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Beautiful thoughts means I dream too much
Feb. 9th, 2025 01:49 pmThis weekend has been a much needed reset after a very, very tiring week. Everything happened efficiently, without much effort on my part. Heavily limiting social media use also probably helped.
I began Saturday with my usual two hours of classes at the gym (my body is still in pain — in a good way — twenty-four hours later), and detoured home via the market, where I picked up Greek and Spanish deli items from their two respective stalls, and Tibetan food for lunch. I then spent the remainder of the afternoon slow-cooking a Burmese pumpkin curry for dinner, doing yoga, and chatting with people via Dreamwidth comments, before meeting Matthias — who had been out all day — and our friend E at our favourite cafe/bar. When I got there, they were sitting outside in the terrace garden, which was dark and bracing, but fine for an hour or so. I'm out of the habit of sitting outside in frigid British winter temperatures, although I used to do it all the time during the lockdown years.
This morning, I did yoga as the sun rose, ate a leisurely breakfast, prepared various bits and pieces for meals next week (stewed fruit, making up a fresh batch of muesli, etc), and drifted around the house aimlessly until Matthias and I decided to make the most of the clear winter sunshine, and go for a walk. The market square was as busy as it always is in such circumstances, and I had to queue for ages to get a coffee, but it was nice to be outside, and wander along the river, watching the geese, ducks, and swans frolic about.
I've been somewhat distracted this week, and my reading has suffered as a consequence — I only finished two books. The first, My Throat An Open Grave (Tori Bovalino), is a YA fantasy novel by an author I normally enjoy, retelling the Labyrinth film's story as a contemporary Appalachian gothic, with folk horror and commentary on the abysmal state of reproductive rights in the US. I feel as if I wish this had been better than it was: interesting ideas, let down by pedestrian execution and authorial timidity. (And why did it need to be told in first person present tense?). The other book was a reread: This Book Is Haunted (David McRobbie), a collection of ghost stories by an author who was a big deal in Australia when I was growing up. The book is from my childhood collection, and I had read it before, so none of the twists in the stories were shocking to me, but I did admire McRobbie's very broad interpretation of haunting. Very few of these are ghost stories in the classic sense: in many cases the characters are haunted by guilt, by stories unearthed on cassette tapes, by mysteries in old photographs, by advertisements in the Classified section of local newspapers, or by echoes of memories in buildings, landscapes, or artefacts. He has a particular interest in haunting journeys, as if trains and railway stations and ferry terminals evoke particularly vivid emotions, and in investigative journalism, and a magpie-like imagination, with an ability to find a story in everything. I really enjoyed the collection, and wondered if it would be possible to publish something like it — for a YA readership — today.
Now the remainder of Sunday stretches ahead, invitingly. At some point I'll need to start marinating the mackerel for tonight's dinner (spiced, seared, and served with a tomato-dill-lemon-garlicky sauce), but beyond that, I have absolutely no demands on my time, which is wonderful. Next week, I have the immense good fortune to be working from home four days out of the five, and I'm hoping that that, combined with the ease and calm of this weekend, will be enough to tackle the grinding exhaustion that has been such a major theme of this year.
I began Saturday with my usual two hours of classes at the gym (my body is still in pain — in a good way — twenty-four hours later), and detoured home via the market, where I picked up Greek and Spanish deli items from their two respective stalls, and Tibetan food for lunch. I then spent the remainder of the afternoon slow-cooking a Burmese pumpkin curry for dinner, doing yoga, and chatting with people via Dreamwidth comments, before meeting Matthias — who had been out all day — and our friend E at our favourite cafe/bar. When I got there, they were sitting outside in the terrace garden, which was dark and bracing, but fine for an hour or so. I'm out of the habit of sitting outside in frigid British winter temperatures, although I used to do it all the time during the lockdown years.
This morning, I did yoga as the sun rose, ate a leisurely breakfast, prepared various bits and pieces for meals next week (stewed fruit, making up a fresh batch of muesli, etc), and drifted around the house aimlessly until Matthias and I decided to make the most of the clear winter sunshine, and go for a walk. The market square was as busy as it always is in such circumstances, and I had to queue for ages to get a coffee, but it was nice to be outside, and wander along the river, watching the geese, ducks, and swans frolic about.
I've been somewhat distracted this week, and my reading has suffered as a consequence — I only finished two books. The first, My Throat An Open Grave (Tori Bovalino), is a YA fantasy novel by an author I normally enjoy, retelling the Labyrinth film's story as a contemporary Appalachian gothic, with folk horror and commentary on the abysmal state of reproductive rights in the US. I feel as if I wish this had been better than it was: interesting ideas, let down by pedestrian execution and authorial timidity. (And why did it need to be told in first person present tense?). The other book was a reread: This Book Is Haunted (David McRobbie), a collection of ghost stories by an author who was a big deal in Australia when I was growing up. The book is from my childhood collection, and I had read it before, so none of the twists in the stories were shocking to me, but I did admire McRobbie's very broad interpretation of haunting. Very few of these are ghost stories in the classic sense: in many cases the characters are haunted by guilt, by stories unearthed on cassette tapes, by mysteries in old photographs, by advertisements in the Classified section of local newspapers, or by echoes of memories in buildings, landscapes, or artefacts. He has a particular interest in haunting journeys, as if trains and railway stations and ferry terminals evoke particularly vivid emotions, and in investigative journalism, and a magpie-like imagination, with an ability to find a story in everything. I really enjoyed the collection, and wondered if it would be possible to publish something like it — for a YA readership — today.
Now the remainder of Sunday stretches ahead, invitingly. At some point I'll need to start marinating the mackerel for tonight's dinner (spiced, seared, and served with a tomato-dill-lemon-garlicky sauce), but beyond that, I have absolutely no demands on my time, which is wonderful. Next week, I have the immense good fortune to be working from home four days out of the five, and I'm hoping that that, combined with the ease and calm of this weekend, will be enough to tackle the grinding exhaustion that has been such a major theme of this year.