The imminence of rain has hung over the skies of Los Angeles for the past couple of weeks. Today at about 1, the clouds darkened, threatening deluge, so eagerly we looked to the smog swathed grayness above, hoping, waiting. Outside the library, I felt a few drops, but it was a poor showing. Rain cleanses me, I feel, and sometimes when I drive through it, I feel cheated and dirty, like those days I sit at home or in my office indoors and miss the press of the sun's heat on my skin, trading it up for the ghostly luminesence of flourescent lights and computer screens. Unnatural.
The consciousness within me balks when I come indoors. It's like the unnatural bites in and drains the venom of simulacrum and plastic into my blood, making me weak and sickly. Trying to escape, my mind races frantically to find some escape; I get a headache and have to step out; I have trouble breathing and need fresh air. And if I am strong enough to douse those urges, I find myself feeling sleepy from inactivity, dozing amidst the pale light and paperwork, all the names swirling around me in a thick ooze of numbers and letters and miscellaneous symbols.
This afternoon, to keep from sleeping I looked up torri gates on Google: I'm feeling lucky. The people's string of virtual conversation about a religious symbol seemed strangely out of place; religion is where people are, where their consciousness is; the digital multiverse didn't seem to have a language for the explanation needed: What exactly is sacriligious now? Is it putting a torri gate in a garden? Submerging a cross in a bottle of urine? Rejecting tradition or change? The fascination is peaked by the taboo -- what will happen? Will we get away with it.
Yet, across the gate between what is seen and what is unseen, the goings on of heavenly beings are, I imagine, untroubled. The worst has already been done, the head of a prophet served on a silver platter, the statue of a god broken and discarded, the Almighty throne challenged by the hand that served it. The meaning is lost down here, yet we ask the same questions, unsure whether the meaning was supposed to be important, unsure of whether there is some significance to a symbol beneath the surface of lucidity, the icons written on our genes, but unintelligible in writing or speech. They are natural and engraved on our very subconsciousness, somewhere between soul and frontal lobe. Meaning or none, they remain, unreachable, unerasable, but grounded firmly in the beginnings of humanity many years ago, a time forgotten but simulated in our lives everyday.

It's Monday again. I just realized that quite a few of my blogs fall on Mondays. Maybe it's that point in time when everything is just out of wack enough that I can see all the colors, like some cold prism that refracts life into a array of philosophical undertones.
Or it could just be coincidence.
Either way, Monday always comes too soon, and I found myself in the same bed in a new apartment when I woke up this morning, still uwilling to get up; but things don't have to change that much to take a turn for the better.
Everyone had had it last Friday: dragging their feet around the hazy blue-speckled-white office carpet amidst the dun 1970s looking partitions, just wasting time. Some of the guys over in Admissions were riding a scooter between the filing cabinets and the Assistant Director'd office; she obviously wasn't there, but it was Friday; even if she was, she wouldn't have bothered to say anything.
My boss was gone on a vacation thing of some sort at 1:00, so we had no boss, but moral convictions, a rock and hard place you find at religious institutions. It kind of makes me wonder what government offices would be like if they had religious affiliations. Can you imagine? The Buddhist District of Motor Vehicles.
Okay, there is something a little different from karma or jihad in a Christian institution (did I just make a statement?), but even after the weekend, even after 63 hours of freedom from files and belligerent phone calls, even after breakfast and coffee twice with no cubicle to follow, even then, Monday comes with a thud.

Thud

So I stared at my computer screen, wrote a few emails, ate some fruit salad and mulled over Bob's file. His parents are middle aged, rich, and unwilling to give him any money. But he wants money. And he's not going to go get paid minimum wage when he can just write a letter and claim that their house payements, his car payements, all the credit cards and gas...and, oh, he has to pay for his own food! The tragedy!!! What saviour can we find?
Stafford Loan, 3500. Apply for it or get a job.
And that's why I write on Mondays. Goodness, the students are so creative on Mondays, I don't know. Maybe they inspire me.