Things Right Now

[queerbychoice]

Taking my cue from dzuunmod, I'm going to try making a list of "things right now" too.

• Sounds: A deep bass beat from someone's music playing in the parking lot outside. In the opposite direction, happy shouts from kids playing in the pool. A door closing. A car starting.
• Next to me: Empty pasta-roni dish; just-paid credit card bill; checkbook; dictionary; baby-naming book (for naming fictional characters); 79-page (single-spaced on standard-sized typing paper) printout of my novel-in-progress, with lots of handwritten marks on it, mostly made at work today.
• On the chair across the room: Library books (Penelope Fitzgerald, Fannie Flagg, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Barbara Kingsolver, D. H. Lawrence, Penelope Lively - the only ones I've read so far are the first two, and I mildly liked both of them but didn't love either of them). I've recently resumed using the public library, after having angrily resolved five years ago to stop using it because their late fees for bringing books back one day late were so high I might as well have just bought the books. I will probably quit using the library again for another five years as soon as I'm next late in returning any books. So far, I haven't been.
• On my web browser: jaw-droppingly gorgeous skirt, found via link from keryx. Not purchased, due to high price tag. (Not that I couldn't buy it; just that I'm as miserly as they come and I have an iron will when it comes to refraining from buying things with higher prices than I feel are justified.) Will keep staring at it and contemplating it a while, though.
• In my email: I recently finally got around to mentioning to my mother that chisparoja and I have recently finished (well, several weeks ago really, but I've been putting off telling her because there never seemed to be an un-awkward opportunity to bring it up) a rather long, gradual, and mutual process of breaking up (not for the first time, but we're going to work from the assumption that it's for the last time, although we do remain awfully good friends and I doubt that either of us would rule out all possibility of eventually getting back together someday if we both went through some changes in the meantime). My mother replied and said she's glad I don't sound very upset. That's because I'm not, and the reason I'm not is that I haven't been treated badly. It's an impressively amicable breakup.
• Not in my email: I owe a rather overdue reply to pure_agnostic's latest email. I haven't forgotten. I've just been distracted, partly because of the item above, and partly because of julnawrimo, and partly because of some other things but I can't even remember what they all were.
• Random thought: Ever since my ex-boyfriend anukhet taught me how to fry eggs instead of hard-boiling them, in the summer of 2002, I have been frying them instead of hard-boiling them, simply because frying them is a lot quicker, and I am impatient. I had, however, during the past several years, been gradually becoming more and more aware that I didn't seem to actually like the taste of eggs anymore, even though I quite distinctly remembered having previously loved the taste of eggs. Then on my brother's birthday this month, I went to my parents' house and my mother had put slices of hard-boiled eggs on top of macaroni salad. Now, I don't much like macaroni salad really, but I did steal some of the egg slices on top, and hey! Suddenly I loved eggs again. Amazing discovery: I can tell the difference between the tastes of hard-boiled eggs and fried eggs, and I like them much better hard-boiled! I never knew I could tell the difference before. I'm ridiculously bad at telling the difference between the tastes of any remotely similar foods that have just been cooked differently; even when I can actually tell the difference (as eventually dawned on me in this case), when I first attempt to tell the difference, it doesn't seem like I can. I have to go on eating the foods regularly for several years before my brain eventually gets around to processing and comprehending that it actually has noticed a difference.


• Anticipated event on my mind: In less than a week, I will have less than a year left until I turn 30. I'm not sure whether this means I'm on the brink of being undesirably old or on the brink of being desirably old. I think the desirability of it might depend somewhat on how many great accomplishments I can produce during my remaining year-and-less-than-a-week of being in my 20s. Right now it feels a bit like my big age-related accomplishments are persistent psoriasis of the face (every day I wake up to find I've grown a hard white sensationless exoskeleton on my face, which renders much of my face barely movable unless I take a sharp blade and scrape the exoskeleton off, at which point I end up with fairly normal albeit somewhat pink skin, but this only lasts 24 hours until I grow a new exoskeleton - no such thing ever happened to me until I was 26) and rapid color-fading of giant sections of the front of my hair (most of the fading sections are fading to blonde at the moment, but blonde is my hair's usual intermediate step on the way to white, so it'll be white soon).
• Other things on my mind: Yeah, there are other things too, but they need more words to describe, so I'll save them for separate journal entries.
• Updated to add: And now all these people on my friends list are squeeing about having bought Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at midnight tonight, but this is weird to me because IT'S NOT MIDNIGHT YET HERE. Not that I have any intention of buying it at midnight anyway. I probably will buy it sometime within the next week or two, but definitely not at midnight.

Comments

[rekraft.livejournal.com]

*surfaces for air*

Hermeneutics I could still wrap my head around, but what is this psoriasis you speak of? But yes, speaking of skin woes, I've recently been Very Displeased by the apparent ultra-sensitivity of the skin on my face to the slightest stimulus (but even more so by the fact that I haven't yet had the time to get down to the bottom of it).

(every day I wake up to find I've grown a hard white sensationless exoskeleton on my face,

Have you been reading too much Kafka?

That's because I'm not, and the reason I'm not is that I haven't been treated badly. It's an impressively amicable breakup.

I think impressively amicable breakups are one of the best things one can ask for. I almost can't decide which to rank higher - that, or impressive more-than-amicable relationships.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

"Have you been reading too much Kafka?"

You have no idea how loudly this made me burst into laughter.

"I think impressively amicable breakups are one of the best things one can ask for. I almost can't decide which to rank higher - that, or impressive more-than-amicable relationships."

Yes, I quite agree.