the days that i ride the lightrail in, i feel like i’m part of something bigger. bigger but still microcosmic. i feel like a bee in a hive, an ant in a hill. i deboard, i cross the street, i enter the hospital from a lobby where a hired person plays the piano. there are uniformed door greeters and yesterday one of them brought me my newspaper after i dropped it outside in the rain. he stopped me from walking briskly by him and i thought that his doing that, his making a connection with a rude girl, was really generous of him. when i hear the piano music in the morning, i never really recognize it, but i’m grateful for the gesture of pleasantry offered for strangers.

the lobby is interesting. it’s aesthetically soft, people are sleeping. statues of surgeons and a jesus healing the sick stare down at you as you walk through it. i think the juxtaposition of the statues – the surgeons and the christ depiction – are telling of our culture. i’m reminded also that some people really do great things. people i pass are tourists or staff, visitors or in scrubs. we’re all here for something. after i turn down a few halls, depending on the shoes i’ve worn that day, i either take the stairs or wait for the elevator. sometimes, my elevator experience includes construction workers, orderlies and sick or old people on stretchers. i try to squish in and fit into a corner and not make eye contact and hope that the asian girl who got on with me is the researcher i saw on my floor last week and she’ll press the 4 button so i don’t have to reach through the bodies and do it.

i attended an irish-catholic wake on monday for a friend who died – in what i consider immediately – from bone cancer. to me that sounds like the most painful kind. it was so gddm fast. the funeral mass was long and well-attended. lots of nuns and bishops, and it felt moldily ceremonial and exclusionary. it reminded me of having seen the crucible last week. i watched it as a child watches the ceremony of a play on a stage. i haven’t dealt with the reality of her death yet. i’ve avoided processing the loss so far.

when i go home on the light rail, i get off at the museum station and walk past the azalea bushes and like the look of the buildings of the museum as i pass them. i’m grateful that i live in a place where i get to walk past them in the process of just going through the steps of my daily life. it makes me glad sometime to live in a city. i cross a few streets, watch a lot of cars and try to time the traffic and the crosswalk light, possibly as a game so it feels like i’m doing something. i pass old houses and a lot of them are uniquely nuanced and i find that relishing. i make mental notes of how i’d design my house when i design it. i think about sharing this and ever starting a life-routine. i think about the photo series i mean to start and of all the collaging.

i want the dialogue in place of the ranting.

OS and i saw Ari Fleisher on Tuesday and Adam Levine last night. two polar opposites on the sexiness scale. we shared disappointment in the mad preaching of the former and how far away our seats were in the latter. regarding last night, we went as the guests of KO and his badass sister, and before finding our seats, we walked through a surreal show of animals, the most perfect in their class, and it was a shockingly interesting sort of showing to behold. i talked to the director of the exploration systems mission directorate yesterday and he’s considered a celebrity around here and i thought of how what i know now is shaping my opinion of the DOD and the inner-workings of federal agencies. another little world that’s both a mystery and a tornado and i kind of peek my nose in when i can.

i would love to read this book right now. i think it sounds achingly fantastic. i wonder if it would be any good, if it would help me. i’m worried about the drilling in anwar and about the reality of powerful and scary governments. i don’t believe everything i read. i look hard for the truth. oftentimes though, stomach signs point a prescient way.

on sunday, a 2-day old chick took it’s last breath while i held it in the palm of of my hand. i physically witnessed a moment of death. i thought of having heard a real lion roar in the houston zoo a month ago. i remembered that i would die too, and what if – really…how i wish i knew for sure what happens after death. and if that means investing better in the now. and being more deliberate with my life and not just throwing crap up here and i better start producing and actually taking time for anything besides falling out of tune. i sort of think i’ve fallen upon a gem with my snow-fuel discovery of honey peanut-flavored balance bars. they’re the most utility food in the world with lots of protein AND taste.

on tues i bought ski gear and it was fun because i love buying any kind of gear and collecting it and relishing its usefulness and relishing every kind of manifestation of good engineering. i get to try out the gear in utah on saturday and i’m excited about being enthralled, anticipating the rush. wanting to take good pictures this time. i want that $349 ipod with the color screen since they announced it but i’ve been holding off. i get excited over purchases; they provide a happy drug for a good-enough period of time and i know better but sometimes i buy into it. i’m totally a consumer. i’m not all-the-time into it, but the times that i’m not don’t account for the times that i am. and if i’m talking about engineering, i’m enjoying how fun the kasabian album is.

right now, i’m thinking about vitamins, non-stop about how you pick a friendship back up and about getting lasik. i’m grateful that kim invited us out for st. patty’s drinking tonight, but i feel more like packing and leaving the house clean and staying late to do all the work i haven’t started and being good.
so there’s your peek, in all its grand mundanity.