Lunchtime Battles

I'm sitting in the Indiana University Student Union, eating my lunch, reading a magazine, and I can't help but notice that the two guys across from me seem to be discussing some really interesting, next-level stuff. Something that seemed to a mix of computer programming, geometry, and visual cognition. They dropped terms like "data packets," "recursion," and talked about how the past 50 years of computer programming might have been going at it the wrong way all along. The professor several times said to his grad student "Wait, slow down, I don't think I really get what you're saying." The student said "Maybe I'm not explaining this properly." The student had ideas that the professor didn't seem to get. There was no sense of rank between the two of them. They seemed genuinely interested in what they were doing, as if what they were talking about might actually be the most interesting thing in the world at that moment.

A man emptying the trashcan walks up to me and says "Is today Thursday?" Today is Wednesday. I tell him this. He says "Crud, I thought today was payday."