I drove one hundred and fifty-five miles today. How do I know that? Good question! I put $20 of gas into my car this morning because I was out, but I stopped at an Arco that would only take my old $20 and not my nice crisp new $10s, which meant that I had to stop pumping at the half-tank mark. I reset my mileage then -- and by tonight, my low fuel light was on again.
The reason for this strange occurrence, was because I took 280 to work (adding ~10 miles to the trip, but cutting the time), drove to campus, took 280 back to the city after class, picked up Adit at ten p.m., took him to the San Francisco airport...and just as he was getting his luggage out of the car, he remembered that he was flying out of Oakland. So, I drove my heart out back to the city, across the bridge, and down 880 to the Oakland airport, dropping him off just in time for him to start boarding. It's a good thing we weren't cutting it as close in SFO as we normally are, or else he would have missed it. So, by the time I drove from Oakland back to the city, my day's excursion amounted to 155 miles. Sweet.
The funny thing is that I felt absolutely no annoyance at this, which was surprising considering how vividly angry I got over the unpaid Comcast bill a few weeks ago. It's funny what things bother me and what things don't -- but Adit is lucky that I'm not the vindictive sort who would kick him out at Treasure Island.
Beyond visiting two of the three major Bay Area airports tonight, the rest of my day was pretty good. I made it down to the office a little before nine a.m., slogged the whole day, and took a nice break around 1:45pm for an impromptu lunch with Adit, who was hungry and took advantage of my office's free food. Since I'm barely going to see him in the next few weeks (he's in DC until Sunday, and then I leave Wednesday for a week and a half in the Midwest), it was good that we got to catch up.
I made it to my class tonight, and the discussion was quite good; I'm seriously debating taking another class next quarter because it forces me to think about new ways to write and gives me the chance to explore with different voices and styles, but given that I need to write a book next quarter, taking a class would be stupid. It's too bad, though; the instructor of this class (whom I really like) is teaching a class on creative nonfiction next quarter, which would give me a chance to work on a project about my hometown. I'll write my heart out this weekend, take stock, and decide whether I can handle it after that.
When I walked out of the History Corner tonight toward the Oval, my car, and my rendezvous with Adit, I had a brief, vivid flash of...something. It wasn't memory, precisely; but somehow, even though I wasn't soaking wet from the latest water fight or playing Mafia on the cobblestones, the scent of the Quad on a spring night brought my whole college experience back in one blow. It's somehow comforting to know that it smells the same, in a way that I can't describe, even though my life has moved on in the past seven (gasp) years since my senior spring.
Unfortunately, though, I really desperately need to get to bed; while I don't have early meetings tomorrow, I need to get down there at a respectable time because I'm leaving at 4pm to meet up with the instructor before class and chat with her about her thoughts on writing programs. Goodnight!
No comments:
Post a Comment