apartment hunting

...is a little like internet dating. Sounds good, looks good, there might even be a nice e-mail correspondence beforehand, but then you show up, sit across the table from one another, and have a conversation. Reality. It's not for everyone.

Pretty soon they are telling you they don't believe in wireless technology, or sniffing your fleece coat and reporting that if you want to live in their house you'll have to change fabric softeners, and, "I just smoke in my office... I'm sure you can barely tell.." [cough, cough].

Onward...

It seemed beautiful to me

I read this lovely thing about laughter the other night, in Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. The dying narrator, a minister, is walking by two local mechanics standing outside of their garage:

"There they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline, I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It's an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see it in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent."

More Than Just a Name

Here's a short-list of what I get called at work:
Laura
Laura D
Laura Didyk (my theory about this one is that people like to say my first and last because each name is a perfect trochee, stressed syllable followed by an unstressed...so they go well one right after the other, and it would be the same if one were to add my middle name: Laura Esther Didyk, three trochees, you can say them in succession with no interruption. Try it. It's fun).
LD
Lauralu
L-Dawg
The Enforcer (alas, this is my job)

I like my new job. So far, no one has called me "babe" as almost every other person in my life, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.