a week's worth of ramble

What a week...I've learned that a common cold can turn into nasty things - like conjuntivitis... Which has a very high ick factor. And it developed between 2 and 4pm on Thursday, right in the middle of my seminars. How charming I must have looked trying to demonstrate any kind of authority or reassurance while leaking snot from my eye. Luckily, I'm currently sporting a kind of Thurston Moore, circa 1995, coiffeur and so was able to at least obscure the eye in question.

And the medication that the chemist handed me over the counter was a drug that caused my dad to doubt my ability to read - he made me spell it out over the phone - and then calmly explain that it wasn't available back home because it (very rarely) caused persistently deadly side-effects. Fun! Anyway, the eye seems to be clearing up on its own - maybe the three doses of deadly-drug worked.

The highlight of the week was definitely Wednesday night - completely worth the rest of the week - I'm still smiling. We meant to go to a concert at Nas's uni but were having such a wonderful time just talking and making goofy-lovey-dovey faces at each other that we decided to give it a miss. You know when you realise that in spite of sharing a (very small) space, you haven't actually exchanged anything more important than the state of the milk in the fridge? Yeah. So I dressed up, Nas met me off the train in York, we walked around the city enjoying the sudden reappearance of the sun after threatening clouds all day. York is beautiful in the late afternoon, especially when heavy rain-clouds move off to the east and the sun is starting to set in the west. If anyone is planning on visiting York, try to be there for this. The Minster is particularly stunning as Yorkshire stone compliments Yorkshire weather-effects with a native grace: the whole thing glows in that kind of light.

In keeping with this mellow yellow kind of afternoon, Nas promised me a banana-flavoured beer...and it was! We had dinner at Concerto Cafe - and I will whole-heartedly advertise them here. Small, cosy, excellent food, lovely wine. The only thing I might say is that we weren't really asked how everything was - the service might have been a bit more engaging. But then, I suppose plenty of people prefer service as invisible as possible. I did think that the style of the place might suggest a more informal approach. But it was lovely - and with a view of the Minster's impressive west entrance. Such a perfect evening.

Tonight we're going to a good old-fashioned pizza party...

I've been reading about privacy recently. It's interesting, of course, to be writing about such a topic on a weblog - do I have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Do I want privacy given that I'm using this medium? If I don't, do readers suppose that I present an authentic 'me'? I suppose authenticity is an outmoded concept anyway. But it is interesting in light of something I heard during a seminar about a project commissioned by the CBC asking prominent writers to keep diaries - with the understanding that they would be published. One participant noted that she had started doing things, noticing things, in order to include them in her journal. On the other hand, privacy can protect the trivial; it isn't always a mask to conceal subversive or exceptional private lives. I suppose one outcome of the explosion of weblogs is the relevation of a critical mass of quotidian lives - a defensive presentation of the ordinary and mundane. And of course, in turn, it creates a readership comforted by the multifaceted projections of the universality of experience, if we consider it in its broadest, most general aspects: eating, loving, working, sleeping; health and illness; change and stability; interactions with people and self-centred reflections of how they affect me. It's a comforting continuity - a borderless mass of code that lets me believe there is solace in the trivial details of my life and the people and things that share my life - not just for me, but for strangers for whom reading my 'private' log is participating in a continuing, becoming, existence.

But then again, maybe not.