I've never before seen as many people in banana suits as I saw this morning on my way to and from the gym. They've just opened a new Jamba Juice at the Hancock Tower, and there was a trolley going up and down Lake Shore and Michigan, filled with people in banana suits. Beyond this, as my bus passed Hancock, there were about 20 more banana-people milling about outside. By the time I was going back to my apartment, there were only seven or so left, and they looked rather cold and disenchanted with the entire banana-suit-wearing-business.

Speaking of the gym, I have a visible muscle! In my arm! This has never happened before. Sure, it's only on the right side and not the left, but I have high hopes for haivng more visible muscles sometime in the distant future.

I spent about 30 minutes this afternoon talking with an fortyish man in a coffee shop about how much he loves Barbra Streisand. He's part of a group of older guys that hangs out in the coffeeshop in the middle of the day and shoots the breeze for hours on end. I think every coffeeshop is required to have a group of these. The best all-day-talking-middle-age-to-oldish-guys-in-coffee-shop groups, however, are professors in college areas. UChicago is sadly lacking a high-quality coffeeshop in which they can hang out (DivSchool is too hot, Classics is too expensive, Bookstore is too corporate, RC and Uncle Joe's are too... studenty), but Cafe Paradiso in Urbana and Unicorn in Evanston were absolute old professor meccas. Unicorn even got old Russian professors, because they put out preserves for their tea. Old Russian professors? The best.

Prolix, prolix, nothing a pair of scissors won't fix...

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