i am in a letter-writing mood, an email-writing mood, a heart-to-heart mood. unfortunately, both of the emails and the letter that i am working on at the moment have come out acerbic and slightly passive aggressive, and what i want them to be is loving and comforting and expressive of gratitude and a melange of quotidiana, so i am going to leave them be until whatever proverbial bug is up my proverbial butt passes through my system. they are not urgent.

today has been good and while i meant to be productive, what i mostly was was sleepy. the top item on my to-do-list, though, was "take a bath," and i managed to do that. while i was in the bath, i reflected on why baths feel nice to take. i had one of those moments, turning pruney in tepid water with oily shampoo traces marbling the surface, where i sank into where i was right then and realized that there is a lot that is not so great about baths. at first they are hot, and sometimes bubbly. if you live in a fancy house there might be whirlpool jets or candles involved.

in this house, there are neither of those things, but the tub is an old clawfoot and excellent for cradling the head and upper back. the hamper is right next to the tub and is the perfect height for placing a book on. people make theories about why humans like baths, mostly citing womb-memories. for me, it's not so much that. i don't remember the womb on the top self-conscious layer of my consciousness, but i bet it didn't feel like being surrounded by white or like having my tailbone ground into porcelain. for me, baths feel nice to take because they are rituals to draw and to structure and to sit in, each bath a chain of decisions. bubbles or no bubbles. wash the hair first or at the end. but the water gets cool pretty fast and it's acceptable to get out. they accommodate both my love of ritual and my (contradictory) short attention span.

after my bath, i can't remember what i did for most of the day, besides eat bread and watch law and order: svu on the internet. this show used to be a guilty pleasure of mine, and now it makes me progressively more angry all the time (not that that has stopped me from watching two and a half seasons in the last week). i hate the simplicity with which they self-righteously paint complex moral issues. it's tv, duh! still. since frank informed me about the specter of the end of net neutrality, yesterday, i feel pretty panicky about enjoying the internet while i can. i only did one other thing on my to-do list, and it was also on the internet. alex is back from chile and came to visit for a few lovely hours and cups o tea. she brought me the most beautiful scarf. it is soft and slightly, darkly iridescent, and it is from peru. she has correctly identified me as a Scarf Woman.

night night!