Myasma

Feeling a bit sluggish lately round the old homestead. Hard even to pin down exactly why that might be. Harder even to talk through it without running the risk of inadvertently hailing those who may or may not be inadvertently contributing, y'know?

Part of it, though, is the relentlessness of the meta, which is one of the unspoken dimensions of processes like the search for jobs or the quest for tenure. In both processes, it's not enough to do what we do. We also have to represent the doing of it, which is a whole nother layer of doing, and one that tires me out, frankly.

Not that I don't engage in my own little sidetrips into meta-land, here and elsewhere, but it's the persistence of the self-surveillance and the self-accounting that gets me down, and that trickles down, making it ever more difficult just to do.

Part of it, too, is that I learned last night that a friend passed away. Not a close friend, but a friend nonetheless, and that has me reflecting more than is generally healthy on my various successes and failures in meeting assorted life goals and whatnot. That's about as euphemistic as I can be. So yeah, I'm a little sad, and that tends to feed on itself when not exposed to direct sunlight.

Let's push things forward.