• Vocal students from the conservatory playing choral music loudly from a phone in the school dining hall.
  • Waiting for a gaggle of geese to cross the road in front of my car.
    • Googling to find the right collective noun for them.
  • “Swan Song” by Bee Gees—not even my favorite song from Idea—being stuck in my head.
  • Deleting Twitter from my phone for I think the first time, to take a breather.
  • Peeing extra carefully, now living in a house at school with many women.
  • Staring at the body wash aisle in Target, thinking that the national (positive) trend of tempered masculinity had penetrated the market because all of the soaps were floral… but then realizing that there was a separate men’s section. Buying a men’s body wash because, I think, I preferred its smell and not because I wanted to affirm my own masculinity. But I’m not sure. And ruing adding my dollars to the sales figures that say women buy bright, flowery products and men buy dark, gritty products.
  • How, in my experience, younger professors tend to have more complicated syllabi and wordier lectures, which might be because they need to prove to students (and to department colleagues) that they know what they’re doing.
  • The male, cisgendered student who proclaimed, defiantly, during a pronouns-and-names sesh, “I am DEFINITELY a ‘he’.”
  • The professor who, while explaining an ancient Chinese philosophical concept, said, “Rice hasn’t been developed yet; we’re dealing with millet here.”
  • The professor of French who accidentally let a door slam in my face.
  • Putting Burt’s Bees chapstick on while eating Tic Tacs for an inadvertent multi-mint mouth bomb.
  • Talking to a custodian in Packers Country who is a Bears fan because when she worked at a mental hospital, players from Chicago would visit patients there.