I'm still waiting for a storm, though it has been raining. I would like to blame the weather reporter, but it could have been the fact that I was reading something while only kind of overhearing the news, and I might have confused the local report for the upstate report. Well, a storm will come eventually.

It's been a weird cold lately. It's probably got more to do with the fact that I'm bad at dressing for winter than anything else. I like the way hot tea makes my cheeks warm, and the warm spreads everywhere. Some days I drink too much tea, and then suddenly I realize it and think, "whoa, no more tea." Then, the next day I'll have only one cup and think, "whoa, no more tea," because somehow it feels like that one cup has reactivated the too much from the day before. Is this scientifically sound?

Sometimes I remember everything the way I remember dreams. Haze, and leaps in time, and unexpected details that sound like nothing but feel like everything.

Certain things are just right, the radio, and the warm yellow lamp, and the sound of the cars in the rain, but I've absolutely no patience for too many things. The need for spare synthetic limbs, migrating vowels around the Great Lakes, people forgetting that strangers are not as strange as they're expecting, almost hoping. The world is like a cluttered room, and I just want to clear it out. There's no space in here to just stretch out on the floor and wonder at the ceiling. I'm building a model of the solar system, not of what it looks like, but how it makes me feel. Did you know that pipe cleaners are not called pipe cleaners anymore? They now are called chenille stems. No one has any pipes left to clean, and no one wants to be reminded now that they're gone.

I'm happy today, and I don't know why.