constance | Absinthe is now my only vice and my last remaining pleasure.

Some tidily-segued bullet points for you!

One thing I can't get used to, as I accustom myself to life in a different part of the country from the part I lived in before this place, is the way the heat of the day builds and settles here. The thing is that back home, the day was hottest from maybe noon to three o'clock, and you knew that if you went out during the day at all in summer, you'd be advised to time your outings so that you'd be conveniently air conditioned during those hours because ho.ly.crap. it was hot. Here, though, the hottest part of the day falls later than that, from three to six or thereabouts, and five years later, I am still surprised by this, still plan my days wrongly in the face of it.

That said: weather.com tells me today's high was 89 degrees (or I think I mean is 89 degrees, since it's still 89 outside now), which means that at noon today it was 85 or so, plenty cool enough to be drinking diet lemonade and lounging in the hammock on my freshly swept-down porch. It is July and the temperature hasn't broken 90 and won't, and just FYI that seems to be what it takes to put me in a good mood, because behold me, in as good a mood as I've been in for weeks. Weeks, I tell you.

Except that my memory is playing like an LP with a deep scratch on it, where I can remember a scene from a book, a scene where one of the characters is returning home after a long time away, a time in which everyone thought he was dead, and he stumbles in and puts his head in the lap of the Wrong Girl because the Wrong Girl is the one he really loves, and I can remember everything about this scene so vividly, I have such a clear picture of it in my head, the homespun frontierishness of it, the quietly moving scandal of it, so stong because among other things it marks the birth of one of my favorite tropes of romantic love in fiction, the Patience Rewarded trope. I remember everything so vividly, as I say, except the book that this scene comes from, and no matter how much weight or counterweight I put on the needle, I can't get that one line to play; so help me friendslist, please! What am I remembering/not remembering?

Oh my god, it seems that it really does help to write things down! No sooner had I written that last sentence when suddenly the scratch smoothed out. The Witch of Blackbird Pond, how could I ever have forgotten?

I've been meaning to ask this too, lately: when did frigging become a primetime-ready substitute for fucking? Because for someone whose sexual cathexis (is that a redundancy or not?) was largely comprised of hilariously and brilliantly overwritten Victorian serial smut, what frigging signifies is almost as dirty as actual penetration (and, for the record, an entirely different act), and I'm just wondering when it morphed from a seriously objectionable (I mean, from a Victorian POV, because of course otherwise it's all good) act of its own into a mild euphemism for something else entirely? I am curious about this. And also amused, and I have to admit that its presence considerably ramps up my enjoyment of network TV.

On a related note, I went looking for a favorite from long ago, the Victorian Sex Cry Generator -- I was going to randomly generate the perfect subject line for this post -- and it seems to have gone! Links to it redirect to the host site homepage, and a site search yields the bare bones for what I guess eventually became the generator, but not the generator itself, which quelle tragedie, and I actually mean that completely unironically, because occasionally paying a visit to it was one of my favorite old-school things to do on the internet, like rewatching Strindberg and Helium or Potter Puppet Pals (which, actually, Snape's Diary puts me strongly in mind of Strindberg and Helium, so this juxtaposition is much more fitting than is otherwise immediately apparent).

Anyway. I wish the sex cry generator were still around. I feel that the Internet is a sadder place without it, and that the lolcats event horizon is looming ever closer in its absence.