they do it all the time

I woke up this morning and made it to my seven a.m. conference call before it started, which was nothing short of miraculous. I also made it through the conference call and had breakfast, but was struck down around 9:30 by the same occasional bout of chills and nausea that I get every couple of months. It hit pretty suddenly, but I walked out of my office without looking back and made it home, covered in goosebumps, before throwing up. I slept it off and was feeling better by the afternoon, but didn't feel up to going into the office, so I stayed home. I also skipped my writing class, which was unfortunate, since the class is pretty much what I live for these days; so, to make up for my lack of artistic development, I read 'The Time-Traveler's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger.

I'd picked up the book when I was in Dublin, on one of the many lazy Saturday afternoons I spent browsing through Waterstone's (the UK/Ireland equivalent of Borders) when I wasn't traipsing about the countryside or working all weekend. However, due to all that traipsing and the vast quantities of work I was applying myself towards while in Dublin, I didn't get around to reading it there. It's sat on the 'must read these books now' shelf for months, ever since I unpacked all of my books in July, and I've finally read it all the way through in one evening. Check another one off the list; only thousands more to go before I get through everything I want to read in this life. Anyway, I highly, highly recommend it if you like time-travel and devastating doomed love affairs--and really, who doesn't like time-travel and devastating doomed love affairs? The story itself moves fairly linearly, but is told from two perspectivies--Clare, the wife, who lives life in the normal straight shot towards the finish line, and Henry, who is also moving forward but occasionally pops into a different time for some undefined period. For her, they first meet when she's six and he's in his 30s; for him, they first meet when she's 20 and he's 28. Anyway, the writing was beautiful, the narrative threads were well-plotted even though it must have been v. difficult to keep the threads together when the characters' chronologies were different, and it was reminscent of 'Never Let Me Go' in that I cried rather unrelentingly for the last few chapters. Really, my 'must read these books now' shelf needs to get less depressing; I suppose it trends toward the depressing side because I buy interesting-looking books and then am never in the mood for the more serious ones, so I skim the surface and read all of the more entertaining varieties, gradually sinking the emotional average of the entire mass into some awful, havoc-wreaking quagmire, before rebalancing the pile by either reading a bunch of them at once (in other words, bingeing on depression) or buying a lot of new books to throw on top of the heap.

Now that I've written in my blog, thus fulfilling my obligation to all of you for another evening, I should go to bed so that I can go into the office tomorrow and do everything that I should have done today. Goodnight!