daines'n around

I decided to take a walk around Old Town on my lunch break this afternoon. It was easily 85 degrees, if not more, in the sun today. With the last few weeks of rain and so much indoor work during the day time I haven't spent much time at all in the sun.

The heat from the sun's rays isn't something one easily forgets. Memories of walking constantly with slacks white shirt and a tie on in Brasil came to mind, for I was dressed similarly today. There's something different about me. I'm smiling.

This isn't to infer that I go around with a sour look on my face continually throughout the day. But thinking over the last week over recent events just makes me smile. Among the sun-spurned memories of heat, my smile is also prolonged by thoughts of my surprise birthday party, phone calls from friends, reconnecting with some old friends who had lost touch, and making new friends in Orange County.

I sat in a cove, table rock in front of us, and listened to a conversation that weaved its way between moonlight, ocean waves and rising tides. The conversation traveled from small town to third world county and back to rocks on a beach... her hypotheticals, my inward hypersensitivity; her high points, my mistakes highlighted. Our ideas presented themselves to one another, curtsied, and swam out to where I couldn't find them again.

Never once did I long to be somewhere else. Never once did I want it to end. But now I speculate every hour that it is too good to be true, it is too late and already over, it isn't as easy as sitting on a rock and talking about how you hope that everyone in life feels love, because it is amazing how life changes once you feel that love.

But I've digressed from my walk around old town. The walk led me into the Barnes and Noble, and a discounted copy of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky jumped at my attention. I read twenty pages in during the last minutes of my lunch and I'm addicted to the wry wit of the author thus far. I've found my winter semester reading. This book will add to my vocabulary I'm sure. I've had to look up three words already in the first twenty pages. I love it.

EVen the author's note as an introduction makes me want to delve deeper:

"He is a protagonist, but a protagonist vague and undefined. And, in truth, in times such as ours it would be strange to require clarity of people. One thing, I dare say, is fairly certain: this man is odd, even eccentric."