vacation

Yesterday marked the start of my vacation. Yesterday opened up the invisible calendar and placed an unseeable (cf. invisible) mark on the a.m. of the 7th, saying, "Don't go to work. Stay in your rooms. Draw the blinds, cover the clocks, order your supper from the Vietnamese place downtown. Refuse the phone (I made the mistake of answering the phone once yesterday. It was a collection agent looking for a small but ancient debt to the university) and peel from your mind, one by one, the corn-leaves that have grown around your brain over the last year".

It's true: yesterday told me that I had corn-leaves around my mind.

Anyway. I took yesterday's advice and sought to do as little as possible. I spent the early part of the morning doing nothing, then turned to being lazy, which effort I was able to convert into a few hours of profitable idleness. At one o' clock or so I hit on the perfect inactivity: rereading a favourite book. I poked around the bookshelf until I found my copy of Flann O' Brien's The Third Policeman and spent the rest of the afternoon reading it long gulps, pausing only to go the bathroom or make another pot of coffee. Rereading a book is the ultimate do-nothing experience. Your brain shuttles back and forth between the book and your memory of the book, comparing versions as you read, congratulating itself on being more perceptive and superior to the younger self that last read the book. It's a lot of reward for very little effort.

We (that's myself and Schmutzie) are going to Costa Rica on the seventeenth, so until then I can look forward to another week and a half of these kinds of days, broken only by the occasional lunch-related task.

Good. Times.