This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.

Said Keats regarding indolence, and while I to this day hate that Ode, I still love Keats and admire as always his respect for indolence. We devalue it tremendously, of course, the sitting, being, the taking in, and allowing...

We are no doubt fearful that passivity or unalloyed receptivity in one area will leech out and become some overarching guiding principle in our psyche, or life. That we'll wake up one day and find we've unwittingly morphed into swarthy, layabout Mediterraneans who say 'five' when they mean 'six-thirty' or worse. This is one reason, amidst poor taste, uninventiveness, ignorance, xenophobia, and fear of solitude, that we spend our vacations righteously doing things, ticking off Chartres and Epidavros on our lists, snapping the requisite few hurried shots of St. Basil's and St. Peter's before making our way to consuming the Great Wall and Kyoto's daibutsu.

I have no such fears, myself, but certainly if you are the sort of person who needs to, you can check my resume and see that I have worked hard enough, and worked long enough, to have 'earned' the right to spend the day doing nothing but making melon balls I never intend to eat or sitting around Montmartre doing nothing other than doing nothing and calling it a holiday all the same. And that's what I did. That was my vacation. I ate quite a bit of pastry, drank a lot of both coffee and wine, talked to my friend and my friend's friends, and bought a book hoping it would help me reproach one of them in German. It didn't, and anyway I expect his French and English were better than mine, so I stuck with those and reproached away and got a foot massage out of it so all was fine.

We did make it to Champagne, which is where the reproaching, the Teuton, and the feet come in, but it wasn't a 'goal' of mine, or even my idea. And we almost didn't make it (European gas mileage is a thing of beauty, but only when there is gas in one's tank to get mileage from), but we did, and we sat around there, too. This litttle sojourn to France was very nearly the only short trip I've ever taken except for ones close to where I happen to live right then, and I was very tempted to stay there, too, except that that would mean the loss of both my bed and a truly fabulous coat.

Maybe I'll move there next year. It couldn't possibly cost more to ship my bed than what I paid in overweight charges for books and shoes when I left Greece. And by then I could have conceivably winnowed my current supply of both to a manageable level, so that it would only be the 100-piece Chinese bed and the 50-pound coat with which I'd need concern myself. And since it will no doubt remain true in a year that the only German I know consists in a few cabaret songs and the occasional singspiel stanza, I won't have worn out my welcome with anyone.

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

I don't know. I tried to write an entry about how senior citizens aren't what they used to be anymore, and I thought I did the math wrong, so I scrapped the whole bit, only to try it one more time after deleting everything, upon which I discovered I had it right all along, up until the point I redid it. I didn't have to 'borrow' from the zero at all, since I was subtracting a 0 from a 7 before that... Which means, to those of you who don't know math as well as I do, that 2,007-70=, as I previously and rightly believed, 1,937.

So, nothing about Chuck Taylors versus Novachords, or Gene Krupa or Bing Crosby before the 'Road Pictures.' It's sad, too, because it had funny bits. Moreover, it explained things much better than 1927 did, an equation I found inscrutable in many ways, most of all the heads tilted sideways when I mentioned things like Lyonnaise Potatoes and Pork Chops, or Holländer, or the shock of the New Look.

And then I read a story about a seminal philologist that moved me so strongly I actually attempted to 'contribute' a 'comment.' At which I also failed, apparently, because I don't know what I pushed instead of 'Yes, show me, I'm trying to do something here!!' when Firefox let me know it had shut down a popup and did I want to see it. Nothing happened, so I reloaded and recocked, and whether it's the firing pin or the trigger assembly or the action is too light, something went awry and I went straight to the Technical Issues page, and by this point I was all in (seminal philologists can do that to me, even Calvinist ones), so I had to set up my Outlook, as that's the address the Technical Issues office wanted, even though they could reach me far more handily elsewhere.

But I seem to have achieved greater success with the manly Hand Balm I started, which makes sense because you can blunt some of the technical issues of scent and still have good results. It seems quite likable now, but we'll see as it cures. So far it is strong on oregano and saffron, as I wanted, with vetiver, cedar, and oakmoss in the bottom, and very little bergamot for a tiny bounce and to coax out the citrus notes in the vetiver. Who knows, but it smells great on me right now, and the oregano is settling in so beautifully.