I have nary the time nor inclination for a post today.  My humble apologies.  I’m sure I’ll post tomorrow.  In the meantime, please figure out how to stop getting phone books.  Does anyone use them anymore?  The answer is: No.

Hola, good readers of TEOTH!  I would like to take a moment to state that I am totally addicted to sugar free Life Savers in both peppermint and wintergreen.  Oh, sorry: Pep-O-Mint and Wint-O-Green.  Heh.  My lunch is not complete until I’ve had four or five of ‘em.  It’s sad, and yet, I look forward to it so much.

Did everyone have a nice weekend?  Hope so.  Mine was fine.  Friday night we went to beer club at Holy Taco which turned into a later night than what I’m used to, but it was fun.  There were a ton of people there and the servers did a really excellent job of keeping everyone’s glasses filled and keeping the tabs seperate.  I was totally impressed!  They also remembered all of our names; I don’t know how they did it, but it was cool and slightly creepy at the same time.

Saturday Dice and I had an easy, lazy day.  We did some stuff, and at once point Dice went up to midtown to go to Borders and Whole Foods, but mostly we watched TV.  It was magical.  Sunday I got up and ran 3 miles and, yippie! my knee felt fine.  Yay!  Then I went to see Mamma Mia! with the female half of the Canadians, M, and M’s BFF ML.    It was a really cute movie, I really enjoyed it.  You basically just have to buy into the cheese factor and just enjoy it for all of its superficial fun.  After the movie we went next door to Apres Diem where we all had a fatoush salad and a glass of wine.  It was a good salad, with darker greens (possibly arugula or romaine), eggplant, feta, cucumbers, and some other stuff.  Hit the spot on a warm day!  Later that afternoon Dice was hungry so we went to the Brick Store where he had the brat and I had the veggie and hummus plate.  Then back home again to watch movies and veg out.

Plans for the week include Handitard dinner and a couple other things.  Nothing too exciting.  As usual I need to eat healthy and detox from all the damage I did to myself over the weekend.

So, I’m still not reading Romola.  It sits on my bedside table, forlornly holding up the weight of the book I am actually reading, which right now is Rachel Ray by Trollope.  Yes, folks, after a brief foray into the works of other authors, I’m back on the Trollope wagon.  After I finish Rachel Ray, I’m going to read He Knew He Was Right, which I had forgotten I had until the other day when I saw it while perusing my bookshelves.  I’m just not motivated to read Romola.  I suppose I’ll get to it someday. Someday when I’m locked in a tower room with nothing else to read.

Something that bothers me about people is the smaller ways in which they are inconsiderate.  When people do really asshole-y things, well, you get angry and you deal with it.  But people are inconsiderate in small ways 10,000 times a day, and you’re not supposed to get mad about it, or confront them, or anything.  You’re just supposed to shrug your shoulders and consider it the price we pay to live together on this crowded planet.

Take for instance the trend lately to have huge keychains with several different things hanging off them, charms, dangly spirally things, a light, maybe even a key or two.  Then you’re supposed to carry that massive key chain out, not in your bag or pocket, but out where it CLANGS and CLONGS and generally makes an incredible racket.  For no reason!  People do this just walking down the street!  Or at work!  I don’t care what you put on your keychain, but it’s rude to let it turn into your own personal noisemaker.  Thus you are saying that your personal space is much more important than my personal space.  Or people walking on the sidewalk.  People walking on the sidewalk never, ever make room for people coming in the opposite direction.  Like you’re just supposed to disappear so that they can walk down the sidewalk.

You can see how little things like this add up to extreme annoyance.  I mean, if people only did one small annoying thing a day, that’s billions of people doing annoying things every single day.  What happened to being polite?  And aware that you aren’t the only person on the planet?  Trust me, I don’t want to be around you any more than you want to be around me.   But you just made my day that much worse, just by being inconsiderate.

I imagine this problem is prevalent mostly in the U.S.  Although I’ve been to European cities where people are rude in much the same way, as well as more obvious ones.

In other news, dinner last night was fantastic, at least for me.  If you remember from yesterday, we went to Sear during Downtown Restaurant Week where expensive restaurants offer a three-course prix fixe for $25.  It’s usually from a limited menu, which is the trade-off.  Well, first of all the restaurant was inside the Marriot Marquis which had just undergone a $50 million renovation and last night was their grand re-opening, so there was a HUGE party going on in the lounge area, complete with a gigantic stage with a DJ and two dancers on pedestals.  So we pushed through the crowd to get to the restaurant which was comparatively quiet and not too crowded.  For appetizers we had the choice of wedge of iceberg or chilled garlic almond soup.  I got the wedge and it was perfect, very crispy and tart; Dice got the soup which he didn’t enjoy very much.  For entrée there were two choices: skirt steak with caramelized onion over mashed potatoes (skirt steak is when it’s in strips that are wound into a circle, kind of like an apple peel) or corvina with capers (whitefish).  Everyone who had the corvina (including me) thought it was delicious!  A little salty but it had some fennel and other tasty things.  The people who had the skirt steak said it was okay, but nothing big.  So this is reason number two why I’m glad I didn’t get the skirt steak. For dessert either a nutty cheesecake or a sorbet.  I had the cheesecake, it was very light and airy (which I like) and the nuts were SO good, plus there were nuts in a caramel sauce that covered it.  From talking to the others in our group, it was clear that the menu that I chose, iceberg wedge, corvina and cheesecake, were the better dishes of the choices.  And they were very tasty!  Plus the decor was very nice.  We were a party of 7 and they placed us at a table that could have fit 10.  It was nice to spread out but not very intimate.  However, there were some really cozy looking booths that would be perfect for 3 or 4 which I will hope to get next time.

Tonight?  Beer club at Holy Taco!

Okay, so there is a difference between nerds and geeks.  It might be a subtle difference, or a difference that doesn’t manifest itself in an obvious way, yet it’s fundamental.  American society tends to lump geeks and nerds into one large category because they both look so, well, dorky.  I submit that their outward appearances are one of only two manners in which they are similar, the other being a single-minded interest in a topic or topics. However, geeks tend to lose themselves in sci-fi, fantasy, computers or the like, but still like to socialize with the human race.  They might be socially awkward, but they prefer to surround themselves with others who are also socially awkward share their interests, so it all works out.  Nerds, on the other hand, are characterized by interests that are more scholarly in nature.  The social skills of a nerd are more atrophied than non-existent.  Because nerds tend to be more solitary, given the nature of academia as an individual endeavor.  Thus they spend more brainpower on whatever their academic field is rather than the latest craze in fashion.

I could write a manifesto on the differences between geeks and nerds, but that’ll do as a nutshell description.  I feel singlularly qualified to delineate the differences since in my life I’ve dabbled in geekdom, nerdiness, and the general masses.  I grew out of my geek phase, thought seriously about being a nerd while in college, then discovered that booze is the great equalizer and ultimately went to too many frat parties to qualify for either category.  Dice says that my singular interest in Victorian literature qualifies me for nerd status, but I contend that he’s too much of a nerd to know better.