death and syntax

i missed it all, i missed the creaky little wooden desks and the echoey hallways and the bad coffee and all the kids running around being stupid college kids. i missed clicking my mechanical pencil and opening my notebook to the next page and writing the date at the top. i missed being in it but not of it.

and waiting for will outside of class and he comes out and says some crazy thing. today it was "let's go to 125, it's meeting downstairs right now! come on!"

so i followed him. what else was i to do?

after years of working fulltime, sitting at a computer all day, the freedom of wandering around campus midmorning with the sun bright and the air rain clean is luxurious. and these professors are so smart and so interesting you can't even believe it. so when there's a class starting right here right now and you can jump in, you just do. even if it means you're an hour later to work.

should i take both classes?
can i handle a syntax double header?

yesterday i returned (after several weeks' absence) to the research institute where i work as a volunteer on a project in frame semantics. i explained to a meetingful of linguists the pub/sub messaging model. then we had ice cream. it's the way this kind of silly trivial daily detail intersects with the rarefied world of great thinkers that is still so amazing to me about hanging around berkeley.