A long hiatus, I know. Last time I was preparing an entry I wrote: "Over the past few days I have been trying to update this diary more regularly, even daily ideally, but the truth is that I am a slow writer and there simply isn't enough time in the day. I will stick to occasional updates." Turns out even that was an understatement. Funny thing is, on most days I actually want to update the diary; but when I am in the mood for writing I don't have the time, and when I have the time I'm not in the mood. Such is the life of the underachievers.
A number of small things have happened since the last entry. My wife bought me a kite and we went to fly it twice in a local park over different weekends. It's a pathetic excuse for a park surrounded by suburbs on one side and the highway on the other, but it has a stretch of meadow so it does the trick. Flying a kite is almost therapeutic, hours flow by like minutes. The first week of September brought at last a final gasp of summer weather, surprising everyone; we even went to the beach on Monday the 4th. I did not manage a swim because the water turned out to be full of jellyfish; a strong wind also made it hard to enjoy our time there, but I appreciated the chance anyway. We spent the remainder of the afternoon in a local pub before heading back home. Other things have happened, but enough time has passed that they are starting to blur together to some extent, and there is maybe little point in trying to untangle all the strands of memory; a sample will suffice.
Immediately after the unexpected week of summerly weather, temperatures plunged and it abruptly became autumn. The wife has already gone on a Halloween decoration spree in the house. At one point last week it rained for 36 consecutive hours: started on Thursday the 14th and ended Saturday morning. On that Friday my wife went to a rather underwhelming hen do (apparently the karaoke was cancelled and the other girls spent the whole evening talking nails and hair), and I talked to our friend M. over Skype instead. He had had this idea that he and I should do a cook-off over the internet, which I agreed to: we cooked spaghetti with braised onion, pecorino cheese and 'nduja simultaneously, while chatting. They were very tasty. In the end we did not submit pictures of our food to "a jury of our peers" as originally agreed to; I was kind of relieved because in the absence of the missus (she's the photographer) I had managed to take only some very poor pics of the dish by myself. I like chatting to M., partly because he gets himself into all kinds of funny trouble in between our meetings; but also because when you live abroad it is nice to hear from your far away friends, obviously. I enjoyed it when during the pandemic everyone organised Zoom meetings over Zoom meetings to get some semblance of a social life, because - and this is sad to admit to - for some of my friendships that was the most we talked in the past few years. Somehow we managed to be closer under pandemic duress than during regular times.
Yesterday afternoon V., my wife's colleague, came over to get her help with some injection for a treatment she's doing; she ended up staying over for dinner as well. She is always welcome, as she is invariably enthusiastic about the food (and brings beer too). This time she was not particularly lucky: I made an attempt at a fancy pumpkin risotto (with mascarpone cream and fried leeks) but I was not too happy with the result. My biggest gripe is that the pumpkin fucked me over, as it took forever to cook and made me overcook the rice somewhat as a result. I am old enough to accept these blunders as an inevitable and even important part of the learning process, but I will never not be salty about them in the moment.
Today I was woken up by drilling in the apartment next door. Judging from the materials collected in the hallway, they were re-doing the bathroom. For some reason the drill frequency travels exceptionally well across the walls (which are otherwise quite insulating), so it felt like they were drilling my very skull and it nearly drove me insane. I wanted to shout. Thankfully my wife was working in the office today, or she'd have lost her mind. I made myself a naan from scratch for breakfast and filled it with scrambled eggs and assorted veggies. I am trying to learn how to make good naan - they come out a little dry at the moment. In the afternoon I went to the university to attend a working group organised by S.. The speaker was not prepared enough and kept stumbling; this being the first meeting, I was afraid we would lose all the outsiders in the audience so, since I am well-versed in the topic, I kept raising my hand and interjecting, hoping to fill the gaps. I suspect I came across as a bit of a cunt, at least to the speaker, even though I tried my best to be respectful; I hope they forgive me. It occurs to me that the worst talk I have ever given was on the very same topic, so I feel a certain degree of empathy. After the talk I walked home, waited for my wife, smoked a cigarette with her when she arrived. This is a rare occurrence so I cherish it especially; it feels very intimate to share a cigarette with her now. It's one of those moments that feel very 'husband & wife' to me. We chatted about Danny Masterson's conviction while I made dinner - pasta alla puttanesca with tuna. The scent of the sauce permeated the kitchen and lingered for a long time afterwards. I love it when the smell of good food lingers, it turns a house into a home. My wife paid me a big compliment some time ago, entering the kitchen she said "this is starting to smell like a house where people eat well".
Maybe I am just under the influence of the gloomy weather, but lately I have been having this feeling that things in the world keep degrading and we are due for a hard reckoning. Everything seems to be getting ever so slowly worse, and I don't remember the last time I thought that something had improved. That's a hard thought to have - "I have forgotten the last time things got better". Maybe I should make that the subtitle of this website. Every day brings a new perplexing testimony of the decline of the institutions: for instance, today an email informed me that a well-known "wellbeing" charlatan is giving a seminar at the local university; no one batted an eyelid. They are quick to object to any speaker deemed "problematic" (a word empty of all meaning nowadays), but the charlatans do not even register. Later I was reading on Reddit someone complaining about the extortionate rates hotels charge nowadays and they said something that stuck with me: "the last time I saw these prices was 2007-2008". I confess that the thought of another financial crisis coming is somewhat soothing to me, not because I think we would be spared but because the alternative is that things keep getting worse forever. It would be too devastating to learn that we are born and spend the entirety of our life trapped in the arms of a gargantuan maelstrom, each revolution bringing us inches closer to the unforgiving eye and us dying well before we even get to see it. A downward existence.