Saturday

Sitting at Panera people watching. My idea of a social life. I used to come here every day (almost) for lunch but how many bowls of chicken soup can one guy eat? So for some reason beyond my comprehension I started going to Alex's Family Restaurant. If you live in metro Detroit you know about all these "koney island" type restaurants which serve Greek salads and gyros and breakfast stuff, etc. They are usually run by immigrants and feature simple food and cheap prices. OK, that's what Alex's is. It took me maybe a nanosecond after entering to be greeted by Jodie with a big smile. It took me about ten more minutes to realize that the food was miserable, but cheap. So in short time I came to know Amber, Lisa, Kisha, Marie, Tabitha (That's right!), Dawn and Amy. For a short while there was some internal back biting because Maria was spending too much time sitting with me and she told me not to talk to other waitresses, etc. Maria is from Bulgaria and I really have this attraction to foreign women. It's not hard to understand why -- intelligent people who have learned English as a second language always have better grammer than most Americans. I relish good grammer. And ESL speakers are anxious to learn and I am happy to help them. It took me about 20 seconds to teach a friend what a double negative was and why it's incorrect. Two thirds of the hillbillies around her couldn't begin to understand the same thing.

So why am I back at Panera? Number One: you can only take so much bad cheap food. Number Two: Everything runs it course (and Maria is married.) And oh yes, reason three: the customers are a different type person than you run into at Alex's. Not better or worse, just different. You know me well enough to know that people watching and checking out the women present are the same thing for me. But, just like at the fitness club, it doesn't mean that I have figured out how you turn a nice smile in your direction into a conversation.

On to other more mysterious topics. What do you make of those comments to my posting about Cancun on12/10/07? The comments are from Anonymous. Little miss anonymous claims to have seen me at the hotel. How the fuck does she (he?) know who I am? Me thinks this is someone who knows me and is fucking with me. This is like myspace.com revisited. There are creeps and scam artists all over that site -- but at least you can browse for interesting people. Interesting could mean bizarre or whatever. My own daughter claims to live New York on myspace and I know many women omit or change information to protect themselves -- a fine idea but it makes it hard to distinguish the real from the scam artists. I've had a dozen or so messages from profile who appear to be young females in provocative poses who want to be "friends".

Remember that there are posers like me and there are FBI -- full blown Italians. Regrettably my mother is not Italian so I can never be a made man. One of life's tragedies.

Let me know what you think about Miss Anonymous. For a laugh, my profile is www.myspace.com/jimbarce.