Noises off

Last night there was a proper thunderstorm. It started off quietly enough: walking back from the MTR I saw occasional flashes in the sky and distant rumbling, but it could easily have been mistaken for a flickering neon sign and somebody dropping their luggage.

About 10 o'clock it got its act together: an avalanche of rain while God kicked his drumkit downstairs and the Manulife building in Causeway Bay took a direct hit. Teach them to build thing so high, won't it?

Alas, this is a secondhand retelling of the storm, for while my girlfriend was craning her head out the window to experience static discharges in all their heavenly glory, I was crouched over a plate of pasta, only pausing from concentration on carbohydrates to mumble monosyllabically.¹

Positive thinking has never done anything bad for me, so as I was put to bed to sleep I tried to think positive thoughts about my environment. A lesser person might have encountered insomnia, what with the barrage of lightning and rain. I just tried to imagine it as something restful, as the sound of being underwater, surrounded by fish and sea urchins.

I don't think my girlfriend appreciated me yelling out that I was drowning. Oh well.

¹ A propos of which, has it ever struck you that "monosyllabic" is not monosyllabic? Perhaps we should coin a word, "reflexive" for words that do reflect their meaning, like "short" or "polysyllabic", and another word, "irreflexive" for words which don't, like "long". And then we could ask whether "irreflexive" is irreflexive or not. And then ponder why we don't seem capable of recalling the set theory we studied as philosophy undergraduates.^2
2 Not me, of course. I haven't got time for pondering, I've got to go get a beard trim from the Barber of Seville, just as soon as he's had his own hair cut.