On the walk to lunch, I felt it: raindrops!  Just a few tentative beads falling from an ambivalent sunny-cloudy sky, barely tangible.  I stretch out my arms and stop for a moment, turning to my friend–“This is the first rain I’ve felt in three months!”  Reportedly, it’s been raining in Akka and two weeks ago for a few minutes in Haifa, but I missed it.

After lunch, I step outside and it’s raining in earnest, fat drops and the fragrance of ozone.  I hesitate under the overhang, considering taking the tunnel back to my office.  But I choose to be impractical and to take a walk through the garden in the rain.  It’s deserted, and I appreciate my solitary stroll, pretending that my skin is like the soil thirstily drinking up the rain.  By the time I get to my building, my shirt is dappled and my hair has curled into messy ringlets.  I might work indoors all day, but that doesn’t mean my existence must be hermetic in either sense of the word.

Navel-gazing, arboreally.  It’s only natural.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about awkward interactions, hasn’t it?  I’m sure they’re still happening to me (or more aptly I’m happening to them).  Maybe I’m just acclimated and no longer even notice.   Maybe I’ve finally broken out of my chrysalis of shyness into a gorgeously non-awkward social butterfly (lolz, yeah right).  Or maybe I’m getting too contemplative–goodness, I keep writing about lying in the grass and soaking up the rain, even though the majority of my time is spent in the land of Excel spreadsheets!