Me and English rain

After a long adjustment period, me and the rain in England have finally come to an understanding. When I first got here, I confess that I was inclined to scoff at English rain. It would start to drizzle the tiniest bit, and everyone would shriek and run away and be completely horrified by the incredibly heavy rain that was raining down, while I was like, Dude. It is drizzling. This hardly even qualifies as rain. The clouds are not splitting. They are hardly even spitting. Do not get your umbrellas out for this.

Even when it is quite rainy, there is never quite the same magnificence to it that there is at home, because there is no dramatic thunderstorming. So I sneered at English rain, and it, in return, got me extremely wet while I was still thinking that it did not have the capacity to do that.

But now we are good friends, the English rain and I. Every time it starts to rain, I agree to go to my window and lean out and get drizzled on, and the rain agrees to also drizzle on people who think the rain is a much bigger catastrophe than I think it is, for my viewing pleasure. I like to watch them put on their hoods and scurry along the sidewalks in order to escape. In an obvious way this should be schadenfreude, but I like to think that it is also my abiding love for humanity. I like to people-watch. It's just that it's more fun (at least when you're high up and can't hear what they're saying) if I can watch them trying to get out of the drizzly English rain.

Now the English rain likes me so much that it waited for me to get back from town before it began raining, presumably so that I would be safe and dry and in my tower ready to amuse myself by watching other people get wet. (Cause our deal wouldn't work if I couldn't watch from the tower, and if I were in town, I obviously couldn't watch from the tower.)

Speaking of which, the other night I totally couldn't get to sleep because this guy was puking outside my window for like a half an hour! I'd start to doze off and then I'd hear BWWWW (that is my onomatopoeic approximation of the sound), followed by twenty seconds of spitting noises. At first I was just frustrated because the guy was loud, but then he kept on puking, endlessly, and I began to be concerned that he might be gagging up an organ or plasma or something, so I went to the window to see if he was going to survive. Of course I couldn't really see him, just a blur of white beside a tree, but having thought the thought that he might be dying, I couldn't fall asleep, and every time I heard BWWWW (spit spit spit) I thought, OMG he's going to die because I'm too lazy to call the medical people. But eventually someone came up to him and said, Ruh ruh ruh right? Bruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh, and he said, Ruh ruh ruh. Ruh fine. Ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh., so I figured there was nothing to worry about and went to sleep. (I was up high and could not hear them very well, so this is an approximate description of how the conversation went.)

Well, that has nothing to do with English rain, and the rain has stopped now in any case, which means that I can no longer watch Frisbee players and such run for cover. I suppose I had better start studying Jane Austen, which is just my virtuous way of procrastinating for studying Wallace Stevens and Yeats. Why is there so much Wallace Stevens in the world?