We Live Where We Are

Notes on Today

The cold is coming in through the thin windows and wrapping about the ankles my too-short pajama bottoms leave bare. It's just starting, this crisp snap. The wind bellowed up around lunchtime today, stripping branches, the leaves making knife-sharpening sounds on the asphalt. I walked to 7-11 to grab a hot dog and some milk tea, a cheap and comforting lunch, but had to stop twice along the way to rub out errant bits of leaf and dust from under my contacts. At the store, with my eyes watering, one of my students mumbled a timid hello behind me in an aisle as I compared brands of chips (I went with a Nabisco Pringles rip-off, a mistake). He asked me a few carefully considered and stiltedly phrased questions and I watched his whisper of a mustache. The conversation was awkward for both of us. His mind churned away, dredging up infrequently-used English with an effort I can't seem to muster when it comes to language learning. I turned the canister of chips end over end in my hands. I have encounters like this all the time and they're never really boring, unless I'm tired. And I was tired today.

When I got home I scrubbed the shower grouting and cleaned the floors in the kitchen and toilet room. Julianna came home late, wet hair, wet jacket, the bottoms of her pants dripping, glasses fogged. She brought McDonald's, wisely packed in a plastic sack, two cheeseburgers apiece and fries to share. We ate and watched Okusama wa Majo, a Japanese version of Bewitched that appears on Wholphin #2 and features invented sub-titles by writers of the Daily Show. I could only take about fifteen minutes of it. The subtitles were funny, but the characters' voices were grating and the special effects of the hey-wow-another-blue-screen-comp-shot variety. Normally this kind of low-brow, ha-ha-the-subtitles-are-fake-and-they-slipped-in-some-good-Engrish-jokes humor is just fine by me but, like I said, I was just tired.

Julianna went into another room to do Juli-things (like a baby, I have trouble imagining others' actual existance when they're out of sight--this is no insult, just a lack of imagination and full-helping of laziness) and I sat down to track some guitar so Louise could have something to sing over tomorrow when she comes by to record. The third string, G, felt tight as I was tuning and just as I nestled the pitch within the LED - 0 +, the string snapped up past my face and then fell jangling across the others. No luck tonight. I took a long shower, in the newly clean shower, but I had to dry off with a towel damp from this morning's rinse. No luck tonight.

I'm not sure why I'm not in bed yet, the cold air wrapping about the ankles my too-short pajama bottoms leave bare.