Caveat: Cheap Flights to Auckland

Anyone who has a blog has had the experience of "spam" comments showing up in the comments section. I recently ran across a piece of spam commentary that seemed almost like poetry. It's not often that spam speaks to one so personally as this passage seems to do.

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. Cheap Flights to Auckland

I always wonder about the origin of texts like this – computer generation? non-native-speaker authorship? some kind of burroughsian cut-up of wikipedia?

Caveat: PTSD?

My acquaintance Kelli (a former coworker from circa 1988) suggested, based on her own experience, that there is possibly a component of the cancer treatment process that leads to PTSD. I've been mulling it over, and it makes sense. That explains the slightly affect-less, semi-shell-shocked feeling I've been having so much of, lately.

I hesitate to use the term, though – both because it seems broadly over-used as part of our culture, and also because I'm not sure how I feel about it as a "diagnosis" at all. I'm not much of one for the DSM, when you get down to it. It's a lot of labels.

Partly, though, my feeling is it's just being back in the grind of work. I had been intending to plunge back into a kind of self-curative workaholism after the worst was over, and so… that's where I'm going. It's taxing, though – physically because I'm not in the best shape, and emotionally, because, well… work.

What I'm listening to right now.

Peter Murphy, "Cuts You Up."

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

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