Sunday, July 23, 2023

Random bullets of July

  • It’s summer, it’s hot, and it’s going too quickly. Although they’re pretty, I always dread seeing Queen Anne’s Lace flowers because they mean that the second half of summer has begun. 
  • Traveling from a dry climate to a more humid one is a shock to the system. People joke about “it’s a dry heat,” but there really is a difference. I got off the plane and felt as though I had walked into a wet sponge. 
  • Despite all the weather & other stuff (waves at the world), people where I was and in the airports seemed—what’s the word? Happier isn’t exactly right. Maybe more resigned? Patient? They seemed less frantic than before the pandemic (or the panini, as they say on Reddit). I was in a city where I’ve been several times, and, quite unusually, people even said hello once in a while and smiled and held doors for each other—things like that. 
  • Not everyone, though. On the plane, a woman swept her long hair back over her seat back so that it was hanging over onto my screen—and I swept it right back over the seat back without thinking twice about it, and that was the end of the matter. My action was instinctive, but my thinking is, if you don’t want me to touch your hair, don’t put it in my space. Who does this? You are not Rapunzel, and I am not a handsome prince. Still, that’s a pretty minor thing to deal with.
  • Work is going well.