Prof.B had Joe Navarro as an invited guest today and yesterday.

At like 10:30, Prof.B. says to me, "Do you want to see an interrogation?"  Sure.  And then of course I was interested in the debrief.  And then we moved to lunch.  (I was expecting Spangler, but we went to the Faculty Commons, so I ate lunch on the department dime -- though as economists will tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and my opportunity cost was actually high 'cause I'd been excited about Spangler pasta and the FacCommons has classy food which tasteless me is less a fan of.  And at one point I actually got to contribute -- I brought up the "negotiating from a position of weakness" section of Max and Deepak's book.)  I got back to my desk around 2:00.

Nicole was wearing her "Elitists for Obama" t-shirt.  I love that it looks like a very down-to-earth college t-shirt.

Edit:

Nicole got put on the spot to be the interrogatee. Someone was joking that actually this was a ruse and they were gonna interrogate me. I said, No, I still work for Prof.B., so the power dynamics are different, because if he gets on my bad side I can ruin his life. Nicole said, "I love that your sense of the power dynamics is: He can't get you too upset with him."

In the aforementioned "negotiating from a position of weakness" conversation, someone mentioned Gandhi, and someone mentioned that he had the power of the world media, and Navarro mentioned that Gandhi was trained as an attorney, which I had forgotten about.

Navarro talked about how you can change the power dynamics just by standing up. I was thinking later about how often I'll stand up when I'm at my desk and people come to talk to me, how I'll stay standing when I'm in B's office, and wondering how much that was subconscious.

/edit

***

I got dinner at Mr. Crepe.  Super Avocado Crepe = v. yummy (though I wasn't clear that there was actual avocado in it).  The chai latte, however, was really weak/watery -- which problem I also had the last time I ordered a hot chocolate there.  Sigh.  (The chai latte also had a huge amount of bleh foam.)

After dinner I was craving chocolate, so I went to CVS.  Where they still had half-price Halloween candy.  (Though srsly, candy makers?  I already knew about Chocolate Skittles, but your newest Hershey's Kisses concoction is candy corn?)

***

I went to econ class tonight for the first time in like a month instead of finishing reading Abington vs. Schempp for tomorrow's class.

( topic: competitive and non-competitive markets )

***

When FUH was leaving for the day, he said, "Have fun tonight."
I laughed and said I was going to grab dinner, go to class, check the internet when I got home at like 10:30, and then go to bed.
He said, "Maybe it'll be decided by 10:30."
I said, "But the polls on the West Coast will barely have even closed at that point, so you'l just have the really inaccurate exit polls."
He said, "But if he wins Pennsylvania and Ohio..."
I was like, oh yeah, although there are some western states in play this election, all the big swing states are on the East Coast.

We got out of class about 9:15, and a woman in my class said, "Sununu lost New Hampshire."  I was unclear as to whether she'd been getting text message updates or what ('cause class starts at 7:35, and not all the NH polls are even closed yet at that point).

kurukami linked to a nice map of the United States, color-coded by poll closing times (calibrated to Eastern Time).

I enjoyed the flurry of flist posts this morning about the midnight NH voting.

(via friendsfriends) an explanation of why America still uses the electoral process.

[Lexington] Two cheers for American democracy: A good way to pick a president [Oct 30th 2008. From The Economist print edition]