Do I ever have stuff to catch up on...

Actually, I started typing an entry back on the 18th, but fell asleep before finishing it. I'll have to get back to that sometime, I suppose. For now, it looks as if another one of my catch-up entries is in order.

Let's see, then.

This past Shabbos, I returned to the family home, where I had some quality time with a couple of my siblings, and raided the freezer, as is my custom when returning home. Oh, and I took a bath, at which point I was able to confirm that Mary Anne's anthology, Aqua Erotica, really is waterproof. Cool. A bit eerie, but cool.

Saturday night, I went shopping for sneakers, as the pair I've been wearing almost every day for the past three years is now all but unusable. "Holes in your soles" has wonderful prosody, but doesn't make for a comfortable footwear experience.

My brother naïvely agreed to drive me to the shoe store, and my sister even more naïvely asked to come along for the ride, as neither had had the misfortune of experiencing sneaker shopping with Shmuel in the past.

To make a long and painful story short, I tried on well-nigh every pair of sneakers in a two-size range at the primary shoe store, and quickly swept through the selections at two other stores in the mall, one of which turned out not to have a shoe section in the first place, and the other of which specialized in ugly sneakers arranged in a haphazard fashion. I did not emerge with new sneakers. There was nothing suitable to be had.

I think my feet are slightly different sizes. I had no trouble finding decent sneakers that fit my right foot. The left foot was another story entirely.

I finally got up in the afternoon, and decided to go out to Manhattan and make another attempt at getting a pair of sneakers. I'd go to Macy's, I decided, reasoning that as the biggest store on Earth, it would surely have a good footwear section. This was pure speculation; I'd only been to the Macy's in Manhattan once before, and that only briefly.

I also decided to stop by CompUSA, as they'd advertised a Presidents' Day special in which they were practioally giving away computer memory; the mail-in rebate was equal to the price of the stuff. I suspected they'd be sold out, but it seemed worth a try.

Just before leaving, I checked the newspaper to see what was playing at the second-run theatre. I was going to be in the area anyway, I reasoned, so why not?

The New York Times didn't have anything listed for the theatre at all. This seemed odd, but I figured the Times had dropped the ball, especially once I checked Newsday and found the full listings. A bunch of films were playing, of which the only one I was remotely interested in seeing was Charlie's Angels. Which I'd seen before, but still.

On the heels of that thought, it occurred to me that Elaine probably hadn't seen it, and she lives in Manhattan, and I had a book of hers to return... so I went online, caught her on AIM, and talked her into meeting me at the theatre to see the film.

To make another long story short, Macy's had only a small, pathetic display of uninspiring sneakers, the memory was sold out at CompUSA (although I did get Corel Print House Magic Deluxe Edition for a song -- $10, minus a $10 rebate), and the film... well, the theatre turned out to be closed. As in, for good. There was a note on the door to the effect of: we're gone, thanks for coming, and do patronize our chain's first-run theatres in the area.

Oh, well. It was a nice idea.

If not for more recent events, I'd probably go on about this longer, as it did succeed in getting me down a bit for a day or two. I'd known that the Marshall, Fulbright, and Mellon were all extreme longshots, but I'd kinda hoped I'd at least get to the interview stage on one of them before getting turned down. I found myself wondering if this was foreshadowing the reactions I'd be getting from the grad schools I'd applied to.

Buffy and Angel were good, though.

Anyway, so that was fun, and did a better job of discrediting the Jewish right-wing groups with which the writer was affiliated than anything I could possibly have written.

Otherwise, went to my classes, gave a speech to a third of my public speaking class, stopped by the library, ran into a former classmate who asked for help with an essay, gave some advice right there and arranged to meet her on Thursday to look at the next draft. Went home, found a message on my answering machine from a professor at the University of Michigan, asking me to call him back, except that (a) it was pretty late by that point, and (b) the answering machine cut the message off when he was partway through giving his number. Hmm.

I'm not gonna decide anything until I hear from the other schools I applied to, and until I visit the Michigan campus and that of any other places that accept me, but this is quite definitely good news.

After telling the news to a few people, I wrote my column for the school paper, had a somewhat frustrating speech therapy session, looked over my former classmate's essay and basically advised her to pray for mercy and try to do better in the future, there not being time for a complete rewrite, went to my class, e-mailed the column out during the break, went back to class, trudged home in the snow, which had blanketed the ground in the few hours since the start of class.

You might gather this entry has just about run out of steam. You'd be right.

G'night, y'all.