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Kate’s visit, part three

It was Tuesday, January 12. (I’m really falling behind here.) I went to work/school, and Kate met up with me for lunch. We had the infamous/not-really-infamous Krishna Lunch, served on the Plaza of the Americas outside my workplace, Peabody Hall. Fortunately, Kate liked the food.

After lunch, Kate sat in on my classes. First, there was Numerical Analysis (<sarcasm>fun!</sarcasm>), and later, Databases. Kate actually works with databases and stuff like that, so as the professor was giving a lecture on the basics of SQL, Kate told me that she could probably give the lecture herself. I wouldn’t doubt it.

Tuesday evening was our Esperanto Club meeting in which we would introduce a real Esperanto speaker from an exotic land. I invited 100 people on Facebook, and only one showed up. I blame myself for not promoting the event more, but I didn’t promote it very much because I didn’t have enough time to reserve a room. So I blame myself for not reserving a room before winter break, although I’m not sure if that was possible, so maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up over it. Anyway, the show went on, and we explained to the one guy there how Kate learned and had used Esperanto.

I think it was that night that Kate gave Andy and me a primer on the Russian alphabet. Andy was interested in learning Russian (or maybe just the alphabet, I’m not sure), so we went over the vowels and then the consonants. It took a while—there are a lot of them, and Andy and I were struggling to pronounce some of them. I thought it might be hard to learn a new alphabet, but surprisingly, in the weeks that have followed, I’ve been able to sort of pronounce Russian words that I see.

On Wednesday, Kate got ready in time to go with me to work and class. Wednesdays are kind of frantic for me this semester, so we grabbed a quick lunch at the KFC Express on campus. Kate didn’t really like the food, but I could have guessed as much. I’m glad she tried it, anyway. After that, she sat in on my other classes, Software Engineering and Accounting.

We stayed on campus for dinner because Kate was interested in attending a lecture. We ate at Pollo Tropical at the Reitz Union, and she loved it, which made me happy. (Wikipedia has some bare facts on Pollo Tropical for those of you unfortunate enough not to be graced by its presence within a reasonable distance.) After that, we went to the presentation. A professor from UC Irvine talked about the history of criminal identification technologies, including the rise of fingerprinting and then DNA.

On Thursday, I had my weekly lunch with my sister. We eat at a different place each week, and this week, it was Moe’s. She brought along her friend Nathalie, and I, of course, brought Kate. We didn’t have much time, but Kate and my sister chatted it up.

Kate had been wanting to take an official tour. She had looked into it and said that there would be one starting at 2:00, so we hurried over to the Welcome Center after lunch. I was going to be late for Numerical Analysis, and I wasn’t sure if they gave tours to non-prospective-students, but I thought we should give it a shot. When they asked about her potential relationship to the university, I just told them that she was a junior computer-science major at PBCC looking to transfer, and when asked why I was doing most of the talking for her, I just said her English wasn’t very good (even though it is, I hasten to point out). We had to give her contact information, so I wrote a fake address, and we hurriedly parted ways: my class had just started, and her tour had just started.

Later, while I was at work, she said she had gotten lost from the tour group and would meet me at my Databases class. So she met me there, and afterward, we had a little bit of time to grab coffee (well, she grabbed coffee and I helped her drink it). After that, we went to the Gator Freethought meeting. Kate had asked about any student organizations she might be interested in, so I suggested Gator Freethought, which promotes science, skepticism, and critical thinking. The topic of the meeting was logical fallacies, which I thought was kind of interesting, but the discussion was pretty chaotic, so I wasn’t sure how much of it Kate could follow.

So that was Thursday.

Back to the present for a moment. Today (well, yesterday, since I’m writing this after midnight) I found out that J.D. Salinger had died.

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in my freshman year of high school. It was influential on me, as I noted at the time:

(As a side note, my writing may seem unusually informal today. That’s because I have to read The Catcher in the Rye for English, and it’s written in very informal speech. It’s a good book, if you really want to know. I was actually reading it today while I was waiting for about five hours for my sister to get off the lousy computer. I was that much into the darn book. I mean it.)

Ha ha. I didn’t say “damn.”

Anyway, The Catcher in the Rye instantly became one of my favorite books, and it’s one of the few that I still reread with any regularity. In fact, I was just thinking of picking it up again the next time I go home, which will probably be soon. After recent re-readings, I’ve wondered whether I can still identify with Holden Caulfield. I’m older than him now, after all, and I’m in college. Who’s to know? I guess I’ll have to keep reading to find out.

The Onion has responded to the news in the style of The Catcher in the Rye: Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger. It actually works well if you think about it.