2005-01-04 - 6:59 p.m.
My annual birthday winter illness (this year a weird sore throat sinusy thing) drags on, making me tired and cranky. I'm so tired that I slept through my alarm this morning, dreaming that I was browsing in a book store where they just happened to be playing the radio-station my alarm is set to. In fact I was so tired even in the dream that I eventually found a couch in the back of the store and lay down to take a nap on it.
Dreaming about sleeping. That has to be a new fatigue low.
I'm reading a very readable book about Victorian domesticity, which goes through a classic victorian house room by room and explains what happened in it and the social attitudes and expectations that were played out in each room's life. The chapter on the drawing room includes an excerpt from an advice book on decoration, which confidently tells us that, "Large negro lads with glass eyes and arsenic-green draperies starred with gold, are not as suitable, even in a great hall, as a bronze Hercules or a really well-modelled elephant."
There's something about the specificity of these rules - arsenic-green draperies with gold stars, or a *really* well-modelled elephant.
All in all... I'm glad the victorian age is over.
