Syllabus #184

 Wooooooooooooooow.  This week really got away from me.  I spent half the week in a K-hole* blowing my nose on the couch, alternating between reading John Updike novels and watching White Lotus.  I took three negative covid tests, so I guess I just had a good old fashioned debilitating cold that turned my sinuses into an inner-city fire hydrant wrenched open on a hot July day, kept me up all night coughing even after chugging** some Vicks 44, and gave me a 3-day headache.  Everyone likes hearing hyperbolized accounts of other people's moderately inconvenient communicable diseases, right?

*I've never done ketamine, I just wanted to sound cool

**taking the exact 30mL dosage as directed on the bottle

Thank you to my incredible care team, impeccable bedside manner

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I didn't read a single thing on the internet this week that would be worth sharing.  What I did do with my screen time was a concerning amount of Duolingo, because I'm in some kind of 3-week Diamond league challenge where you have to stay in the top 10 or you get knocked out.  I have been clawing my way to the top 3, neck and neck with some guy from Israel whose Duolingo handle is 'Your Real Daddy.'  I must best him.

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Analog Reading:

Finished Stella Maris.  It left a lot of questions open, especially in contrast to the narrative presented in The Passenger, but they'd all be spoilers so I won't raise them here.

Andy is on a John Updike kick, reading the Rabbit tetralogy.  I read them probably 15 years ago, and have forgotten most of the plot, so I decided to revisit them.  They hit different when you're approaching middle age and have lived through the Me Too era, among other things.  Harry Angstrom just oozes misogyny from his pores, and he's a racist prick, but Updike just writes such a beautiful sentence that it carries you along.  It's a little bit of Stockholm syndrome at work, but I'm not not enjoying the books.  

I read Rabbit, Run over the course of about 3 days and am now plowing through Rabbit Redux.  In the 2nd book, he's 36 but is basically already a paunchy old man, which is almost as offensive to me as the racism and misogyny.