observations and notes, vol. 3 issues uncounted

Things that are less good:

I'm perfectly happy and then come home to my roommate and get incredibly annoyed feelings, instantly. Today she was listening to classical music really loud, something baroque, and it was like being assaulted by pretension. Seriously, four more weeks.

My boyfriend is almost certainly spending summer in another city doing research. Which seemed okay until I looked at the price of plane tickets and driving distance, and realized that we're one month away from another three and a half apart. I realize people do this all the time. I realize that I can figure out long weekends and it will be over before we know it, but it's still weird to know that soon he won't be as instantly available and we won't be able to work beside each other in the library anymore.

Things that are more good:

But the reason he's spending it away is because he's a research super star and had a really good meeting today with a bunch of people who kind of run his show and apparently it went well. And it happens to be the same city my brother lives in anyways, and one where a bunch of my friends work.

*

I had tea today, properly, at the coffee shop no one knows about. I have a guarded life in my city that flies under the radar, better breakfast spots and places that do things well, where I'm still relatively anonymous, that I'm unwilling to share. The Starbucks on my street is always saturated with people I know, jittery, staring at laptops and excessively sugary pastries and pots of something that has coffee in it somewhere. Not here. Here, they warm the cup and give you a saucer and a pot, and the temperature is just right and the magazines are current, and the sun is in the window and the music was picked by the staff, who all look like scrubbed-clean Suicide Girls when that was a novelty five years ago.

*

Yesterday I looked at what I was wearing and I realized only the shoes and the socks were from where I currently live. The jeans were from a beach town in South Africa, the shirt was from a boutique in Durban, a cardigan from Minneapolis, the jacket from Toronto, a scarf from Amsterdam, and tiny embroidered wool gloves from Paris.

Funny. Strange. Neither good nor bad.