Friday

Last night we ate dinner with a good friend from Monterrey at a previously undiscovered mezze restaurant several miles down the road. This marked the third time in four days that I've eaten Mediterranean slash Middle Eastern meals, which remain one of my favorite kinds despite the recent overindulgence. I've regretfully forgotten this restaurant's name. These awkward sentences are tribute to how W. Somerset Maugham is destroying me from the matrices out. While his book has grown no lighter, my new bookmark is much closer to the back cover than it used to be. One day soon I'll finish it. Maybe it will all be over this weekend (like everything else), though I might not be able to spare much reading time due to a wedding road trip. My normal routine for travel day: wake up, thoroughly houseclean, pack, load the car, and pick Sunshine up from class. Some days she gets out later than others. When we leave at five thirty, we hit nightmare District traffic from the inner loop to Quantico. When she gets out at four o'clock, it's just the same. Today was different: because there's nothing left in the unit, there's nothing left to clean. I spent today reading between packing and leaving. Sunshine's arrival home was even earlier than ever: our trip was underway by three on the nose and we made it all the way to the Capital Beltway before traffic ground to a stop. The radio blamed accidents around Franconia, but all I saw was neatly parked commuters all the way to Quantico. Eventually we got to our North Carolina hotel to discover its lobby gridlocked with an unpronounceable wedding party, so we skipped checking-in before heading to the pool dive where our own beloved friends' wedding was doing its partying. [Cavin]