Kim J leaves the city today, Maggie’s leaving in June. So long, supper club. So long, Charles. Seems like the end of an era.

Been listening to “Between the Bars” on repeat lately. You weren’t the only one with a house of cards heart, Elliott. Everything knocks me down these days.

Professor Cleese is showing a steely determination to drill an appreciation for Keats into us. Up until now my only contact with Keats was in Hagar’s class, when we were assigned to groups and forced to give oral presentations of his (Keats’, not Hagar’s) poetry. Kim and Michele (and Katie?) and I wound up with “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and all through the oral report Kim kept muttering “it doesn’t scan. ‘And no birds sing’ does not scan. This is bullshit.”

So far I tend to agree with Kim; Keats is not my guy. Despite having the metaphors behind every word in every line in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” explained to me last night, I still cannot escape the feeling that I’m just reading a poem about a vase. The only Keats I really have warmed to so far is this, from “Ode to Melancholy”:

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

As poetry it is swoony and ridiculous but as advice it’s pretty good, and I herein offer it to the Lad as a how-to manual for weathering my emotional storms.

Nice Old Lady I Work With: Why do you always do that?

Me: Do what?

NOLIWW: Touch the wall when you walk.

Me: It’s a prison thing.

My cowboy boss was predictably fascinated by my Thursday experience with my professor of Beer Studies. He kept trying to get more details out of me. “So, how did he talk you into this, exactly? And he bought all your beer? How much did that cost him, do you think? And did he hit on you? Where was he sitting? How close, exactly?”

“Ew, pardner,” I said. “It was innocent. And in any case, I am NOT giving you tips on how to pick up girls in their twenties.”

“I don’t need tips,” he said, “I’ve got moves.” He danced the flamenco by himself for awhile while I edited some technical reports. “So when are you and me gonna go drinking?”

“I’m not drinking with you.”

“Don’t you want to meet John?” John is his alter-ego, the one who does bad things when drunk. I’m pretty sure that John is the reason why my cowboy boss no longer has a driver’s license or a live-in girlfriend.

“No thank you,” I said. “I’ve seen quite enough of John.” He sighed, shrugged, wrote down a haiku about birds, and returned to his office.

You know the spot at the bottom center of the ribcage, right where CPR workers put their hands to jump-start you? That part is where I miss the Lad. Right there it feels empty and listless like an uncharged battery pack. First I thought this was a symbol of our beautiful, cinematic love, this physical ache for him, but this morning it occurs to me that I might just be in withdrawal from his magnificent hugs.

Many of you have known the hugs of the Lad on a regular basis in times of need, or in times of him hitting on you or, if you are lucky Sean and Jack, every time Mister Roper comes over, so that he’ll keep believing you’re all gay. Did you, too, find you missed these hugs when they disappeared?

Not that this will make our love any less cinematic. But I am curious.

Not long ago, while waiting for my school train (which smells like a hundred ham-fisted schoolboy colognes), an enormous woman began showing me the pictures she carries around of her ex-boyfriend. She knows he dumped her because she doesn’t look like Britney Spears (or maybe she does, in triplicate). She eyed my hips and I could tell that I was indistinguishable, at that moment on her platform, from Britney Spears. “Haven’t seen your man,” I nearly said, pulling up my sleeves and turning out my pockets as proof; “I swear to you I only inherited this metabolism, and already it’s showing alarming signs of wear and tear.” But I know what she means. Without girls like Britney around, she’d do all right.

“This is my wife, Jane,” he said.

“Oh, hello,” I said. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”

“Hello,” she said. Then she turned to my prof-boss somewhat accusingly and said, “She’s beautiful.”

***********************

“Can you come to my office and fix my fax machine?” said my prof-boss.

“Sure,” I said, went to his office, and reloaded the paper into the correct slot in the machine. “As a tenured faculty member in Electrical Engineering,” I said, “you clearly are neither mechanically inept nor lazy, so I can only assume you call me in to fix your small technologies in an effort to be endearing. But in light of these four flights of stairs between you and me, I really think it’s time you made that Ph.D. work for you.”

Tuesday night in class a girl was talking about her little brother, and how he doesn’t hang out with his friends or talk to them on the phone or even chat with them online. “They all have these online journal things,” she said, baffled.

“Blogs,” someone said wisely, pronouncing it to rhyme with “blow.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And he comes home and writes about his day and then goes around commenting on all his friends’ sites while they comment on his. It’s so weird.”

Is this how people reacted to the invention of the telephone, too, I wonder?

Interesting side note: MT flags “blogs” as a misspelled word.