20:23 - Tuesday, Sept. 08, 2015
still forgetting
It was almost a hundred degrees today even with the beach breeze. My whole wall of office windows fought with the vicious building A/C and warmed up my office to the point where I almost didn't have to put on a shawl. Almost.

If it had been a normal day, I probably would have started shivering when I got the email from Julian confirming that he will be leaving for China within 3 weeks. I tend to get suddenly chilled when I am steadfastly denying that something is upsetting me. I remember wrapping myself in a blanket in the carpeted area of the women's bathroom at work one day when one of my students was in the process of getting expelled based on a chain of events I set into motion. I thought I had a fever, and maybe I did, as well, but mostly I was a totally repressed version of guilty.

But today it was simply too hot to be chilled. It would have been a physiologically impossible reaction. I mean, I've had fevers in the tropics. You can't feel cold. You can shake. Violently. But it's not like here, where your extremities can feel like ice cubes. I've sat in meetings with my teeth chattering, bitten my tongue with them before speaking. Today I felt only something akin to twitches in my bone marrow. Way deep down, buried too deeply to have anything to do with the air.

I was with a student at the time, and he was talking about how Ralph Waldo Emerson was too much of a hipster to be taken seriously. Easily, I slid into a debate (were there even hipsters back in an era where not conforming was actually uncool, as opposed to now, where it's sought after?), and easily, deliberately, forgot about the email for the rest of the day. I'm still forgetting about it now, even as I mention it.

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