Coffee Contradictions

My ears perk up every time I hear about a new study on coffee. And for the past decade or so, I've heard or read a fair bit about the health effects of drinking coffee. It seems that they take turns in suggesting that coffee is good for you or bad for you. Yesterday and today, I read two more such articles. The first suggests that drinking coffee could make you crazy if you're young, and the second suggests that it will prevent you from going crazy if you're old. The contradictions continue. On the other hand, this might have explained my dad's enthusiasm for drinking coffee.

Well of Course

Since I finished my degree and started teaching, my wardrobe decisions have been based primarily around looking halfway professional. This seems not to be a universal concern amongst professors. I know of one professor who is barely distinguishable from a homeless person. There is another who could easily be an extra on Trailer Park Boys. I don't think I'm smart enough to get away with that, however.

While blue jeans are my preferred choice of lower-body clothing, everything that I've bought in the last year and a half has been denim free. My favourite, most recently purchase pairs of jeans (identical) have both worn out, leaving me with two other pairs. One is a pair that these replaced. The other pair seemed fashionable when I bought them in 1999. However, due to a long string of bad dietary decisions, they became too small, so they got stored in the bottom of my drawer until a year or two ago. They now fit my lower-body, but don't fit in with the rest of my wardrobe, or anybody else's. I'm not sure what made anyone think they were fashionable when they were. On the other hand, they possess the distinct advantage of not being worn out, due the the preservative effects of the cardboard box in which they were stored for 6 years. I mainly wear them if I don't plan on being seen by anyone who knows me. In other words, I don't usually wear them when I leave the house.

This morning in particular, I decided to wear them, thinking I'd be in all day. Later this afternoon, on a whim, I decided to venture out to the mall nearby in hopes of finding the perfect winter coat (a lifelong quest, it seems). When I got to the mall, I realized that I had forgotten to change out of these jeans. "Oh well," I thought, "I don't know too many people who live around here anymore. Who could I possibly run into? Besides, if they laugh, I don't need 'em 'cause they're not good friends." The first store that I went to was Sport Chek. I saw a coat that I liked at one of their other locations, but the only one that they had in stock was too small. The selection at this location was better, and I managed to find a similar coat in a larger size (the main difference between this one and the first one I had seen was in the material that the collar was made of, which is immaterial to me). Even though it was bigger, I wasn't sure it was bigger enough, so I didn't make the purchase.

I thought about walking around the rest of the mall to see if I could find something in another store, but this was the third mall I visited in 4 days, and it was becoming apparent that the main difference between one mall and the next is the layout. Most of the stores that appear in one will likely appear in the other. I had already sifted through the merchandise at the stores in the other malls, and even if there were stores at this mall that I hadn't been to yet, the chances of finding something I liked were still pretty low, so I decided to leave.

On my way out, I saw the Danier Leather store, which was suggested to me after I returned from the second mall outing, but which I hadn't been to yet. I've never yearned for leather anything in the past, so I didn't expect to make a purchase. I just wanted to see what sorts of things they had, so I could go home and think about it. One of women at the cash looked familiar. It wasn't implausible that she could be who I thought she might be, since she married someone from around here (younger brother of an old friend, coincidentally), but her hair was a fair bit longer than I remembered it being, so I wasn't sure. I proceeded to check out the coats.

I had just finished looking when I noticed a display of wallets, something else on my list of things to buy (fairly low on the list, but yep, it was on there). After looking for a while, I found a wallet worthy of my pocket, so I went to buy it. When the transaction was nearly completed, the somewhat familiar cashier asked me for my name (something to do with a warranty).

"Randy," I said.

"I thought so," she responded.

"Hilary?"

"Yes."

And we proceeded to chit-chat about what we've been up to since she finished with Queen's. Fortunately for me, the offending jeans were hidden from her view by the checkout counter.

"I'm sorry, but you have the wrong number....

...You are looking for Randy. This is Randy's student card."

It took me about 4 years to memorize my student number. Though this past September, after enjoying the privilege of not needing to reach into my pocket for my student card for about a year, I got a phone number that (a) starts out with the same three numbers as my student number and (b) uses only one number that my student number doesn't (though the numbers are not in the same order, disregarding some nonsense about cyclic permutations. I'd say something about Hamming distance, but those who would understand what I mean are probably already thinking it.).

Now, when I give out my phone number, I'm not sure whether I'm giving them my student number or my phone number, and also it takes me quite a while to remember my student number with a significant degree of confidence before I say it out loud.

The mind ends in more ways than one.

Funny

Mathematician that I am, when faced with the fact that I needed to give credit in the form of a link to my food muse Erica, yet she didn't have a blog, I created a blog for such a purpose, aptly titled "The Blogless Erica".

Curious to see how much status a person without a blog could have on the internet, I decided to google The Blogless Erica and find out. Turns out there's only one other blogless Erica out there, who is, coincidentally, somebody else's food muse.

Of all the !@#$ing coincidences

As I mentioned in Monday's post, my parents were in Kingston one week before my dad passed away. Among the things that I talked about with my dad was a country song called "Waiting around to die" [1] I never quite understood his enthusiasm for listening to country music on the radio until sometime in the last four or five years, when he told me that he mostly listened to country music stations hoping to hear something resembling the country music of earlier decades, though he never heard what he wanted. The composer of the song was Townes Van Zandt. The name was familiar, but it didn't sound like something that was recent. I thought that he might be a performer from earlier days of country music that my dad would recognize. Turns out that he didn't. The recording of the song that I had was from the Be Good Tanyas, which happened to among the topics of DSM's post that I read on the day of that sad anniversary.

[Warning: plot spoiler ahead]

Later that day, I watched Prison Break.

If the main characters were real, we'd have something to relate to. At least it wasn't raining in Prison Break.

[1] If the topic weren't so morbid, I might be amused by title of the song, when I asked him about it, and what happened one week later. I should say, however, that the main character of the song has basically given up on life, and his only solace is found in substance abuse. This was not my dad in any way.