Aug. 27th, 2018 11:28 am
Fensterwochenende
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muckefuckIn Herta Müller's Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (lit. "Today I would rather not have met myself", translated as The appointment), which I just started reading, she uses the term "Fenstertag" or "window day". Near as I can tell from context, she's not using it in the common Austrian sense of Brückentag (i.e. a day you take off to have a longer weekend, like Thanksgiving Friday) but in a peculiar nonce sense of something like "a day you observe from behind a window". Whether that's actually what she meant or not, I need that word, so that's what I'm using it for.
Last year, I had a lot of Fenstertage. I took their relative infrequency this summer as some of the clearest evidence that I was making a sustained recovery. If that's so, then this past weekend confirms the slump I've felt for several weeks. Had there been something formally planned, like last weekend, I would have made an effort to go, but there wasn't, only some vague notion I had of visiting the beach. Even tantalising pictures to my social feeds from Ugly Betty and others weren't enough to overcome my inertia.
More than anything, I would have loved a continuation of Friday's cool grey weather that justified my desire to make a cozy nest at home. In the absence of that, I turned on the AC and pretended. Naturally this meant I couldn't risk leaving the house and destroying the entire illusion, so I shuttled between comfy chair and bedroom, dragging phones and paperbacks in my wake. I even made hot tea.
Friday I'd made another run at the by-the-pound used bookstore and left with four books for under $10. The Müller was one. I also picked up a Dürrenmatt and something called Le village de l'Allemand by an Algerian author named Boualem Sansal. Rounding it all out was a collection of short stories translated from Hindi. I ended up reading snatches from all them that day and then earnestly started in on Müller and Sansal, despite being less than thirty pages from the end of Mephisto.
Sadly, I don't have much progress to show for all the time at my disposal. I kept letting myself get distracted by my phone. Occasionally I did a lick of work or cooked some food, but my heart wasn't in either. My stomach was still unsettled from a week of antibiotics and the prospect of someone coming over was remote (though I had someone offering himself an invitation after a week of hinting).
I finally did make it out for two entire hours on Sunday. A friend texted me about brunch early in the weekend and I put him off until Sunday, when we rescheduled for dinner. We settled on Uptown Pho, an unremarkable old-school storefront on Argyle, and followed that up with drinks at Kung Fu Tea. So I still spent most of that time regarding the world through a pane of glass as it passed by unconcerned.
Last year, I had a lot of Fenstertage. I took their relative infrequency this summer as some of the clearest evidence that I was making a sustained recovery. If that's so, then this past weekend confirms the slump I've felt for several weeks. Had there been something formally planned, like last weekend, I would have made an effort to go, but there wasn't, only some vague notion I had of visiting the beach. Even tantalising pictures to my social feeds from Ugly Betty and others weren't enough to overcome my inertia.
More than anything, I would have loved a continuation of Friday's cool grey weather that justified my desire to make a cozy nest at home. In the absence of that, I turned on the AC and pretended. Naturally this meant I couldn't risk leaving the house and destroying the entire illusion, so I shuttled between comfy chair and bedroom, dragging phones and paperbacks in my wake. I even made hot tea.
Friday I'd made another run at the by-the-pound used bookstore and left with four books for under $10. The Müller was one. I also picked up a Dürrenmatt and something called Le village de l'Allemand by an Algerian author named Boualem Sansal. Rounding it all out was a collection of short stories translated from Hindi. I ended up reading snatches from all them that day and then earnestly started in on Müller and Sansal, despite being less than thirty pages from the end of Mephisto.
Sadly, I don't have much progress to show for all the time at my disposal. I kept letting myself get distracted by my phone. Occasionally I did a lick of work or cooked some food, but my heart wasn't in either. My stomach was still unsettled from a week of antibiotics and the prospect of someone coming over was remote (though I had someone offering himself an invitation after a week of hinting).
I finally did make it out for two entire hours on Sunday. A friend texted me about brunch early in the weekend and I put him off until Sunday, when we rescheduled for dinner. We settled on Uptown Pho, an unremarkable old-school storefront on Argyle, and followed that up with drinks at Kung Fu Tea. So I still spent most of that time regarding the world through a pane of glass as it passed by unconcerned.