Yay, another person from Tucson! I'm pleased. Given that the town has its flaws (nothing at all to do for the under-21, intermittent and unpleasant public transportation, a surplus of old people), but I wouldn't live anywhere else. I love the desert, I really do. I have a fascination for this climate and this environment that borders on the erotic. The desert is beautiful in a way that few other, more temperate environments aren't. Austere, brutal, severe, brutally simple, sharp-edged and gleaming from the macro- to the microscopic, desolate and fiercely living from the sensual to the biological. If I sound like I'm describing a person, I mean to. Desert-dwellers know that the wisest course is to treat the environment as an entity, one that has no interest whatsoever in ensuring your survival, and one that houses many, many things, both living and nonliving, that would impassively watch you die. Is there beauty in this? Of course. Any implacable force is beautiful, if only because we must look at it that way to avoid hating something we can't change and thus wasting our energy. We laugh to avoid crying, we revere the beauty of the desert to avoid fearing it.

Even the overlay of a city I alternately love and hate can't dim the splendor. There's something powerfully moving about walking around a corner in the height of summer, wearing as little as you can get away with and literally feeling your skin burning as the sun beats down, making the pavement and the sky too bright to look at and leaving you a narrow margin of shadowy middleground that you can squint at without going blind. Feeling the 110 degree heat and a blast of wind like the breath of hell--these things are sublime to me.
I guess the gist of this excessively long rhapsody would be Desert Dwellers Unite!

In other news, I might get to move up to cooking at work. Right now I'm a disher, which is *shh* semi-secret code for Universal Minimum-Wage Slave. And bugger all you who live in states where the minimum wage is $7. 'Round here I'm grateful to be making $6. But if I become a line cook I'll make more and have a less crappy job. And I can lord it over all the rest of the kitchen--YES! So today is a good day.