Thank God I'm gay

Just kidding -- there's no God.

Seriously, though, if I were new to town and expected to pay for two people each time I wanted the company of an attractive, single woman, I would be immediately bankrupt with movie ticket prices like these. Ten dollars and seventy-five cents? American dollars? At least Moon was woooonderful. I knew it was about a man who spent many years isolated on the Moon, so I figured it was a tale apropos to my current circumstance. It wasn't, but I still enjoyed it.

In addition to catching a movie at the Criterion Cinema downtown -- what a bizarre name for a theater, incidentally -- I accomplished much today. Let's talk parking. Here in New Haven, one must have a sticker to park most places, including my street. Thanks to Yale SOM doing a truly fantastic job keeping incoming students up-to-date on all the things they might need to take care of, I was prepared this morning to head down to City Hall and stand in lines with various forms and get this task done. It, of course, turned out to be even more complicated than I had imagined. I will not go into the details, because they're not interesting, but I will say that I left the house at 8 a.m. sharp and returned at about 10:45 with the actual sticker. Which, incidentally, expires Sept. 30 ... thus I will have to do some, but not all, of this again.

But the trip did get me more familiar with the downtown area. City Hall, it turns out, is also where the Greater New Haven Toastmasters Club meets every other Wednesday (but not this Wednesday). Anyone who knows me know I am an avid Toastmaster; I was in two clubs in Dallas-Fort Worth, and was an officer twice. So if time allows, it's certainly something I'd like to continue while in New Haven. The other club nearby is a Yale club, and it meets Fridays. I will be doing that this Friday.

I hit my second grocery today: Nica's, which was not as charming as Manna's but had a better selection of fruits and vegetables, which I loaded up on. On which up I loaded? Up on which loaded I? I bought fruits and vegetables.

Beyond that I did some reading and just a wee bit of time-wasting, but not much. It's funny -- I do have some legitimate pre-orientation things to do, but not nearly a week's worth. More like a few hours' worth. So I feel guilty when I'm not doing something "legitimate," even though I know there aren't a full day's worth of legitimate things to do. But getting acclimated is legitimate, I must tell myself! And it's informative. Like today I learned that parking at a meter downtown costs $1.25/hour, and that the Starbucks near City Hall has a super friendly shaven-headed barista, who makes an iced skinny vanilla latte that's interchangeable with those prepared at Starbuckses elsewhere. This might not come up in class, but knowledge is knowledge.