Ninjas. Sushi. IHOP.

Hello, readers.

Currently I'm reading Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. It's about the world after some cataclysmic event, and also about the world before it, and also there is gong fu and ninjas. It's also going to be a very sad book. I can tell.

The picture above has nothing to do with the book except that it's awesome.

Yesterday was a day in which everything happened.

One of these things was lunch. I had fried chicken at this lunch. It was brined in coca-cola and good enough that sometimes I was distracted from the three friend girls at my table who were discussing, among other things, monsters and women being shot out of cannons.

After this, I met with the director of my committee at a bar that isn't really a grocery, despite what they say. A committee is the thing you have to impress to graduate with an M.F.A. I defend my collection of stories tomorrow, in fact. This meeting was not really so much to prepare for that as to give us an excuse to lament the lack of awareness among graduate students of Captain Marvel. Also to plan a Cat People marathon.

It turned out that BGF was also at the not-grocery bar. He had a friend there with him who had broken her toe and believes if given a choice between Philip Roth and John Updike, she'd choose John Cheever. I later accompanied this wise woman to a sushi place. We had saki. She told mostly sad stories about dead people and forgotten art. I forgot to warn her that the Volcano rolls were rather warm. It was fun.

And then, I went to IHOP with another group of friends, completely separate from my lunch friends, or my BGF, or the Sad, Wise Woman. It was a goodbye ritual, of sorts, as we had made a similar journey three years ago. We were all new to Oxford, then, and it was after midnight, and we wanted IHOP. At some point in our discussion that night, we realized that the closest IHOP was in Southhaven, which is practically Memphis and almost an hour away. We were not deterred, though, and we drove and made a memory. And so, last night, we made the journey again, except this time we went a different way. We stopped at Sardis Dam and counted falling stars, threw rocks in the water, and texted the member of our IHOP clan who had left us last summer.

On the way back, we sang "Piano Man."

I went to sleep after sunrise.

And that was that.

Happy Day-You're-Reading-This, readers.

ttfn.