It’s been raining all day today, from when I finally woke up this morning and pried myself out of bed, talking to myself the whole time (“Get. Up. No! Get. Up. No! Get! Up! Noooooo! GET! UP! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”) to right this minute. One of my coworkers, who is new to Seattle, came in with a look of consternation on her face and a very wet jacket. “It wasn’t like this last year,” she said, shaking off the rain. “Is it usually like this?” I just looked at her with silent sympathy and shook my head sadly. Yes. It is always like this. The week after they switch the clocks back kills about forty percent of your brain cells, the forty percent that can think about anything other than “flannel sheets” and “hot chocolate with extra cinnamon,” and “ thick socks.” Actually, I probably have more space than normal in my brain devoted to those things (along with “goat cheese,” “maybe it’s time to check my email again,” and “that cute boy who sells the organic soap at the farmers’ market”) so maybe I have only lost thirty-five percent of the total mass.
I think the rain has soaked in the blank spaces though; I can almost hear it sloshing around in there, messing up the electricity, making me have all these daydreams about what it would be like if I could sing a George Michael song accurately at karaoke, or if I was really good at giving dinner parties and was the kind of person who was good at interior design, or if one day I was just walking along the street and all of a sudden music started playing and everyone started dancing to the beat, just threw down their coffee cups and their bike messenger bags and Palm Pilots and started dancing, dancing, all along the sidewalks and into the buildings, like a music video but not as totally coordinated, but in a cool way, you know, like very spontaneous but also everyone on the street would be a good dancer and not an embarrassing dancer because obviously there are few things more awkward than watching an embarrassing dancer who doesn’t know how embarrassing he or she is. That’s the kind of thing I wonder about when I have all this rain in my brain.
Sometimes I think about having sort of second-rate super powers that wouldn’t be as cool as being invisible or being able to fly, but still sort of useful. The ability to get really good frequent-flyer mile flights, whenever you wanted them, for example, or the ability to find the one awesome thing in a depressingly half-hearted yard sale, like a fully functional accordion or a really great cameo necklace. I wouldn’t mind the superpower of being able to organize my closet very effectively, or the superpower of finding the absoluter perfect birthday present for each one of my friends, like the kind of present that makes them look down at the floor and then look back up at you with tears in their eyes and go “How did you know?”
Ooh, also I’d like the superpower to be able to manifest specific social occasions. Right now, for example, I am obsessed by New Year’s Eve, and I have this thing where I want to go to a really swanky formal party because I’ve never been to one before and I have this awesome long silver ball skirt I have never worn that I want to wear. The other thing I want to do for New Year’s Eve is to make friends with someone who has a ski cabin and do that; go up with like ten people and ski during the day (I think I would keep on the bunny slopes and also I’d have to borrow ski clothes…I’m from Florida, people) and then come back to the cabin and make chli or lasagna (or both!) and then have hot chocolate or hot apple cider (or both!) and then go out to the hot tub in the snow and parboil for a while and come back inside and put on jammies and watch movies and drink some more hot chocolate. It would be even better if there were people to flirt with and people to quote movie lines with and at least one really good lasagna-maker. I guess it would be good to have someone there who could help me with the whole skiing thing…I haven’t been for years now and the last time I went I went down the mountain on my face instead of on my skis. Maybe I could even try snowboarding, at this magical ski cabin that it would be my superpower to conjure up. Okay, yeah, seriously, that’s the superpower I want: The Superpower Of Amazing Weekends. Forget all that flying stuff.
Other times I think about traveling around the world and learning different languages and meeting all sort of different people or about getting really good at sewing and knitting and all sorts of crafts. I think about finding the perfect pair of black knee-high boots…which still elude me after two years of searching, and you know, I was kind of thinking that 2005 would be the year, but there’s only two months left and I don’t know if it’s going to happen…or about learning how to write short stories or how to make pizza dough from scratch, about having one of those really big horse dogs, you know, like they’re bigger even than Great Danes and I’m sure they are more expensive to feed and care for than a child, and they often wear bandannas around their necks and have names like Rufus? Would it be really horrible or really awesome to have one of those? And maybe give little kids wagon rides with it, as if it were a pony?
It’s good to be where I am right now, in this drizzly pine-scented city, in the beginning of November. I don’t even mind the rain soaking me inside and out, washing down the streets in its passive-aggressive Pacific Northwest way, making me think my slightly delightful winter thoughts.