I'm having one of those weeks.

Here's a quote that sums up my mood:

I have ,--but wherefore I know not,--lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise...].

Not that I ever had any "custom of exercise" in the first place. Anyway, just reading Hamlet makes me feel a little better; after all, I don't have half the problems he had. (And I'm a real person, after all, not a fictional character, which can only be a good thing. Or are We All merely fictional characters in someone's bad novel? Who would have written the unbelievable character of Brittany Spears?)

Enough babble. Soon I'll have to trundle off to work, Saturday being the heaviest work day for me. I'd like to get an extra job, especially since I cut down my hours, but most of the part-time jobs available seem to involve standing up for hours at a time (cashiering at the local grocery store, for example). I had a tendency to faint after working for long hours on my feet when I was seventeen, so I doubt that twenty years later I'll have any greater stamina.

I need something more interesting to read in my so-called "free time" than the books I currently own. But somehow the science fiction section at the bookstore has lost most of its appeal. Reading the average scifi novel these days has an effect equivalent to wearing a hairshirt in ninety-degree heat. All those Important Social Problems, etc. I picked up a new paperback edition of Le Guin's The Dispossessed and read through it, and it recalled to mind the reasons why it was never one of my favorites of her novels. The didactic asides the book is sprinkled with concerning her quasi-socialist-anarchic "paradise" undercut the story, for one thing. At least they are shorter and more evenly spread out than Ayn Rand's brain-numbing Objectivist creeds that go on for pages and pages. (I skipped those parts of Atlas Shrugged.) Both authors, though coming from opposite ends of the ideology spectrum, seem to share something in common, though Le Guin's characters, are at least recognizably human (even the alien ones!).