My cosy blog needs an infusion of random talkiness to prevent ze dreary doldrums, and so I write. I have seen some movies, they were silly "The Banquet (with an idiotic Zhou Xun and an aging and browless Ziiyiii Zhaang)", and I'm sure I've watched some more, but they have not ze stickiness. I read some Greene and Spark, the latter was superior. I prefer clean wicked prose over all else. Greene is clean enough, but his Catholicism weighs leaden, while Spark's is playful and smart. Why writers smear their suffering all over is inexplicable. Even worse are the people who love such rubbish. The best writers edit with demoniacal intent. They eviscerate all that's personal and make sure their works are pure, light, true. They judge with an omniscience and disregard for real life. Even "gritty" writers must spew with a regard towards utter sordidness and unreality. Then there is wonder, and not hubris or petty agony or stupid angst. I love coffee. |

Absolute business - busy-ness - has become the regular (not regularly irregular, and oh how! I wish! it was irregularly irregular, but such days are like ze dingo, they have gone into the lost bush and fauny vastnesses) rhythm of my automaton-esque existence. Did my first true night call, and it was as G said "hellish". I became an ECG machine; I became a drawer of interminable tubes of blood; I placated patients and relatives with a manner that I plucked from a strange bless'd plane. It was 0730 till 1215 of the very next day, with fewer than 2 hours spent off-legs (sitting, not like those pore gerry patients, and how I wish I was back within a Citi bus ride of the Cam) I reckon, and not a wink of sleep (apart from the moments when I sat upon the filing ledge and it was next dawn). It was a taste of things to come, and there is the comfort that a brain can still function at full crank, in spite of inhuman pressures, and also the fact that countless have gone through it and become the sagely consultants (not dormicum-dealers) with spindly fingers, Ipswich connexions, elegant usages of "ptosed", and above all preternatural clinical abilities who dwell in rarified atmospheres. I'm not sure that this was what I had envisaged for myself when I put my name to that deed of slavery, but then I'm not sure any other profession would offer the kind of strange, unconceited moral conceit that a day of exhaustion for others (on little, too little, or, in our cases, no pay) gives. What use gym memberships, or tailored suits, or sleek shoes, when an apron against MRSA, a tray of sharps and assorted aids-towards-states-of-sterility, and a stethoscope that has acquired the rounded horn of one's nape and lost its squeaky-newness for a specklily dusty veneer, can confer such peculiar contentment? Ehehe. |