After my vacation, I had one day, one single day, when I was refreshed and energetic, and I did a boatload of work done, and it felt amazing. And then I started getting sick, and I got the surgery, and I was recovering from the surgery, and now I’m a wreck. I feel completely useless. There’s no energy, I have to take enormous breaks between short bursts of work. I hate this. One day. One single day of feeling energetic and productive is all I got out of my vacation. Drat.

It’s been a month since the surgery and I’m still completely useless. I did the revisions on my article, submitted, and got the final acceptance. I finished my new article and submitted. I did the taxes for my organization. I wrapped up the competition I’m running. I have 800 words of a new article. I’m almost done with the review I’m submitting next week. I’ve done 2 out of 3 syllabi for next semester. But all of this is happening against the background of me staring stupidly at the TV for hours.

I haven’t been able to leave a check for my RA. I haven’t sent a friend’s coat that I promised to send in two weeks ago. I can’t get myself together to buy a birthday gift for Klara’s friend. I have a load of laundry that hasn’t been folded for 8 days. I can’t even make up a label for a bunch of daycare wipes. I’m weeks behind on emails and even on text messages. And it’s all like this. I hate this, this stinks.

OK, rant over. I need to go rest.

“When the history of this terrible moment in American life is written,” “the indignity of wage labor,” “the atmosphere of ambient rage we’re all living in,” “I had a new apprehension of what it might be like to be young, idealistic, and at the mercy of nearly totalitarian economic forces,” “the most diverse generation of adults in history at a time of vicious right-wing backlash from older white people,” “as multicultural socialism reshapes our politics, it’s probably inevitable that it will also start to reshape our entertainment.”

These are some quotes from a single article in the New York Times. I feel like it’s author inhabits a different galaxy from me. I’m scared of these people. I think they are either dishonest or mentally unwell.

One of the speakers at the Bavarian symposium is the author of the first crisis novel I read. That novel made me think there was going to be a whole genre of crisis literature and that I needed to write a book about it.

I started working on the book before the genre actually appeared, which is why I published before anybody else did. And now I know that half a dozen people are writing books about it. But I’m the first one.

That first novel didn’t make it into my book. I started writing about it but then cut it all out. The book is of the ironically postmodern kind, and I just don’t like this kind of stuff. I can’t write on books I’m passionate about. And it doesn’t matter if I’m passionately liking or hating them. But I can’t be lukewarm about a book if I’m working on it.

Still, it’s very cool that the writer will be there.