Cooler than the Average Monday in July

    It was 58° when I left for work this morning. It is July. Even now, at 3:30, it's only 70°. I don't understand. My feet are freezing (although my blue toenails--OPI 'Cool by the Pool'--are strangely appropriate).
    Today is unequivocally one of those days. A day where the non-ringing phone sounds particularly quiet. (The context isn't missed nearly as much as the contact.) Where the empty inbox seems fraught with meaning. Where the migraine that began as a slight pinging behind my right eye is now a dozen maniacal tribesmen with bongos, pleading with their gods for rain and fertility and good crops, all at once. The clock is moving backward rather than merely standing still. How can it be only 3:35?
    I'm listening to my new CD, Give Up by The Postal Service. It's working its way into my brain like a parasite, but in a good way. !
    I had lunch with an old, peculiar friend. We were both late, although he was quite a bit more late than I was. I'd given him about 3 minutes before I'd have gotten something to go and ditched him altogether. Things in his life are looking very positive right now and it was good to see him so happy. Of course, considering the source it was impossible for him to entirely see the bright side. (The glass isn't just half-empty, but there's a crack in it and it's slightly dirty, too.) He's "just a total sweetheart."
    Three little quotations--little chapter decorations--from The Reluctant Metrosexual by Peter Hyman. They caught my eye while I cataloged the book so I thought I'd include them.

"There can be no injury where there is no property."
John Locke

"Having nothing, nothing can he lose."
Shakespeare

"No I never got over those blue eyes - I see them everywhere."
Johnny Cash

    Next Sunday is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. It's also my niece's 17th birthday. She'll be the same age that I was when she was born. That's huge for me--momentous. Is there any way to impart to her, as the only one of her generation on my side of the family, what she has meant to me for these 17 years? Every other child I have ever known, or have ever even heard of, is compared to her, or my experience with her, in some way. If I tell her that, will she understand it? Or prehaps she will (as she often does) simply look at me with that prescient, all-too-knowing face that's too much like mine and say, in a voice too much like mine, too: "Yah. I know."