The Professor on the E

Today, I carried my camera around all day, looking at every minute as a possible "picture of the day" opportunity. And, rather than post one single picture, I have a few for your viewing pleasure...
After I got home from work, I was walking through the park, and the sky started rumbling and the air smelled heavy with rain, and I looked up at the sky. It was a beautiful gray, blue and the clouds almost faded right in, except the edges of each cloud were tinged yellow, and quite frankly, glowed. My first thought (as always) was "Christ is coming back right now!" My second thought was, "Picture of the day!" And so, I snapped a few pictures of the sky. The first one wasn't quite to my liking, and neither was the second, so I'm posting both in the hopes that, with this combined effort, you'll feel at least a little amazed at how lovely the sky was.

And now, another unrelated picture...

As I got off the train today, I thought, "Not everyone in Indiana would quite know what this feels like--getting off a train." While we Hoosiers do have the People Mover between our Indianapolis hospitals, we're not quite European in our transportation. So, camera firmly in hand (what a benefit to these Picture of the Days!), I took a picture of getting off the train. A little banal, but what else could Picture of the Day imply?

I spend a lot of my life on these train platforms. When I first came here, I was really intrigued to see what particular trash littered the tracks at each station. In fact, one day, I took a list. Here's what I wrore:

Pontault-Combault--bottle caps, cigarette butts, Coke can presumably filled with urine.

Noisy le Grand- glass bottles, candy wrappers

Noisy le Sec- boxer shorts

Val de Fontenay- Evian bottles, Orangina, deflated lotion bottles, Starbucks stir (richer area?)

After taking these notes, I got it in my head that I'd write a story about a girl who moved to France and chose her home based on the type of garbage on the train tracks at each station. I talked to my roommate, my coworkers, and friends about the story line, and overtalked the story line so much that I never got around to writing the piece. Not really a shocker.

So, above is the station at Villiers.

But anyway, speaking of trains, I think I saw my French professor from Olivet Nazarene University on the E today. I boarded the train at Val de Fontenay, and immediately sat down and pulled out a book. My eyes were focused down, and I saw her feet, which seemed oddly familiar for feet. At Rosny Bois Perrier, I looked out the window, and got a better look of her...or rather, her neon pink spandex leggings. At Noisy Le Sec, I was very curious, and as I stood to get off the train, I looked at all of her--the faded mumu-type shirt, her leggings, her orthapaedic shoes. I was way too surprised to say anthing, and I was still in the process of deciding whether this really was my professor from French 101. But after thinking about it, I feel pretty sure it was her. I'm sure that was the woman who told my class about her summers in France and watching old men play something akin to cornhold and most definitely, i remember her tirades on the dangers of dieting.

"You don't ever want to look like this!" she'd say, wagging her belly at us. "If you diet in your youth, you'll look like this when you're old."

That's when I decided never to diet.

So, an Illinois professor on the E. What are the odds?