Sometimes, you end up sitting in the restaurant at the Four Seasons of San Francisco - a glass of wine offered to you the second you sit down at your individual table, because you happen to know someone who works there (an old math friend of mine). As luck would have it, you even like the music that is playing. There are so many worlds in this one world.

On the drive up to San Francisco today with my father, the road was awash with rain. Finally. (Keeping you posted on this restaurant thing - the tables look like marble but I can't imagine all of them are, because that would be ridiculous. The bathrooms are a collection of tiny individual bathrooms with the name of the hotel/resort embossed on the paper towels by the sinks. Every person that I've talked to (besides the friends of my friend) has called me 'miss' and in the little personal bowl of nuts that was just brought to me, there are curious green nuts that I can't quite figure out - wasabi somethings or pistachios? *crunch crunch* Huh. Neither. )

By this time of the year, there ought to have been around 30 inches of cumulative rainfall in this area. The showers over the last few days have lead to about 3.5 inches. The landscape is reacting so happily - patches of grass in the woods that were shriveled and dull were almost glowing green when I saw them yesterday. So, on this drive up Highway 1, there was more rain and wind than ever. Of course, the ground isn't all that used to the moisture and so it doesn't hold on to it very well - so plenty was on the road, so the drive was plenty interesting.

But to make it even more interesting, we listened to a podcast from Ram Dass (see here), a Harvard professor turned hallucinogenic drug researcher turned spiritualists and guru. And we talked about how some people actually live like that - we talked about how we each, academic as we may appear, think there probably is something to this whole "higher states of consciousness" thing. I know I love math - but my horizons are fairy broad. At sixteen, I attended an incredible ten-day silent meditation retreat. There is something to it, let me tell you.

I digress. The point is, some people live that way . Monastic lives, scholastic lives, lives as opera singers (I watched the Met simulcast of Rusalka this morning - fantastic!) and rockstars, as fishermen and soldiers and stay-at-home moms and diplomats. As people who frequently drink a glass of Zinfandel at the Four Seasons.

The complexity and variety of lives in this world is just one of those things that's a bit too big to understand fully for any length of time. Like the fact that each person's life is as complicated and important to that particular person as mine is to me. Too much to hold in your mind for long - like the spaciousness and infinite-ness of infinity.

--

Sitting alone and drinking wine makes me think, and I chose to write just a little bit as well. My friend's coworkers attacked me with food that I was not allowed to pay for, and there was simply no way I could get through it on my own- steak tartare, delicious olives (served warm....beautiful), curried cauliflower... Not a bad way to spend an evening.