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.

In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. Heinous. Heinous. Especially heinous. Over and over again. I’ve got roughly 4 billion episodes on the dvr, but every one I cued up was one I’d seen before. Literally took me six tries to find a new one, an episode about a baby abandoned in a taxi cab featuring a cameo appearance by Martin Mull. So irritating. I nearly contacted the major case squad.

We’ve learned something important here today about cooking with serranos. They are actually pretty hot.

Did so many irritating things today, all of them came with just a little flash of extra-annoying. For example, the quarter machine at the laundromat was broken and the guy who normally makes change was nowhere to be found and the guy at the dollar store wouldn’t sell me any quarters and I was so argh. So when I finally got to sit down with a bowl of chili and a new episode of The Office (!) it felt like about time.

The butter came in a small ceramic dish like a dollhouse churn, whipped and green with dill, and I dipped and smeared around small chunks of bread and swallowed them off in the RAT-tat-tat-RAT-tat-tat rhythm I lent my lunch after it became too much and I didn’t want multitudes just for a minute, something steady and reliable and unsurprising, my scaffolding, a chunk of bread and a spoonful of chili, a chunk of bread and a spoonful of chili, a chunk of bread and a spoonful of chili.

The geometry of my thaw-’n'-serv work week culminated in not quite enough chili filled out by a little too much rice served slightly too-hot from the microwave, and eaten in my cloffice. I read through a magazine and picked out things to buy and then realized that I still don’t really know how to do that here. I also got a return email from M. asking about Thanksgiving weekend, so turned to the schedule at Aqueduct to see if we might snag some racetrack-branded tote bags or water bottles over the holiday. Sadly, nothing but an exceptional Saturday of racing on offer.

I was sitting quietly in my cloffice finishing up the last of the (unfrozen) yam chili and paging through my book when my little googleymail tab lit up and I was advised that S. had requested me as a friend on Facebook! Finally! It was so exciting! Not being content to simply communicate with S. via her newfound status update, or waiting to talk on Saturday when we’re stuck in the car all day, I called her on the phone to talk all about it. In the middle of that phone call, my little googleychat tab lit up and I was advised that L. was responding via googleychat to my earlier facebookmail, and for a minute there, I was firing (admittedly distractedly) on all cylinders and felt truly cyborgian until I could no longer keep up and S. hung up to head into his meeting and I was able to concentrate on L. and the last chunk of yam in the bottom of my dish–to be savored!

I was just tucking into my dish of yam chili over rice and the Business section (what are those rascals up to today?!) when my phone rang. C.! From last night! She couldn’t find the cloffice–I’m tucked way back here in the corner–and needed help making RefWorks run. Since she could only be here at all due to the holiday, I told her I’d give her a hand as long as she didn’t mind my eating while we worked. I sat on my hands as she struggled with the software, and marveled again at how much patience students with low tech skills bring to higher ed these days. School is so much easier for those of us whose computalators begin where our fingertips end. But C. trucked along, slow and steady, until RefWorks hiccupped, collapsed, and spat out an error message where a citation should have been, and we adjourned until the next time we’re both in the library at the same time.