So here it is: 11pm on Tuesday evening, and I'm typing this before turning in. I'm shaved, fed, and I've ironed a shirt for tomorrow, and the iPod is playing "California Dreamin'".
Not that there's anything big on tomorrow. Three defences to crank out, and also the next instalment of the performance management process (in the form of finding out what's in the plan itself). They keep allocating files to me which I take to be a good sign.
Today was heavily spent on one file, a multi-defendant matter where we've received a swathe of new information. Then, I stayed back at the office till 9pm working on one of the defences for tomorrow. I came back here and made up dinner - half of the paella that Jennie boxed up for me on Saturday bulked out with a can of lentils, and some fruit.
I got a sweet little email from my little sister Fran this afternoon, advising of her new email address and hoping we can catch up on the long weekend. The thing is, I think this is because Jennie (as she told me) worded Fran up about the difficulties I've had at work and suggested that a little rallying round would be nice, so I'm really grateful to her for that. I hope poor Fran isn't in trouble again. She's a good kid (kid? she's only 18 months younger than me) but a bit mixed up. Still, she does seem basically OK with her life as it is (I probed her on this over Christmas). I guess that's what's important.
Not having anything else to report for the day, why don't I share a bit of my mental wallpaper with you? I think one of the notions that's always fascinated me is the concept of "home" and how people's internal lives reflect and create their "home". I'd love to say this is because I'm some wildly deep thinker, but it isn't. It's because much of my adolescence was spent commuting 4 hours a day between home and school, and watching people on the train or seeing their houses slide past the train window, and wondering how they lived and how they saw their own lives. And sometimes I could, in a strange way, want to switch into their lives (escape? possibly). Anyway, after I went to University one time I was in the journals section in the arts and humanities library essentially opening volumes kind of at random when I came across the photo herewith [Citation: Joel Sternberg, 'Santa Monica, California, August 1988' (1989) 114 Aperture 42]. For some reason, it spoke to me then and I've never forgotten it (although, oddly, have never pothered to print or photocopy it). I can't even say why it somehow ties into the concept of 'home' in my head, except that perhaps it was it was a (first?) time of realising that (many re-readings of Arthur Grimble's "A Pattern of Islands" and Clive James' "Flying Visits" notwithstanding) the world might be full of places which are foreign yet also 'home'. Maybe that's why I buy regional newspapers so obsessively, and love photographing streetscapes so much. I can't seem to explain it better than this I'm afraid, because the idea is one which I've never been able to pin down. The thought seems to hover just out of reach at the bottom of my mind, like hearing music being played in the neighbour's house, where you can just make out the beat and a fraction of the melody, but not enough to identify the song.
Here endeth the profundity.
OK, bedtime.
See you tomorrow
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