Reports from the longest day ever

-Class itself: fun. Sorting out the mystery that is online homework: less so. A work in progress, but to be resolved, I estimate, in the next 24 hours. I see how great it will be once it's going smoothly, but that time has not yet come. A sign, no doubt, that I am ancient. I think today's undergraduates expect this kind of assignment. In my day, French homework was written in hieroglyphics.

-"Hey beautiful," said some guys on Broadway near Penn Station. Not to me, but to the woman walking next to me. A foot taller, and about as much wider (but in all the right ways, I suppose), and, most saliently, wearing shorts about as short as bikini underpants, and heels. If I were under 25, this would just be a Slutwalk story about street harassment, in solidarity with this woman who had every right to go out on a hot and humid day in a revealing outfit. And that's a totally valid argument that I support intellectually (caveat being that as cat-calling goes, this particular remark is likely to elicit the least fury). But I'm close enough to 30 that this is also a story about being the woman not called beautiful. Even if my choice of attire (jeans, backpack, flats) may have mattered more than my haggard 29-ness.

-Crowds and delays at Penn Station, with a guy next to me eating (what else) a bag of artificial-butter-flavor popcorn. Upon finally getting a train (and not, mind you, the train I'd arrived in good time for and intended to get), I ended up in some sort of river of unclassifiable NJ Transit fluid, which has now soaked through much of my backpack and, alas, bike helmet strap. The real concern, though, is that this is some kind of omen about the trains, and my strategy of arriving in the city about an hour before I teach (a morning class, to be clear) is actually cutting it too close. Not enough of one to merit going in at 5am to be on the super-safe side. But still.

-Approximately three dozen smaller but cumulatively significant-at-the-time concerns I'm now forgetting because it's late.

-Was this all cancelled out by fish-and-chips and low-alcohol beer with the astrophysicists? I'm going to say yes. Getting out of the house, never a bad idea.