Awake

Rain falling against my window woke me from a pastoral dream which had turned to dystopian violence. What I feel in such dreams is equal parts fear and humiliation at my helplessness in the face of unreason, my inability to do anything about the situation.

It's been two weeks since I posted. What have I been up to, you ask? 'Tis a fair question, for which I have no particularly pleasing answer. I might well say that I have been on a sort of internal holiday, since I have also done very little work during this time. I have spent a lot of time, entire working days, in Second Life; though again even there I would be hard pressed to tell you what I did in SL too. Mostly talking and listening and a fair amount of worrying, about two friends who are going through rough patches in their real lives. I don't feel that I can say much about this, because they aren't my stories to tell. I am slightly uneasy at the amount of time I spend in SL, and the increasing proportion of my emotional life that takes place there.

Working slightly less than half-time with G and U on the two competitions due this summer, with moderate comfort. Working very semi-occasionally for the Münsters, I've hardly lifted a finger since delivering the last batch of changes.

Reading quite a lot: the King James Version Apocrypha, Terry Pratchett's "Making money" which I found quite good despite the Lioness's poor opinion of it, Michel Houellebecq's "Plateforme" (in German, a Christmas present; very disturbing, quite a good read), "The black swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (expect the unexpected), and currently both Charles Frazier's "Thirteen moons" (coming of age in the Appalachians during the Indian Wars) and a collection of essays on reading "the classics" by various German authors. The disappointment of the summer has been re-reading T.S. Eliot after more than a dozen years, sparked by my remembering "Prufrock" recently: much of it is unreadable. Many poems come across as badly dated, as fusty as the Victorian stuff that the Modernists opposed. I still have a soft spot for Prufrock and "Ash Wednesday" and the "Four Quartets", but the rest is superfluous. Sorry, Tom. And let me draw to your attention a book review in a New Yorker from this Spring, about economics and choice and what utter fools we mortals be: fascinating stuff, well worth reading even for non-economists.

Hot chocolate is ready, so I shall sign off and take it back to bed to read myself to sleep. Shabbat shalom, my dears, may you all be happy and healthy this weekend.