I told myself I wasn’t going to blog tonight—there has been too much out and very little in over the last few days, and altogether not enough sleep, and I kept nodding off on the trains today—but I like the exercise.

Just home from a Cedar Tavern burger dinner and belly laughs with Jason and the NYU crew. We like these people, quite a bit actually, Jason and Maud and Camille and Philippe and Greg. Everything is funny, even—and we are sorry for this, really we are, in between the heaving laughs and the tearing eyes—even Helen Keller.

This morning I woke up just in time to go meet Kevin for lunch. My mum called while I was brushing my teeth to read me Hokkien rhymes from her childhood. Unexpected, but welcome.

The flurry of the day’s activities included a stop at the STA travel agency by school to finally book my summer itinerary (JFK-CDG-SIN-SYD-LON, call me Agent Stellou). And, man, it took just forever before the travel agent girl offered transits in Qatar and Bangkok and a one-night stopover in New Delhi for the bargainia student price of TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY DOLLARS. Oh, AND TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. Actually, the way it went down was, after clicking and clacking into the machine for ages, she said, “How much would you like to pay?” Hello, is this a fucking game show? But I thought I should play pleasant, and after all she was very nice, nice in that nice cow-like way, so I said, “Um, maybe less than a couple of thousand dollars?” And, without saying a word, as if she were a middle-aged Chinese salesman in a blue-and-white-striped button-down and a pleather belt in the electronics paradise that is Sim Lim Square, she turned her computer screen to me and tapped at the number. That number again: TWO THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY DOLLARS AND TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. So I said thank-you, then came home and booked it online for somewhere around half that amount.

But half that amount is some amount all the same—(you know how in Charlotte’s Web, at one point the message Charlotte weaves about Wilbur is “Some Pig”? This was Some Amount.)—so then I had to pop in at Café Regular for a cappuccino to calm me down.

And then there was the Cedar Tavern, and the burgers, and the belly laughs. I returned Jason his copy of Durkheim’s Règles de la méthode sociologique and he gave me the new Benjamin Biolay and Keren Ann CDs. Everybody be quiet and maybe he won’t notice he got the bum end of the deal.

And now I really have to go to bed, because I have an early-morning breakfast date tomorrow. Non mais vraiment. Le truc c’est que life is good. And I remember now that I was talking to Tom this afternoon and he said, “How’s it going?” and I said, “Everything is incredibly good,” and he said, “Oh, do you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?” Non mais BRAVO.