Catherine left for California tonight. I'm feeling lonely. I wish I had booked the same itinerary as her, but I'm not leaving until next week. The problem is that I had no idea on May 24th (which is when we had to book these tickets in order to take advantage of the special Independence Air price-slashing) what my schedule would look like right now. Maybe I would need to be here part of the week for a project. What project? I have no idea. Just one of the random things I consider when making travel arrangements. One of the rules of making travel arrangements is that I must always regret the dates and times of said travel arrangements. This is crucial for my well-being. Oh well. As it turns out, my friend Mitch is going to be in DC this weekend with his girlfriend and they're going to stay with me. It'll be fun to catch up with him and it will be nice to have the company. Then, next week, I too will be in the cool air of San Francisco. It'll be interesting to be there, because I've been reading a lot of beat-era literature lately, which of course is where it all went down. Reading it and being there should bring me into some kind of cosmic alignment with the literary moons.

So I cleaned up the apartment tonight. Dusted. Swiffered. To swiffer: there's a modern verb that wasn't around 10 years ago. I found piles of coupons - mostly receipts I get from shopping at CVS. Whenever I shop at CVS, I get some kind of coupon on my receipt. These guys are geniuses, these damn CVS people, because they can appear all gracious and charitable, giving their customers money back, but they know the reality is that most of these coupons will never get used by idiots like me. Instead, they'll sit like mine do on a bookshelf waiting, hoping to be used sometime before they expire. I've got a couple of good ones right now including a $3 'Extra Bucks' which I can apply on any purchase I make. But I just keep forgetting to take them with me. I've tried putting them in my wallet even, but they just wind up expiring in there, instead of on my bookshelf. I might as well just throw these things away when I get them - it would do me just as much good. But I don't throw them away because that would make me feel guilty. Instead, I save them in their designated spot until they expire. Then I throw them away. This is the necessary cycle of things.

Speaking of memory, or lack thereof, earlier this evening I was reading through an old notebook of mine. I opened it up to the first page and it was dated August 19th, 1996. Exactly nine years ago to the day. How's that for some crazy shit? There must indeed be some kind of cosmic lunar alignment already going on with me. So what was I doing nine years ago to this day, you wonder? I was attending bartending school in Arlington, Virginia, strangely enough, in a valiant effort to shake off the hubris of my college education and get down to the heady, welcome reality of everyday life. Do you ever look back at certain periods of your life and wonder if they were a dream? Or wonder if you were perhaps an entirely different person? If it wasn't for this physical evidence, for these scribblings with pen on paper, I could see myself completely forgetting this particular episode of my life, or at least perceiving it differently in my head. Yeah, I guess the real benefit to having things in writing is not that it helps you remember the things that happened in your life, but it helps you recall the details of those things, helps shed light on what was going through your mind when those events transpired. It's the perceptions that somehow get lost in our brains: what we were thinking at the time. But having it in writing makes it so much more real. I was listening to 'science Friday' today on NPR and there was a professor of cognitive science talking about something he termed 'snapshot memory' and how sometimes memories that remain very vivid in your mind can actually be completely altered from how they originally occurred. We think we know what happened. However, through some subtle suggestion, our recollection can be altered. The professor went on to talk about how the legal system puts so much weight on eye-witness testimony, but how this sort of testimony can actually be the least reliable. Of course, this is my recollection of what the professor said and is therefore useless. He may not have said this at all. Either way, I'll have him know that I don't need him or any other fancy-talking academic to make me paranoid about my perception of reality. I get that completely on my own, thank you very much.

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