Monday, October 25, 2004
Surprise!
This past week was full of pleasant surprises. Here are a few of them:
* When the busdriver stopped the bus at fillmore street inbound on my crowded morning commute and waited at that busy stop for an inordinately long time, I wondered what the holdup was. Then the busdriver started heading back toward my part of the bus, way back behind the articulation, coming right at me, a big man with a solemn expression bearing down on my drowzy unfocused ass saying, “sir, you have to get off the bus, the police have been called,” and it turns out he was talking to the guy right behind me, a heavy older russian man in a nice shirt and a fedora who’d boarded through the rear door with several others, who apologized and left immediately. Pleasant surprise: I didn’t get thrown off the bus. This time.
* A few nights ago I took off my shoes and socks to discover, to my shock, that the ball of my left foot had somehow been dyed a deep indigo blue. This freaked me out, but I quickly verified that it wasn’t sore, didn’t bleed, seemed stable… I eventually settled on a theory: the socks I’d been wearing had been on top of my dresser, and might have come into contact with a blue pen, and might have sucked a bunch of ink out of that blue pen, and then dyed my unsuspecting calcanius deep blue. But it’s been fading fairly quickly, for having been so intensely dyed. I figure, within a few days I’ll have normal flesh-colored flesh again. Pleasant surprise: I just have poor housekeeping habits, not gangrene.
* Friday I decided not to bother making a lunch for work because I’ve been good and brought my lunch for goddamn weeks now and I finally got tired of it. But by noonthirty I was hungry and at loose ends. A typical taurus, I figured I’d just go back to my ordinary favorite lunchstand and get another falafel burrito like I always do. As I walked out the front door of the building, though, a guy who works for the organization, whom I sort of know but not really, was just heading in with a big lunch in his hands and handed me a coupon and told me, “go here, free lunch today. And hurry!” So I did, and I got a really good lunch with a fresh spring greens salad, and dry fried greenbeans with asparagus, and marinated mushrooms, and cajun shrimp, and pad thai, and a caprese salad, and steamed veggies and braised tofu and some good cottage cheese with fruit for dessert, with a free 16 oz diet coke and chopsticks and cutlery with a handy plastic carrying case, all for free, absolutely free, because they’re opening monday and want people to know they exist. Well dude, I know it now. Thanks. Pleasant surprise: sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch.
* Concord Ivory. Who knew? The cool thing Benjamin Moore is doing now is they’re selling small quantities of paint in “tester” jars so you can paint a few good sized swatches around the room and see how the different lighting conditions treat the color. We have three identical sets of four different 1-foot-square color samples around the bedroom, and it looks like Condord Ivory is the popular leader among likely voters. And the lighting conditions really do affect the different colors differently; it’s a fascinating study in optics as well as another baby-step toward a coherent decor. Pleasant surprise: all four options are immeasurably superior to the tired dirty old corpse-grey paint that’s on the walls now. Whatever we do, it’ll be a vast improvement - we just can’t really go wrong with this one.
* Rubicon Bakery chocolate-drizzled marshmallows. I can’t find a web link, your loss, they are just amazing, I’ve been popping them all weekend. Never in my long and diligent marshmallow-eating career have I et a marshmallow even half so good. I’m imagining getting some Petite Ecolier cookies and melting a gourmet marshmallow onto it a little in the microwave, and having it with chocolate milk with a marshmallow melting on top and some brandy heating it up from below. In the meantime, I’m going to have another one right now - neat. Pleasant surprise: RUBICON BAKERY CHOCOLATE-DRIZZLED MARSHMALLOWS. Man, have you not been paying attention?
The one thing that is not such a pleasant surprise: this going-to-cleveland-to-defend-democracy thing is going to cost a lot of money, plus I have to take vacation time off from work. It’s a big committment but I suppose that if anything is worth it, democracy is. But really, man. Ouch. And I guess that’s as good a place as any to leave it for a Monday.
