Daily Blague

Had I not fallen apart last week, there would be nothing to read here today. I'd have posted an entry over the weekend announcing a few days' hiatus, while I visited a friend in the country and took a break from blogging. Kathleen, meanwhile, would have arrived at Kuala Lumpur by now. But on Friday morning, the alarmed internist advised against any travel for either of us.

Yesterday morning, I woke as bright as a morning glory. Paging through the Times, I was almost alarmed by the number of interesting stories that I might comment on. This morning, considerably wearier, I looked through the same section in vain. Most of the exciting pieces had so completely lost their lustre that I passed over them all unawares. The few that I recognized no longer promised to yield interesting commentary.

Such swings sound a lot like the shift from mania to depression. But in my case they happen very quickly and, in retrospect, are fully explicable in terms of fatigue. The sad fact is that, instead of taking it easy over the weekend, I not only tidied up the household but dealt, as I wrote yesterday, with numerous "messes" - piles of books, piles of mail, tote bags full of who-knows-what, and other litter. These messes accumulate because - that's right! - I'm usually too tired to deal with them. Keeping up with what I want to do each day is hard enough.

If only someone would customize David Allen's Getting Things Done for me. The hardest thing about all of this is wrestling with the moral question. To what extent am I responsible for being a better manager of my own resources? How expert am I supposed to be about pacing myself when all the evidence suggests that I can't trust my own feelings. My warning systems, if you will, don't work, if they're in place at all. Is that my fault, or just the way I'm made?

Although not at my best this morning, I'm far from last week's worst. I've got enough spunk to be angry about the Supreme Court's Ledbetter decision last week, which, as dissenter Ruth Bader Ginsburg complained, overlooked the fact that most employees are in no position to know whether they're being discriminated against when it comes to paychecks. The majority is re-imposing the pro-business formalism that emasculated so much progressive legislation at the end of the Nineteenth Century. It's appalling! But I've got enough spunk, too, not to mistake the decision for the end of the world. I'm tired, but I'm not that tired.