peeping at purple

once again. sipping coffee, reading the times. this is what makes my world function, despite the heat and the fact that my ears are sweating. small amounts of time spent with a certain degree of focus and quiet fuels the mental and emotional energy for a day. any day. every day.

how else do you hear about things like this?:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/fashion/24renegade.html

one wonders how i made it through 7 years of corporate life that began anywhere from 7:30 to 9 am. my boss and mentor understood that i couldn't and didn't function before approximately 10:30, so she usually avoided me until then, leaving me to quiet, hermit work like retail analysis or markdown acceleration. but she didn't come around until 2002, a full three years after graduation. i wonder how i survived. i wonder how my work didn't suffer. i wonder about people who bounce out of bed at the crack of dawn, ready to start the day, running in meadows and singing coca cola ditties while holding the hands of those similarly inclined as the sun rises. engaging in conversation with someone other than very close friends or family before i'm truly awake is a no-no. it commonly results with me either blurting out something awkward (one of my greatest talents) or somehow compromising myself by over-compensating for my lack of enthusiasm by committing to delivering this project in two hours despite back-to-back meetings all morning, or driving someone to the airport at 5 am. i am at my weakest in the morning. but don't try to pull any fast ones, you. because i do wake up eventually and i can either waste 30 minutes of your time engaging in the most uncomfortable, circuitous explanation of why i can't do what i promised earlier - and who on earth wants to hear that shit - or i'll just avoid you and pretend the conversation never took place.

so. the heat is here. we arrived back from the lovely mountain clime of niseko and deplaned into a ruthless wall of heat and moisture. the next 4+ months will be spent in varying degrees of sweatiness; from a fine veil we like to refer to as 'dewy' (lasts about 5 minutes after bathing) to a dripping sort of personal precipitation that encompasses your entire mental capacity and silly things like rivulets running down your back gain precedence over conversation (halting them) or hailing taxis (forgetting to). the latter is usually accompanied by a garfield-like thought-bubble floating over one's head, filled with expletives.

we in si hao lou, yao ling yao have yet to turn on the air. this is because we are actually too lazy to do it, in a roundabout way. our central air is so inefficient you barely notice it's on when indeed it is. so we have been meaning to run down to the management office and negotiate one of those standing ones (eyesores, yes, but critical to one's sanity in august) for the living room, plus get the lazy cheap bastards to install screens over the windows (mosquitos have taken to turning our legs into the bellagio buffet). but, crippled by our laziness, we sweat and curse the day.