I'm not sick but I'm not well

Thanks to a flu shot and religious handwashing, I managed to avoid getting sick this year right up until (of course) the busiest two weeks I've had yet - the week before and the week after my vacation. (Weirdly, I was perfectly fine the whole time we were in AZ; I suspect I picked something up on the way back. I always wipe down my seat back/tray table/seatbelt buckle/etc. with Clorox wipes, but I can't do the same for every surface in the airport, more's the pity.) The extra frustrating part is that the most persistent symptom has just been fatigue, which is easy to mistake for "I'm overextended this week" right up until other symptoms start manifesting, like a headache or nausea or sore throat. So (for instance) on Monday, I felt a little tired but figured I could make it through the day, and proceeded to have lunch with a friend and get up to Sauganash and teach right up until I got three-quarters through my afternoon class and suddenly I was so exhausted just standing up was making me dizzy. Luckily Breanne was able to help me find a last-minute sub for my evening class, so I was able to go home and rest; after a three-hour nap, I felt far better.

Of course, this opened a whole separate can of worms. I'm well aware that I work in two physically intense fields and that if I don't take care of myself when I need it, I'll burn out fast––and yet all evening my mental narrative was something like "look, you're feeling better, clearly you weren't that sick, you need to suck it up and tough it out, nobody likes a flake, if you use up everyone's goodwill when you're feeling a little off you'll regret it when you're really ill". Never mind that I'd been so tired I could barely sit up; I was functioning, so clearly taking the evening off was me being a delicate snowflake.

I've been doing what I can to ignore that line of thought, and have been prioritizing rest since then, which has been no small thing, given that we badly need to do grocery shopping and a number of other errands––but at least I've gotten through work without having to cancel any more appointments. I'm trying to weigh whether I have the spoons to at least go get cat litter today; the litterbox situation is rapidly reaching emergency status, but I have tutoring this afternoon, two classes to teach tonight, and a jam-packed workday tomorrow. I wish I had a nice little status bar that would tell me how much energy I have and how much I was using for any given task; it'd make judging these things so much easier.

Wednesday book meme thing

What I just finished reading

Provenance, by Ann Leckie. After the galaxy-spanning scope of the Ancillary books, this story initially feels almost an afterthought; the Radch Empire would likely consider the Hwaeans a backwater culture, and their obsession with vestiges (artifacts relating to events of personal or cultural significance) quaint at best. And yet, through the eyes of Ingray, this culture feels just as real and important, even though much of the narrative is about Ingray's questioning as to whether provenance (of her culture's artifacts, of herself as an adopted child, of her friends and their presumed species) is as important as she's always thought it was. I particularly liked how closely integrated this book felt with the Ancillary books, even though it stands just fine on its own; the events in those books, and Breq's actions in particular, reverberate throughout the story and trigger much of the plot, even though the books share no major characters. It helps to contribute to the sense of "upending the entire status quo" that the first three books implied while being entirely its own story––a neat trick. But most of all, I continue admire how Leckie interweaves character development, worldbuilding, and thematic relevance together with such apparent ease; I'm sure she's worked hard to learn the trick of it, but she makes it look like it's nothing at all. (And on a weirder/more personal note, I find the word "nuncle" oddly appealing to say - it feels full and juicy in my mouth, like a ripe apricot.)

The Beekeeper's Apprentice, by Laurie R. King. I have...very mixed feelings on this one. On a surface level I found it quite engaging, and the slow start was more than balanced by a thoroughly interesting couple of adventures that Russell and Holmes undertake in the latter half. King does a good job slowly ratcheting up the stakes and therefore the dramatic tension, without seeming sudden or melodramatic; similarly, her pacing in developing the intimacy between the two feels authentic and sweet. The ending, however, was something of a let-down; in the best Holmes stories (and the best mysteries in general), there's a certain trompe l'oeil aspect, where the various pieces of information and evidence seem unrelated and confusing right up until that moment when you look at them from the proper angle, at which point everything falls into place. I think King was going for that here, but she didn't quite make it; the villain basically came out of nowhere and only seemed to really exist to foster that sense of closeness between Russell and Holmes. Similarly, having looked at some of the further books in the series, I'm disappointed to discover that my future-romance-radar wasn't malfunctioning; apparently Russell and Holmes do end up romantically involved, though it takes thirteen books for them to actually get together. I'm not saying it's an impossible sell, but the concept feels so creepy and exploitative that I'm not really in any hurry to read future books. Can't we have one series where there are two characters of opposite gender who share a mental and emotional closeness without it also having to be a romance?

Moscow But Dreaming, by Ekaterina Sedia. I'm not sure I really have anything new to say about this anthology; the stories are hauntingly atmospheric and often dreamlike, but lack a certain sense of structure. I did quite like "The End of White", where the leaden gauzy feel of the prose was particularly appropriate; and having read what little I have about twentieth-century Russian culture, I appreciated the recurring theme of facing the horrors of the past and the scars they've inflicted on the collective Soviet psyche. But on the whole, I personally like at least a little more structure in my impressionist sketches.


What I'm currently reading

Yoga Sequencing, by Mark Stephens. I've only just picked this up again (I didn't want to haul its textbook-size bulk to Arizona and back), but I'm chugging along on the section on asana-family sequencing!

Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. I think I picked this up on an Audible Daily Deal, and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, Lewis is steeped in sexist and patriarchal assumptions I generally loathe, and I'm particularly unfond of the physical ugliness=emotional/spiritual stuntedness trope. But at the same time, there's a certain comfort (especially during a week when I'm feeling ill) in listening to a story that follows the patterns you learned in childhood. And Lewis is, as always, a far better writer than his assumptions deserve; his characters follow familiar tropes but surprise me with their depth and complexity, and his themes on the limitations of philosophy and science and the human need for faith in the unknown resonate with me on a profound level. I guess you could say I'm enjoying it in spite of myself, heh.


What I plan to read next

This depends entirely on how much reading time I have this upcoming week...I'm starting to feel the urge to just pick a book at random off my shelf.