The rainy season arrived this weekend. Specifically, it arrived as I was walking around Union Square Saturday morning without anything resembling a raincoat or an umbrella. Happens to me that way almost every year. The opening of the rainy season is a new West Coast ritual I’ve had to adjust to since being here. On the East Coast, of course, rain is something that happens on and off throughout the year. In California, it’s pretty much confined to a four-month period. And there’s always one thoroughly soggy, gray weekend which — although it may not be the first rain of the year — is always a dramatic introduction to the months to come.
You can always tell when this weekend hits by the volume of e-mail. Saturdays and Sundays are usually pretty low-volume for me, but this weekend I was flooded. When it’s raining in Internet Central, it shows.
As luck would have it, the beginning of the rainy season was accompanied by my first really nasty winter cold (thanks, Mr. “I’m Not Contagious”). It’s one of those really knockout ones; I feel like I’ve been run over by a freight train. I’m on my second day out of work and I’m BORED!! Aside from Lucille Ball in the remake of “Auntie Mame”, which I’m watching right now, TV has sucked. Even if I felt like leaving the house, I’d be worried that work would call the second I left (OK…not that worried…)
A few ideas for how to spend time home alone and sick:
- Make a Kleenex sculpture.
- Answer all the e-mail you’ve been avoiding like the plague.
- Start working your way through that Quark book, even though your “borrowed” copy of Quark has become corrupted, making it hard to follow along.
- Scan the Sunday paper for jobs you aren’t qualified for.
- Organize and catalog your pornography by fetish.
- Identify and label the stuff in the back of the refrigerator by species and creation date.
- Alka-Seltzer Plus cocktails at 10 and 3.
- Write another long essay about the nature of sex, love, and relationships. Or don’t, and save yourself lots of pointed questions…
