Worn down, worn out


At nine, I awoke, at least technically. While I emerged from the bed and moved around the apartment, gathering breakfast and rearranging dirty cutlery, it was little more than a facsimile of a fugue state, a poor photocopy of a somnambulist’s wanderings. I was exhausted, that bone-deep fatigue that robs you of any hope that your existence will ever improve, where all you can think of is going back to bed. Saturdays like this aren’t joyful rainbows of relaxation, they’re stagnant puddles in a slough of respond.

But it’s sunny. The skies are blue, the weather is warm, how could anyone be gloomy? Singapore is not blessed with the cold grey weather that Londoners have to make do with; there isn’t the jackboot of drizzle forever driving your face into the ground. It’s warm here, perhaps too warm. Perhaps all that time explaining unclear phrases in English to my co-workers had drained the energy from me.

My wife wanted me to go to the zoo today. I refused, having Spanish homework to complete. El compañero de me compañero es me enemy, perhaps. It was fortunate that I didn’t accompany here to the zoo; there was some sort of family day today, where half of Singapore went to the zoo at once, which meant the line for taxis was an hour long, and I would have missed my Spanish class. Instead, after breakfast I went back to bed, and slept another hour, still waking to find myself just as tired as before, still having ny soul crushed by some indeterminate worry.

I conjugated verbs today. I learned about the third person plural, and regular verbs, and it was like trying to drive on glass. I could see each of the concepts, understand for a moment how you conjugate a regular -er verb, but it didn’t stick, I couldn’t find any purchase as the words kept sliding past me. I did get reminded that "hablar" means to speak, and not to have. Why can’t verbs that share the same first two letters also share the same meaning? Surely we don’t need more than 676 verbs in a language anyway?

Despite this exhaustion, there were some highlights to my day. The London Review of Books had a fairly harsh piece on Mo Yan, Nobel Laureate. That was a welcome dark spot in today’s blue sky. I rode a virtual motorcycle around Silverstone, in preparation for watching tomorrow’s race. And, awake, I dreamed of sleep.


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