Scenes from the post office
This afternoon I packaged up the jacket that J's friend had left in their hotel room in San Jose and went to the post office to mail it back to him. There was only one clerk and a moderately long line, given that it was after 5 o'clock. Eventually, the woman behind me insisted on striking up a conversation, so I obliged her. She had recently lost 21 pounds, about which she was quite pleased. The trouble was that she didn't know how she did it, other than going off the pill, and her mother-in-law was eager to benefit from her weight-loss secrets, though she insisted she didn't have any, being mostly housebound (and often seat-bound due to arthritis), and she hadn't much changed her diet. Eventually we concluded that maybe limiting how often she eats bagels had helped.
The really interesting person was the one in front of me, mailing a small semi-cylindrical package within the U.S. and another to Canada. He had long, red dreadlocks and was dressed rather like a cross between a frontiersman and a Russian peasant, with a home-sewn jacket pieced together with exaggeratedly large stitches, and pants to match. He was telling the clerk that he lives in the forest with some friends; they're learning how to build with logs. The clerk asked if he was vegetarian, and no, he was not. It would be awfully hard to live in and off the forest without eating meat, I imagine. It would have been fascinating to listen in on a longer conversation, but that was about the extent of it.
The really interesting person was the one in front of me, mailing a small semi-cylindrical package within the U.S. and another to Canada. He had long, red dreadlocks and was dressed rather like a cross between a frontiersman and a Russian peasant, with a home-sewn jacket pieced together with exaggeratedly large stitches, and pants to match. He was telling the clerk that he lives in the forest with some friends; they're learning how to build with logs. The clerk asked if he was vegetarian, and no, he was not. It would be awfully hard to live in and off the forest without eating meat, I imagine. It would have been fascinating to listen in on a longer conversation, but that was about the extent of it.