(Veggie) burger and shake. The authentic kind. Served to this tired young woman at the bar in a soda shop. The restaurant is a lone holdout in an area freshly colonized by yuppies. At the other end of the bar a man sits reading the newspaper and sipping at a mug of black, strong coffee. A family pays at the counter, not at the table. I got my left hand wrapped around the half-empty fountain glass, my lips frosted with chocolate shake. Surplus shake, a quantity enough to fill my glass full again, sits in the stainless steel mixing cup in front of me.

I just finished my 2nd midterm. Three hours lost, one parking ticket gained. I could eat here 2.5 times for the price of that exam (in terms of the parking ticket, not tuition - tuition feels like a sunk cost.) It wasn't really so bad, the exam I mean. Not like that first one last Fall that gave me a huge headache. Now I'm used to the brainsuck of testing again. Three hours. Could've gone longer - toward infinity - because we've learned that our scores are correlated with the quantity of words spewed into the skinny white spaces between problems. We get points just for rambling. Pure crap. I want to test this theory: Want to take the sums of squares for the error of the Concise Answer, SSE(CA), and subtract it from the sums of squares of Pure Crap, SSE(PC), to see if Pure Crap accounts for more of the variation in earned points than the Concise Answer.

Fillerup from the metal cup. Burger's here.

Would've sat there for hours just filling up the white space with words, rambling on about the stories found in scatterplots and ways to make them "fit". This is the work of psychologists, the secular agents of the moral standard: Assigning abnormality to perfectly beautiful and unique patterns, then transforming them into the normal, the average, the uninteresting, the every. Violations of normality. All things tend toward normality given a large enough sample size. Sample size conquers all. Normality: another way to say "conformity". Better get out your t because you'll need something robust to violations in the big N to see through me.

Delerium after battle.

A masseuse named Mish. Green eyes like discs of jade. Her body strong against the tightness in mine. Friction warming skin. My body reacts to it: Muscles twitching, head congesting, eyelids heavy. The deeper she goes, the more it hurts; I try not to cry out. The knots from hard workouts, from hunching over equations. Back, front, feet, and scalp. Even my cheeks a little bit. Her hand is very small in mine. I don't like holding it; don't like the delicateness, the thinness, the missing mass that makes her not a man. Ooo, but that thumb in my palm.... She stayed for 1 hour and 15 minutes then left me lying on the table with a hot towel wrapped around my head. Said I could stay as long as I wanted. I did. Then went to the hot tub for awhile until my headphones fell into the water and wouldn't play for me anymore. Time to go home.