Burrito Express

[Written Sunday, October 6, 2002] I'm sitting at Burrito Express, my manna-from-heaven source. I wonder how many bean and cheese burritos, spicy, I've eaten during the three years I've lived in this neighborhood? A bean and cheese burrito, spicy, is the ultimate in comfort and convenience food. It is hot, soft, fairly nutritious, and filling. The restaurant—except restaurant isn't quite the word, even though there are three tables with benches squeezed inside where you order and tables outside under an awning and surrounded by a wainscoting-level wall with a two-foot wrought iron railing fence on top of the wall—is excellently situated on my way to the freeway when going to school and on my way home when I come back. A traffic light conveniently lets one get back on the busy street after picking up a burrito. And a burrito, expertly wrapped, can be eaten with one hand while driving. Today I'm sitting in the lately hot late afternoon sun with my back to the busy street and have almost finished my burrito.

On my drive here via the cash machine, I wanted to write everything I saw and remembered, like Laura's Chinese notebook(s?). Except that I'm writing on the back of a print-out of my sister and brother-in-law's wedding registry. (I still have to get their gift; according to the Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, it is acceptable to give a wedding gift up to one year after the wedding.)

There was a woman I'd see when I used to hang out at coffee shops, back when I was a "real" student when I first moved to California. She had three or four journals she would hold up to her face and speak into as though they were dictating machines.

At the cash machine I heard two men talking behind me, and I knew they were speaking Armenian. I tried to figure out how I knew it was Armenian—it's sort of guttural and the diction is quite deliberate. But would I be able to identify it if I was in a place I didn't know there were people who spoke Armenian?

[Today] I wrote more but have recorded enough. I am tired and blank.