I Am Here

Greater Charlottesville, VA.  Missing my kid.

I Was Here

Indian Rocks Beach, FL.  Also not taking pictures.  Possibly because I was there for all of SIXTEEN HOURS.  Taking a very, very short trip is like being abruptly parboiled: In you go, and then out again, pale and damp and mildly transformed.

I Was Here

Raleigh, NC.  Not taking pictures.  Because I am terrible at taking pictures!  A lack-of-predilection about which I periodically have existential crises.  Is my failure to snap the world a failure to acknowledge my presence in it?

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.