It's dark now. And by now I mean 5pm. Okay, it's actually almost eleven now, but the sky looks just the same as it did five hours ago. I have officially entered winter hibernation patterns. I had forgotten about this whole nine or less hours of daylight thing since the last time I had a Seattle winter some eight years ago. Snow and inversion are a worse sort of enemy in my opinion and I'm glad to have left them in the hands of the skiers and snowbums who think it's a worthwhile price to pay for proximity to powder. But I have to admit, this darkness is more menacing than I remembered.
Every day about 3 pm, when the sun is bright and sometimes even has burned through the clouds for a nice bright blue sky, I make all sorts of plans for the night. A run [for my heart], errands [I'm out of contacts and the ones I have make my eyes burn], out with friends [they're probably not hibernating...right?], evening reading [my to-read pile is now 6 books high. I'm 18 pages into 'Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productvity.' It's good], and a little time on one of my projects of the moment [painting my new frames, finding photos for the frames, mastering the electric guitar, etc...].
What I forget every day is that by the time I get home, my run is doused in darkness and rain, and as are an motivation to do
anything. Snacks for dinner means no cheap, healthy eftovers for tomorrow, which means another day at my new favorite restaurant,
Deli Seoul, where I could get an egg salad sandwich, kimchee, and a donut all in one stop [if only I'd dare]. Every day, the sweet Korean man who runs the place sells me on the day's special, which is always bibimbap, while I hold up the line with my order. I swear I'm perpetually starving, but can't bring myself to fix a proper meal, instead opting for crap snacks and pretty much only the food I know my stomach hates. Maybe if I rounded out my diet, I wouldn't always feel like sleeping for 15 hours the second I walk in the door.
This week I started up a Netflix account. The $9.99 a month free streaming movies and mailed DVDs is actually a fulfillment of my New Year's Resolution to have a permanent enough address by the end of the year that I could justify signing up for something where I couldn't use my parent's address as a stand-in. I'm only in my apartment til March, but it's dark outside and I have apparently lost the will to move once the sun goes down. So movies it is.
I spent my first Netflix night and the following morning compulsively rating movies and being amazed that Netflix can usually guess my rating by within star. On a scale of 1-5 stars I guess that's not too impressive, but it's a fun game to play that doesn't require any movement or much thought. Good for winter. I now have a
queue of 38 movies that I'm raring to watch. Most are in the Documentary or Drama categories because those are the movies I always feel compelled to watch but somehow are never in the mood for. Tonight I watched '
Love and Other Disasters' starring Brittany Murphy with an English accent so bad they had to write into the script that she grew up in America to explain it. 37 to go and I'm not even done rating yet. It's gonna be a good winter.
Maybe I'll go running in the morning when the sun is up?
