Influenza Ex Machina

The switch away from summer daylight saving time has happened: so after a grey day with low cloud cover, a long, prematurely dark afternoon has followed.

That said, things are not so grim for me personally:

I began to feel ill on the weekend. I slept most of the day on Sunday, and since then I've written to my professors and asked for time off this week. Today I toddled outdoors for the first time due to a shopping errand: it was not so bad except that I was drained and still felt in the throes of a moderate common cold – an improvement on the baroque flu symptoms (e.g. nausea) of earlier. So climbing onto a bicycle and heading to university would have been a bad idea. An attempt to catch up on homework was not too successful either; it was exhausting.

To pass the time I'm reading romance novels, doing household chores as energy permits, following the news, and watching a bit of Netflix. (Documentaries, with e.g. Greek subtitles to practice the language.)

It might not sound like fun, but it's a luxurious contrast to...: the first two weeks of the university semester were much more demanding and uncomfortable than I expected. I've warmed to the 'forced socialization' aspect that I complained about in my earlier blog post, simply because many fellow students really are quite friendly and do open up. But 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. classes do strain my health. It's clear I'm not seventeen years old any more, or even twenty-eight. On the other hand the intellectual stimulation has been healthy; so has the feeling, after a long and demoralizing phase of doing journalistic work that nobody publishes, that someone (the university bureaucracy) has finally pointed a finger at me again and said 'You Can Do This.'

In the meantime I'm still thinking of working on my 20th century research project or finally writing at length about the journey to Canada. But the same rule of thumb applies: don't overdo it.