and I would like to go for a walk but it’s just too miserable out, the kind of rain that doesn’t even really have the decency to be rain as such, the kind of rain where you’re sort of walking through a wet cloud and you’re not quite aware of being rained on but you still manage to get soaked, the kind of rain that forecloses using your phone, which is fine on some level because we could all stand to be using our phones less, and I do feel as though I have a nasty habit of Going For a Walk and then just scrolling on my phone the entire time which means I miss all the Grand Splendor of My Neighborhood which is not really that Splendid all things considered but such are the pathologies of twenty-first-century life. It’s spring in Washington, which means the weather is nothing if not erratic. A breaking-through of wet that has otherwise been held at bay by the meager cold that passes as “winter” these days. We get the occasional gorgeous day, the kind that reminds you of the spring to come, or well really the early summer, given that spring is on the whole a relatively dreary season if we’re being honest with ourselves (which I think, in general, we rarely are, but that’s understandable), but right now we’re moored in wet, grey, vaguely smelly, the whole world a dog caught in the rain and pausing every now and then to shake itself dry. I can’t imagine how anyone lives in Seattle. It’s days like these that I remember that I am little more than an enormous plant. Since lockdown I’ve grown much more dependent on the sun to regulate my moods. It’s probably something to do with how much we had to recourse to going outside in those days: sun means I can Do Things and Be In The World, and even though I can do those things and be in the world now with (mdoerately) less stress, the old neural pathways remain. So instead I’m inside, and I think I’m going to make myself a cup of tea.