MG picked me up off the street yesterday afternoon as I was walking up M*ss Ave from work to the Beer Store for a much-needed (and -deserved) post-laboratory tipple. We ended up going to R*k* for extraordinarily beautiful sushi and going to see The Salton Sea.
I feel a little [gulp] exploited by work at the moment: inasmuch as I'm salaried (!), I feel it's necessary to succumb to a bit of pressure now and then to log in after hours and during the weekends to get something done for the company. I have too much of an ethic of mucking in to resist. Now, the place is hardly going to the dogs, but it has been busy, and I, with my deeply proddy sense of guilt about my own carefully-cultivated sloth, feel that it is entirely my responsibility to pick up the slack. Is this the same boy who two weeks ago could hardly be bothered to roll out of bed to check my email?
Today, apart from writing the scintillating repartee we call tech support email, was about reading through Bach harpsichord concerti and going to see Delicatessen at KM's. Oh -- and a beautiful morning, it was, being roused from my slumbers by the chearing cry that breakfast was ready. Indeed: KH and ED had made eggs and veggie-sausage and pancakes for all.
I have been revisiting Donne (of course) and, by extension, Anne Carson's Men in the off hours, which contains two of the best poems ever written. The other one is a counting error in Alcman, this one is shorter, and is part of the series on Leo Tolstoy and his wife. It goes (in part):
With the diaries he forced into her
a jealousy that licked her insides
for 47 years.
They both wrote every night.
"Immortal wheat for the New Life!" begins his entry for June 2, 1857.
And next door,
with her little red reading glasses perched on her nose
"If I could kill him then make another man exactly like him,
I would do it joyfully!"
Which at first was merely amusing since it reminded me of Woody Allen as Boris Grushenko in Love and Death, intoning, with great seriousness, "cream of wheat..."