my mondays

Oh, let me tell you about my Mondays. I know this is another post right in a row, but I am vegging, and Josh is reading, and I am full of words and soon will head to bed with my paper and pen journal. Right now I want to imagine having a friend or two sitting with cups of tea or coffee and listening to my rambling and doing a bit of rambling on their own. (I love your rambling, friends. Please, please ramble all you want. I read it and pretend it's in your voices and feel cosy and good.)

My Mondays start at 7:01, if I can sleep that long through the neighbors' alarms and slamming doors and courtyard laughter. I pick out clothes on Sunday night; I drink tea too quickly, balance my mug sometimes on the white sink in the bathroom while I shove pins in my hair (if it's not too cold to go without a hat). [Aside: there is no shame in eyeliner, right? It is okay to be a woman who wears eyeliner? That's not selling out? And perfume?] I eat cereal (right now it's Target brand cinnamon toast crunch; Josh picked it. I always pick the honey and oat mixers, which is Target brand for I forget what, but it's yummy and healthy. Ish.). I pack my lunch, unless Josh is up and manages to get to it before I do. Today he made me peanut butter and jelly on really delightful white bread with poppyseed crust.

I dash out into the brisk morning. I greet neighbors with a similar schedule, hold open the black metal gate (it creaks--when the windows are open in the summer I hear it creak and creak and creak and love to think of human beings coming and going and having hopes and feelings). I crunch and slide over the sidewalks to either train or bus (whichever seems more likely to arrive or depart first). Or, in the thirty-degrees-and-up instances, I walk a mile in my own shoes. I pass three coffee shops on the way. Two are independent. One is Starbucks.

On Mondays, I teach at 8:15, then I hold office hours. I fill my purple Nalgene at a drinking fountain (sorry to those of you, like Brandi, who are sure drinking fountains spread the Plague). I head to the library, to the cafe, for some coffee from the cranky middle-aged barista who scolds customers, invariably, and I sit at a table and drink it, eat my lunch out of my purple and grey lunch bag, watch the lake. Today I wrote late Valentines and read articles on Toni Morrison and ethics and aesthetics.

I tutor writing from 1:00 to 4:45. In these sessions I try to be personable and charming, honestly. It's so hard to work with someone on your writing when that someone is a stick-in-the-mud grammar dictionary. I try to be more like a brush-in-the-pastels encourager with a bit of grammar thrown in. By the end of a session, I like for my new writing buddies to be calling me by my first name and making eye contact and cracking jokes about their commas. This is the best kind of scenario, and it happened three times in a row today, so I was sort of delighted even while I was exhausted by the time the shift was over.

Then I come home. Then I make dinner and eat it. Then I goof off--or work really hard--until I head to my flannel sheets. Which I'm about to do.

And that is Monday.

What's yours like? I'm waiting for your ramblings, friends. The kettle's on.