Ill

Well, it's hardly a secret that when one is sick, everything seems even more overwhelming.  I can't say whether stress at work contributed to my current illness, or if it was more just dealing with the shifting weather.  At any rate, I've been sick since Monday.  I left work maybe just an hour early on Monday, but then much earlier on Tues.  I tried to get enough rest on Tues. and thought I had turned the corner, but then at work I was getting major chills, so again left early on Wed.  I'm still not 100%, and I am definitely not going to be biking to work or going to the gym the rest of the week, but perhaps this Thurs I can at least make it through a full day of work.  I guess we'll see.

There's quite a bit to update on the blog, but I think for the moment, I will just mention the third book I have dropped in an extremely short period of time.  I was so disappointed with PKD's Confessions of a Crap Artist, where the narrator feels humiliated by having to buy his sister a box of Tampax, so he ends up punching her in the stomach and getting into a real brawl.  What a pathetic little man.  (It might be also worth mentioning that he has to get three drinks into his system to go buy the Tampax and he locks his niece in the car during this period.)  I could not even contemplate finishing the novel after those two scenes.  I suppose under very limited circumstances I might finish a book where there is violence against women and children, though almost never if the narrator tries to justify his behaviour and make the reader complicit in it.  I truly don't know how the ultraviolence is handled in American Psycho (not that I have any intention of reading this) but say for example A Clockwork Orange, the beatings and rapes are described almost clinically.  I certainly don't recall that Alex ever pleads with the reader to "understand" his point of view.   I actually made this decision on the weekend before I got ill, so I know that I wasn't in a harsher frame of mind.

I should see if I can get back to bed now and see how I feel in the morning.