on having feelings

despite my best efforts

Austin and I have a long-standing disagreement about lighting. I tend to switch on the overhead light and forget about it. He prefers indirect light, so, should he enter a room after me, he’ll go around switching on lamps and switching off the overhead.

I always say that I don’t feel a difference and he says that, really, I think I don’t feel a difference but I do (that is, in various subtle ways, my day is improved by the indirect lighting even if I don’t attribute my uplift in mood to its effects). Should we ever live in the same place perhaps we’ll deal with this by simply removing all the bulbs from the overhead lights. Then I can’t turn them on out of habit even if I try.

I think about this thing with the lights from time to time because in certain ways I am a very dense, even sort of stupid, person. It means there are many things that might cumulatively…