It was on a Tuesday that I made this observation. For the last five years I’ve spent about, oh, 90 to 95 percent of my Tuesdays indoors, at a desk, probably typing away at a computer. What my Tuesdays were like before those five years, I don’t remember. The corporate lifestyle has this ability to make you forget most of your previous life so you can concentrate on the task at hand which is, as I’ve learned, called “watching your back.” My cousin picked me up in his Jeep, the kind with a loud radio and no top, and we took off for the East Bay via the San Mateo Bridge. And there we were. Going at a fairly good speed, wind in our hair, and warm. We were warm. I didn’t know why. Usually, on Tuesday, in the middle of the day, I’m pretty much used to being at a steady, climate controlled, comfortable and familiar ‘room temperature’. But that day I was warm. I looked all around me trying to find the source of this blissful and all encompassing heat. I looked left, right, forward, and even behind me. Then I looked up. Up, way up, higher than the sky itself (which is blue, believe it or not), was this massive ball of nuclear fire that my cousin told me was called The Sun. Then I started to have these flashbacks to when I was a kid. I think that, as a kid, I saw this “Sun” often and took it for granted. I just used it as a light so I can more easily see my GI Joes and Transformers and such, but I didn’t give it much mind after that. When the day was over, and my cousin and I were done driving around, my skin was darker, I was happier, and after a full day of constant moving and driving, I felt refreshed – instead of the ‘worn out’ feeling I usually got after work on Tuesdays. The Sun, my dear friends, is a good thing indeed.
No More ‘Meals’ Nowadays, if I get hungry, I just hop on over to the fridge, grab just enough to make that feeling of hungry go away, and then get back to work (by work I mean finding a job). And even those little hops to the fridge aren’t that interesting. Just now, for example, I looked into the fridge and there was about a fifth of a block of cheese sitting there wrapped in plastic. I looked at it. I thought that it would be just enough, in volume, to satisfy my current level of hunger. I grabbed it, unwrapped it, and gobbled it down. Then, uninterested in anything I had to drink, I turned on the water in the sink, shoved my head under it, drank until satisfied, turned it off, and went back to ‘work’. So, I’ve decided, that this week I’m going to head on downtown, like I used to do on Tuesdays past, and have a meal, waiters and all, with my buddies. I will tell them of my no longer having regular meals and they will be in awe of my ability to survive regardless of lack of contact with wait staffs. I will tell them of eating blocks of cheese in lieu of a full meal, and we will laugh and carry on and partake in conversation. |
