Last night I went through the hall cupboard and discarded numerous bottles of nail polish, old lipsticks, redundant eye shadow, clumpy mascara. I consolidated the makeup into my pretty silver cosmetics box and moved on to the bathroom, to toss bottles of disliked toner and hair goop and so on.

I promise to be more careful. Makeup is such an impulse buy, so tempting, a pick-me-up. Here at my desk at work I even have a few lipsticks to play with. So girly, I know. But it’s a pleasant distraction to smear color on the lips, stay inside the lines. Press them together and feel their buttery texture.

I collected the keepers from the cupboard and half-filled a box I scavenged from work. I have so many Lush bath bombs. I love these things. But I rarely use them because our current tub is so very unpleasant, with the drain on the wrong end and so on. The new tub is a massive, deep claw-foot, soon to be filled with fizzy salts, hot water, and of course, me.

I am considering keeping my collection of New Yorker magazines. First I was going to give them away. Then I was going to sell them. Maybe online or at our sidewalk sale. But now I realize that since we will have ample basement storage space… I may not be ready to let them all go. I need time… to comb through them again and save the stories I liked best. Dammit.

But I am definitely tossing all the issues of Living and so on.

It was so sunny this morning, with a crisp, cold breeze off the hills. These days every time I wait at my corner traffic light I think about how not long from now I will no longer have to deal with this dangerous, noisy intersection. How I might make a point of never crossing these streets again. Cars lurch blindly through the turn, drivers on cell phones 95% of the time. I’ve witnessed two accidents on my street, those are just the ones I saw myself. Never seen a pedestrian hit, just lucky I guess. Now I should knock wood.

People on the train are always interesting to me. Maybe that’s part of why people watch cheap “reality” tv. We are just fascinated by each other, just as dogs and cats are fascinated by each other. This guy got on the train in his shiny Todd Oldham denim jacket and furiously pecked at his PDA with a little black stylus. Some girl took up two seats (rude) as she slouched over the lanyard she was weaving, two dirty blonde dreadlocks hanging on either side of her eyes.

Speaking of cheap reality tv, I caught about 45 minutes of the new shitty matchmaking show on NBC last night as I was doing my stretching and crunches in the living room. So. Over. The. Top. But you can always count on the fame whores to provide absurd entertainment. The gold-diggin hos were predictably over-eager and fake-sincere, and the clueless bachelor in question had apparently undergone some kind of personalityectomy. Yes I just made up that word, but for these purposes it works.

I mean, when you have to dump five women in the space of ten minutes, can you think of another line besides “I don’t think it’s going to work out”? Please get this man some cue cards, stat.

Anyway. I went to bed after that and dreamed about taking long car rides in flat places, and then feeling homesick at the place I ended up.