wisdom is overrated

There is so much on my mind that I can only reach for rings of donuts and load Buzzfeed, that bane of at-home productivity.

The thing with working from home is that I am within walking distance to actual food that I can prepare myself for free, but would rather open a pack of keropok and eat mango-and-cream sorbet (fantastic dessert, by the way) directly from a tub. Why.

Am reading Northanger Abbey and can identify with the ironist Henry, but I also feel that I am projecting too much of prior social experience onto Catherine — her use of The Mysteries of Udolpho as an interpretive tool to understand the events taking place in Northanger Abbey, for example. I can relate to her tendency to mediate real life with textual life, and this takes place on two frontiers: in books and in film/TV. (Unfortunately Catherine's refictionalisation of her world, after defictionalising gothic tropes from reality, only reaffirms the uncomfortable truths derived from textual life. That sucks.)

I felt like the Barefoot Contessa because I tiptoed to my potted rosemary plant without footwear, intending to snip off some stalks for a gin and tonic with meyer lemons, please forgive my pretensions. Also, this is probably where the similarities between Ina Garten and me end. She does not have to return to public housing.

I need to ease myself back into writing full sentences, because no one speaks with punctuation in daily conversations anymore. It is unfortunate that whenever I hear someone below 25 speak with semicolons in their sentences, the only thing on my mind is how class-conscious they sound. My own self-aggrandising follow-up to this is that we are all at a certain age where our minds are structured by a sublimated form of class anxiety, so it doesn't matter: we are all proletarian whenever it's convenient.

Recently I have been thinking about how complex amorous relations are, and how they occasionally manifest the appearance of being complete and utter bullshit. Of course I stand corrected. This is not a popular worldview because it's obviously detrimental to the human race, assuming there is anything worth perpetuating. Also if relations take the shape of something trite (and consequently, vulgar and repulsive) there surely has to be some minutest grain of reason that might justify its existence? What validates a relationship anyway? Zizek's all like, "if you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them" which is true. It's a supra-rational activity. Let's all have fun with that.