Tonight is Sunday night, which means, among other things, that it’s dollar dinner night at Grendel’s. That very nice and attractive waitress whom I first met a few Sundays back with Teymour and DJ served me. This time she recognized me and asked how my thesis was coming. Maybe she was tipped off by the stack of reading I had at my table. No matter what, her politeness was appreciated.

I couldn’t help but listen to this man in the table to my diagonal right who was very loudly explaining to his friend that at Harvard they make up their own degrees. Like, well, he couldn’t remember any at the time. I suppose he means that we call our B.A. an A.B. He almost found an example after a minute or two of digging. At the School of Education, he explained, they don’t call it a Ph.D. Instead it’s something, not a Ph.D., but something else. We call it an Ed.D. But I think that’s not too uncommon, as Google will corroborate.

Then two women joined them, having returned, I guessed from their bags, Finale. The man switched topics but continued speaking loudly. “Chest hair,” he announced “has come back.” He followed up with some statistic about 60-70% something, but I couldn’t make it out, as the ambient noise level and my excitement to see a proof of the existence of a spinor structure on a space-time evolved from Cauchy data drowned him out. At this point I stopped listening, but I’m fairly sure the man is pleased with his own chest hair. And I say, why not!

After things settled down a little, the two men mentioned above left; the women stayed and a man joined them. I didn’t catch his speaking ever, and the women switched to what I thought was German.

By the time I got to dessert — and the dessert at Grendel’s is good. I got the turtle cheesecake — a man from the table behind me left and returned three times. On his final departure, a girl at his table “hope[d] your date works out.” I wondered what she meant. I suppose she had marriage in mind, because she couldn’t’ve meant free dinner. He had just eaten.

But as that group Pink Martini sings:
Je ne veux pas travailler. Je ne veux pas déjeuner. Je veux seulement oublier. Et puis, je fume. [Not really.]