Piano, Homework, Dinner and Virtuous Resolves

Today it was a quiet, busy, cloudy day. I got up in the afternoon, well rested and not at all uneasy of conscience. I played the piano, starting with Czerny exercises and continuing with scales and the fourth Preludium in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. I. It wasn't a brilliant session by any means, and I was absentminded most of the time, but I enjoyed it. I went shopping for dinner later on; the dinner consisted of oven-grilled lamb, couscous, Greek salad, flatbread left over at Mama's work, olives, figs, and feta cheese baked over with paprika. Now I make the Greek salad without any onion, and I think it is no great loss.

I've been thinking as usual about pulling myself together and undertaking something. The day before yesterday I decided to try to have a short story published in the New Yorker. I want to write several short stories, decide which is the best, leave that one alone for a month and then proofread it again, and then submit it per e-mail. Since the magazine staff prefer to have only two short story submissions per year, I was planning to have one story written by May, and another written by September. I do also want to take a look at the published stories in the magazine from time to time, so that I know what they're looking for.

Another way of pulling myself together is to start learning things again. One of the things that was good in university is that I had to read a certain number of pages and absorb a certain amount of information regularly. I want to do this at home, too. I think that it is really the lack of mental occupation that brings out the slow-witted, self-absorbed, and whiny elements in me. At the same time I do want to go to lectures, concerts, museums, art exhibitions, etc. It is not so easy because I feel ill at ease spending money, whether it is logical to do so or not, and because, oddly enough, there is not always something going on that interests me. But it doesn't bother me so much any more if no one comes with me, though I would certainly prefer if someone did.

Anyway, in the evening J. and I did part of his Spanish homework. He had to look up websites of different large Spanish shopping centres where one can also buy products online, and answer questions about them. First of all, I thought that the assignment is advertising, which has no place in a school. Secondly, I thought the assignment is impractical. J. groaned much of the time. Stupid school. Soon uncle W. came to visit, and, procuring a handful of pistachios, J. decided to stop working, and retired from the field with a listless and weary expression. Such is life.

And now I shall return to my pious nineteenth-century novel, A Face Illumined (I am now reading Gutenberg books by authors whose last names start with R). Not the author's best, I would say.