Hi, it's me. I have a dog now, a puggle R. and I adopted from a shelter on the Fourth of July. We pretty much spend all our spare time in love with her. In fact, this evening we split one of her vegetarian, ground barley, apple and yogurt biscuit treats in order to see exactly what she loves about them. It sort of reminded me of a cereal I like.

Many years ago, R. took a deviant psychology class, and part of his grade involved a deviance experiment in which students were supposed to act outside of social norms and record their findings. Of course R. invented a project and, with my assistance, wrote a creative musing on what exactly happened those afternoons when he sat at a bus stop and picked his nose. But our running joke since then has been that whenever we see someone completely acting out, it's the deviance project.

I told my friend Andrea about this when a woman approached us on the street one afternoon and told me how much she admired the whiteness of my teeth. For one thing, my teeth are not white. Whenever I go to the dentist they assault me with questions about cigarettes and coffee-- vices I gave up (for the most part with coffee-- I really love a good iced soy latte) years ago. But Andrea and I had a good laugh over lunch when I told her about the deviance project theory.

I bring this up because, today, I witnessed the most blatantly deviant person I've ever seen. As I exited my workplace and began to walk home, I noticed a white man wearing no shirt with a gigantic boom box slung over one shoulder. A punk rock/techno type of conglomerated song played loudly, proclaiming, "I wanna commit suicide" or some stupid shit. Meanwhile, this man walked down the middle of the busiest street in the city pumping his free fist in the air. It was crazy.

For a moment I actually became a little afraid, since our paths came close to crossing and I was alone and he looked so aggressive. Then, with a bit of space in between us, I began to laugh. Cars were honking, necks were craning, and those of us able to make eye contact with one another broke into huge, unselfconscious smiles.

When R. came home this evening, I told him about the guy and we decided he was too honestly deviant to be a psychology student. And anyway, no one really does those deviance projects-- it's just too easy to imagine how people will react and record your "findings" in the three page paper.