Cheap Treats

Today I felt not large but sufficient charges of pleasure from eight decidedly mundane things:

Writing checks to pay my rent, minimum monthly credit card payment, and cable, Internet, phone, and energy bills—though not having stamps enough to mail them off tomorrow.

Returning Laurie’s cake dish (thank you, Laurie), then eating lunch at the Blue Corn Café downtown and buying a couple of books at the Regulator Bookshop—Zoe Heller’s The Believers and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel.

Hearing someone (with apparent genuine interest) encourage me to “no, no, talk on” after I had modestly offered to shut up about my political opinions vis-à-vis colonialism, capital, greed, and destiny.

Laughing conspiratorially with colleagues over news that we, as faculty, are now expected to abide by community college dress codes and to enforce same with our students—we were particularly tickled with the idea of wearing burqas to class or determining whether students are springs, winters, falls, or summers in evaluating how they’re dressed.

Showing several students specific ways they can improve their argumentative essays (due at week’s end) and sensing not just one but several real gestalt breakthroughs in their thinking.

Watching the second disk of Season 1 of Gossip Girl—via Netflix—and trying to figure out how my disproportionate elation could ever be explained to those friends whose tastes and opinions I respect.

Feeling oddly pleasantly bummed out at the thought that I will never be able to see Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon on Broadway in Ionesco’s Exit the King, so thrillingly praised in last Friday’s The New York Times—but vividly imagining how indeed exquisite it must be, especially at this particular moment in history.

Cuddling with my dog, Tom Ripley, on the couch.