The jeans, and other ruminations and digressions

I have been under the weather since yesterday morning. It has been a good kind of sick: nothing too awful, but enough to justify lounging around all day in my nightgown and nestling into the sofa with a good book.

Just now, Wednesday at 2 p.m., I emerged into daylight for the first time. I'm still not 100%. What, then, could draw me out of doors and across the Vallcarca Viaduct? The early-morning rain gave way to bright blue cloud-dotted skies, but actually...I ran out of cigarettes. (More about smoking and Spain later.)

I'm happy because it's sunny - the kind of day, seemingly typical in Barcelona, when it's too cool for a T-shirt but too warm for a jacket. And I'm happy because I'm wearing my new jeans.

The jeans that Hannah does not like. But then, she is not here to criticize.

The jeans are big and baggy in the legs and, I imagine, provide me with the silhouette of a chic puppy. Who could resist that?

When I brought the jeans home, Hannah went to the closet to fetch them. "Ohhh Mommy," she sighed, holding the jeans between thumb and forefinger as if they were a dead rat, sorrow and pity saturating her words. "Only teenagers wear a denim rinse like this!"

I don't care. I like the jeans. They make me look a bit sloppy. Not the chic, tossed-off sloppy of the stylish boho girls near the University. I will never look like them, with their agreeably clashing layers and their dreadlocks. Maybe if I grew dreadlocks. It's odd, though, about these dreadlocks. In front, the hair is short, or long, shiny and clump-free. but from the crown back, it erupts into long, white-person dreadlocks. We deem it a strange variant of that 80s-style 'do, The Mullet (which either never went out of favor in Barcelona or is experiencing a huge resurgence). The style is sported by male and female. The oddest one I've seen was on a young, prematurely balding man with no hair on top, but what remaining hair he could marshal cascaded stiffly down his back in snarled ringlets. (I think dreadlocks can only cascade stiffly.) I'll try to find you a photo to illustrate this phenomenon, but I'm kind of shy about photographing unsuspecting people. I'll get over it.