hannah

I ended up getting enough done today I won't feel too bad about going to the movies tomorrow, which is pleasant enough. The end of the project is within sight, though not without some consultations about the ephemera. I don't know how my client wants the bank notes and shopping lists tabulated - likely by format and in chronological order, but it's his family documents, so I'm not going forward until I know exactly what he wants.

I've got a decent idea of how I'd do it - and again, his documents. So, while I wait: the movies.

I'm forgoing a couple chances to go to the movies this week out of a sense of personal responsibility. I can afford the price of the tickets, but not the time it'll take. For example, I knew tonight I could take the evening for The Master on 70mm, but with a meeting this afternoon pushing cooking lunch for tomorrow until after I'd done my writing for the day, I couldn't make it out. I don't think I can do Wednesday afternoon, either.

I'm hopeful about Thursday afternoon, though.

In reasonably positive news regarding the writing, I managed 2000 words, which is unusual enough to warrant a mention.

Thunder all over, rain coming down steady and hitting hard, lightning slashing through the clouds for just a second and you hope you're lucky enough to be looking right where it is when it comes. Standing outside, knowing you're getting wet and knowing it's okay since you can get dry later, happy it's a reprieve from the last few days' heat. Light in the west, bright light, the light at the end of a day with nothing cutting through it since everything's washed out with the rain. It's still washing out, still coming down, far from a downpour or a gullywasher and far from over.

You walked over fast to get to your building and you're heading to the park, and you stop to feel the smell all around you, and you head to the rooftop.

It's harder to see from up there with nothing between you and the sunset, not even any clouds. What clouds there are hang south of you, gentle purples, or northwards, blue-gays. Lightning wherever it wants to find itself and thunder rumbling for many long seconds after. To the east, dark clouds, heavy and ready to burst. To the west, sunlight. Not even a sunset. Fading sunlight. The occasional, incidental glimpse on the horizon of a rainstorm far away, a patch of haze on an otherwise perfectly clear view to the end of the day as the sun moves down below the horizon. No clouds, no smog, no haze. Nothing but clear sky from here to forever to get in the way of the sunlight so all you see are the colors as they fade out. A sun that's too bright to look at, that hangs behind your eyelids if you do more than glance. A sun that's still up, low in the sky, the lightning that scrawls and sprawls across the sky at the same time dazzling in its own right, but nowhere near as steady.

Dark shapes of large birds and small flying creatures, artificial shapes of large and small boats on the river. Standing out against the colors fed into the river and sky by the last of the day's sunlight as it keeps going down. Fading, gently. Finally gently to your eyes because the rainstorm knocked out everything else hanging around in the sky. There's clouds above the sun, eastward close to you, and south and north and probably far west, too, but in that strip of the sky where there's sunlight there's nothing else. Just sunlight, just the sky getting filled with the colors of sunset.

The rain doesn't stop when you leave the roof. The sun's dipped below the horizon, and it's only a matter of time now. So you might as well take the moment to say farewell.

I've reached 1916 in the letter transcription project. I finish May, get to the next letter, and see it's for July. I say aloud, "Where the fuck did June go?"

I glance over at the wall calendar.

I say, "Oh, right," and shake my head slowly at this particular set of circumstances.

It turns out June didn't go anywhere; there just aren't any letters for that month for this year, at least not that I was able to find. There's a large folder where the letters aren't dated as specifically as the full day, month, and year, so one might turn up later. In any case, what timing.

Four hours at Pride is about my limit. Next time I'm thinking of maybe bringing along some kind of nonviolent deterrent for people around me that smoke - maybe just keeping my mask on to make the point that they're stinking up the place. Better 100,000 whips and chains at Pride than a single cigarette. Or vape pen. Or anything that makes smoke, really.

Still, aside from the smoke, and how tired I was by the fourth hour, it was a good afternoon. I commented to someone that you know it's a great parade when you lose count of the marching bands. There were at least four of them, plus two different motorcycle cohorts. I applauded at the rainbow capitalism floats for the canaries in the coal mine that they were, though I drew the line at applauding Disney. The local unions helped wash the taste of that out of my mouth well enough.

I wore a tie-dyed rainbow dress, which I've taken to calling my proudest dress. I've also taken to saying I blended in perfectly.

I stayed for four hours and it was estimated to keep going for at least another two, so I don't mind having left when I did. Also, I was constantly re-applying sunscreen and I don't doubt that the sun's going to make itself known tonight in the shower. So perhaps next year, leaving a bit earlier, and also a hat.

Out of all the things I could've done today, I decided to focus on fruit. I knew my younger brother R. and his wife G. were coming for dinner, and I know how much she likes rhubarb, so I decided to make a strawberry-rhubarb soda syrup - the big difference being throwing the lemon into the pot, not just the strips of zest, along with a hunk of ginger from the freezer.

Also from the freezer, because I couldn't remember when I put them in there, was pawpaw cake. The pawpaws were frozen and thawed overnight in the fridge, still ripe and the perfectly tropical aroma wafting through. The recipe says it's bread, but I didn't mince words tonight and just called it cake. I had enough pulp for three of them, so it doesn't save a whole lot of room to swap the fruit for a cake, but this time I'm at least marking when it went into the freezer to begin with. And it's three months to their next season. I might be done with this one and have room by then.

It'd be very nice if I could figure out where tonight's nausea is coming from. I feel ill, but not quite sick enough that puking would help, which puts it at an improvement over Sunday. Nevertheless, it still sucks.

It's been largely a good day, as days go. Nice weather, reasonably productive on the job front, got some good writing done. I'm going to sit quietly for a while, maybe have some fruit, and see if I'm feeling better when I get tired enough to go to bed.

So goes the Solstice. I didn't do anything to mark it, other than going out to enjoy a little sunshine.

While out, I went into a coffee shop, heard the guy next to me mention he worked at a Starbucks, and I turned to him and asked, "How's the union coming?"

He, I, and the barista then spent about ten minutes talking unions, bosses, and jobs in general. I made a couple jokes about coffee shops fueling the French Revolution. When his pour-over was done - which he was very pleased to talk to the barista about, being in a much better state of mind than when she'd begun - he thanked us both for giving him time and space to talk about such things.

I'm not seeing any reason to cut back on talking to people the way I've always done. There's a lot of misses, but every so often, there's a hit.

This afternoon, I heard someone proudly talking about how they're featured in every chapter of their psychiatrist's upcoming book.

It's a book about living with and recovering from eating disorders.

I'm not sure what she was trying to communicate, or why she wanted to talk about it with a relative stranger in the room. It reminded me a little of a conversation a while back where someone else at the table was trying to impress and shock the group by crowing about how she was in such a bad place in college, she had to take mandatory therapy sessions.

At that dinner, I said, "Who hasn't?"

At the gym today, I didn't ask a thing.

At that dinner, she doubled down on trying to explain her therapy had been mandatory - "Yeah, who hasn't?" I said again, casually, having been there myself and taking a certain sense of pleasure in deflating a moment by reminding someone that while their experiences might not be universal, neither are they unique or unprecedented.

At the gym today, the person was talking about the therapists and doctors she sees on a regular basis, and at multiple points her trainer asked her to slow down because she was talking too fast for him to understand, and I had the wicked thought of asking about a speech therapist, and said nothing, only asking her for the author's name. I didn't find out about the book's subject matter until I got back to my apartment, so to go from hearing someone attempt a flex about simply being in their psychiatrist's upcoming book to a book on eating disorders added the additional dimension to have me wonder about it with a greater level of specificity.

I keep wondering if she was talking like that because she's so proud of her accomplishments, just as I keep wondering why she's announcing that.

It's been very nice having the Knicks as a conversation topic the last couple of days. I know it won't last beyond this coming week or so, but for now, it's a pleasant feeling to be able to ask pretty much anyone about it and know it'll be responded to in a positive way.

Piggybacking off my mom's Netflix account to work through some sub-par movies I still want to see is usually enough to work through less-than-stellar lunches, but sometimes it's too much for even a great movie to distract me from what I'm eating. I managed something else for the next couple of days out of the canned goods I had around, so I'm only slightly disappointed. So it balances out.

Of more interesting note, I killed a cockroach last night. I'm not wondering how it got into my bathroom - it's New York City - and had a moment of trying to catch it that had me saying, "Oh, yeah, you can fly" before I trapped and presumably suffocated it with foam cleaning spray. I say "presumably" because I used an old plastic container to scoop it up and throw it out the window. It might still be alive out there. I haven't gone to check. If I'd seen it anywhere else in my building, I doubt I'd have even thought about killing it, large an insect as it was. But in my apartment, especially my bathroom, I'm not ceding even the minuscule inches it took up.