The town's sundial will be useless!

It's getting on toward winter, my first real one with snow and giant Christmas trees and Macy's rioting and if I'm very very very lucky, elves. I've been fascinated since high school, when I first read David What's-His-Name's obscure little essay on the real, grown-up adult people who voluntarily wear furry hats and jingly shoes and work at Santaland because they need to buy groceries or a place to live or whatever. You won't have heard of him. (Will we see an upsurge in former Wall Street employees this year, looking for a change of pace, a place to get out of the cold, or just the chance to ask Santa for their careers back? Regardless, I'm sure they have a lot to say. The coming months will likely find me wandering about the department store, a Muji notebook in my hand, doing my best to guess which elf will win NPR's random annual drawing to become an international celebrity essayist.)

But before we can have elves and blinky lights we have to have fall! That is, from what I've gathered, how seasons work. And fall is, again from what I've gathered, a time of year marked by the complete disintegration of systems and objects that were whole and functioning not a month and a half prior. Since the equinox two or so weeks ago, here are some things that Saturnus has felled with his sickle and gathered unto himself for his grim harvest feast:

1) my laptop
2) our foundationally sound economy
3) everyone's immune system
4) the entire fucking sun

So yesterday with the sun-blocker securely in place and harvest festival plans nixed due to plague I went alone to see "Blindness" (bad move) and then with some Californian MFA colleagues to Westville East (whose website is down, THANKS FALL), where we lamented what we missed about living near or below the equator and compared inabilities to choose appropriate footwear. This evolved into an idea for some type of weekly Sarah Lawrence dining club devoted to trying new cuisines and complaining about our stupid, stupid classmates. Next week is either a dinner party at someone's apartment or Ethiopian food and I think the plan is to talk about people who don't use punctuation in their fiction. I'll keep you posted.