Phwew

So I'm writing this on a perfectly cloudy, if still warm, Thursday afternoon. I'm perched in a far corner of Cafe Abir, and I'm going to try and crank this out as quick as possible so as to avoid what appears to be a now-universal cliche of sitting in a coffee shop with your computer propped open. At least I'm not on Facebook. The part of my face where nose meets forehead feels flushed - most likely a reesult of my crazy, alcohol-fueled evening out not but fourteen hours ago.

It was fun.

I've been here in San Francisco for almost three months, and I have no clear idea how so much time passed without my realizing it. New episodes of Mad Men provided a good gauge of Sundays passing in rapid succession, though now the season's come and gone and halloween is knocking (Chilean miner!) and Thanksgiving lies just beyond that followed by Christmas and Spring Break and where's all the time I was supposed to be using for GRE studying and grad school researching and improving my writing skills to the extent that I'd even be accepted to any of them, anywhere?

And wow: just took a bite of the roast beef sandwich I ordered. The mustard on this puppy is intense.

Curtis visited this past week and we discovered a new hobby/obsession: aquariums. I think I've been biased toward aquariums - and, for that matter, fish tanks - in the past because most are grimy and there's shit floating in the water and you can see some sort of tarp liner or another poking out below the gravel that's being tossed around because the water pump just won't quit blowing at full force, and amid all that mess the poor little fish float, trying to stay alive. Yeah, I think that's why I never liked them. But so anyway, Curtis and I were walking to an Indian buffet not but five blocks from my apartment (jesus, this post is really making me realize how much I love typing "not but") and right next door, square in the display window, was the most pristine glass tank of water I'd ever witnessed. The sign above the scene, Aqua Forest Aquarium, promised even more inside. We were really hungry, though, so we went straight for the buffet.

- "When we're done here, we, like, have to look in that aquarium window again!"

- "I know! But how are we going to do it without looking like we're obviously looking, you know?"

- "Maybe if we stand way out by the street and just kind of look really hard."

- "But we can't be obvious about it."

- "Okay."


Twenty minutes later, we stood among the tanks, drooling. It turns out aquariums are a really big deal among artists and hobbyists in Japan, and Aqua Forest Aquarium is one of two stores in the entire US to sell these insane Japanese tanks, fish, and landscaping elements. I'm about to blow soooo much money. Curtis and I deduced that as the world continues to wind down, nature will increasingly resort to the perfectly lit, pristinely kept confine that only an Aqua Forest aquarium can provide. And also that people will spend most of their time staring at these perfect little specimens of mother nature at her finest. Indeed, the website's tagline reads, "Creating the Mother Nature." Bah!


Sooo I think that's about it for now. I mean, obviously there are tons more cool things going on, and I could go on and on talking about how great everything is - except, of course, for all the stuff that totally sucks - but I don't really feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if they knew I was saying anything too personal about them. Don't get me wrong, they're nice as hell, they're also just real touchy when it comes to stuff like that...