Despertar

i guess there's some things that you can never erase

Bandwagon, I'm on it. One hundred percent Secular Humanism. Nice.

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I'm so over my commute. I did the "early to bed, early to rise" thing for the first week, but nature took over. I'm a night owl. Exhausted or not, I like being awake for a long time after the sun goes down.

I resent having to walk over a mile to the BART station, crowding onto a train that's already SRO, jostling around for half an hour while it stops and starts over and over between Oakland and San Francisco, walking another three quarters of a mile to our building. The weather is unpredictable. Last week, it was freezing every single day, so today, I brought a heavy jacket. Ninety degrees.

Today, for the first time, I was spotted by one of my coworkers on the Millbrae-bound train. I'm sure I met her on the first day, but I don't remember her name, and honestly, I didn't recognize her by face, either, when I rammed into her on my way onto the Embarcadero platform. I'm a completely different person on the train than I am off. I pack nice shoes in my bag so I can wear flip-flops on the train, and I sweep my hair up in a ponytail. I don't apply lip gloss till I'm on the elevator heading up to my floor. Often, I turn on my iPod and dance to whatever extent the limited space allows. This morning, I was rocking out to Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" on repeat for a full twenty minutes. I'm sure I looked like shit when she saw me.

She caught me when I settled at my desk and said, "Hey, do you take the Millbrae train down from Oakland? I think I saw you!"

Which means now I have to look like a human being starting at seven-fifteen, when I leave the house. I don't have the luxury of pulling myself together during the train trip, anymore. It's little things like that. Life and tiredness are encroaching little-by-little on my Shannon time.

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It beats the alternative, though. Being in the car sucks. We drove to Fresno early yesterday morning, and back in the evening.

Certain legs of the journey are really beautiful, fine. The hills between San Francisco and Fresno are yellow and dotted with windmills and look, honestly, like something out of a picture's book, a child's introduction to the rural West Coast. I like to look at the crops, huge expanses of stalks in neat rows, and count the number of directions in which they exactly line up. My boss said they plant those by hand, as saplings, and not by seed machine, like I always figured. I'm learning a lot.

It was ninety-eight degrees in Fresno yesterday. I spilled coffee on my white linen blouse, so I had to cover it up with a suit jacket the whole day. Angry board members can be very condescending, and they yell a lot.

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Also, my top left and bottom right wisdom teeth are coming in with a vengeance. My gums on the right side are sliced up so bad, I taste blood every second. During our road trip, when we ran out of things to talk about, I started whining about cutting teeth, and my boss told me a completely unnecessary horror story about his younger brother, whose dentist had to break his jaw because the roots of his wisdom teeth were so badly entangled with his mandible. Now I've convinced myself my tonsils are swollen because my wisdom teeth are seducing them, boa constrictor-like, with evil/vile roots that are going to land me in the emergency room needing still more mouth surgery. Fuck that.

Because, yeah, my tonsils are swollen, too. Totally random sore throat. I can't tell whether it actually is or isn't connected to the wisdom teeth thing. I have no medicine, and I'm feeling too cheap and too sore to make a whole extra trip and buy any, so to soothe it, I'm sticking to tea, cup after cup, compusively all day, which, see above, makes me have to pee pretty much hourly.

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I really do love it here. I'm just feeling kind of blech. I wanted to get all my whines out at once.