we always walk into heartbreaking things, or slip into them. i was sitting in starbucks today with the usual mid-week brain cramp, staring into space, when a young blonde woman paused to rest in the center of my vision, and for some reason she brought me back to earth, and i caught sight of her clear plastic bag of apples just before she turned away. the apples reminded me of my TA from one of my classes last year. the professor had introduced them at the front of the lecture hall in the first lecture, but i wasnt paying attention, so i never put the names to any faces. inadvertently i picked his section. i walked into the little room in the math building one day, and there he was, all curly hair and crinkled white shirt like he’d just rolled out of bed reeking of intelligence and manliness. i couldnt place my finger on who he reminded me of. i later realized it was timtam he was reminiscent of — although it must be said that i wouldnt think of timtam as reeking of intelligence or manliness, ha ha ha — and it made me miss timtam, who was in aarhus at the time. but timtam likeness notwithstanding, i looked forward to section every week. cos he — the TA — was so smart. so scatterbrained but so smart. he was my first columbia crush, i think. i later chanced upon a really weird photograph of him straddling the merrill lynch bull, and that made me giggle. finance guys with horrible penmanship… just cant run away from these patterns. briefly i wondered if he could be gay; with this school, you never really know. but then i guess i didnt care too much if he was gay or not — inspiration fornicates asexually. he’s graduated now, and i have another TA whom i have not met. i wonder what he’s doing now. and i meant to write this post a whole year ago, the first day i met him, but i eventually forgot. there were no apples around to remind me.