Sabina Oscar

Drove home last night, listening to the tail end of Anansi Boys and then the rebroadcast of the very first This American Life episode. Overlaying them both was the steady hum of the studded snow tires my car wears every winter – they get worse gas mileage and they’re noisy as hell, but my car handles better in snow, so for a few months of the year, I deal.

Slept poorly last night, due partly to a very enthusiastic orange cat wanting to insinuate himself under the covers, and partly due to … dunno, heating/cooling issues, dry air, ley lines, solstice jitters, something like that. Woke up thinking that it must be nearly time for dawn, looked at the clock, and saw “2:13” staring at me. (Longest night of the year, both by the clock and by my own experience.)

The night before I had a really nice mellow evening in with Glen. We ate falafel and chatted about friends and our various trips. In the morning, we were musing on how things might have been different if I’d moved in with Glen when he bought his house, way back when. (It was an idea we’d talked about a little, at the time, but Glen had decided he wanted a break from roommates and I was in a good place at the time anyhow, so it never amounted to much.)

Glen turns to me, by the front door, and says, “Well, sure, but who’d be feeling Sabina Oscar?” I blinked for a second, replaying the question in my mind and coming up with the same thing I heard the first time. “What?”

So he says the same thing again. And now I have to ask, “Who the hell is Sabina Oscar?” Glen chuckles and clarifies that he’d asked me, “Who’d be Felix and who’d be Oscar?", implying that we’d inevitably end up in some Odd Couple dynamic. But for the rest of the day, I kept wondering who Sabina Oscar was, and whether she’d have come between us somehow, sowing strife into our happy never-happened roommate-hood.