I am standing today with my afternoon tea near the stairwell that leads to the eighteenth floor, my forehead pressed gently to the window pane, my mind hypnotised by the rains and only vaguely registering the hum of the office behind me. I watch the pedestrians walk clumsily about midtown, their giant umbrellas overhead. It's quiet here.

I love days like today, days where the city lies gray beneath heavy monotones, where the sun sleeps quiet behind moody clouds, where people have little to say but the most general of pleasantries that define the borders of collegial civility. The gentle showers of a new spring are today closer than not to November rains: heavy and dark and cold and wet, with nebulous clouds that overrun the city skies and swallow the tops of tall buildings in unapologetic fashion. Days like today are meant for little more than mindless musing.

The coolness of the window begins to chill me, and I take a nonchalant sip of my tea, my eyes closed to the world, my hands wrapped gingerly around the flimsy paper cup and curious to the warmth radiating through them.

I love days like today for the calm they bring, for the temperament of spirits where gruff laughter becomes a quiet grin, where bosses and serfs alike have little to say about projects due and deadlines to be met. I love days like today for the ease with which we slip into and out of them, comfortable like old blue jeans and easygoing like weekend flipflops. Days like today are meant for little more than gentle smiles.

[permalink] ::

The cupcake sits comfortable in a cardboard box, its icing an impossible shade of green, its guardian leprechaun sitting cross-legged and smug atop a generous dollop of white, the entire concoction covered in a thousand sugary emerald sprinkles. It's Saint Patrick's Day, and the lone survivor of yesterday's green-themed cupcake fest taunts me from two feet away.

I ate just one yesterday, the one with the plastic four-leaved clover, and try as the confections may, they failed in their mission to have me eat any more of their kin and with little more than a semi-dignified drooling on my part. I gave two of them to Matthew yesterday evening, and as we chatted away the pair called out to me from the bag.

"Eat us. Don't give us away," they said.

I left them in Matt's charge.

The lone cupcake has been egging me on all day today, daring me to sample him. My colleagues haven't succumbed to its siren song, and every time I walk by I look into the box, hoping all at once that someone had taken it and that no one had touched it. No one but me seems to hear the little voice from the cardboard box.

"Hello?" it says. "Try me."

He's tried all the usual tactics: the bullying, the begging, the guilt-tripping, the screaming. The sad I'm-but-an-orphaned-and-unloved-pastry-so-why-don't-you-eat-me. I've been hearing and ignoring him all day long.

But now that the day is ending, my defenses have weakened. Now that the skies are darkened, my hunger is calling out with a voice of its own. The lone cupcake seems to make more and more sense. Perhaps I will sample him. Perhaps indeed. It's all so very obvious to me now.

Cupcake 1, Patrick 0.

[permalink] ::

Dinner tonight, the four of us at a local favourite, the table behind with a quartet of older and well-dressed black men sipping purposefully on glasses of wine and discussing the psycho-sociological impacts of changing demographics and what their collective implications on being African American in society would mean to future generations of educators. Halfway through our meal, they are replaced by a man and three loud and buxom ladies, the latter discussing the ways their breasts bounced in their sparkly dresses, the former testing by poking at each with his fork.

Ah, life in contrasts.

[permalink] ::