cold wet and invincible

Economics and common sense make strange bedfellows...

I had hoped at least, for a ride to the transit center. my umbrella was missing in action, and today was the kind of day that you really need one unless you wanted to swim in your clothes.

if you guessed that i had to wade through the rain to get to the TC, you would be absolutely correct.

Jumping over the small lakes that had materialized on my quiet neighborhood street, i made it to the bus stop just in time for the rain to start falling in earnest. and i had to stand there for about 10 minutes because the bus was a good 5 minutes late.
10 minutes is just long enough for it to soak in to the outer layers...

i froze waiting for the train to come...the underpass must've been 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding area. makes me think the barriers against sleeping were probably a bit pointless, who in their right mind would want to sleep under that icebox of an underpass?

by the time i got off the train, the rain, if anything was even worse. i was on the wrong side of the highway from the shopping center, but luckily there was a pedestrian bridge, so i sloshed over that (the water had soaked through my shoes from stepping in too many puddles), and made it to the shopping center with 10 minutes to spare.
Except this wasn't the right shopping center, which became abundantly clear.
So I had to go back....

I was pretty good and wet by the time I came to my next quandry. The new directions were to head west, which seemed to defy common sense...west was a long expanse of a nursery growing operation on one side of the road, and trees and trees and trees on the other. No sign of a shopping center.

But I went that way anyhow. There was no sidewalk so I had to walk along side the road past speeding cars. If anything, it rained even harder, but by this point it hardly mattered. I went from feeling an innate sense of despair, to the zen like calm of being completely at one with the rain...an attitude that makes perfectly good sense considering that I wasn't going to get any drier anytime soon.

Just when I was starting to think this whole trip was not only a complete loss, but an utterly insane idea, I came across the reassuring sight of a shopping center full of recognizable corporate chains...I had made it and the journey was at an end. To add a note of irony to this whole moment of catharsis, the sun came out all golden and glorious, shining with full force upon my sodden defiance of common sense.

So at last I made it and stalked across the wet parking lot, oblivious to lane conformity and the the parking and exiting needs of the drivers of cars, all of whom were much drier and warmer than I was.

I don't know what if anything will come out of this (besides some kind of illness perhaps), but it all seems far less traumatic now that I'm home wrapped up in a blanket on the couch. Now I know that there are worse things in life than being rained on.