Today is one of those sticky, overcast days I associate with the tropics: not those lush, balmy tropics with white sands and turquoise water you see in the travel bureau commercials, but the real tropics, where light-painted houses have beads of sweat dripping down their walls, geckos clinging tenaciously to ceilings, and banana trees rustling lazily in the faint breeze.
Not, of course, that LA or even Long Beach is actually humid or sticky (not compared to Florida), but today does actually have an element of humidity which is endearingly homelike. I have three windows open: my kitchen window, my street-facing window, and the louvered window next to my door. Through all three I see the low-lying swaths of grey cloud, and various types of greenery, mostly palms and that strange tree outside my window which I haven't yet identified yet.
Downstairs someone is rolling around a garbage bin, and the rumble of the plastic wheels on the pebbled walk makes me think of thunder, which I miss in a way I could never have imagined before I moved to this lush and deceptive desert.
Long Beach is much too windy to be tropical though. Whenever I picture the tropics it's always with slow, sultry air with only faint stirrings of breeze - until there's a hurricane anyway.
I'm sorry I haven't written lately, but I've been overworked to the point of rebellion. Earlier today (a Saturday, mind you) I turned in two final projects (they aren't late, they were due today). I have since rewritten one lab and have 7 left, plus two essays left to rewrite, an extra credit essay, and an extra credit lab (that I don't think I'll have time to do, sadly) and a final (which is almost done, I just have to write the discussion - I've already written the conclusion) all due Monday.
I am taking Tuesday off. Only inexorable forces of nature or my boss will make me do anything but nothing on Tuesday.
Earlier today, I texted a classmate to complain about our workload, saying, "I don't feel like dying of nervous prostration like those ladies in Victorian novels." He replied, "You're tougher than those dried up broads," which made me giggle, to think of those fair ladies with their beautiful complexions that 7 dermatologists and hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars' worth of modern cosmetics can't give me described as "dried up".
The rest of the week will be spent on my job and my last final which is due Friday, and then I'm taking the weekend off too (it's been a hard semester) before settling down to intensive work on my job the week after that. Then I fly home on May 30th for a wonderful vacation.
I also have to do laundry tomorrow, what a pain. One of my friends from high school bragged how she had forty pairs of underwear so she only had to do laundry once a month (I assume she had several pairs of jeans and forty shirts as well), but I don't think buying 365 pairs of underwear would solve my laundry problems.
Oh well...guess I should get back to work. Heigh ho...
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