Freckle-dressed

Today we played a money/trading game in one of my anthropology classes, and we had to talk about how it made us feel and what values we saw reflected in the different interactions and responses, and my answer although I didn't say it was IT MADE ME FEEL EXISTENTIAL DREAD. Because he never told us the objective of the game, yet everyone else was still milling around, transacting with the strange required gestures and counting their money. But apparently needing to have a goal is a cultural thing.

You know, a stranger will give you some amazing thing if you ask in the right context? You should do that.

For lunch I cooked brown jasmine rice and mushrooms in my rice cooker and had that with curry and yogurt, and then I ate the rest of the mushrooms with some Parrano cheese. My room still smells great. College is hopefully the only time in my life that I will have to slice mushrooms in my bedroom.

I haven't seen my digital camera since Friday. I'm trying not to be upset by that.

Also I typed up this freewrite from last January:

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One of my Twitter friends asked what is your favorite beach memory. I've grown up perched on the edge of the Pacific, I have so many to choose from. But I didn't have to think long, it was the time we went to the beach last August. We rode the streetcar down and you talked about college, leaning against the doors. We got coffee, this was before I knew lattes were fatty, also before I realized that that sweater looked bad on me. Ocean was quiet and gray, the sky was low and white, foggy looking up and down the beach. I always think of August this way, a colorless sky and a quiet gray sea.

We sat drinking coffee and digging holes in the dark sand with our restless elbows, grains stuck in the rib of my sleeves. You took a picture of something with your phone. I had my camera along and I wish even more now that I had taken a picture of us, not so I could remember something I've forgotten but so I could see what was in your face, what was in my face, eyes, what did I think then standing at the edge of what I am now standing in?

I was bored with the end of my latte and poured it out into the pit I'd dug. You took off your shoes and rolled up your pants and padded down to the water's edge (I couldn't I was wearing tights).

What you said to my sister at my house, which block we were on when I tried standing on your skateboard, what you wore, but most of all how I hadn't made our friendship so weird and sad yet, I remember and I taste all this through the thick now of how sorry I am.

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At the top of that page, I had written, "Interests: August." That part still holds.