If Saturday was a very productive day, having cycled 50kms in the morning, attended my master’s class after shuttling the ten year-old to his taekwondo class in the afternoon, today I got sick. And when I get sick, I grunt and grumble with each move and inconvenience – from standing up to shifting positions on the sofa to squeezing the cap of my tumbler. It’s my way of indulging in my once-a-year sickness, which this time is a bout of cold or flu – fortunately not Covid, as I don’t have sore eyes and my sense of taste and smell are intact. It’s probably fatigue. So all I did today was to read the entire day: from verbose David Foster-Wallace essays to climate newsletters to the latest Bon Appetit issue on sustainability to the ecologist (and white nationalist) Garrett Hardin’s classic article on the tragedy of the commons to a soporific article by a Harvard professor on how Confucianism is key to East Asian industrialization. One article that struck me, from the Guardian, is about this guy who left his demanding events job at the New Yorker to be a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (He has since switched jobs, and wrote a book on the experience. Sounds about white?) I tried imagining how it is to be one – specifically how the art pieces and objects look like at night, with lights closed and with almost no one but a bevy of guards stationed here and there. It could have been magical.