Met up with my usual Thursday crew for drinks last night, which was fun as always. I wish I could still stay out as late as I did when I was in college, but Thursday isn’t the end of the week for me anymore - I get up while it’s still dark out on Friday and I definitely regret it if I don’t get a reasonable amount of sleep. I think four day work weeks should become standard practice - those crazy academics have the right idea.

Maybe it’s because drinking makes me more talkative than usual, but I seem to invariably get chatty cab drivers on my way home from bars. Not that I’m complaining; it’s nicer to have a conversation with someone than to sit in silence or listen to whatever god-awful radio station they might be playing. Last night, my cabbie was a man who lived not far from me, just over the bridge into Queens, so we talked a lot about some of the various neighborhoods we’d lived in. He agreed wholeheartedly that Roosevelt Island is a world away from Washington Heights and that while it might be fairly expensive (at least compared to the outer boroughs), it’s definitely worth it. And it also turned out that he minored in philosophy when he was in college - who knew? Maybe I’d make a good cab driver, too, although I doubt it. (I hate driving.)

It’s looking like it’s time to throw out our pumpkins already, as they’re getting fairly saggy-faced and I don’t want to end up cleaning pumpkin goop off of any surfaces. It’s always sad to see the last traces of Halloween disappear, especially since they’re being replaced by the first signs of the impending Christmas season. I have nothing against Christmas, but the transition from ghosts straight into santas just serves to remind me how very short my favorite season actually is. I will attempt to defy the encroaching red and green by eating a great deal of pumpkin pie between now and December. I feel that this is a foolproof plan.