It’s been a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of week, and time for pleasurable displacement activity like reading everyone else’s blog posts has been in short supply. But this morning I indulged myself, and read a whole week’s Dead Guy posts at a single sitting.
Bad idea.
Not that I didn’t enjoy reading them. For ten minutes or so I was thoroughly entertained. But I now feel completely inadequate, and wonder why you all put up with me. Barbara’s zany account of the toilet police made me laugh out loud. Jeff’s feelgood nostalgia about The Man from U.N.C.L.E carried me right back to lunch breaks at my all-girls high school and adolescent sighings (not just mine) over the acme of male beauty that was David McCallum. (Sorry, Jeff; Napoleon was OK, but our priorities, not to mention hormones, were different from yours).
And everyone else has such a fascinating life. P J even made the blogger’s equivalent of writer’s block sound warm and witty and interesting; that takes real talent.
Then again, maybe I’m just feeling a bit sorry for myself because I’ve got one of those low-level viruses that makes you want to curl up in a chair with a pile of undemanding books and maybe the video of last night’s Mistresses (there was football on another channel, not my choice, but apparently essential viewing) but doesn’t really make you feel bad enough to justify time off work. It’s not as if I have the excuse that I might pass my bugs around everyone else in the office; Crème’s everyone elses are at the other end of the phone or e-mail in-box, all except my other half who valiantly does the numbers work, and I caught the damn virus from him in the first place.
I keep telling myself that at least I don’t have to go to the gym. Apart from the minor point that a stuffed-up nose and raw throat makes any physical activity more strenuous than lifting a coffee mug inadvisable, that really would be anti-social – breathing my bugs into their air-conditioning to be re-breathed by all those previously healthy people.
So here I am, at my desk as usual, but with brain set on Slow and to-do list not getting any shorter. Fortunately there’s plenty of routine stuff on the list, which doesn’t require too much in the way of coherent thought.
I was going to meander on about the power of advertising, and whether the ten percent that works makes it worth paying for the ninety percent that doesn’t. But if you don’t mind, I lack the mental agility to make any sense of that, or anything much at all, today. Maybe next week.
In fact, I think I’ll shut up and let you all get on with your lives. They have to be more interesting than mine. Today at least.
