food on the fire-escape

damhnait:

So I was just sitting at a little table outside the French place down the road which I passed on the way home from the train station and decided to stop at in order to keep working on a little list entitled “100 questions I’d ask me if I was my thesis committee” in preparation for next week. So I was there eating my snails and drinking my cabernet, because I may be poor (not for long! potential unemployment excepted) but they still have a great happy hour, and had gotten to about #60 on the list, “why did you think this was a good idea in the first place?”  and #61 “if you could do it all again, would you?” when I realised I was still wearing my badge from work. It may have been underneath my cardigan and dark out but for the candles but there was still jpl-jpl-jpl-jpl-jpl around my neck. It’s a metaphor for my life. Not really, I keep trying to make metaphors out of everything this week, like the hawk I saw ripping feathers off something smaller and fluffier in a tree at work yesterday (America, me??). Anyway, I have a horror of doing the name badge outside work thing after a lifetime of my dad making fun of people who did it at his workplace and calling them institutionalised (incidentally, I’ve completely lost the ability to tell where s and z should be used in american and british english after the last five and a half years and just fling them around randomly at this stage, the hawk is eating me, etc.). And the french place is pretty hip, even by Los Feliz standards, which tends to make it entertaining such as this evening when I overheard a lurid tale of sex on set, but for a minute I felt like a nerd in a bad way, not the normal I’m studying how to detect signs of life beyond the Earth way. I’m better now.

I really like the aside ending with the hawk reference and the nerd bit at the end.  I also like that you sound just a little bit frantic but still funny-in-tact like the way other people I know (all phd’d successfully, by the by) about to defend have sounded.  I hope someone with great taste will buy you tasty treats for the end.