my friends, my habits, my family

Time has been passing here quite nicely. I have started to build the routine that I have been craving; the days have started to feel the same. I wake earlier than my parents and my brother and his girlfriend. I have minute oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit; I fill a ceramic mug painted with a tree pattern with Milo and hot water and evaporated milk and add a dusting of Iguazcu instant coffee, only to fool my senses; the smell alone should convince my brain that its hunger for caffeine has been met. I put on my vitiligo sun hat and my vitiligo cream and vitiligo sunglasses and my vitiligo suit and my lesbian low hiking boots and I bring my dog boyfriend to the field at my former middle school, where we play versions of our favorite games, Dog Soccer and Let Mommy Pick Up Poo. (Good grief, so much. What is he eating?!) We come back, I trot a loop around the Baylands, I feel unfit. I nibble things around the house. Mom sometimes leaves Tupperwares full of Chinese food in the fridge - tea eggs, greens sauteed with garlic and her special Japanese flavoring powder, green beans with ground pork, soy saucey tofu skins. I fix a bowl, nuke it, and eat it lying on the floor holding The Year of Magical Thinking over my head. In the afternoons, I find friends for California casual dining (so far, pupusas in Redwood City, fish tacos in Palo Alto, noodle soups and ice cream in San Francisco) or watch clips of movies and TV shows (Up, Inglorious Basterds, a New Zealand nature show in which a volleyball-sized parrot attempts to mate with the photographer's head) with Richard and Aimee on their computer. Sometimes there is a little adventure in the city (zoo, apartment hunting); more often there is nothing but poor posture and an Internet connection. S and I chat; while we do so, family members come into my room to offer fruit, talk about Black Friday electronics purchases, and proclaim that prolonged telephone talking leads to brain cancer. After this, I approximate brushing my teeth and climb in bed and whine for Richard to come and turn my light off. Boo army crawls under my bed, and then we sleep.