Bright skies

I was up at 0630 and biking the 13 miles into work before I had a chance to think about it. So nice. The sky was cold and beautiful and bright. It made my eyes hurt. I'm listening to Matt Ridley again - but irritated he's wasting his time with philosophy instead of giving me the biology fix I've come to expect from him. C'mon buddy, you wrote "Genome" in the 1990s. Surely you can give it an update!

I'm making friends with the other women in the locker-room. The women who bicycle into work, like me. Neat company. Mathematician from Uruguay who studied General Relativity for her graduate thesis. A Dutch physicist working on her PhD and fighting with her graduate advisor (don't we all?); a German woman who does near-earth observation with satellites.

Stopped by for take-out on my way home. I'm coming down with a head cold and wanted soup. Didn't really occur to me before now: the Vietnamese place is neighbors with the sex shop. I could stop by for Pho and a strap-on dildo without ever going out into the rain.

Still too lonely for my own good. I meditate and do yoga and go for long and glorious rides in the sunlight but I am too alone. Extroverted personality traits tend to stretch and expand during enforced solitude and I find myself chatting up the girl opposite me on the train, the man next to me on the bus, the biologist at the coffee machine, and the artist in the hallway. I go to running club so I can punish myself with an 8 mile jog and have someone to talk to while I do it. Pretty much anyone who will take the time to look at me gets an earful. And god forbid someone actually touch me. I'm hungry for human contact. Two weeks ago, when I met the young physicist during a bicycle ride in the rain and we went out for beers in the cold, I said goodbye with a hug that lasted far too long.

I'll be fine, I know. It's just the empty spaces in the transition. This is just another transition.