Duplicity

Okay, I think I maaay be a little late in the promised per fortnightly entry. But here it is, and I hope that this makes up for it.

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I had been spending time reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, not the French version of course but an English translation. And the main comment that I can make is: wow. The main storyline is relatively straightforward with the focus being on Jean Valjean, and the over-arching theme about how class often triumphs nurture, no matter how much has one done to make amends for the crimes that one makes. It's a touching story, especially when you consider the sacrifices that Jean Valjean had made to ensure the future of Cosette, a person who was at best someone he adopted.

But what sets Les Mis apart from other fiction that I had been reading is the large inserts of historical information. Things like the Battle of Waterloo, the political philosophy of the revolutionists, and even the Parisian sewers all made their way into the tome to fluff it up to the nine-hundred page brick it is. I can't write like that; my knowledge just isn't encylopaedic enough. In fact, I'm sure when people said that one could learn a lot of general knowledge from reading they were referring to Les Mis.

I'm sure many have deconstructed the story enough that I won't even attempt to do so here. It is a good book to dive into, but be forewarned, it will take a bit of time to go through it.

In other news, I have tried to re-start my running training programme once again. The last time I started on this, the haze got in the way and I couldn't continue. This time though, I could keep up with it, mostly, until this week when my body started to give out on me from fatigue. The problem with the training programme is that it requires a very specific sleeping and waking schedule, which for most purposes is just brutal to keep up. I can't run in the afternoon, and evenings are terrible for running due to general tiredness and heat, which leaves only the morning. But I take the bus to work in the morning, which means that I need to wake up early. To run, then, would require me waking up even earlier, and to ensure that I have enough sleep, I will have to sleep earlier still.

The long and short of it is that I need to sleep by 2200hrs each night and wake up at 0500hrs each morning. This is bad because I only reach home at 1900hrs at my fastest due to the amazingly [in]efficient transport system. Even driving doesn't help because of the massive jams on all the roads that lead to my home.

I guess it's no wonder that my body decided that enough was enough and shut down on Wednesday, forcing me to take a sick day to rest up.

The haze is fast coming back too. I just hope that I can survive through that.

On another front, I think that I am more isolated than ever now. Janet's been busy with lab, and so isn't talking with me online that often---I miss her enough. The other people that I used to chat online on a regular basis have long since gone on to other pursuits and are thus less available as well. And don't let me get started on the people who are physically near me---there are too few of them left. And the artificial groupings that are thrust into my face are not helping much---dinner and dance, and the ugh faux social group for scholars. I take offense to such artifice. I may have studied on a scholarship or two, but I never felt like I was ``one of them'' scholars. If anything, I feel like a schmuck. I think this might be due to my general distaste for the Machiavellian conduct that many of these people practise---narcisstic self-serving sadists most of them are. Or maybe I'm just bitter I don't have a PhD and am sick of having to explain myself to a bunch of people who never saw defeat and failure in the face. Each time any of these people try to reach out to me, instead of feeling camaraderie, I sense them as just pitying me and just trying to be nice. I don't like it when people act that way. Duplicity is the key to all complications and if I can reduce the amount I have to deal with, the better.

I like people who see what I see, rather than try to see how I look. To look at me for what I am, and not for what I appear to be. Maybe my cynicism has gone too far, or maybe it hasn't gone far enough; I'll leave it to society to judge. Meanwhile I'll just carry on what I've been doing so far, building systems, reading voraciously, and writing a whole lot more.

Till the next update, and sorry for the rambling angsty post.