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I ran a few errands yesterday after six hours of performing Selfless Public Service. And then I went straight to bed.
At the time, I thought I was being incredibly lazy. Or that I was depressed.
This morning, my nose is running, and my ears are doing that phantom tinnitus thing. I’ve been sneezing nonstop. Even though I slept 12 hours and drank espresso, I’m still exhausted. And achy. And peevish. So, I think I’m fighting off some kind of infection, and my body understood that yesterday even before I began developing symptoms.
Clever body!
The day is shaping up to be an ordeal: I’m supposed to go to a birthday party this afternoon, and I can’t cancel without creating all sorts of Bad Feelings.
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It snowed yesterday morning. In the afternoon, the sun came out, but the temperatures dropped. The snow formed crystals on the trees that looked exactly like some kind of fruit blossom. Eerie. Beautiful.
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I’m feeling disgusted by the political narratives on both sides. L actually got really mad at me for suggesting that Obama might not be entirely innocent of the spying charges Trump dropped on him.
“They’re not true!” she told me indignantly. “Obama is a decent man! He would never do something like that!”
“Oh, c’mon, Linda,” I said. “Obama was the least transparent President since Richard Nixon. Don’t get me wrong – he’s someone I’d love to sit next to at a dinner party. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some scintilla of veracity behind Trump’s Captain Queeg-like levels of paranoia.”
L got so mad that she actually stormed out of the room in a huff.
I keep going back to Bion of Borysthenes:
The boys throw stones at the frogs for sport.
But the frogs die in earnest.
Bion knew of what he wrote: He was born into a low class family and for some offense the father or the mother committed (probably equivalent to the modern crime of jaywalking), the entire family was sold into slavery. Somehow he managed to become a Famous Philosopher, working his way through every ideological sect in turn – Academics, Cynics, Hedonists – until finally he became an Aristotealian. I figure he figured Aristotle where the big bucks lay in ancient Greece.
But the quote I reference above isn’t particularly Aristotelian.
It’s just true.
