The cutting board looks like the stage at the end of Hamlet again.

That just means I made beet salad. I have a friend coming over for dinner tomorrow night and I've been planning the meal since noon today - I got very excited.

I accidentally fell asleep with a printout about Modern Portfolio Theory on my lap today, glasses smooshed to my face and everything. Luckily, I was at a coworker and friend's house and she didn't mind, nor did the two dogs that witnessed it. After that work day that ended so abruptly with my snooze, I eventually made my way home via the grocery store. I bought those ingredients I needed for tomorrow night and when I got home, I wanted to watch something while I cooked (oh, brave new world). And so I found Ted Talks. I'm really late to the party, I know, but sleep was starting to look optional so I cut myself off. The last one I watched was this, which made me smile on the inside - if you have four minutes, check it out.

But as I was cooking, a strange thing happened. I was looking at my hand (earlier, as I glanced at the same hand, I wasn't sure whether the color on it was from the beets I had carried home from the store, the berries I had picked from the bush, or from the bush that had tried to stop me from picking the berries - but don't worry. I washed the mysterious red off before I started to cook), poised on a quite lovely-ly sharp knife, the light from the sun going down mixing with the deep red of the beet juice, and I noticed I was smiling. The entire beet process (peeling, slicing thinly, then slicing the slices into slices - don't know if it qualified as julienne, but it was the Emily version of it) took about twenty minutes, and this was near the end of it, and I was smiling. And my head flashed forward ten years, maybe fifteen, and wondered whether I would be grinning and chopping beets in those years - for myself? For someone else? Holy shit, for my kids? It happened quite suddenly.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe there won't be beets then.

---

During the daily bustle and shove of a commute, I spend a lot of time doing what everyone does - I shift weight from foot to foot, get distracted about the day ahead, fiddle with the smartphone or music device to pass the time, avoid other people's gaze and get embarrassed when eyes happen to meet, hastily adjust clothing that gets disorganized by bags and briefcases and wind, and doggedly not look at that thing or event by which all of us are completely distracted. But one other thing I do, particularly on escalators, particularly at the Embarcadero station, is look at people's shoes. To be fair, on an escalator, my options are: 1. up - nah, nothing much there. Just the sky. Who cares. It's uncomfortable to look up anyway. 2. the person-in-front-of-me's bag. Rather not. Too close to my face. 3. The person standing next to me. Are you kidding? We don't do that. Ever. 4. Shoes, i.e. down.

And this is San Francisco, and the stop is near the Financial District. There are some nice shoes out and about on any given morning. I frequently seem to be next to quite a lovely pair of shoes (took me forever to realize that I often do like shoes- my thirteen-year-old-self is looking at me, aghast, and saying "What, are you going to tell me you like feta and olives now, too? And you're not going to be a dancer?" Hate to break it to you, kid...) almost every day. And compliments are nice, right? And good shoes are deserving of a compliment, yes? Several times, the compliment has risen in my throat and I have hastily swallowed it back, not wanting to interrupt the status-flow that keeps us rippling up the metal steps.

But today, I told the woman next to me as I walked by (I was in the passing lane, you see) that I liked her shoes, and her face was almost like that of the woman to whom I gave the apple the other day. In the three seconds that our interaction lasted, she didn't show any other expression than confusion. If she's anything like me, it was probably so unexpected that confusion was the only appropriate response, but after I was out of sight, maybe, hopefully, she started to smile a bit and perhaps, it's possible, that interaction made her morning slightly different in a minutely positive way.

I guess I'm a bit odd, but I don't think I'll stop being so.