I trailed around the corner and down the stairs and to the right behind LS. into the faculty lounge in the pharmacy department. The pharmacy department has a faculty lounge! We gossipped about professors and classmates (she’s the only person I’ve told who can appreciate that I ran into J. of all people in front of Empire City Raceway last week, waiting for a shuttle bus; a true my-life-persists-beyond-all-absurdity moment, like I live on the flippin’ moon) and bureaucratic structures and therapy and relationships and babies and getting older and whether she ought to take the Monday night sociolinguistics class because I’ll be in it and then we’d be in class together or stick to the Thursday night professional writing seminar. Confidential to LS.: Take sociolinguistics with me!

I sat in my cloffice and ate a giant bowl of chili and in between bites wrote a hospice volunteer recommendation for C. That meant I got to dwell on C. a little bit, which was pretty great because C. is pretty great. The cloffice is just the same as I left it, though I think they turned the heat up while I was away. My feet aren’t cold, which is a nice change of pace.

This is Emeril Lagasse’s recipe, with modifications due to my weak grocery store–canned corn, no serranos. It’s still got bam!, sure, especially when paired with an episode of Jersey Shore. Thinking I’ll start going by Emwwow.

Heated up last night’s leftovers, shoved my cold feet under the cat. It is so cold in here. When will it stop being this cold?

So you pay $15.75 for your train-bus combo ticket and when you get to the casino you redeem your ticket for a ten dollar free play and a ten dollar food credit, plus five additional free play dollars because it’s New Years Day. Buffet was $19.95, and I knew from experience that I cannot eat $19.95 worth of tub macaroni salad, so went to the food court instead. I got the tenders with fries plus a bottle of water, and owed $2.19. C. managed to come in at $9.97 with a chicken club wrap, and A. made the $10 limit by getting two bags of chips and a bag of M&Ms that were shared out later. The track outside was frozen, first post not until 7, the black branches and floodlights stark against cold late afternoon light.

Ate the rest of the soup with the rest of the fried onions with the rest of an episode of Medium. It’s true: these fried onions are very versatile.

In New York, there’s a fence a few feet away from the outside rail, running the length of the grandstand, that keeps the spectators some distance away from the dirt. I was close enough to hear the steam come rushing out of Adriano’s nostrils when Edgar Prado brought him into the winner’s circle at Turfway Park in 2008, could have stroked him if I’d been crazy; with just a little lift up I’d have been on the track at Bay Meadows that same summer. It isn’t like this everywhere in the world, this guarded and set apart. Same is true on Riverside Drive, where I leaned against the statue of Joan of Arc and ate a banana. Sign says you ought to be right on the river, but really there’s the whole West Side Highway between you, not to mention the steep drop at the edge of the grass. Boy, I’ve lived here a long time, long enough that the fences just seem normal now, unless I take care to remember.

No matter what happens, it starts with an onion, chopped, in a pot with olive oil. This time I added a jalepeno, some salt and pepper, four potatoes, a box of frozen corn, broth and water, a sprinkling of cilantro, and the juice of a lime.

I got the Cameo combo, said on the sign it was for light snackers, and that’s actually a pretty apt description of me, metaphorically too. I took it and sat in the dark and watched the movie. Times call for drastically pulling in my field of vision which meant that I missed the Big Themes entirely but was pleased to note that Maggie Gyllenhaal uses my preferred brand of mechanical pencil in her role as the fool-fer-you cub reporter. I’m practically famous.

More lasts, a parade of them coming out of the cold of the refrigerator, taking up their posts on a plate, into the microwave, a couple minutes on the timer, when I set down to knuckle in half the turkey skipped out from under my fork and hit the floor, sending me some kind of message about investing too much ordinality in stuff that’s pretty much ephemeral at the definitional level. I mean, it was just leftovers.