Rainy Days and Sundays

Unlike Karen Carpenter, do not get me down...however, there's some serious rain hitting 14th St (and, I presume, the rest of the city), so after I finished today's (increasingly annoying) LSAT practice, I took off my cute new Urban Outfitter yellow sneakers and put on those J Crew boots I spent all winter breaking in (no, I do not have a pair of Wellies - an omission I clearly must rectify) to walk to Whole Foods.

Slight diversion, but it all comes together: the other night LSAT was ticking me off, so I took a break and meandered over to ITunes, always a bad move when one is drunk or in a self-pitying mood - and I went through all the Hot 100 charts from like 1939, which was a very fun walk down memory lane of songs from the car with my parents, or high school parties, or songs that came out when my cousins and I were in Malta for the summer. But I got into this 80s mood and like a drunken sailor, started downloading songs without thinking.

So there I am, walking to Whole Foods in the pouring rain with a crappy umbrella someone left at the last party and I'm going through all my new songs and I realize this is my list of 80s songs:

-Tainted Love

-Oh, Sheila

-Africa

-Raspberry Beret

-Take My Breath Away

All classic 80s, sure, but I have absolutely no idea what I was thinking when I hit "purchase" - this is the most random 80s collection I could've accumulated. Where is "Bette Davis Eyes", for one, or "Boys of Summer", or any Duran Duran whatsoever?

But as I'm listening to Toto wax poetic about wild dogs and Kilamanjaro rising like Olympus over the Serengheti (who came up with that line? genius) and the really awful cockney accent that opens "Oh Sheila" and I'm smiling like a damn fool and so these were actually brilliant choices, clearly, despite the fact that even the homeless guys are like "weirdo - not asking Smiley over there for change")

And it's pouring, and that made me think of this day at the Imperial tombs in Hue and then I remembered that today has nothing on that day, when we got caught in what must've been a monsoon, drenched everything we owned and lost my friend Steens for a while after she veered off the road towards a bridge:

And then I thought of this day in Phnom Penh, when Steens' little brother made me carry him through the market so he wouldn't get his feet wet:

...and I was in such a good mood when I got to Whole Foods I spent a fortune on a bunch of items I'm sure I don't need, like grapefruit body lotion and these organic sponges (just because I didn't know they existed) and on the way home, kept grinning and watching people run through the rain on the way to late brunch or to spend their own fortunes on organic who knows what and I'm thinking, how on earth can Sundays and rain not be fun?