It's raining in Madison, Wisconsin. It doesn't matter what time I am writing this, or even if I am writing it after the fact. It's still raining. And tornadoing in the shady places surrounding. Gusting wind and mist and loose branches everywhere. It's oddly beautiful. I never thought I'd say this, but there is more to satisfying weather than heat so hot it pulsates and a sea breeze.

Mazur of Wintermute has a house with a semi-skylight where, if you are so inclined and have the time, which I am, but don't, you can lay on the floor underneath and test the brain-challenge of keeping your eyes open as the heavy drops fall towards you. I choose instead to shiver, flip through photos, and kick ass at cards. I think the whole time about how many games of Egyptian Ratscrew I played when I went to Mexico two years ago. We would sit in our beach hut with geckos flying up the clay walls around us, and eat rolls of expensive imported chocolate cookies. I have a peculiar penchant for holing up inside when I'm in exotic places and then feeling bad about it. In Mexico, we only played cards at night, though, after stuffing ourselves with shrimp. In Madison, I play in between creative pizzas and peanut butter ice cream. It's the Midwest for sure.

We save worms who have been flooded out of their dirt homes by the lake. When touched, the squinch up and help us get our fingers under their bodies. I toss them in the dirt and wonder how come bugs and worms can fall from such great relative heights and not die, but we can't. I'm sure it has something to do with the weight of air. When I write sentences like this I become painfully aware of how stupid I am capable of sounding.

I'd move to Madison if the only thing I'd give up the mountains for wasn't Chicago. Just read it again if it doesn't make immediate sense. I need sentences like that thrown in the books I read to keep me from skimming and/or being lazy by not attempting to understand complicated sentences. But maybe I'm the only one and this aside was just personal.

Chicago, Savannah, the entire southeast, Madison. A birthday spent with a stranger.* Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong. One week until Boulder, Colorado. I don't really have a home anymore. It's kind of nice.


* My mom called me at 12:03, my birth minute. "What are you doing? Did I get the time right?" I have a tradition where I have to write down what is happening at the anniversary of the moment that I was born, as a strict, unexaggeratable record of the general feel of my life, and I won't stick this likely long, rambling aside in the center of my sentence flow. This year I was checking for updates at something positive and waiting for my car to return so I could meet Mike for lunch. I was thinking about how to best make a song in a major key sound sad but not sappy. I was also thinking about how people's faces change when they're photographed.