the rain in spain stays mainly in the plain

I love the rain. It is the best type of precipitation. Heck, it’s my favorite weather period. I think I should move to someplace like Seattle where it rains all the time. The only catch is that would require me leaving Virginia, and good god, I love Virginia. We basically kick ass. We were the first colony. We’re named after Elizabeth the first. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Monroe, Woodrow Wilson, and a lot of other really important Americans were Virginians. We also have the best dialect, hands down. It’s southern, but not ignorant sounding. It’s very smooth and elitist, rounded and drawn out like honey. It’s much better than that flat crap they speak further south. I don’t have that strong Virginian accent any more though; eight years of theater and studying Romantic vowels has pretty much killed any of the natural ease with which I used to speak. Now I speak in an almost untraceable Mid-Western, linear and proper like a newscaster with just the slightest hint of something British.

My father though, still speaks with that old Virginian, at least amongst certain circles. He has the uncanny ability to unconsciously change his dialect to match whomever he’s speaking to. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I want him to speak his Virginian all the time.

But again, my linguistic inklings distract me. . .

Where was I? Oh, the rain.

I love the rain. So many poignant things have happened to me while being in it. I’ve found God and love in the rain (and yes, both DO exist, of that I’m sure). There’s something so primal and spiritual about the rain. It’s something that you really can’t experience in anything else: the feel of the water on your skin, the frigid but gentle beating of each drop as it rolls down your cheek and the backs of your hands, washing away everything, making you feel invisible as if you had become part of the rain and for that brief, wet moment you were something more than just flesh and blood. It’s like you’ve become fully human, you’ve crossed out of the roaring, screaming chaos that is this existence into the harmonic, perpetual peace of nature that like everything good, is so illusive and fickle with us.

Yeah, rain is great. . .