$2.50 rice and beans for lunch make me feel human again. two fiddy. can't beat that with a stick. all morning i have been whiny and snively and oh-me-oh-my i hate getting sick-y. cheek on desktop, sipping tea instead of coffee.

but i took more sudafed and gave in to my iced coffee cravings and got a pure protein lunch and i feel a little better.

and i have been kept busy and seeming to do things semi-correctly, which is good.

i'm thinking about tattoos again. i do that a lot, it's true, but i spin around ideas and thoughts and then i always realize i can't afford it and i put the thoughts away. today i'm thinking about the clematis vine that grows on the front of the old house in oregon, and what will happen to it when that house is torn down. and how it would look on my skin. i'm thinking about the things i love and how they would look and where they could go and trying not to think about how i would afford it.

and beyond that i am checking my email obsessively, checking, waiting for that message from outpost to tell me that my snowywhitecomputer is on the way. jt was pointing out that now i have a white cat and a white computer. i might name the computer one of the names that was not given to halo-cat. mogget. mogget is a little white cat in a couple of books by garth nix who is not entirely a cat and who is contained in cat form only by the collar around his neck.

my computers seem to be named for their colors. the imac is named terrapin, to name it turtle in a slightly less obvious way. but my last laptop was named chistery after a monkey in wicked by gregory maguire.

books. always from books.

did i mention yet that keara's list of oregon things is wonderful? it reminded me of some of the things i'd forgotten about the weekend. like laughing at her suggestion that the aging-hippie band was really a fleetwood mac reunion. like the perfection of the back porch. like finding her behind the house on the phone laughing to her roommate about the same things we were laughing about already.

i always want to show oregon off as if it were mine. which it's not, but no one else i know is from there, and so when i'm here, when i can crack open photo albums and pick out pictures of crater lake, of the view past the red barn to fern ridge resevoir, of the mountains on a clear day, it feels like it belongs to me as much as i belong to it.

i want right now to pick a topic and write for hours but i need to do my work. i need to do my work well. and then i need to write so i never have to work in an office again. no matter how spacious. no matter how cool my rushmore poster looks on the wall.