duck-shaped pain

I've been out of school for two years, and it still amazes me how much my mind is still attuned to the rhythms of the school year. All summer, I kept thinking about things I needed to do, and there was always this idea in my head that it all had to be done before the end of August, before the end of fun. Of course, now that I'm a working stiff, August and September sort of merge into each other, and I measure time by pay periods, not semesters.

My wishes have been fulfilled, sort of. The bagel shop, the one decent place in town to get coffee, is now open later on the weekends -- closing at 7:30 instead of the usual 4 in the afternoon. A small victory, but it doesn't make much to create excitement here. So I went there after work today and celebrated by ordering the largest chai they make

The bagel shop has glorious chai. They make their own, blending and cooking together the tea and spices each morning, so it's pretty fresh and tasty, even late in the afternoon. It's a substantial improvement over the chai you get in big asceptic containers (although I like that, too). Drinking their chai makes your mouth all tingly -- I'm not sure what spice causes that, but it's a nice effect. It's also intensely caffeinated, so a big glass of it will keep you humming and twitching and stealing food off other people's plates for hours.

The local bluegrass association was scheduled to play at the bagel shop, which I didn't know about until I showed up. When I sat down, there were all these people sitting around, waiting for the musicians to show up. I amused myself by writing in my paper journal [1] and reading a book for awhile. More people showed up, and none of them were musicians. Finally, one guy came in with a guitar and amused the audience for minutes and minutes by playing, over and over, the one song he knew: "This Little Light of Mine." After that, I left. I'm sure the real excitement happened after I left.

I was the only person there who seemed to have bought anything -- all the other people who were there to hear the music had taken advantage of the jug of ice water up by the counter. I'm sure the bagel place people really appreciated that.

I bought some reading glasses tonight. I find that they help me concentrate on reading and writing more, and my old pair had loosened up to the point where they fell off my head every time I looked down.

It's taken me awhile to find a replacement pair, because reading glasses, as a rule, are ugly, ugly, ugly. I think they make them really ugly to punish you for reading too much -- if you spend that much time with your nose in a book, you can't be very attractive anyway.

But, I finally found some I liked -- little oval glasses with tiny black frames. My criterion for choosing glasses is very simple. I put them on and ask myself, "Would I have sex with me if I was wearing these glasses?" If the answer is yes, I buy the glasses and hurry home as soon as I can.