beet-red, not just while jogging, but in these moments as well. Or maybe not.