I'm finally beginning to feel like myself again after the viral month of October. I was beginning to lose interest in almost everything except sleeping.

Now that I'm back on top, I've managed to get a handle, or at very least a perceived handle, on work. I finally managed to teach a few decent lessons and also managed to get The Man off my back. We all have The Man in our lives, that incessant obligation that complicates our lives and spoils all our fun. When you're paying - or the corporation that employs you - close to $20,000 USD to educate your child, you're looking for something resembling a quarterly report to the shareholders, especially when you have notions of Yale and Skull and Bones and the White House in mind for your spawn. We had parent-teacher interviews last Tuesday and The Man wasn't nearly as punishing as I thought, confirming my life-long held belief that if you're worried about doing a good job, you're doing a good job. The Man can be just about anything: your boss, your mortgage, your spouse/partner, your stomach or your golf game.

I'm not clear on the genesis of The Man, but I would guess it was the early 1950s. I've been reading a fair amount recently as I didn't have energy for much else. I've followed my tendency for threads, threads that tie and bind, or either get knotted up when you pull them or unravel the fabric of existence. I'm self-schooling myself in American post-modern literature. It was the logical stop after ready quest and odyssey for four years. Semiotics is what I think I'm talking about, symbols that point to things, that allow us to name things. Somewhere in a pile of gmail is the name of a text book I need to read on the subject. My understanding is this, if semiotics applies to questing, then the "The Hero's Journey" (I'm almost embarrassed to utter the phrase) points to or suggests answers, a goal or an outcome. Post-modernism points to another question and things defy labels. This is confusing. In 2004, I thought I knew where I was headed and all I encountered just affirmed that feeling. Now, I know that I'm still headed in the same direction, but everything points away from the appointed journey, the excluded middle. Like an Escher painting, the background implies what is in the foreground. My first clue that I had entered this phase of life was The Crying of Lot 49 and now I think I've found the font of that work, Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. It's a groovy little book and I highly recommend it. Anyhow, I'm starting to understand the point of Finnegan's Wake, though I make no claims to understand it...yet.

Realizing that it would be criminal to sequester myself to my apartment on weekends for the next two years. I have a duty to you, my reader, to get out and explore this wacky place. On Sunday, I finally ventured forth to Hösök Tere or Heroes Square to grab a coffee and walk around the city park, reconnoiter the thermal baths and the museums that await. I really wanted to take my camera, but I forgot. I realize I need some non-work related ritual in my life, so I will head back to the coffee shop on Sunday and take some photos this time. I will resurrect this travel blog, I will win you all back.

With the internet providing all the information we need through a little, tiny fiber-optic cable, I don't really see the point in links, except for this one. Who the hell thought to check whether Scotch tape emitted X-rays? I can see some senior scientist at 3M, hunkered down in a dark room on Christmas Eve, stripping off great lengths of the new-fangled adhesive and making a note to investigate the sparks after he finished wrapping his wife's brand new vacuum cleaner. Has anyone ever tried stripping off tape in a pitch black room? Well, it gives off enough radiation to X-ray your hand!!! Fear not: the air prevents most of the photons from reaching your hand. Still, this is a damn strange phenomenon. Next, I suppose dental floss will be found to fuse hydrogen atoms.

There I stop. I need to ease myself back into this. I'm still a little at odds with writing. Try wrapping this years gifts in the dark but wear a lead bib.

P.S. thank you reader, whoever you are, for completing the poll

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Hi friends: It's a little discouraging for me to face up to an entire month, October, without writing anything. As some of you have suspected, work has been beating me down some. And the isolation of living somewhere new. I've also been struggling with a virus, it seems like almost a month now, that has dampened my enthusiasm for everything except sleeping. The saying goes "you can't keep a good man down" and as my life's ambition is to have "good man" as an epitaph, I'd better get up. Thanks to you for giving me a poke to see that I was still breathing.

It would be too self-indulgent to blather on here about my U.S. Election angst, we all have it and for similar reasons, even if some of us view the next leader of the world from opposite sidelines. Be it enough to say, any change at this point has to be positive. I'm not sure this blog is the place for political rants: there's plenty of cyberspace elsewhere to host that. I think the "success" of this blog, if I can be that self-indulgent has been in the "what I got up to today" spirit of it. So, in that spirit, I will continue, though perhaps without so many links.

Pictured above is me/myself/I and my brother-in-law at Kleine Scheidigg in Switzerland, photo courtesy of my dear sister who takes very good photos of the two of us. As I discovered from Forensics - one of the many courses I have been cajoled into teaching or compelled to teach at AISB as part of my self-styled financial freedom package - I will not name names. Once a student told me the names of my nieces and nephews and my maternal great-great grandmother, I thought it best to refrain from names of family and friends.

I'll let the picture tell its tale: it was a great day and I would visit this place again and I was very happy to share the experience with my family.

The trip to Switzerland was undertaken by rail from Budapest. It was an overnight train and, yes, "Night Train" was resonating through my brain whilst I rode, which may explain why I couldn't sleep better. That and the virus. The coach consisted of several six passenger compartments, lining one side of the car, with six seats within, three facing three. The seats fold down to accommodate the six passengers in bunks. Fortunately, there was only one other passenger in my compartment and they did not snore. It was a surprisingly pleasant way to travel. The main train stations in Budapest are all very close to my apartment, perhaps less than six tram/tube stops, so rail is darn handy and responsible.

Speaking of responsibility, I think the ecological/environmental Armageddonism is getting to me. Please, refrain from sending me anything illuminating this issue further. I've thought about it, which is why I stopped driving a car four years ago and if I can find a way to get to Europe by boat and rail without spending all of the money I'm saving (see above), I'll do it. Frankly, the world just isn't set up for non-air travel between continents. When all those Brits traveled to Australia on P&O in the sixties, were they mortgaging their lives to do so? Maybe. I know the planet and all life on it is screwed, I just don't need any reminders, at least not now. Remind me after I'm over this virus. I suppose the viruses will survive.

I best not push myself too hard, it's 12:30 am, with no election results in sight and I can never be sure that I'm feeling 100% these days, so I'm turning in. I will try to pull it together and get back to blogging. In the meantimes, walk or take a bus, pass on the New Zealand lamb or the apples from Chile; wash your hands regularly and cover your mouth when you sneeze.

Ken