The Daily Life of a Self-Pitying Drone

To record the events of today is a reasonably humble task, since it has to be admitted that I did not do very much. I slept in to make up for having no more than eight and a half hours of sleep per night during the work week, and got up past 1 p.m.

One of the first things I did is to sketch out a menu for tomorrow, which is now today, and decided to make it a French meal. It will have three courses. The first is a tomato and cucumber salad, and after deliberating I decided to obtain the tomatoes from the organic food store, alongside garlic bread. Then, a stew of beef with onion, carrots, potatoes and red wine, which the cookbook called a daube in the style of Béarne. Lastly, crêpes suzette with a shot of rum.

After that I washed the flowered Austrian (Gmunden) china that we have by hand. It appears to fracture easily, so I placed the dishes in a lower level of water and only lingeringly filled it the rest of the way, as I imagined that the pottery would have accustomed itself to the temperature change. Then, vacuumed the corner room and narrowly prevented a specific gauge of small screw from disappearing into the vacuum bag forever.

A while later, I applied another layer of pine green foundation paint to a cigar box that I sanded down yesterday and want to decorate with very old paints that are however precisely designed for this type of thing. The cigar box lids usually warp, presumably due to the humidity in the paint; so I weighted down the lid after the first layer went on, and it worked. The ambience is nice in the corner room, with the old paint boxes and their dappled lids on the table, the warmth from the stove, the geranium and azalea on the windowsill, and the Christmas tree with the rough-textured pine crib still underneath.

Reluctantly, I then went grocery shopping with Ge. After we had done the main shopping, I went to the organic food store and bought the tomatoes, navel? oranges for the crêpes suzette, and blood oranges, and pretzel sticks to eat after lunch at work. The pretzel sticks are made with spelt flour, which in my opinion sabotages the flavour of everything it's in, but not so much that I can't enjoy eating it anyway. That said, next week I was going to observe a plan not to eat processed food, because it is amusing to follow different eating practices now and then; so eating the pretzel sticks will require exculpatory mental gymnastics.

I read news about the Inauguration-Dämmerung in the US. Then I tried out one YouTube exercise video and a part of another. — In the past week I've been unhappy about work. My tiny sub-department is being scrutinized for inefficiency, and I have had to do a great deal of tasks that I absolutely hate lately, and I haven't taken it very well. I've been on the verge of tears fairly often at work and at home, gone for fewer promenades near my workplace and generally relaxed in fewer ways out of feelings of paranoid guilt, poured my woes into the already afflicted ears of my parents and siblings, and tried to 'anesthetize' myself by wasting time on the internet late into the night, when I try to be at work by 9:15 a.m. — But last week I 'dosed' myself with a dance exercise video, led by Madhuri Dixit—as far as I've seen, a queen of Bollywood acting, a grand personality, and a superlative dancer. It lifted my mood, so exercise should help. And, of course, in general I still love my work and my colleagues.

Anyway, to return to today: after doing language exercises in Turkish, Swedish, modern Greek and Spanish on the website Duolingo — I did the entire Spanish 'tree' in the past two years, and had really meant to finish the Swedish tree before beginning the Turkish one, because juggling a lot of languages would tend to mean that I know a lot of fragments, badly — I watched part of an animé series based on the fairy tale of Snow White, in Greek, on YouTube.

Now I have a new episode in one internet browser tab, and a lecture on quantum field theory opened in another — the lecture, because my interest in matters scientific has intensified especially because of work colleagues and their lunchtime conversations, although school lessons in addition to general reading whenever Virtuous Resolves have arisen over the years has proven unexpectedly efficient. I believe that Linus Pauling observed in the introduction to a chemistry textbook that the study of science has become so far-ranging and fragmented that a scientist cannot be well informed in all fields that are currently being researched. So even someone like me, a former humanities major with a chequered school history in mathematics, chemistry and physics, has a chance at being as able to talk accurately and fruitfully about a fair spectrum of scientific subjects as anybody else.

What remains to round out these days, I guess, is to play the piano or violin, or both, tomorrow. Then to do a lot of cooking, and then eating. And then the weekend should be complete.

January: In Verse

It is easy to protest that the days are longer
as, the great milestone of Solstice past,
we wait for the snowdrop's bowing advent
and the baroque ruff of aconites.

But as we gaze across the winter's sky-breadth
searching paler kinds of ashen grey,
and await knotted fronts that bring us
boreal temperatures, rain, perhaps hail;
and see western winds that shatter the branches,
batter the tree trunks, and struggle like an opposing army
through each space and refuge of the house,
and pillage the coalstove's heat whole,
roaring rudely through the chimney stacks;
— then, as we see the rushing clouds' despair
in the lonely levels up the troposphere —
then facts are misted by skeptics' fears.

Yule's warmth from December has left,
and the Star of Bethlehem arced beneath
the far edge of this hemisphere
— no more to brighten the world with an Epiphany.
Now an early Lent spreads austere unity
to a dark and weak parade of weeks.

On Jane Eyre, Jane Austen and Piety

Today was a tough day at work not because of outward circumstances but because of the excessively gloomy mood I was in. So I've decided to escape reality through one of the long excursions on Jane Eyre that I've wanted to write for a while. It came to mind because of a Guardian online article that recently juxtaposed Mr. Rochester of Eyre with the putative feminist hero Gilbert-something-or-other in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whom I myself had found one of the pettiest twerps who has ever had a major classic consecrated to him, and whose emotional or intellectual depths were nowhere near those of the heroine, upon whom Anne Brontë bestowed, or foisted, him.

I read Jane Eyre when I was thirteen years old. My mother had recently bought a copy of the book, as far as I recall. It was such a 'rattling good yarn' that I finished it in one sitting, past 1 a.m. although it was a 'school night,' as far as I remember. (Although we have other copies, I was sad that this paperback vanished. It was tasteful, and I am so fastidious about books' covers that every niceish book leaves a long-lasting impression.) Brontë's novel did strike me as a polar opposite to Jane Austen's works, although I do think that they are not so different in their subjects and plots — subjects like the roles self-analysis and logic can play in affecting one's relationships with other people.

A main and glaringly evident parallel is that they were daughters of clergymen; and yet religion plays a divergent role in their works. Not being a good pupil of religion, I haven't read the Bible much. But because so much phraseology from the Bible (King James, even!) appears in Jane Eyre and Shirley, whenever I do read the Beatitudes or bits of Revelations or Psalms it turns out that I am familiar with a lot of passages. It's beyond my capabilities at present, but I was planning to look for a kind of narrative arc patterned on the Bible in Jane Eyre, and maybe write an essay about it. Certainly it's made easier by the fact that I believe that it ends with a quotation from Revelations — although a question is also what order the chapters of the Bible are really, ideally in.