Dinner last night was ice cream. Ice cream and a few odds and ends as I remained hungry. Incidentally, the last of the red wine is gone. Recipe:

Red wine sauce
Boil 1 cup sugar in 1/2 cup water for at least five minutes. Remove from heat.
Stir in 1/4 cup wine and 1/2 teaspoon grated orange or lemon peel.
Serve hot over delicious vanilla ice cream.

I need to buy malt powder. The ice cream was a confidence booster of sorts for last night's activity: meeting other MAPHiosi at a local bar. I was going to wait until the big orientation on Sunday, but the guy who organized this signed his email with "Prost," always a good sign, and, well, we all know I'm an alcoholic.

So many people wondered about "Prost" but didn't look it up. Disappointing.

The main obstacle was the presence of Californians. I've just never liked people from California, especially southern California. Call it prejudice, because it is prejudice.

I'm not sure quite why. It could be because all my least favorite authors live there, or because the Californians I have met, like the West-Coaster in Freiburg, tend to confirm my preconceptions. Maybe it's their unflattering representation in various movies and t.v. shows?

Anyways, I talked to one guy from Berkeley, who time may reveal as a blowhard (he's a big Pynchon fan who's read all the big books redeemable for hipster cred), and he seemed nice enough. So maybe this is progress.

The rest of the MAPH students, and there were about a dozen there, were surprisingly friendly. Except when I was talking (listening mainly) to the aforementioned Californian, conversations tended to revolve around the predictable getting-to-know-you topics.

The majority of us seem to be English majors, with a few Art History and Philosophy types thrown in, and most of us got the big envelope of doom simultaneously rejecting us from the Ph.D. program and accepting us to the MA program. There are quite a few Midwesterners, but most of the states are at least represented. Most of us are coming right from college but there were a few people who'd spent a year or two doing other stuff (one girl already had her MFA). A lot of us seem to have studied abroad, most of us live near 55th street or south of there.

There are a smattering of people from the area, former UChicago undergraduates and such, and I gleaned a bit of local knowledge. Apparently there are only about four bars near UChicago (thanks to prohibition-era religious reformers) and people really do shop at the Co-Op, a supermarket with deplorably high prices ($3.49 for milk?). There's a book co-op somewhere that I'm determined to check out.

(The Woodlawn Tap, by the by, has much cheaper prices than I'd expected in Chicago: $2.50 for a Miller Lite, $2.75 for Leinie's.)

For my part, I explained my penny-pinching DSL arrangement (roughly $25/month for phone and high speed internet) and some people seemed to be interested. After great effort I had turned off most of the critical voices inside my head, so it's anyone's guess if people were patronizing me.

I was generally pretty talkative and slightly ridiculous, but I'm giving my classmates credit (in the past generally not a good policy) to be in on the joke. I was (characteristically?) forthright and cynical, but with the exception of the Californian, to whom I admitted my prejudice outright, I don't think I offended anyone.

Well, unless that one girl is Japanese and not, as I assumed, Korean, in which case I think I committed some sort of hate crime by mentioning the hallway incident at our '40s 40s party.

Yeah, I'll try to be a bit more sedate next time, Sunday. Try to learn as much about the other maphiosi as I'm giving away about meself. But I think it was a success, as far as introductions go. Though speaking of which, I wonder how many names I'll remember?