If you're in law school, and someone asks you what you plan on doing after you graduate, if you answer that you want to be a lawyer, you will be thought a sensible person. If you're in a doctoral program and asked the same question, if you say you plan to be a professor, you are showing a certain degree of over-confidence, if not outright arrogance. It's professional school, but if you enter 100% sure of the professional outcome, you might be in for a disappointment. Any sentence beginning, 'When I have my degree,' is already pushing it. However, if you're open to various possibilities, all of which are helped along by your (eventual) degree, you're probably fine (she says, with her fingers crossed, all the while knocking on wood).
I think it would be pretty great to be a professor. It would also be quite fabulous, I bet, to work at the New York Public Library's Jewish Division. This is my new favorite place in the city. OK, so checking stuff before entering is always a drag, but I've found that getting a chocolate croissant at the Pain Quotidien on 40th before a visit and getting sushi and brown rice tea at Chiyoda on 41st after makes the whole thing go more smoothly, and makes me not even wish I could bring, say, a coffee and a Twix into the reading room.
One slight problem with Chiyoda: it's also a bar. This can happen. A coffee shop I like near NYU, Think, becomes a bar at some point in the evening. Right when I'm getting into some work, the lights go dim and the wine glasses appear. Nothing gets loud, but I do feel like I might be interrupting someone's date with my typing. Chiyoda's bar is just part of its take-out area, which is a bit odd. All of a sudden, in the late afternoon, four young-professional-types arrived, talking loudly about how drunk they planned on getting. They spent a good 10 minutes explaining to the bartender what a "sake bomb" is and how to make one--I could be wrong, but I suspect this is not an authentic Japanese cocktail. Then it was "bombs away," and I overheard part of what was probably a more interesting conversation for the tipsy people involved, about someone liking some rapper's early stuff only. My workday wasn't over then, isn't over now, and isn't likely to end until I've read everything everyone French has ever had to say about les mariages mixtes.
Digression aside, my love-hate relationship with the NYPL is all love. Everyone who works there is extremely helpful, and, if you avoid the main reading room, the never-showered set is easily ignored. If only I could make it so that it didn't rain every single time I go to that library...
Photo credit: Nick or me, who knows.
Confirmed, Rufus is God. There should be no separation between Rufus and state. Praying to Rufus should be mandatory in public schools. I can't confirm that there is no other God than Rufus, but it's some stiff competition. There should be shrines to Rufus in the temples of all major and minor Eastern religions that have shrines. And there should be shrines to him, period. He is divine, and I mean this literally. "Fabulous," as he is often described, is too much of a nondescript term used about (and allegedly by) gay men to explain someone of such universal appeal and importance.
Aside from pointing out that his singing sounds at least as good in concert as on the albums, all the way through a very long set, I can't convey much about the music itself. Amazing music, but I can't describe it, you'd be better off just listening. But the costumes! First there was the striped suit (or, in Rufus-lyric terms, "pants-suit-sort-of-thing;" see above) with shiny brooches on the leg. No shirt beneath. Then there were the lederhosen, which are as spectacular as one would expect from custom-fitted lederhosen. He paired these with a rhinestone (?) necklace and bracelet. Then he reappeared in a white fluffy terry-cloth robe (no photo, probably the rainstorm was picking up during those songs). A few songs later, he added to the robe a pair of high heels (worn, it was clear, over seamed stockings), red lipstick, and very shiny (rhinestone?) earrings. He then whipped off the robe to reveal... a just-long-enough tuxedo jacket.
