It turned out that staying home on Friday was a great idea, because I was more exhausted than I'd realized. I believe I haven't taken a whole day's holiday since September. But mentally accommodating many people under time pressure and failing at the tasks I'm supposed to do, for so long, has led me to the point at times where I can't think or say or explain anything any more. It feels pretty hopeless. That said, the colleagues are very comforting.
Although I'm still forging through the footnotes of Naomi Wolf's feminist Beauty Myth, and read the weekly local magazine Zitty in the train, mainly I'm engaged in reading Ronald W. Clark's biography of Albert Einstein at present.
Zitty had a touching article about city pigeons. It was inspiring especially because a mother pigeon is nesting with two chicks outside the office building where I work. Animal observation is much more action-packed and fascinating than I'd realized as a child...
Weather: Green is scattered everywhere now, as well as blossoms that have partly burst and begun to litter the pavements, the earliest tulips and the crocuses are already overblown but many more flowers are springing from the nooks. It is a relief not to see a metaphorical graveyard to everything, every time I go to work and look out the train windows. Also, the long daylight hours are pleasant.
Today the Mueller Report was released. I guess I should read it. But it worries me to think that perhaps the energy put toward reading it, should be put into learning about the grave social and economic issues that pervade the US nowadays instead. I'd have to doublecheck, but I think the report just confirms that gross impropriety is the Trumps' normal mode of operation; and that no special malice, no special (to borrow a term from the Victorians) base cunning, and no special criminal intent went into their attempts to fish advantageous elections material out of Wikileaks and Russian government circles.
As for the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, it did grieve me to see it burn. What grieved me was that this unusual building — these medieval timbers, craftsmanship and idiosyncratic Gothic experimentation, and potentially the enormous old stained-glass windows — was disappearing from one minute to the next. Also, the risk of the walls collapsing outward and causing even greater damage. I was not shedding tears for the Vatican or for the French government's coffers. And at no point I did think that using the term 'agony' — as a few commentators did — to describe the experience of watching the church burn on live TV, or the experience of French citizens watching it, was not exaggerated, compared to many other human tragedies.
Anyway, that's enough 'Last Week in a Nutshell.' I'm looking forward to the Easter weekend.
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