The View Out My Window Is My Greatest Pleasure

It’s soothing. And these days soothing is a service.

The image you see above is the view outside my bedroom window at 4:16pm Sunday evening. If this photo had been taken at 6:16pm (or even — I’ll be generous — 5:16pm) I’d say “what a beautiful winter sunset!” Instead, the vista gave me a strange urge to lean far enough into the window that I sort of just rolled out, as if rolling off of a bed. (I do have a small balcony, but it’s designed for flowerpots, so this manuever is purely hypothetical.) What I’m saying is that the view made me sleepy. It made me want to knock off work call it a day. Unfortunately my working day was nowhere near over.

I couldn’t really lie down on my bed because my bedroom is also my office and my bed is a wall bed. Most days, I dutifully put the bed up into its cabinet, an only slightly more strenuous version of making the bed. I do this so there’s space to pull my desk away from the opposite wall and set it next to the window. (All cables and cords are arranged to make this a smooth transition.)

In the pandemic, I spend nearly all of my time at my desk. There’s not really anywhere else to go, since my sofa, is petite and mostly decorative and I don’t have a dining table. (As you may have gathered by now, the tradeoff for my view is that my apartment is…