April 4th and Some Wonderful People

It is Friday night and I have been gone for eleven hours so nothing serious in the blog tonight.  It is Kick-back Friday.  As it happens though, they are a few wonderful people that I met today who just have to be described.

Today was first class for a graduate course in Embodiment and Materiality.  It is a seminar with doctoral students from several different disciplines: history, gender studies, English, art history.  One woman described herself as a "medievalist."  That seems to me like a very good thing to be. The class is made up of about eighteen students seated in a large and beautiful conference room (with very comfortable chairs.)  We began by introducing ourselves.  About halfway through the circle, we came to a young woman who is best described, without criticism or mockery--just plain fact, as plain.  Very plain.  Her hair is cut sensibly with bangs that cover her forehead.  She did not wear any makeup and something about her skin suggested that she had never worn any cosmetics. Her first name was two words, the kind of name you give a girl in a small town in the South. I think she looked like this (a quick sketch I made right after the class.)

Well, she didn't really look like that very much but it is the idea of how plain and simple she seemed to me.

She is getting her doctorate in "Screen Culture."  I am pretty sure this means film but it probably includes other media such as digital, television, video, and such.  She went on to describe what her area of scholarship was.  I am giving this as a quote from my memory.  You should know that I am better at remembering what someone says than I am at sketching faces.

"My primary interest is the erotic in contemporary film, especially in video pornography.  I am exploring a number of issues but most of my work right now is centered on BDSM and pain-related eroticism."

I have no idea what the next five people said they were working on and my description of how I am a high school theology teacher seemed out of place.

Earlier in the day, I was sitting in a cluster of chairs in the Norris Center, drinking coffee and getting some reading done.  There were four or five ugly chairs and a love seat circling an institutional coffee table,  There are several of these clusters but they were all filled up except the one I was sitting in.  I was the only person in this little grouping.

A young couple walked up to the love seat.  They gave no indication that they noticed me, or if they did, they did not care that an older man was sitting nearby reading theology.  This is pretty close to the dialogue.

HIM: (Gesturing to love seat.) Is this ok?

HER: It's fine.

They sat down and he took her hand.  She pulled it away from him.

HER:  That's the point.

I assumed from this that the conversation had been going on for a while.  I was catching them at a difficult part of it.

HER: (continuing) I don't know how many times I have to explain it.

HIM: What?

HER: Just stop texting me or anything. Ok?

HIM: At all?

HER: At all.  Yeah.

HIM: I gotta go to class.

HIM left and she picked up her phone and started texting someone.  

I would have liked to ask her who she was texting.

The train coming home was very crowded by the time it got to Evanston.  At the front of the car, there are two sets of seats that face each other. The benches should seat four people in each set. Tonight, four people (friends with a bottle of wine and a six pack) had spread out to occupy both sets of seats, filling the areas next to them with purses, bags, and beer.  There were three women and one man, in their thirties and clearly professional.  Their conversation suggested they were lawyers but they were dressed "business casual." Perhaps they were taking the train back from a case or client in Wisconsin.  Even though there were several people standing in the aisle, these four did not move anything or invite a standee to sit.  Neither did those in the aisle (which included me) ask them to move their things.  I was not upset by it but I did enjoy a moment of moral superiority remembering a gentler age when people gave up a seat for the elderly.  The train stopped at Rogers Park and a woman in a uniform that seemed like it might be that of the Postal Service (although I couldn't be sure) came on and pushed by those of us standing.  She took one look at the wine-sipping young lawyers and said, "Move that stuff."  They looked a little surprised but one of them complied and put her purse on her lap.  The new passenger climbed across and sat down.  The male young lawyer became uncomfortable with the intruder and put his shoes back on.  

Good day.