AT THE STOA

The announcement came from my friend, who was lonely and under all kinds of stress from school, who came over last night: "It's 10.9 degrees Celsius today." He came over with a bottle of wine. He was wearing, in all sensibility, a scarf, and in all insensibility, a pair of shorts. We finished the bottle of wine, and then another one, and went to bed shortly after he left. Today I woke up with the depression only binge-drinking can give, and had coffee while looking at my social media and files I can do for the day. I showered, bemoaning the fact that ours never seem to get quite the right temperature, and ended up having a cold one. I selected several files for the day, one of which was of a man and a woman talking about their lives and how it went downhill after a court case, ending with a plaintive, yet sad and final "Bye" from both ends. The file gave me an  unpleasant taste in my mouth, so I then set about to cook for my nephew, his guest, myself, and Ti

It's the first day of the new year, and I just finished reading one of David Sedaris' essays in his new book Calypso, Stepping Out. It was about him and his obsession with getting his FitBit to acknowledge how many steps he has made in a day, until it took over his life, making him want to do 65,000 steps per day, or something like 25 miles. It was his way of keeping fit, plus other things besides. The universe has a very funny way of making me encounter things I need just when I need them. I was thinking I was getting fat from all the holiday festivities and the months leading before them, and this fear was confirmed when I changed clothes this morning only to find that two of my jeans don't fit right anymore. "That's it," I thought. "I'm not going out today." I am absolutely aware that this fear of getting fat stems from my vanity, fed perhaps by almost limitless exposure to Western standards of beauty, which in turn was fed by my colonized b