First thing that happens is you get all housewifely. Dusting high surfaces, rearranging the tchotchkes and so on. Around dinnertime you start dying for someone to come over so you can show off your handiwork. Look, see that Mexican orange-peel box? I put the paper clips in it. How clever of me.
Actually that’s the second thing. First thing is you pay all your bills. And then you have some Top Ramen for dinner to celebrate your renewed poverty.
Eventually there’s the crushing guilt of all the people who are (you imagine) still patiently waiting for a reply to their email they sent you months ago. I’m starting with five a day. If I can work my way up to writing back belatedly to 10 people every time I get online, I think I should have everyone taken care of in 2007. That is, if none of them write back to my replies in the meantime.
By the way, you all are wonderful. In the ongoing why-aren’t-you-in-grad-school? interrogation, I have reason to hold my head high.
I’m learning (again) to play the guitar. I think that finally, after several aborted attempts that left me no more competent than when I last quit, I’m making some long-awaited progress. At the rate I’m going I might be able to play Mission Street on the fall tour. There, I said it. The race is on.
Current reading is Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Picking that up straight away after finishing Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was interesting. Like waking up from a dream to find yourself in the front of the TV, watching a story on CNN about the monsoons in India. Funny thing is, the dream was about a village, submerged in water…
Teitur is playing here in town tonight. With his band, no less. Not a show to be missed. He is, after all, the iconoclastic Dane.