In truth, I don't have a great reason. Perhaps a rundown of my last twenty-four hours, even if it fails to illuminate why I'm sitting fully clothed in a bone dry bathtub when I should be asleep, will put you in a state of mind in which you can better understand. Or not.
I lied when I offered (or rather proposed) to tell my last twenty-four hours. Well, I didn't exactly lie, but I didn't wake up till two in the afternoon yesterday, so the first chunk of that time is me sleeping in my dirty, oversized bed in my dirty, disorganized room. The recent streak of hot days has reminded me why I cherish the bay air the way I do; I can't help but cure under my breath when I wake up to find I'm already coated in sweat. My room traps heat, and sometimes my roommate who sleeps against the window will not open/close it in the appropriate situation. This particular day the temperature wasn't awful, though.
I awoke to a phone call from a friend who wanted to hang out. This plan, as it turns out, went off without a hitch. Sitting on a couch and watching a friend play a video game while you skim through any and every news article that you can find that day is a good time killer, and it doesn't take a terrible lot of planning. Just one part sloth and one part curiosity. I began eying the clock at around four, and pulled out my phone to place a call. I found that I had a few missed calls, as I forgot to switch the ringer on after the preceding night's rehearsals. I dialed up notorious friend of the blog Carla Zilbersmith to confirm plans we'd made the week before. At 7:00 PM, I left my home to head to Albany and meet her.
I had decided to cross the Richmond Bridge at the precise moment the sun would reflect directly off my side mirror into my eyes. It wasn't dangerous exactly, but I suddenly felt exhausted when the bright glare vanished, almost as if I'd been on a limited stipend of energy, and the extra effort in keeping vision on the road had sapped me. I ended up parking my car an absurd distance from Carla's apartment, mainly because I circled the whole street and block once and couldn't find a better spot, despite the fact that there were plenty of spots when I walked down towards her apartment. I had clearly somehow proven an incompetent parker. I felt reflexively regretful about this when I met up with Carla and her son, Mac- despite the fact that Carla has a motorized wheelchair, there's a certain melancholy in knowing your inefficient parking has inconvenienced somebody for whom transportation in general is clearly more difficult than anybody would hope.
We ended up dining at a very nice Chinese restaurant in Oakland. We ordered three different items, but Mac was the only one who really made a dent; both Carla and I seemed to be grazing through our food, each of us as deliberate as a priest weighing the pros and cons before ducking into a strip club. In truth, while I wasn't phenomenally hungry, I likely wouldn't have eaten that much even if I was. I was much too busy chatting it up with Carla and Mac, which is something I don't get to do often, exactly, although we do cross paths with a decent frequency. For the record, though, the hot and spicy tofu was still quite good.
After dinner we went back to Carla's apartment, and they invited me up for a bit. I went up, had a cup of tea, and continued to shoot the shit, as they say. Mac showed me how to use the webcam on my computer, but seeing as most of my friends with webcams live within a stone's throw, I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it.
I must digress for a moment. The hard surface of the tub has begun to cramp my legs. I shifted my weight to help it a little, but I'm clearly living on borrowed (or stolen) time. My legs will soon be numb if I don't stand up...
I left Carla's at around 10:20 or so. I jetted back to my apartment where I spent another few hours chatting with friends and drinking only the finest of chilled, bottled water before they started heading to sleep. Thanks to my late start to the day, I couldn't follow their example; I found myself alarmingly untired. I continue to be. There's a guy sleeping on my couch, so I didn't want to make a ruckus in the living room. There's a roommate sleeping in my room, so clacking computer keys there isn't ideal. So here I sit, crunched into this tub, completing the self-fulfilling prophecy; I'm writing about why I'm in the tub, but the only real answer is cause I couldn't write anywhere else.
P.S. - I also read the first twenty pages of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope in this tub before grabbing my laptop. I bought it yesterday, along with a copy of the U.S. Constitution and an issue of SLAM magazine. I highly suggest, should you read these three things as I have, that you follow this order: Constitution, SLAM issue, Audacity. It's just better that way.
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