2024 Week 3: Broken Resolutions

There, I've done it. I've gone and broken Resolution Number One for 2024: Be Nice. I have been crying a lot this week, being mean and angsty to Jon, and being mean to myself too. 

My bad mood reached a crescendo on Tuesday, after we went to NTUC and Valu$ to cash in our CDC vouchers. The Junction 8 NTUC always puts me in a bad mood as it's infested with rich people walking around totally oblivious to their environment. The aisles are always choked and it's super aggravating. (So, not unlike the bookstore then.)

After this we went to Valu$ and I noticed that it was almost time to get lunch and go to work, something that gives me major anxiety. But before we could wrap up and skedaddle home, the floodgates had burst.

Noticing reflections of my parents' behaviour. I have a horrible tendency to blame Jon for things when I am upset, which is totally Mum. This wars with my obsession with pleasing people, which is totally Dad. It's like a family row in my head every time. But what would Clara do? So powerful are these parental scripts that I don't even know.

Anyway, I caved and finally signed up for a counselling session, thanks to Joel who sent me one that offers a discounted rate based on your income. 

Semi-related: I saw the doctor this week to review the results of my blood test, which was, in a word, inconclusive. The doctor asked me a bunch of questions about HIV, ordered another blood test to test for folate and/or vitamin B12 deficiency, and said he'd refer me to an immune system specialist. The more he spoke the more the costs added up in my head - the potential bill, truth be told, worried me more than my health.

Possibly there's something really wrong with my attitude towards my health. Even though I fell sick probably about 15 times last year, I saw the doctor once - and it took burning chest pains (I thought it was a lung inflammation) to get me to go. As for mental health, I've been putting off counselling for at least 3 years, allowing crying jags to go unexplained. 

In my mind, healthcare spending is for weak-ass snowflakes, and that's not the kind of person I can admit to being.

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Apart from the above... this week's been okay.

I have been missing work a lot due to the medical appointments. With more free time on my hands, I finally got round to sorting and arranging our books. The Penguin, Oxford, and Wordsworth classics now live in my room:

Everything else, including Jon's comics collection, is here in the living room, sorted by size and colour.

I've also tidied the outside of the house. Moved our (significant) pet supplies outside (we do not have a bomb shelter/storeroom for these things), and then set up an outdoor table and chairs (where I am sitting now, writing this while drinking cheap wine):

High points of this week include going for yoga (finally) on Monday and having lunch at Isle Cafe - finally - before grabbing a bunch of reduced-to-clear baked goods at M&S - and then jogging nearly 4km on Thursday. It's my first jog of any significant distance and I'm so happy about it.

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As for Project Read Non-Fiction, that's turning out a little more complex than I had imagined. I'm having a lot of trouble distinguishing credible from non-credible writers, especially with the "big history" and political science books. So far I've learnt that being published by a major house like Penguin means nothing. And if the book is a bestseller, then all the more reason to suspect the author of cherry-picking facts to support politically driven theses.

For example, I'm currently reading Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography - a bestselling primer on geopolitics even though it's written by a journalist, not a historian or political scientist. Now I'm not saying that journalists can't write good books, but this book reads like one very long op-ed, eschewing historical detail/nuance/research for broad-stroke commentary. 

I guess it's fine to read it as an op-ed (which I am) but I can imagine lots of people reading it and thinking they know all there is to know about geopolitics. Well, you can't blame them, because that's what the book tagline claims - which is total intellectual dishonesty.

By the way it's kinda depressing how at the bookstore we sell so many awful or at least intellectually suspect people's books. I'm thinking about not just Henry Kissinger but also people as varied as Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Yeonmi Park. Puke.