“the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there…his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t on the job.”

As a couple, our primary consumerist vice seems to be buying, or at least acquiring, books. Even when neither of us has any money, which is often, scarcely a week goes by that we don’t have an influx of books, a new intake. I don’t know why or even how this is – I don’t set out to add to our extensive collection, but between buying and borrowing and receiving gifts, our extensive collection is undeniably expanding. And we have a lot of books in the house that neither of us has read – or that neither of us has read very closely, anyway. I like this because it makes it feel like my home is a bookshop: there are discoveries, as well as re-discoveries, still to be made here.

Paul Auster’s Leviathan, from which the quote at the top of this post comes, is one such discovery, made after two months of failed attempts to read a whole good book. I started with Women in Love. I began it in October, during our strange Indian summer. One Saturday afternoon, knowing this was probably the last Saturday afternoon of the year that would be so mild, so sweet-smelling and free, I walked down to the café at the end of our street and sat outside in the sun in my shorts and fedora and ordered a green tea and pretended I was in Morocco, or someplace else, at least, sipping something hot to combat the heat of the day. At the time Lawrence seemed perfect; but later, about halfway through the book, I realized I couldn’t bear to read Hermione Roddice’s voice described as “sing-song” one more time. If I read that one more time, I thought, I will crack up, I will break down. I’m not giving Lawrence up forever: just until I get a grip on myself, I thought.

So, remembering my thrill upon discovering Margaret Drabble earlier in the year, I picked up Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The problem here, I told myself after just a few pages, really, was the size of the book: it didn’t slip easily into my handbag, it was hard to hold open with one hand. I couldn’t go on; I would simply have to come back to it later, when I was feeling more physically able, when my strength had returned.

The perfect antidote to this problem was bound to be Paul Harding’s Tinkers – a slim, modern book, just 191 pages long, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a first novel by a man who holds a creative writing MFA. And it turned out to be not bad, not bad at all, but not right, not quite right. I’m not giving this one up forever either: just until it’s what I need, which might be next week or might be next decade.

You never know with books, is the thing: sometimes it’s just right to read something and sometimes it’s not. It’s a lazy way of reading, yes, and I know too that my inability to commit to one book is more a symptom of my currently unpredictable attention span than anything else. But the problem for me is that reading is a competitive sport, not an idle pastime; I feel the effects very keenly, and the desire to leap up off the chair and begin writing something of my own, or to go for a vigorous walk along the river while I contemplate what I’ve just read, is often so strong that I have to suppress it every two or three pages. In the pub, the living room, the park, you can see me glancing up every few minutes, like a startled meerkat, staring at the world and seeing it anew, over and over again. So the fundamental pleasure of reading is enhanced by reading something which is personally timely; the problem is identifying what is personally timely. Who would have guessed that I would happily consume all of Amsterdam in one sitting a few weeks ago? I certainly wouldn’t; I picked it up simply because it was there, on the coffee table.

But the other night I went calmly over to a shelf in our lounge and pulled Leviathan from between The Complete Novels of Jane Austen and Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, where it had been inexplicably resting for several years. I don’t know why I haven’t read it sooner, or why now is exactly the right time to read it, but I am utterly transfixed by it, which is a good feeling, a refreshing feeling. And I’m reminded that reading is part of the job, yes – as much as eating or having a drink with a friend, both of which I also count as work – but, like those things, it is also not just a part of the job.

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1.

In my last year of high school, I took a photography class. I’d wanted to take one for some time – it was what all the cool kids did, snapping moody photos of each other between classes, disappearing later into darkrooms to develop their relationships. But I had spent the last three years distracted by a misguided devotion to music, culminating in the purchase of a pickup for my violin that only served to amplify my hopelessness, so it was only as a senior that I finally admitted a kind of interest in the visual arts.

For most of the year I used a big black Minolta SLR that my mother had given me. She had lugged it around Italy and carried it to parties and school functions and finally decided that, impressive as the object itself was, clear and striking as the photographs it produced were, it did nothing that a much smaller digital camera – a silver Canon, sleek, practically pocket-sized – couldn’t do. Unlike her I liked changing the lenses, the aperture, the shutter speed. I liked the bulk, the extra baggage. I liked the sense of control the camera gave me. I could choose to make a photograph blurry, to overexpose it, or, even more fascinating, to clarify a high-speed object, to freeze a runner, which was the most artificial thing of all: to suspend forever something that, in everyday life, was never suspended for more than an instant. Later in the darkroom were other opportunities to interfere with the image. By taking a photograph out of the developer too soon, you could create the illusion that the photographer had only been half-present, that her attention had been elsewhere; the foggy, not-quite-there quality made it seem like a dream, like a Renoir or a Monet, everything viewed through an impressionist haze. I liked the process of developing film (gently groping in a blacked out room), of making contact sheets. I liked the chemical smell, the faint glows of light, the clinical precision.

For my end-of-year project, I took photographs of things I found washed up on the shore. It was a short series – three, maybe four black and white images, each item (driftwood, half a styrofoam cup) alone, against a sand backdrop, quite close up, framed carefully. I printed them in the darkroom on 8.5” x 11” paper and matted them on foam board. The Minolta – built more to look impressive than to withstand the pressures of use – broke shortly before the project was due, so I shot the series on my grandfather’s old Nikon. This was a beautiful object: black and silver, simple, small but appealingly heavy in the hands. I took it down to the beach; I took my photos. It was a very bright sunny day. I shot just one roll of film, taking one or two photos of the sea itself, not for the series, but for personal context, perhaps. Context for the memory of the day.

The photographs turned out better than I could have hoped. I don’t mean that they were technically very great, or compositionally even competent. I don’t know about that. I am not and never have been a Photographer, though I am, as so many are nowadays, a photographer in some sense – a documentarian of my own life. What I mean is that these were the clearest photographs I had ever taken. Whether it was because the Nikon was made better than the Minolta or simply that the way it felt to handle my grandfather’s camera made me better at taking pictures, I don’t know. Either way, the photographs were, in their own austere, adolescent way, rather beautiful. I mounted them proudly; I don’t think I had been particularly proud of any of the work I had done that year, although I had enjoyed it, but I was proud of this series. You could feel the heat of the day, though you had no idea what sort of day it was really.

2.

On a recent family visit to New York, I read this:

“Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie. The most mindless snapshot tells the truth of what the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked.”

It’s from Janet Malcolm’s profile of the German photographer Thomas Struth, which appeared in the September 26, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. I find it an unusually, almost disturbingly aggressive article – it’s as if Malcolm the interviewer is actually Malcolm the interrogator. At one point, describing his education with the artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Struth says: “For example, a typical thing Bernd would say was ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Malcolm responds:

‘”I don’t get it. What does Atget have to do with Proust?”
“It’s a similar time span. What Bernd meant was that when you read Proust that’s what the backdrop is. That’s the theatre.”
“Did you read Proust while you were studying with the Bechers?”
“No, no. I didn’t.”
“Have you read Proust since?”
“No.”
“So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?”
Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad example,” he said.
“It’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed.’

Although it is a false image, I picture this conversation taking place in a tutor’s rooms at Oxford, Struth the student upon the settee, sleepy and hungover and possibly very brilliant but unable to overcome the vast chasm of academic hierarchy. “So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?” is the tutor’s way of inviting but not inviting a commentary, a way of curtailing freedom to speak by tempting it. Naturally the student nervously concedes the point, and they both laugh about it. I feel an automatic, undeserved sympathy with my fictional version of Struth and an even more undeserved animosity towards my fictional version of Malcolm.

Struth’s photograph of the inside of the SolarWorld factory outside Dresden has been reproduced for the article. ‘How will your pictures show that what is being produced at SolarWorld is good for mankind?’ Malcolm asks Struth:

‘”Just by the title.”
“So photographs don’t speak.”
“The picture itself is powerless to show.”’

I observe the image. It makes very little sense to me; I don’t know what’s happening, except, in a broad sense, because of the caption, that solar panels are being manufactured. The photo is quite small on the page, surrounded by thick blocks of text. It is industrial and futuristic; lots of horizontal lines, blues, whites, silvers. I feel virtually nothing when I look at it; but as I continue to look, I get the impression that I want to like it, and the reason I want to like it has nothing to do with it and what it means. No; I want to like it in spite of Malcolm, a woman I do not know who has written an article about a photographer I had not even heard of until today. I choose this reason arbitrarily, and it is no doubt influenced by external factors: I have had more coffee than usual, it is unseasonably warm for October, I am broke, I am a writer, searching for something to write about, I am on holiday. All of these things which have so much to do with me and virtually nothing to do with the photograph. A medium of “inescapable truthfulness” – but what kind of “inescapable truthfulness”, exactly?

3.

A few days later, I encounter the question of context again, this time in a midtown gallery. The exhibit – “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker“ – is a selection of photographs that have appeared in the magazine, curated by former visuals editor Elisabeth Biondi.

“Every picture in The New Yorker, even a portrait, makes an editorial statement,” Biondi writes. “When published, the pictures are bound to the written word, illuminating and strengthening the context of the magazine. After publication, strong images assume a new life, beyond their original context.” Even this exhibition is not devoid of context, of course; someone has placed certain pictures in certain places, created an invisible narrative. But I deliberately do not take a copy of the guide, so that I can view the photographs, at least at first, without any extra insight.

I pause next to a portrait of Agatha Christie in her old age. My eyes are drawn to her thick, elderly ankles, juxtaposed with Amy Winehouse’s fragile-thin legs, bent under her as she smokes a cigarette on a hotel bed, in the next photograph. And there are the Romanovs (I have to consult the guide later to identify them) in a rowboat, seemingly quite adrift. And there is Gertrude Stein, at her desk, looking like she’s in an Edward Hopper painting. In some instances there is no context even to be offered by the guide: anonymous children in an anonymous park, blurred as they leap over a wall; men, women, rooms without names.

Later that day we visit the International Center of Photography, but I am all photographed out. I spend an hour on a bench, taking advantage of the free wifi, checking emails on my phone, sending tweets to friends I want to meet up with while I’m here. My shoulder hurts from carrying the extra weight of my DSLR. I have hardly used it; the only photos I seem to take nowadays are with my ubiquitous iPhone. And maybe that’s the fairest way for me to photograph things now: using the device with which I communicate, consume and create, often simultaneously, seemingly constantly. The real camera feels artificial. The photographs I take with it do not reflect my experience, only what’s there on the other side of the lens; they reflect back to me what, as Malcolm writes, “the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked,” but what the camera’s eye saw does not always have anything to do with what I saw, just as what is there to be seen does not always have anything to do with how it’s understood.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had in the summer with a friend of mine, a skilled amateur photographer who finds the proliferation of high dynamic range imaging applications for smartphone photography a little disconcerting.

“It’s practically defying the laws of physics,” he told me. “A camera shouldn’t really be able to do that.”

“Yes,” I said, myself an avid user of just such an app, “Maybe. But sometimes – often – that’s the only way for me to capture what it is I am seeing.”

4.

Back home in England, I assess the contents of my memory card and realize that I forgot to take any pictures of New York. I apologize to people who I might otherwise have bored with a protracted viewing of my holiday photos. I say I was distracted, I was busy seeing my family and my old school friends and telling cab drivers that I was sorry I couldn’t give them directions, but I don’t live in Brooklyn, either.

But this is not entirely true. I did take photographs. I did not take the sort of arty shots that a person like me, who dallies with but has never had enough patience or passion for photography, takes in order to feel that she understands or at least appreciates the form. But I took a blurred photograph at Coney Island of family friends, arms in the air, mouths open in joy or horror, coming down a ramp on the Cyclone roller coaster. I took a photograph of my mother in a green field, bending over her father’s grave, holding a red umbrella against the grey sky. I tried to take a photograph of the deer running through military rows of little white cemetery crosses, but the deer moved too fast; they were not even blurry, they had simply left the shot by the time my finger had found the button. I took a photograph of a painting I liked at the Brooklyn Museum. I took a photograph of some fake-denim leggings (“Chic Style!”) for sale in a CVS, some fishermen on a windy beach in Montauk, a neon sign outside a café where we had BLTs and mugs of sickly sweet coffee.

5.

One morning I come across Andrew Motion’s review of Magnum Contact Sheets in the Guardian. Motion quotes editor Kirsten Lubben:

“The contact sheet…embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality.”

I often feel that I have devolved as a photographer, since those first heady days when I wielded my mother’s discarded Minolta and spilled developer on my hands and learned that patience and luck were as integral to taking a picture as a good eye. Then I was eager to explore the science and logistics of the art; now I cheat, I download applications to manipulate images that are being taken on my phone – my phone! – and upload the finished products to the weak and weary acclaim of my Facebook friends and Instagram followers. I have not held a physical photograph for years; I see my own images exclusively on screens, expandable, rotatable, contextualized with my own text. And I don’t know what process professional photographers use to select their images now, but I do know Motion is right about contact sheets – the advent of the digital camera made them “instantly obsolete”.

But then again, maybe my current camera of choice has, in its way, actually improved my photography. My photos are not and never have been very good – not very beautiful, not very interesting, not very thought-provoking, not very well thought out. But now, taken and stored as they are – impulsively, on a multi-use device – they are nothing more or less than a perfect record of my time unfolding, a kind of never-ending, interactive contact sheet.

6.

Now it is winter, or nearly winter. Night falls at 4 pm; rain falls all day, sometimes. It is hard to find the desire, let alone an opportunity, to get out and take pictures. All my photographs of this place are repetitive anyway – always the same views, the Merton playing fields, the Radcliffe Camera (of course: the biggest, most beautiful camera of all), the telephone wires on my suburban street, over and over again. These days I don’t even need to leave the house. I realize I’ve been unwittingly working on a series of photographs for a few months now: shots from my desk, taken through the study window, of the cherry trees and the painted pink wooden chair in the garden, rotting and unstable after a year in the sun and rain.

I mean to juxtapose the photos, to observe the reddening and yellowing of the leaves, the falling of the leaves, the bareness of the branches, happening quickly, in these still shots – to speed up time, or clarify its passing, at least. But I don’t. I don’t need to, I guess, because I know that on my phone, interspersed with shots of the tarte tatin I made the other night and the bit of cornicing that fell from our living room ceiling earlier this month, is this linear, visual representation of the march of time, the change of seasons, the thickening of the weeds in the garden we don’t tend to enough.

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Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

- From “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?” by John Tierney, New York Times Magazine, August 17th, 2011

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For the past few weeks I have been trying to capture the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window on video. This is harder than it sounds; they come off in bursts, because of a gust of wind, and by the time I realize it’s happening it’s already happened. This is like Autumn itself: I always think how much I love it, the way the leaves glow and the air goes crisp, and how much I’m going to take advantage of it this year, really go for walks, really explore and enjoy it. And then one day I am at my desk, trying to capture the last yellow leaves as they come down, and I realize that I’ve missed it! Again! Already the tree nearest me is bare, save a single red leaf on the tip of a single branch, and soon the cherry trees too will be naked.

So I still have no satisfactory video footage of the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window. I do have lots of short video clips of nothing happening. Someday I will find them and wonder why they’re there. I will wonder this for about ten seconds, and then I will delete them because they’re taking up space, and who wants ten short video clips of the view they see every day?

***

Trying to capture on video something which I cannot capture on video is just one of a number of things I’ve been distracting myself with lately. (By the way, is that the correct phrase – “on video”? It seems curiously analog for a process which involves nothing more than tapping the screen of my iPhone). The problem is that I do actually have something I need to be concentrating on (namely, writing the book which is actually going to be published). I don’t mean that I can’t concentrate (I can concentrate, I sat in the same chair for several hours on Sunday and read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam in its entirety – not a long novel, but certainly an act which requires a certain degree of concentration). I just mean that I can’t see the connections between what I’m concentrating on very well. So on the one hand I have the thing that I’m mostly working on, the thing where all of my attention should be but isn’t, quite. (Is all of anyone’s attention ever on just one thing? At least part of mine is always on worrying about whether or not I’m paying the thing I need to pay attention to enough attention instead of the thing itself.) And then on the other hand I have these other things on the fringes, which are infringing on my ability to think clearly about anything.

***

One day, convinced that nothing in the world could compel me to do good work, so why bother, I watch an old episode of Silent Witness over lunch. I’m still at my desk, which makes it seem like I haven’t thrown the towel in quite yet, or at least, I haven’t thrown all of the towel in, I’m still clutching on to one corner, like it’s a lifeline. Last week was particularly busy, I tell myself, so I deserve this hour (which turns inevitably into three). But for how long can you honestly say you ‘deserve’ something like that? When has the debt been repaid?

Anyway, watching old episodes of anything is a dangerous game for me. When I’m in the throes of a TV show obsession I am worryingly unable to cope with real life. And as a matter of fact I’ve been spending quite a lot of time watching old episodes of Silent Witness recently. After that first sneaky hour a number of others follow, until they are not sneaky anymore. I am watching an episode at lunch, an episode after lunch, an episode before dinner, an episode during dinner, an episode after dinner. I could pretend that I’m trying to find something relevant in it; that any distraction can actually be warped by willpower into something tangentially but unmistakably useful. I’m studying character development, storytelling through cinematography, whatever. But in the interest of being honest, I’ll tell you the truth, which is that I mostly watch it for the pretty faces.

Last night (or maybe this morning, at about 2 am, just before I fell asleep and had fitful dreams about solving a crime which culminated in two exactly identical bodies lying on the mortuary slabs – not twins, just two versions of the same body) – it occurred to me that I also actually just like the show. There’s no shortage of unrealistic television dramas about people who solve crimes and cut up dead bodies and do vaguely sciencey shit – CSI, the other CSI, the other CSI, and so on – but this one, for whatever reason, is my favorite. It doesn’t make me squeamish, which it should (paper cuts make me squeamish, let alone fake autopsies). It doesn’t frighten me, particularly. It walks a fine line between being too ridiculous to be worth watching and representing very finely some aspects of the human condition – elements of the soap opera combined with elements of an Ian McEwan novel, perhaps.

Between episodes, I spend some time thinking about what it means that there are so many of these kinds of shows out there and so many people watching them. I’m not qualified to speculate on this, of course. I’m sure someone somewhere has done a study on it, or written an article. But in my concentration, I don’t think to look it up. The crime element explains some of the apparently endless appeal (a number of these kinds of series have been running for over a decade) – we’re drawn to mysteries, aren’t we, they’re easy to make compelling even in an hour-long slot. But beyond that is the question of whether it is morbid or wise to surround ourselves with all of these fictional representations of mortality all of the time. These shows may not be subtle, they may not be what astute critics would sneeringly call “good television”, they may stretch the limits of our willingness to suspend disbelief, but at the core is the simple truth of life ending in death. Blah blah blah.

But yeah. Basically what it comes down to is this: I like the show because when Tom Ward and Emilia Fox smile at each other over a microscope or a corpse, it makes me smile, too.

***

To try to trick myself into thinking about the thing I should be thinking about (that’s a retrospective excuse, of course), I start a side project. Or, at least, even though it isn’t fully formed as an idea in my head yet, I describe the latest thing that’s distracting me from the thing I really need to concentrate on as a “side project” in order to validate it (everyone needs a hobby, right? So why can’t the side project just be my hobby?). I try not to make it seem too concrete, because the point at which it becomes concrete is the point at which I need to acknowledge either that it is A Thing I’m Going To Run With or A Thing I’m Going To Put On The Back Burner or, worst of all but probably most likely, Not Really A Thing At All. I try to use words that are so ambiguous that stringing them together adds no meaning: loosely speaking, I say to myself, it’s about death, depression, anxiety, memory, and purpose(lessness). It’s really very funny to me, but I don’t know why. I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint precisely what it is that makes me laugh about this.

Then, of course, I find this piece about how to write funny by Steve Almond. “As a rule,” writes Almond, “the sadder the material, the funnier the prose.”

That’s it, that’s the thing, the idea that’s distracting me, or at least that’s the idea that happens to be distracting me in the moment I read it. Take Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which for an unrelated reason has been heavily on my mind lately. No matter how many times I read it (I’ve lost count, I’m afraid to say), it always makes me laugh. That’s a good sign: if its jokes (which seems woefully the wrong word here) relied solely on something theatrical, circumstantial – misunderstandings, Shakespearean situations – surely their funniness would, gradually, start to diminish. One can generally only be delighted by an engineered joke for so long (wordplay is another matter). But the funniest bits of Vile Bodies are the saddest bits – and the book is a tragedy, really.

There’s also Geoff Dyer, who’s at his funniest when describing – well, anything, but particularly those things which on the surface appear quite serious: anxiety, depression, aging, loneliness, ruin(s). Here he is writing about having a nervous breakdown in Detroit. It’s one of the saddest and funniest things I’ve ever read:

It was raining outside. Not a howling storm, just steady drizzle. The kind of rain that yields no sense of when it might ease up, that seems to be keeping itself in reserve so that it can, if necessary, keep going till the end of time. ‘It was raining outside.’ Gore Vidal derides someone for writing a sentence like that, feigning surprise or relief that it was not raining inside. But that day in the Clique I looked down and saw that it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling on to my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying, not sobbing, just this steady leak of tears. And then, as I realized I was crying, I felt that I was in danger of sobbing. I got a grip on myself, stopped the leak, staunched it. I ate my wet eggs and looked at the rain outside, hoping that would take my mind off the rain inside. I’m having a breakdown, I said to myself, I’m having a breakdown while having breakfast. I said this to myself to calm myself down, to try to familiarize and render ordinary the extraordinary turn of events that had led to this internal rain. I stifled my sobs and ate my breakfast which did not taste any worse because I was having a nervous breakdown. When I had finished the eggs I wiped my knife with a napkin and spread butter and apricot jelly on the whole-wheat toast. I finished the rest of my coffee. I calmed down. I was no longer leaking tears but I was no less distraught now than when I was having a nervous breakdown, which I was still having even though I had, to a degree, managed to regain control of myself.

Why is it funny? You might ask that; I’ve asked myself that. But you might just as well ask why it’s sad. The tragedy is in the comedy and the comedy is in the tragedy. That’s right, isn’t it? Like Lorrie Moore (who Almond also mentions in his article). What makes A Gate at the Stairs so funny? Certainly not its wretched outcome – or maybe that’s precisely why it’s funny. Funny for not being funny, like everything else. When I was about six years old my best friend broke her arm trying to do a back handspring in our living room. For some awful reason I began to laugh. I ran into my room with our other friend, another witness, and we giggled inconsolably, behind a shut door. I did not find it funny that my friend was scared, in pain. But something about the inevitability of the situation, perhaps, something about the irreversibility of it, elicited an involuntarily hysterical reaction – like the scene in Outnumbered where Sue submits to a fit of laughter at a funeral.

“So why are these books so funny?” Almond asks, after listing his own favorite funny books – The Catcher in the Rye, Money, Birds of America. “To begin with, because their authors reject the very premise that suffering should be treated only as an occasion for sorrow. They view suffering as something more like an inevitable cosmic joke, one that binds us all…Their characters make us laugh because they tell us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight. And because they continually violate the normal boundaries of decorum, by confessing thoughts and feelings the rest of us spend our lives concealing. We’re both shocked and gratified at their candor, and so we laugh.”

***

I wish I could connect this to what I started writing about here, but as I’ve said, the bit of my brain that makes connections between things isn’t doing its job. You could blame all the TV or the navel-gazing or the short days or the pleasantly dull routine I’ve settled into or whatever, but I don’t really think it’s symptomatic of anything; it’s just the way things are at the moment.

Anyway that’s more or less what’s been going on in my head/life for the last few weeks.

❧

Then, just a few years ago, I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult.

- Miranda July, “Free Everything”, The New Yorker, October 10th, 2011

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