Malaise

Why don't people talk more about malaise?  Is that distinctive cocktail of self-loathing, entropy, and foreboding really so foreign that we have to import the word for it all the way from France?  It's true that the literal translation of "malaise," "bad ease," goes some of the way toward describing its effects, but it leaves a good chunk of the experience untonuged.

Malaise. I haz u.

And I'm not sure why.  Of course, that's the essence of malaise: your inability to articulate any good reason for your presence within it.  It's a straight up first world emotion, the kind you succumb to when you own gadgets for frothing milk.

A thousand pinpricks, none of which bleeds.  Your newspaper is late.  There's a hole in your sock.  We're all dying in our own sweet time, and you're just not sure, midafternoon on a Thursday, what it is you should be doing.

The cure: Misfortune.  A hard fall.  Or tea.