nawl: Fall descends into winter.

The leaves are mostly gone from the trees, now.

At their best, the days are spectacular, bright and clear, cool without an edge, little fluffy clouds, worry-line bare branches reaching into the sky.

After a big storm the gardeners organize the leaves into long piles along the paths on campus in order to suck them up with truck-sized vacuum cleaners, and the classes of small children who mysteriously always seem to be touring the campus run crunching through them, screaming and laughing.

Recurrent headaches. Every time it happens I forget, I should really know better, and then I realize I'm in immediate danger of descending into non-functionality somewhere unfortunate, like a boomy flashy dance party in Manhattan, a noisy and bright hour and a half on the train away from sleep. The pills I was prescribed evaporate the pain, but I feel wrong for the next few days. I'm losing my nights.

I had an MRI. They injected me with rare earth metals, packaged me up on a tray in blankets, earplugs and ear padding, and loaded me into a tube in the machine, with a mirror above my eyes and an alarm in my hand for contact with the outside world. For all the precautions about the noise, it really wasn't much different from the construction outside my window.

I have "minimal nonspecific white matter abnormalities", which probably doesn't mean anything.

I realized that in the past year I've spent more than $600 on shoes, including one pair of snow boots, two pairs of normal shoes to replace the ones that I managed to misplace during Burning Man, and three pairs dancing shoes, the most recent being a stunning pair of pristine white satin standard shoes to break in before the Viennese Opera Ball. They're too beautiful to dance in.