So the standard part of my evening adventure was pints with Laser at the local pub, amidst talk of politics, operations research, and faux communities of practice.

But after some delays I finally managed to meet up with Hat, a Taiwanese emigree on the closeted side of things, whose life is crazy enough that he is quasi-nocturnal, always running across the boroughs and impossible to pin down especially when his cellphone is dying and the 7 trains are all running local rather than express which made our attempts to meet on a train car not only twice-thwarted but very slow before we finally reached Flushing because the train skipped Corona and eventually eating with GBF.

That’s not the story, though, as much as the fact that I’ve been chatting up on MSN Donny, a decent, grounded masculine/bi guy whose renounced his family’s wealth and is trying to figure out balance in his life and how to be independent in the city while working for himself, and we’d made some sorts of plans to maybe hang out in Flushing, but it was very indefinite, and up in the air.

But as it turns out, the friend Hat was heading to see was none other than Donny, and so it was outside on the street that we ran into each other for the first time, unsure whether or not to actually acknowledge one another. In the end we didn’t…

Who knew the gaysian community was so damn small?

So of course there is little to say–I am now revisiting Lone Wolf & Cub, which makes me all emotional, like, with its simplicity and its rawness and its fluid violence, its authenticity–I was also getting pissed off at the new Nation as I was on the subway (mostly for what was going on within it). And on the way home, there was this cute little black boy, who couldn’t have been more than 2, but was already talking and gesturing and everything. Sigh. I must be PMSin’, the tears really do well up sometimes. Ugh. Not enough time to change the world. Maybe it’s arrogant to think people want saving, but I dunno… I guess it’s just making their lives as easy as mine were, back in the day.

Ah, well. Alric does not have good news on the dating front. But I am working on that. I feel as if he and Juliana could get along rather well, actually. I was woken this morning by a call from D, who’s a sweetie, who sends me these postcards with naked women, which I place on the fridge next to the postcards of naked men that my older friends who know me send me, who is still trying to help me out with girls. But yeah. Juliana and Alric? Stranger things have happened. But apparently chicks dig my politics.

I really need to skip more math classes. Induction is a great thing, like the first three times you learn it. You really don’t need to see it more often than that. I’m just a snob. But it is an amusing proof that all collections of n horses are the same color. Hrmm… And there is a philosophical thrust to it all, which is that in the case that any group of 2 horses are the same color, then… But I dunno.

In the modal logic, I am happy to report that I am reaching philosophically meaty stuff as far as existence goes. My sort of kneejerk admiration for Quine’s sort of deflationism is being deflated. This is actually meaningful philosophical substance with actual logic to go along with it. There might be a paper in here someplace.

Making plans with Joephet for tomorrow and the weekend somehow makes me very happy. Like I have something to actually look forward to. And yes: I am evidently going shopping with him this weekend, which I suppose we will hafta try and document in some way, as those who know me will find this rather difficult to believe. I am a very cheap dresser. Cheaper than any you could find at IKEA.

So I am still at somewhat of a loss, just hanging out in the computer lab, having been successful at finding satisfactory Caribbean food in the way of slightly overcooked jerk chicken. But something about that steamed cabbage:

Meanwhile, amazing how fast I was able to read through From Hell–done within twenty-four hours, the sort of leisure that will be well-beyond me come fall. And after that food I feel healthy again, even capable. It’s just a matter of needing to produce, to feel somehow indispensible and unique again, which is a frightening responsibility, the sort of thing that makes you drag yourself into work to see your ungrateful kids even though you have sick days stored up and are sick as a dog–when people ask me why don’t I find another job, you seem so unhappy and overworked, I guess this job is the thing for me to now do. As much as it may be questioned at times, I think I am on the right track–it little profits to look at other plates.

I have been strangely emotional. Maybe it’s the force of the Alan Moore. Or maybe I been seeing too many little kids on the subway. My biological clock is ticking.

So today there was this proselytizer, shouting in the subway (at Lex), about the coming again of God and some such, and how punishment will be visited upon all those who are “practicing homosexuality, which is gay or lesbian acts…” I was sorely tempted (but lacked the balls, despite the cute, white, pecs-parading T-shirt I was wearing) to rebut, “I’m not practicing! It’s fer reals!”

Hrmm… So yeah, other than being sexy and eating yet more rice, I have little to report, other than the beginning of the weekend, and long overdue with my school friends: hard to imagine that that school is now swallowed by another, and that that little chapter has so fully tied itself up. I have, at least, been thinking more about cool new units for next year, and if I start setting things down now I might actually have a new teaching method for next year. I think that it is more fertile ground than last year, and it’s just a matter of getting started on the right foot and making the right sorts of nods to my kung-fu practicing Chinese ass: maybe I can wow them with some distorted vision of Chineseness, where duck sauce and PFR flow from every orifice, a neverending bounty of wisdom and MSG.

So I met this new guy today. This is not something I normally do on the subway, but I guess he saw what I was reading, and I guess I also saw what he was reading, so it was perhaps inevitable. So we strike up a conversation, and hit it off admirably. All the while, I’m thinking: I’m not that obvious, am I? Well, I guess today I was. In any case, it’s sort of a shame that he has to get off so soon, as today we just weren’t getting off at the same stop. We didn’t have time to finish, and all the while I think our trainmates were rather amused or perturbed by his wild gesticulations and floorbound demonstrations. There’s a reason why I don’t like this sort of thing in public… In any case, we exchanged numbers (well, I gave him my email: never phone number to strangers, after all), so we can probably finish up later. Altogether unexpected, but still…

I just really hafta stop reading math on the train.

Hrmm… I am soon compiling all of the writings on a particular bathroom wall that I have been reading and rereading. Apparently, the appropriate response to, “I love all of my girlfriends shoes… [followed by a detailed inventory of shoes as well as acts]” is “Well, I love my girlfriend’s titties and pussy…” Also, while “dictator” is a word, and “pussytator” is not, this is a disconnected fact, somehow. Sigh. A teacher’s instincts never die.

Modal logic is exciting. Correspondence theory! Cayley-Klein geometries and modal logics! Whee!

Orientalism is treating me well. (This is a use-mention error, to comic effect). And I will soon begin work on my tapestry of stories starring pathetic, emasculated Chinabois.

So I’ve been a marvelous juggler. Today since hitting the college library again I’ve been bouncing all around yet more modal logic, some philosophy of math a la Hartry Field, and William James and Pragmatism. And I can hold each in my head, separately. But this of course does not compare to what I was doing last night, which I can now shamefacedly confess–I was half-consoling my friend Boston, chatting with Joephet on the phone about my tendency to be mean to him (for all the obvious reasons), and performing a running commentary over IM about this really bad gaysian porn I was watching with Kean. Yeah. All this at the same time, somehow. I had considered writing at length on that particular porn, but that would be very Albert freshman year. I just don’t know that it would quite change anything.

Beyond that, a wonderful moment at Borough Hall in Brooklyn on the 4 train when a family walks in, and the matriarch (grandmother) mutters about one of her grandkids, “I really hafta get rid of one of them,” to which I promptly reply, “I’ll take him!” Something about 3-year-olds which is so vulnerable and beautiful and full of hope.