A Little Malaise With That

I blinked, and then discovered a week had past. I've heard time passes faster the older we get, as if on some sort of a logarithmic curve. You know, one of those ghastly formulas that you've tried to forget about since school.

I've been searching for the proper word to describe the lethargy or apathy I'm feeling at the moment...decrepitude, angst, disquiet...none seem to fit and all are found in the online Thesaurus.com under a search of the word 'malaise'. For the moment I'll just refer to myself as a lazy sloth distracted.


ma·laise 

–noun
1. a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort, often marking the onset of a disease.
2. a vague or unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness, lethargy, or discomfort.



Number one has some merit as V has been run down with the cold for about 10 days. I don't have the runny nose or headache (yet) but I did cough once or twice this morning. Though a drink of water cleared that up, so perhaps it was just a spider or some such thing stuck in my throat. I was at the doctor's office on Tuesday for recent blood test results. He isn't pushing the the pills (yet) to help lower my cholesterol but the day is close at hand. Speaking of hand, I'm glad I wasn't threatened with the 'rubber glove' treatment either.


Number two also has merit. I'm feeling a bit of discomfort from basketball on Tuesday night with the geezers. The change of evening (Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada) threw us and only four people showed up. So it was 2 vs. 2 for an hour. That's a lot of running and falling down stopping and those 58-63 year old men put me to shame. Again. Perhaps that has played on my psyche.

I'm feeling somewhat unfocused in my writing. There's no hope of a #fridayflash happening again this week. And the well of ideas for blog posts has seemed to have dried up. I have a story half-complete that I would like to submit to this year's Arts & Letters Awards that is held each year by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador. This must be submitted by the end of November to be eligible. I'm pushing now to get this done by next week's writer's group meeting to get some feedback from the group. I can hear the whip cracking. For a long time I have had two different ideas for more 'long term' projects and I have set up files for these. As ideas pop into my head I jot them down on paper and toss them into the appropriate file. In the back of my mind I'm thinking that I may have to set aside short stories and perhaps even blogging for a while to devote some serious time to one of these projects. We'll see...in the meantime, I hope this malaise or melancholy or j'en sais pas will pass and things get 'back to normal'. I can picture everyone reading this saying to themselves, "Normal? What the hell is that?" During my search of the word 'malaise' I ran across a website (there are actually a lot of similar sites) that sells malaise traps and stuff to put in them (pictured). I'd give that a shot, but I don't want to spend 174 British Pounds for the trap and associated gear and the wind here would just blow it away. I'll just use my trusty fly swatter for now...