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September 27, 2005

Tuesday

There are televisions in the elevators in my office building now, on the wall above the call buttons. Very small, with lots of information on the screen: the weather, stocks, headlines, commercials. It’s ridiculous but I can’t help myself: I get in the elevator in the morning and my gaze is hooked. I stare at the screen for the entire eight-floor ride in the morning and again when I leave for the day. I stared at the screen during the ride down to the lobby to meet my friend C. for our daily 15-minute lunch break walk. So far I haven’t ever seen anything that made me glad I was looking, but I don’t stop.

It’s a beautiful day and the air is dry and clear, the sunlight so bright that it’s hard to believe it had to travel through atmosphere to get to us—it seems unfiltered by pollution or by layers of ozone and water vapor, and it is fall for real. I wish C. and I could walk for a while, but she is short staffed and today we had even less time than usual for our perambulatory activities because she’s got to get back to the office.

But I don’t mind, because in a few hours I’ll be home, standing on the deck with a glass of wine and the sun on my face, the cat winding around my ankles. I feel better today than I have in what seems like a very long time, and I don’t even mind that my afternoon is going to be spent reading a document that is basically little more than numbers strung together by articles; or that this morning I discovered I’d rendered my favorite pair of pants unwearable by ignoring the Dry Clean Only label and laundering them, complete with dryer cycle; or that I haven’t heard back from my mechanic about what’s wrong with my car, which disgorged the contents of its radiator onto the driveway a few days ago and then stubbornly refused to keep anything down after that; or that my lunch hour is over and this is the end of

Posted by JudyLa at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)