Saturday, November 7, 2015

Under The Weather

It's been a funny old week. I came back from Malaysia on Sunday with a mild ache around the left side of my back and an aching left shoulder, confidently expecting to feel completely recovered and ready for action by Wednesday at the latest, only to find the achiness getting steadily worse as the week wore on (with wore being the operative word for me.) Fortunately it was a relatively easy few days work-wise, but I somehow managed to make hard labour of every day. I felt like I was about to become spectacularly ill without ever really getting there which was simultaneously a relief and a disappointment. Above all I felt sleepy almost all the time, despite having slept almost too well last weekend.

The pattern has continued today. I've fallen asleep at least four times in the course of the day without particularly intending to. We went shopping in the late afternoon - which felt like a welcome break from dozing off yet again - and just walking around the supermarket felt vaguely heroic, silly as that may sound.

I've been trying to snap out of this, and to that end have been making progress in my latest novel-for-reading, Art Studio by Yeng Pway Ngon, to make myself feel that I'm actually getting something done. I deliberately selected this as a novel that would lead me into unfamiliar territory, and make me do some work as a reader. It seems the writer is a big cheese in literature in the Chinese language on these shores and I'm struggling to figure out why - not that I'm implying any deficiency in the writing in that regard. The heavy weather I'm experiencing in that regard is more than likely to be purely internal to a very dull reader.

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