Mocha happy

I feel happy. I'm sitting in the Panera off of Security Square Boulevard. There are two women right in front of me, I can't really follow their conversation, but it's clear that they're friends and I'm glad that people are friends with people.

There's a man sitting at a table, writing on a manuscript with a blue pen. I just submitted my first scientific article last night, and I edited it that way, too, except I used a green pen. He's wearing a polo shirt and cargo shorts, which is my uniform. I feel connected to him.

There were two men here who just left a few minutes ago. They got up from their table, and kept talking for a few minutes, because they had just one more thing to discuss. One of them was holding a Bible.

My doctor took me off Lexapro yesterday. I'm weaning myself off of it, I'm down to half the dose I'd been at for the last two weeks, and this time next week, I'm going to be down to just taking one pill every other day. I'm feeling a lot better already, probably more than reducing the dose of Lexapro can account for.

I slept in today. I've been sleeping nine or ten hours at night for the past few days. I think that my brain has just been so twisted up that it needs extra sleep to heal.

I went to my friends' house to pick zucchini and bell peppers. They're about to go on vacation, and I talked with them about what they like to do on vacation, and biking long distances, and motorized flexible-wing aircraft. Some of the kids tried to trap me, to keep me from leaving. The littlest one was going in circles from the kitchen to the living room to the dining room and back through the kitchen, with a roller skate on her right foot. She kept falling down.

I don't feel euphoric, but I feel happy, happy in that life-is-good-but-we're-Presbyterians-so-let's-not-get-carried-away sort of way. I feel a little happy, and I've been feeling so convoluted lately that I'm happy to be happy.

I have an iced mocha. It cost $4, which is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a drink, but rather than feeling guilty about having spent $4 on a transient item, I'm incredibly thankful that I can have things that I like but don't need.

I'm reading an article, a delightfully well-written article on the immersed boundary method, the method I use for my research, and even though it's technically work for me to be reading it, it feels like I'm reading it for fun. I love my job, love it.

I got a cherry pastry, and I'm full from the tomato and mozzarella panini I had for lunch, so I don't know if I'll eat it before I leave or if I'll take it with me, and I am totally happy with having that undecided.

I feel like I just finished finals, except that I want to go to the lab and give a lot of work to my supercomputers.

I was feeling very hyper earlier this week. This morning, as I was making my iced coffee, I used slow, deliberate, careful motions. I sat with my Sunbox and read some of The End of Economic Man by Peter Drucker. Earlier this week, I was thinking a lot about how irrational human beings are, and how terrifying that is, and wondering if there was any ultimate meaning. Peter talked about those ideas in his book, and when I read about them, I was still scared about how once the Iranians or the North Koreans build a nuke, the world could end, but I felt much more calm than scared, I knew there was nothing I could do to fix the nuclear problem or world hunger or to stop slavery or redistribute wealth, so I took another sip of my iced coffee and kept reading.

A lot of the time, I read out of a sense of obligation, like I'm the sort of person who owes it to the cosmos to read a lot of books. This morning, I was reading because I wanted to be connected with Peter Drucker's ideas, that's what I genuinely like to do.

I'm now basically out of mocha proper and am now sucking whipped cream and residual chocolate sauce through a big, fat straw. Jazz is playing, and I'm normally ambivalent about the jazz that plays at Panera, it's a little smooth for my taste, generally, but I recognize the last few tracks that have been playing, I'm pretty sure they're by Dizzy Gillespie, and I like Dizzy, mainly because he has the perfect first name for a jazz musician.

Right now, I feel like the cheezy ending of every movie from the 80's, where there's a montage showing what all the characters are doing now that the Conflict is Resolved, and it ends with a freeze-frame of them all jumping in the air simultaneously.

A mom and her daughter just sat down in the corner. The daughter picked the seat. 'Why are you sitting me in the corner? Are you ashamed to be seen with me?' asked the mom. They each have an iced green tea, and they're sitting side-by-side, sharing a bag of the fancy Panera potato chip and they have a sandwich cut in half. The daughter is wearing purple glasses.