How to live until 100

I woke up with a jump (those involuntary, embarrassing, convulsions that twist your body in your sleep, as if shaking any bad, disease-like, impurity that you may have caught in one of your dreams). ‘I should research on which are the finest activities and thoughts that I should nurture, if I shall live until 100’, I must have thought, but I am not sure if I speak any clearly at six zero zero am. Indeed, I had to re-think my thought twice, ‘what did I just say?’.

I put on a floral see-through romper (I don’t own one, I just imagined that’s what a writer should say about my character), and off I went to the closest library (and by closest I mean, if I had to patronizingly give directions to any tourist, “turn right after the Starbucks store, and the destination is one block to the left”).

The imaginary outfit was rather inappropriate, as it was pouring rain. And the library was an inconvenience, as well, for what I needed was a hard-cover notebook with white paper sheets. It was clear that I could not progress any further without a brainstorming session. And hence I changed location, now wearing an (imaginary) see-through floral, wet romper.

Thirteen minutes later, I arrived at the craftsman's shop. I don’t mean it as in the craftsman’s shop of the local neighborhood, but as in the name of the shop. ‘If I owned an arts supply shop I would squeeze my neurons for more juice’, I told myself, ‘but that is just me’.

I had to back off my ephemeral thoughts of superiority, as I could not find any notebook of my liking and was in need of an alternative human support that was not myself, preferably the craftsman's worker (and by ‘the’, I meant ‘the’, as he was the only worker in the shop).

He was cleaning up his desk. He looked like he had two more coffees than he should have had, and had a gold teeth at the very back of his minuscule set of tooth (I was not born in Hastings, and I always get teeth and tooth wrong; no dictionaries can put and end to this disease of mine), which I glimpsed over (the teeth? the tooth?), as he was greeting me and yawning at the very same time. ‘Hey, there’, and then he yawned; and then, the gold sparkle.

‘I am looking for a notebook but there is nothing of my liking’, I proudly announced, lifting my chest a little, just to give my question more credibility and a flair of extravagance.

‘And what defines, ‘a notebook of your liking’?’, and then I had to bit my lower lip, from the inside, as I don’t like to reveal my emotions to the first stranger that comes by. I was of course inconvenienced by his tone.

‘Well, it is one that has a hardcover and has a set of white paper, of about 80 to a 100 sheets, but I would not just reject it for its page number, you see’.

‘Oh I see’, and oh I saw the gold mine again, as he felt the necessity to inappropriately yawn on me twice. ‘You’ve yawn twice in less than a three minute interaction, what a nerve!’, except I kept this sentence to myself. He pulled up his baggy Levi jeans, which were also two or three more coffees than he should have had (not that coffee makes you fat, necessarily, but I envisioned he would be one of those annoying costumers at the Starbucks counter, that cannot order a pre-established regular beverage, they have to customize it: ‘I’d like it with four drops of vanilla syrup, 10 mL of coconut milk, sprinkle chocolate chips on top of my 10-seconds-only whipped cream’).

He came back seventy seconds after (and I know that because I have a Casio wristwatch that allows you to set up a timer). He had a hardcover notebook, with about 100 white paper sheets. It was black, and I was thinking more of dark blue, but I thought this would have sounded childish and I was wasting minutes of my brainstorming session. It was also still rainstorming outside. ‘Matching my mood’, I realized.

I paid six pounds and eighty-five cents, and left the establishment. I felt hungry altogether. ‘I could bake myself some bread, if I knew how to bake myself some bread’, and then I felt sad, because my thoughts some times are too harsh. ‘I shall eat tuna cucumber instead, spread in between two of my stale white bread loafs’.

And that somehow made me think of my white paper sheets again. ‘I shall be proud of myself. I’ve made fine progress, today’. And I decided to postpone my How to live until 100 essay for one, other, day.