Rainy day. Listening to Bon Iver's slide guitar and the fragile voice of Cat Power singing Wild Is the Wind only fills me with an immense desire to be home, in Portland. I love this kind of day, when all I want to do is curl up on my mother's couch, overlooking the grey garden, punctuated only by the ever-brilliant Japanese Maple. I want to sit there and "read." It's not real reading; it's the reading where you don't, except for a sentence here and there. Mostly you just gaze out the window. It's the kind of day where I could sit in an empty café all day long, sipping a warm, sweet coffee, watching the occasional passer-by. Just watching. I don't want to talk to anyone. It's the kind of day that somehow inspires me with its emptiness.

There's a woman here, a sort of Spanish Audrey Hepburn street-walker. She has the most incredible face. I so admire those who have the courage to take a stranger's photograph.

I just can't ask.