sunspots and afternoon showers

I am starting to appreciate how my life starts over at 5 o'clock every day. Leave work and suddenly it is a new day full of unrealized potential. Yesterday's second day took an unexpected turn when I started to drink sangria and listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeah's. This rapidly evolved into unrestrained dancing, which then segued nicely into my new favorite show of all time "So you think you can dance?" In the progressive/indie/intellectual world I vaguely inhabit, I often feel like I am supposed to be ashamed of watching reality TV. But I no longer give a damn, because that show fills me with giddy, wiggly goodness. Gaiety and glee. And I'm a big fan of glee. I start rearranging my life while I am watching. Quixotically creating caricatures of the future. "What dance classes can I take? Should I audition? How good could I get in a year? Okay, if I started to take 1-2 dance classes a day..." and so on and so forth. No, I am not a ten-year-old girl, but damn, sometimes it feels good to act like one.

I finished the bottle of sangria. This, combined with the giddiness from the show, resulted in some ecstatic couch rolling. New soft couch. Big pillows. Blue pillows. Burying and unburying my self. Somewhere in there I convinced Natalie to go to Spiderhouse with me, where we could drink more sangria, only this time outside under christmas lights - an environment better suited to sangria consumption. I lured her with the possibility of a thunderstorm. A well timed roll of thunder, and we were rapidly on our way, out the door, down the street.

I talked with the barista about sunspots. He wanted to be an astronomer when he was growing up. Apparently we are at a low point in sunspot activity. They run in 11-year cycles.

It was surprisingly quiet on the patio, probably because they had the music turned off. No raucous laughter. People studying and talking quietly. Occasional lightning. After about twenty minutes it started to rain. I watched as everyone made their decisions - stay outside or head for cover. Undecided. A fellow sitting next to us mentioned how it rains every afternoon in Maui. People will be sitting outside eating, it will start to rain, and everyone continues on unperturbed. Drops collect on their eyelashes, unbatted. After fifteen minutes the rain is gone and by the end of the meal they are dry, eyelashes and all.

It would be nice to live somewhere where it rains every evening.

We eventually moved under a tree where the drops were less troubling. And there we sat, talking and drinking sangria in the rain.

Sometimes Natalie covered her glass with her hand to keep the rain out.

There was more to the evening - more sangria, more wild dancing to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, more time on the couch. But I prefer to stay under the tree in the rain.