Early morning dark, rain falling, weekday-getting-ready routine, mildly melancholy-infused thoughts

Like a small campfire under a heavy canopy of conifer trees, the living room end table lamp creates a hub of visual warmth and light once I switch it on this dark early morning. The light radiates outward across the living room in fading concentric circles. Out the apartment window I can see cars moving slowly and quietly through the intersection of my little Hollywood-set-esque "downtown." The occasional pedestrian, hood up and slouching against the falling rain, shuffles sleepily in and out of the Starbucks across the road. Somewhere outside I hear a dog barking energetically for a few seconds, then back to the relative silence of the street and rain. The street lights glow, just like my end table lamp, and reflect in the rain puddles and the shimmering wet of the cobblestone-like street below. Most of the storefronts are only partially illuminated, still closed until an hour of morning yet to come.

In a future that feels almost like a past I’m positive is there—
But where? I think my life is still all conversation,
Only now it’s with myself. I can see it continuing forever,
Even in my absence, as I close the windows and turn off the lights
And it begins to rain.
   - John Koethe, from Ninety-Fifth Street

Celebrating our differences is one thing, living them is still something else. We are still sorted and described by the things that make us different (which, I suppose, is what the whole notion of "difference" is all about). As Kermit so famously sang, "It isn't easy being green." Kermit also sang:

Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong wait and see
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me
   - from, The Rainbow Connection, written by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher

Early morning dark, rain falling, weekday-getting-ready routine, mildly melancholy-infused thoughts, I suppose. What is the freedom of choice? "...an individual's opportunity and autonomy to perform an action selected from at least two available options, unconstrained by external parties." (Wikipedia's definition works as well as any I've seen). But, really, what isn't "unconstrained by external parties" in a connected society? Every free choice is a negotiation with some sort of cost or consequence, maybe very small or maybe large.

Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown
pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit
wherever we want now. No need in making trouble,
she says. You all go back to New York City but
I have to live here.
    - Jacqueline Woodson, from what everybody knows now

Life is nothing, if not complicated.

But I like a rainy tuesday early morning like this one. I move to the kitchen and turn on the back right stove burner, the smallest burner where my little espresso pot, already set up last night with finely ground yerba mate, waits. I microwave a cup of whole milk, and wait for the pot to build up pressure and force the water up through the mate and into the upper chamber. Combine: my mate latte is ready. The only latte choice remaining is whether to take the time to enjoy it here or pour it into my thermos and enjoy it when I get to campus. I grab my thermos.