A combination of dread, vacation days, and unmet deadlines meant lunch with S. out on the patio in Brooklyn. I had the pizza, he had a cheeseburger, and we each had a beer. S. chose a table in the shade since we both get sunburns just thinking about sun, and had the place to ourselves save for two small batches of Europeans who arrived as we were finishing up. We did much as we always do–Processed Our Relationship and Our Relationships With Others (PORAORWO), talked about our jobs, and discussed separate plans to go to the movies tonight. She paid since I paid last time and then we walked back to our neighborhood along Eastern Parkway and past the museum, where it appeared by the crowd that nobody in Brooklyn works anymore.

I felt like a sentimental old fool over my two slices of pizza from La Bella in Yonkers up in the library pillow room this afternoon. We had our annual send-off lunch for graduating student workers, and golly I’m just so swelled-up with pride and excitement for all of them. C. is off to library school and an internship at Penn that has me so excited for her I could burst. A. thanked me for all my hard work in the library despite our differences vis-a-vis the Yankees and Cowboys (she enjoys the sporting teams of the hegemon; I hope adulthood changes her). C. is off to study folklore in Indiana and just how cool is that? And it feels like only yesterday that N. was enlightening me about the sponge capital of the world, and now she’s graduating from college. I went with the plain cheese slices because the mushrooms were canned.

A belated report from yesterday–between my late morning breakfast, the conference and Avant-Garde-Arama, lunch sort of got lost in the shuffle. A CLAGS event equals a slice of pizza from that one place around the corner just east of 32nd and 5th. I had a fresh mozzarella slice and a bottle of water. There was a whole jumble of hot sexy librarian/archivist/activist queers, and pretty much everybody ate pizza. K. had a garlic knot.