I only managed half a day at work yesterday, and last night I could barely move, and I fell asleep at 8pm on Leonard's bedroom floor. Woke up after ten hours' sleep with the same overwhelming wanness and feeling that my limbs had been taken away and replaced with limp celery, moreover limp celery that hurts in all the joints and some of the muscles, and so I've taken the day off work, been to the bakery and eaten soup for breakfast, and gone to see the GP. She said Probably Viral Arthritis, Will Get Better and wrote me a medical certificate until the end of the week, so I have that option but I would really very much prefer it if I could be better enough to go to work by Friday at least. There is a backlog of tasks to be done there which are not getting any nearer to being finished. I did extract a promise that I would receive twice-daily texted pictorial progress reports on the chief of these tasks which is a 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle of that Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, and therefore features a breathtakingly obscene amount of white space, but it's now almost two o'clock and I am still waiting.
The GP said drink a lot, eat something, rest as much as possible and take anti-inflammatories. She had no suggestions about how to be less glum. I am reading John Lanchester's essay in the LRB about the ten years since the financial crisis, and while it's interesting it is also mega depressing. I just finished with another extensive downer of a reading experience, Mark Fisher's last book The Weird and the Eerie. I have read Rachel Cusk's novel Transit twice now. As someone said on social media last week w/r/t an entirely different matter, I don't know whether to feel extremely seen or extremely attacked by this book. What I need to do is go through the novel chapter by chapter and write down what happens in what order, and maybe also who speaks, when it is that the narrator interjects with her voice and when with her thoughts, and where are the places where the novel suddenly opens up out of its quiet ironic comedy and places you in this roadrunner-esque moment of realising you've just run off the edge of the cliff and you're hanging there in thin air. I 'm interested to see what the structure of the novel is, and having thought about doing this to it I have to do it now. It's not so much to find out what the 'structure' 'is', rather I have a hunch it'll be useful just to get acquainted with it again on a mechanistic or abstract level, simply to step aside from its extremely potent reality-effect.
I did finish off my rose-printed mini-skirt and it is highly pleasing, as long as I don't plan to do anything reckless & foolish in it such as bend over or sit down. Of course it is designed to be short (this is the dressmaking blogosphere cult classic pattern Rachel Comey for Vogue 1247) BUT STILL. Short skirts are one of those items of apparel which I find spin a very definite variety of confidence trick. The charade goes something like Oh yes, this skirt I am wearing definitely is of a shortness that requires of me a radical alteration to my usual way of inhabiting and moving through physical space, but I'm going to pretend business continues entirely as usual so please ignore the bizarre way I reach down to pick up that fork I just dropped on the floor. The aspect of this that interests me is that all the time, and thought, invested in the hand-production of a carefully made garment doesn't appear to have afforded me the opportunity, at any point in that process, to realise that I just don't live in a manner that is compatible with this skirt. It's almost a truism that consumer activities like clothes shopping are often carried out in a reverie or daydream, but it's been many, many years since I sewed in the grip of fantasy (mild and benevolent fantasy, but fantasy just the same) and made myself a garment so unlikely to be worn.
The kitchen smells great because I roasted some tomatoes, garlic, onion, eggplant, carrot and capsicum in the oven. After I get Lenny from school I'll blend it all together with a can of white beans, some celery stock and some fresh herbs, and thus there will be another round of excellent food medicine in the form of soup + cheese toastie.
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