No empty threats here

I told you, John... it's going in the blog.

We were having a good day. A great day, actually. John and I had met up with Russ after months of not seeing him. We spent some time walking around. Somehow, we ended up in the West Village, mostly because John had never really been there and Russ is great for showing off the city. Once we got out there, before going to dinner, we happened upon this great antique store, full of all kinds of fantastic stuff for antiquity nerds. John spent a good long time with some of the swords, I stared at the provincial Roman and Greek coinage, and we both looked at some of the Roman glass items this guy just hapened to have lying around. Mind you, all these items were hundreds and hundreds of dollars, of course, but that never stops us from looking, nor from being stupid enough to go through the trouble of doing some rough math in our heads and exchanging that "sure, we can afford it" look before pausing, shaking our heads, and moving on to the next wonderful thing we can't afford. The owner of the store noticed our interest (how could you not), an the fact that we were throwing around some antiquity-specific vocabulary, so he engaged us in some conversation and ended up showing us the most incredible manuscript. I don't know how old it was, but it was old, full of koptic writing, and comprised of pages made of some kind of skin and bound in wood. Incredible. Anyway, we'll be going back soon, with books in hand... I want to look up some of those coins.

At any rate, we then went to dinner, and had great conversation and reasonably good food with our absolutely crappy service. It was fun, though, so I'll let that slide. After that, we were waiting to cross a street, during which point we were in the middle of some ridiculous conversation about Spider Man and whether we had hope for the new movie being any good. John, with his vast geek knowledge of comic books, felt the need to speak very loudly (What? John speaks loudly? Surely not...) about the first appearances of different characters from Spider Man, including which number of which comic was in question, even which frame of a comic book page. Anyway, some tool standing on the corner next to us overheard John, and decided he just HAD to chime in with his goober knowledge about the topic. Then proceeded a brief yet painful diatribe about the first appearance of Sandman being in Amazing Spider Man number something-or-other, where this, that, and the other happened, and how that was a certain time frame apart from the first appearance of Doc Oc, in Amazing Spiderman number who-the-hell-cares.

Now, I want to make something very clear at this point. I enjoy comic books. I read certain ones when I've heard good things about them, but I'm certainly no super-enthusiast. John, on the other hand, harbors a dark past of actually being in the comic business, so his knowledge is a little disgusting. Besides, my roommate Jane is also big into comics, but it's just cute when she does it. when John gets all comic-ee, he makes you feel kind of stupid, even if you're not into comics. It's a talent of his... not only being incredibly smart at something, but making you painfully aware that you're not. He doesn't do it on purpose or anything, but it happens. So, back to the story. John responded to the idiot on the corner with another geeky comic question, and the guy didn't know the answer, so he instanty ignored us and, ashamed of his geek inferiority, threw himself into what may have been a fake phonecall on his instantly opened cellphone. As we crossed the street, I reminded John jokingly that if he was going to talk about these things in public, he had to be careful about the volume at which he chose to do so, or else this very sort of thing would happen, and, worse, others in his company would have to be subjected to the ensuing idiotic conversation with whatever ass of a person decided to jump in, just as the idiot on the corner just HAD to. I ended with, "That's it... this is going in the blog!"

So there you go. I made good on it.

On the bright side, things are calming down a little... John and I are both half-way through the end-of-semester rush, and now it's just a matter of cranking out a few papers by next week. Let the party begin.