I am listening to one of my favorite, possibly my absolute favorite bands, Goldfrapp. The song, Pilot, epitomizes tonight perfectly.

There is a big, black cloud sitting resolutely on top of my town. Even the city glow has been held down firmly. It is dreamy, but confining, limiting, something engineered specifically to make you take count of vast, overpowering things that can settle on our little lives with just a whim of weather. Just like this song.

We're pilots watching stars,
The world preoccupied
We're pilots watching stars,
Who do we think we are?

I wish I could stick it here for you to... um, hear, but I don't know where I would put a file that size on the internet.

My boyfriend Joshua and I stayed up until 2:11 a.m. last night, having one of those kinds of conversations you can only have with a lover, take that as you will. Since we live about five hours apart, we exchange love in whatever ways we can, I suppose. That, and he was all liquored up, with high levels of vodka in his bloodstream making him an easy target. After we spoke, I fell asleep, almost immediately as I had to rise early in the morning.

At 6:00 a.m., I woke up and got out of bed to take a shower. But it was not in the cards for me, apparently, because my water heater didn't like something I said about its median temperature range or something. So, no shower. Hoorah. Now I am disgusting, immensly tired, and I have to drive two hours in very, very thick fog.

Why, you ask?

Well, my family, strange birds as they are, thinks that the only decent orthodontist is 120 miles away. So that is where I go for my orthodontic treatments, to Hobbs, NM. Hub of... several dairies. And... a mediocre montage of fast food restaurants. And the only orthodontist that my parents trust in a thri-state area.

Today, however, was a special ortho day. Today, after various treatments since the seventh grade, I had my braces removed. The only downside to this is that the only time the office schedules removals is at the god-awful hour of 8:00 a.m. Then, they fit you for a retainer made of clear plastic molded to the exact shape of your teeth. Quite discreet, and also quite a pain in the ass to have to wait for. Three extra hours in Hobbs, NM.

I elected to spend the first of mine in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, knitting.

I make an interesting spectacle as a knitter, not the only one in a young generation, but certainly one of a fairly rare breed. In this parking lot, I attracted the attention of one Supercenter patron who looked in my window and, smiling, said, "I did that once. I made a fuzzy cap." He was about fifty, and had a fairly conspicuous hearing aide and black checkered hat. A kindred spirit, an odd little bird of a man who bravely and spookily admits to a complete stranger several decades his junior in the parking lot of a consumer monument that he and she have a shared experience. This is one of the benefits (?) of being a young knitter, I suppose. The other is that during the hour in the Wal-Mart Supercenter parking lot I finished two Christmas gifts and caught up on my people watching.

The second hour was spent in a Subway Sandwich shop across the way from the Wal-Mart. My craft here provoked a more interesting array of responses, from the shy little smiles of large women in stretch pants to the condescending jeers of the young and beautiful. The cowboys had to be my favorite, however. They looked alternately between my attire and my needles and couldn't decide, it appeared, whether I would make a good housewife to do the cookin' or a good liberal to lynch. I am a liberalist, when you get right down to it, but I doubt these boys would have cared much for the distinction.

The third hour was spent back in the festive little office of my orthodontist, discussing removals with a loquacious little thing named Pasha. It turns out that her stepmother is also her heigenist at this clinic, and the latter came before the first, oddly enough. Anyway, teeth to die for. So, she did.

:B <------ My new teeth. Didn't they do a superb job?

So, after recovering my retainer, I returned home. I had to spend a half an hour in the little podunk town of Brownfield looking for my car key, which I had accidentally dropped into a bag full of tangled yarns before I went into the convenience store. One of the hazards of being a young knitter.

Eventually, though I got back to Wolfforth and went to the last couple of hours of school, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. When I picked my younger sister, Heather, from work at the fabric store at 9:00 p.m., we went to Sonic to get extra long cheese coneys and immoral amounts of vanilla and strawberry flavored carbonated beverages while blasting some nice oldies, Nirvana.

The clouds still sat over the city, and in the places where the orange and blue-white lights mixed, it looked like the eeriest daylight.