I am home on a lunch break, and for some reason I am experiencing a sense of lucidity and reawakening that I have somewhat rarely, a feeling of awareness and mental energy. It's hard to explain what it feels like, why it is that my thoughts seem to have a different tone from what I'm used to. I was just thinking about a call I made yesterday to the office of a dentist Anne and I went to early this year. I was calling to make a new appointment, and the receptionist told me that we had missed back-to-back appointments for September which I didn't know we had. He sounded pretty mad at me, and said, "You can't just not show up for an appointment. I called both of your phone numbers, and sent a postcard." I explained that we had moved and gotten new phones, and that I received none of his messages, and also didn't know we had made appointments.

I was left unsatisfied, because the receptionist didn't acknowledge anything I was saying. Just now I wanted to reach out to him somehow, with an email or a visit, and explain again that I was sorry but that I didn't think I had done anything wrong. Then somehow I got to thinking about how strange it was that I had a dentist, a person whose income depended on patients, people coming in for the service of having their teeth cleaned and examined. I am in a relationship with this woman, the dentist, that seems somehow unnatural, a result of the complicated social structure of modernity. Like pretty much everyone alive today, I have indistinct professional relationships with people who have received abstract credentials allowing them to perform well-defined services isolated from all other areas of life. I don't know the dentist as anything other than a dentist, nor her receptionist as anything other than a person who is employed by the dentist to answer a phone in her office, make appointments, and receive payments from patients.

I then thought about how strange it is that the tree in my back yard has a trunk that split early in its growth, so that it has branches and leaves growing out of two separate, equally thick parts; and sometimes the owner of my house hires people to come and cut off some of the branches on this living plant, because they happen to be growing in areas that threaten the house's roof.

What might I call thoughts like these? They seem strangely analytical, putting words to patterns of life that I usually act on without consciousness because I too am a part of the systems I'm examining.

Usually I just think about consuming, with unvocalized thoughts like "what can I eat now, because I'm hungry?" or "it's cold in here" or "maybe I can read Watchmen later today, when I get home." I've noticed in the last few days that my thoughts are usually very boring and relate only to myself, Anne, or Scott, and our immediate needs. I wonder why sometimes I seem to think in other ways, and why it's so rare.