So. I got to my English class roughly a half hour late. On the bright side, I did have my homework. I'll take my victories where I can find them.

After class, I spent some time schmoozing with a classmate of mine, who has been alluded to a number of times in this journal. In fact, she's the only student in the college who knows about this place (at least, as far as I know), and, this past Tuesday, I got permission to mention her by name. So... ladies and gentlemen in the reading audience, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Phebe.

Phebe is probably the busiest person on the planet, leaving even Yours Truly in the dust. Unlike me, she doesn't feel compelled to complain to everybody in sight about it; she just does it. I'm continually in awe of just how much she successfully takes on every semester.

Like me, Phebe is a junior, majoring in English. Unlike me, she's also majoring in psychology. (I've never taken a psychology course; I just spent a few years ghostwriting psychology papers for somebody else. But that's a whole 'nother story, which ended shortly before I started attending college myself.)

She's a few years younger than me, intelligent, insightful -- we're both pretty good at dishing out and taking constructive criticism -- and probably my best friend on campus.

Lately, she's taken to referring to me as her stalker.

That hasn't stopped the two of us from having far too much fun with the concept. As in the Tuesday before last. After meeting at the office of our English 399 professor, whom we both wanted to see, she went upstairs to see another professor, whom I hadn't previously met. I tagged along. She introduced me to him as "my stalker."

"You know, that's illegal," he said.

"No, it's consensual," I replied.

The two of them talked for a few minutes, after which she got up to go. He turned to me. "Was there anything you wanted?"

"No, I'm just stalking her."

"Oh, right." He then stage-whispered to Phebe, "Should I call Security?"

She declined the offer.

Sometimes I can't believe we're actually doing this. But we do share a somewhat warped sense of humor...

(Dialogue reconstructed, and may not be the exact words used.)

Shmuel: You know, I'm not so sure I'm really stalking you. In fact, it occurred to me that the very first time you accused me of this, it was when you had invited me to have lunch with you. I think you're stalking me, but you're cleverly managing to make it look like it's the other way around. You know, getting me to hang around by making me think I'm stalking you, thereby accomplishing your objective of stalking me.

PHEBE: Oh, I think there is some reaction formation going on over here, but it's on your part. You're willing to concoct this whole explanation to avoid facing the fact that you're stalking me.

After a couple more exchanges along these lines, I started singing "Every Breath You Take," after which the discussion went off into another tangent entirely.

Anyway. I obstensibly got into all of this here because I was going to write about what I did at lunch, but now that I think of it, it's not all that interesting. We ran into the professor whose book I'm supposed to be proofreading, and schmoozed for a bit on a variety of topics, before eventually going our separate ways. Which leads to my art class.

In class itself, we used colored paint for the first time. After overcoming my initial panic, I ended up not doing too badly, although I still think the resulting piece (a bunch of abstract shapes, done just to get the hang of the various colors) is way too busy. I like simplicity, darn it!

The one catch was that it turned out that the red and blue paints I had simply could not be mixed to produce violet; no matter what proportion I used, I ended up with a shade of brown. After some initial disbelief, my professor confirmed this. Apparently, the red we got was too orangey, while the blue is too cold, or something like that. I may have to get out to an art supply store and buy some purple paint. I really need more white anyway, so perhaps it's just as well.