Sometimes I’m a really old man. I get kidney stones. I go to my alma mater’s football games. Alone. I eat oatmeal with prunes.

I ate mid-shift, standing a respectable ten or so feet away from the reference desk, scarfing down my lunch and reading the Daily News. Serena Williams is comfortable in her own skin. And Bloomie doesn’t have a mandate.

I’ve got too much homework to do, primarily because I didn’t do it earlier, so I had to spend lunch in my cloffice spooning lentils down my gullet while pulling out supporting textual evidence for the argument I want to make in tonight’s class presentation. I had a hard time thinking it through. Something about aporias and terror and stories and murder. Or something. Needless to say, I would rather have been loading and reloading Facebook. (And admittedly I did some of that too.)

The poster for the brown bag lunch event said we were welcome to bring our lunches, but I felt like the only person there with half a sandwich sticking out of my mouth, I was still chewing when it came around to my turn to say my name, garbled around a gullet full of last night’s leftovers from delightful dinner with C. A box of assorted Pepperidge Farm cookies sat in the middle of the other table, and no matter how longingly I willed a Milano to levitate into my greedy, greasy little paw, they just sat there, piled in their fluted paper cups, waiting until the speakers were done at which point the box was passed around the group. Since we were in a circle there was no escape from all the shaming eyeballs, which meant I only took two instead of the fistfuls I really wanted.

I was told by a professor recently that what he liked about my library session was my efficiency of language, how pared down and nothin’ but the news my standard library resource spiel has become. It’s gotta be–there’s just so much we have to do, and not enough time! Time time time! I feel like that Alice in Wonderland rabbit with that giant clock around his neck these days, totally obsessed with my minute hands. I thought about that as I sat and ate and read this column about time management, wondering if a week or two of time-mapping might help me stop watching hours and hours of crime TV and start getting the smell off the roses that are surely all around me.

Best thing to come out of Portland in years has to be C.’s tradition of homemade donuts on Halloween. She and A. had me and L. and a bunch of folks over for them and other assorted sweet and savory brunch items. L. made our contribution, a spinach and tomato and egg bake that looked just like it did in the picture on the website, perfect. I took a cube of that, my weight in donuts, and a scratch cheddar scone and settled in to idly watch the Jets game, drifting in and out of conversations, listening to the doorbell ring and watching new arrivals bearing quiche and bagels and cookies and candied treats.

We left the shelter cat-and-puppy-free and stopped at the Gemini diner for food and coffee. D. wanted pancakes but not only pancakes, so we ordered some for sharing. I got an egg and cheese on a roll, and L. and D. each ordered omelettes. I was feeling pretty sadsack about my cats of days gone by, so was glad for D.’s drunken mariachi band jury duty story and L. sitting right next to me.

I picked up L. and R. at the hotel and walked us across the street to the Naturally Healthy Health Food Restaurant and Deli which turned out not to be a health food restaurant at all, though you could order a baked potato. R. had oatmeal with strawberries and L. and I each had the grilled cheese with tomato and fries. R. kept doing that thing little kids do, blowing on his food to cool it off except that he couldn’t muster much of a breeze. The spoon was so much bigger than he was. Being four must be like being on acid said L. as R. wiped his hand across the table, stared at it, and then put something invisible in his mouth and started chewing. If you’d told me this time last week that I’d be splitting (heavily buttered) bread with L. before Annual, I would’ve said you were crazy. Guess I just got lucky.

As of mid-macaroon, one of the least irritating things about my day was swatting a scurrying cockroach on my cloffice wall with an extra copy of the campus literary magazine as I ate through my sandwich. So when I got a call that the student I was meeting was here early, I dashed out and we went upstairs and talked through her confusion and I pointed her a couple of places and explained the thing about keywords and she had two articles to start with before fifteen minutes were up. She was so grateful she tried to give me a hug (that I resisted). The rest of my macaroon was tasty, but I didn’t even really need it at that point.

Wait. Was I really this late eating lunch because of a pedagogy workshop that ended with a guided meditation during which I was asked to think of myself all alone, disconnected from culture and politics and religion, attached piggyback to a tiny grain of sand at the bottom of a volcano that, through heat and compression and violent chaos, was transformed into a beautiful amethyst?