Saturday, June 04, 2005

Caroline introduced me to the wonder that is shrinky-dinks last night. How have you let me go all of this time without them, people? This means that I can make accessories out of illustrations in Shel Silverstein books! The world is bright once again.

Down at the waterfront today, a homeless man offers to thumb wrestle me for a dollar. I'm a sucker for a good thumb wrestle, so I agree. His palm is hard and his fingers are more than three times as thick as mine. He makes a good show of pretending to let me win, even though we both knew from the start that in a fair fight I'd lose, and lose quickly.
Just afterwards a couple all dressed up asks me to take a picture of them. They look like members of a wedding party, but I prefer to believe for the time being that they're just wandering the waterfront in formal clothes. As I hand them back their camera and start to walk away, the guy asks me if that homeless man always asks people to thumb wrestle. I don't honestly know, but since I hope that he does I tell the boy yes.

At one point last night, I was blushing down to my toenails. I'm blushing again just thinking about how red I must have been.

I was on the phone with Toby this afternoon. He's been trying for weeks to break up with his girlfriend but she keeps telling him no. I had no useful advice. He asked about my trip in the same way everyone has, tacking on a question at the end about Nick as though that situation was not the whole reason they were asking. I gave him a rundown of the last few weeks, and he chuckled. "Mouse," he said to me, "you are like a full contact sport. You ought to hand out helmets to the people you meet." He sounded proud, like he'd just cooked a particularly tasty dessert.
It might be an accurate statement.

At the bookstore this afternoon, I'm looking at books about China while the man standing above me is reading about Copenhagen. His wife comes to stand next to him, asking about the books that he's found. She dismisses most of them, calling them too expensive or without satisfactory maps. "This is no good," she tells him firmly, "I want to see where Hamlet lived."

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