Playing in puddles

I went to "Across the Universe" last night. One of the movie's kisses seems to have set me off, and I cried through the last third of the film and all the way back to my friends' place. I walked home from there, and felt as upset as ever until I saw a clogged storm drain. The Wet Seal store in the mall where we watched the film was giving out hangers for free, so I had taken three. I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs, and used a hanger and my hands to clear the debris from the grate.

It's really something to watch--one of the best parts of a good rain. It had been raining all evening, so the backed up pool had come over the curb and stretched across the road. I walked through the water, stepping up onto the curb, and then used one of my new hangers to sound out the asphalt at the edge of the street. I quickly found the soft feel of clumps of soggy leaves, and knew that must be where the grate was. After scraping for a while with the hanger, I gave up and scraped with my hand, my left shirt cuff rolled up above my elbow.

Everyone should try this at some point. You pull the leaves out, and it's like pulling the drain plug on an enormous tub; the water begins to whirl around into a rather large tornado, and you can see the water level dropping. You continue to pull leaves off the grate as they continue to clot the storm drain like a heart attack victim's ventricles. Eventually you accidentally open another hole in the thick coating of leaves on the drain, and another whirlpool opens up.

Pseudoscientists take note: the Coriolis effect, which makes storms north of the equator spin counterclockwise and south of the equator clockwise, has no effect on latitude differences as small as toilets, tubs, or even huge pools in the middle of the road. The first tornado spun clockwise and the second spun counterclockwise. This makes sense because whirlpools, like electrons or gears, like to spin in opposite directions in order to (in the case of whirlpools and gears, at least) reduce friction, spinning complementarily instead of contrarily.

Doing something I hadn't done much since childhood lightened my mood a bit, partially because doing something so odd in the middle of the night made me feel so carefree.

Anyway, I'm feeling a bit better. I really need to set up dates with those girls and get myself socialising again.