the good and the messy

Strange times: In two weeks, I'm out of this cottage where I've been renting a room. I'll be in Oregon for at least three weeks over the holidays (have yet to book a plane ticket back to CA: maybe will take the train?). And then I'll probably be here in CA till the end of January in a studio in the Haight (sublet: I'm checking it out tomorrow... kind of an adventure to take a bus somewhere new). And then, I guess, Wisconsin? And a dissertation chapter on Dickens?

Anyways, that was all to set up the fact that, regarding the messiness of life, I love this from Forster's Life of Dickens:

A longer time afterward he recollected the stage-coach journey, and in one of his published papers said that never had he forgotten, through all the intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed and forwarded, like game, carriage paid. "There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to find it." (11)

Sloppier than I expected.

But: I went on the Target/Trader Joe's trip tonight and bought a box of chocolates that was on sale. And I was estimating the number of chocolates left, vs. the number I had eaten, and thinking, no, I shouldn't, when I realized that the box contains ANOTHER LEVEL of chocolate. Paradigm changer, my friends.