Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

In bright light, this shirt is army green. In shadows, it looks like it’s navy blue. If I were to jump up high, it might turn some other shade. I don’t know for sure. I’m not good at jumping. And I don’t know what color represents the air force. My current set of masks is purple. I was planning to stick with the usual pale sky blue, but the supermarket downstairs from work is out of them. I got what they had. It’s a good shade of purple, lighter than grapes but brighter than lavender. In a world of uniform blue masks, they stand out a little, but not too much. The only other people I’ve seen wearing them are the supermarket workers. Since I don’t wear a yellow vest, no one has mistaken me yet for one of them. I see fewer distinctive masks now than I did when people started wearing them. Maybe they’ve stopped thinking of them as fashion statements. The newest person at work wears a lovely floral mask. The purple streak in her blonde hair almost matches my mask, though she’s so tall that I only noticed it when I was standing and she was sitting down. Most of the masks that I see at the supermarket today are either the usual surgical blue or black. Many of the black ones have a small Adidas logo at the lower left corner. Some children have fancier and more whimsical masks. A small boy in the cereal aisle has a mask that looks like Spider-Ham. They seem to call most cereal here “kornfleks.” I’ve never seen anyone eat them. A lot of people eat salads at breakfast. I don’t think I would have the energy in the morning to prepare one. I miss the cafes’ Israeli breakfasts. I look forward to having them again, if the lockdown ever ends. I’ve gotten making breakfasts here down to a pattern. It does involve vegetables, but that’s usually just a pepper, washed, torn apart, and munched as I sit at my computer. When I buy them, I try to get peppers of a uniform color, different from the last time. It helps me know which I should finish first. It works. In the morning, I have just enough energy to grab a shirt from the stack and put it on. I find out what color I’ve chosen after the coffee kicks in.