Useless day -- attempted to rebuild the winbook, but this old dog apparently has learned one trick (reinstalled one OS) too many. Will have to figure out alternate means. Listened to a couple of lectures, one Oxon on tape, one Edinb. live, wrote an essay, and then headed upstairs to the research reading room. Had to compromise on the Hegel reading, given NYPL's oddly limited holdings (perhaps reflecting the prevailing misreading of Adorno's Categorical Imperative), so wasted a few hours reading about H's juvenilia, utterly unilluminative. Found McTaggart on the Logic, but it's keyed so closely to the main Logic that reading it while I'm working through Jena would be useless.
In sum, a day not well disposed. On the bright side, had an hour or two of sunlight in the park after Mass and before breakfast. So, there's that.
Brief game reset:
Have just survived a tremendous challenge (impecunious winter in a northern city). Considerable fatigue and oddities in the innards as the present empirical effects of it.
Still keeping absolute mental (the Project) spiritual (Mass, online homilies, daily essays on the readings) and physical (new heights in bench-press -- "when the water is muddy, I wash my cloak")
Apparently still blackballed from every job stateside, and not enough freelance editing work coming in to decamp to southern Europe for a sustainable room/board while exploring the culture. Present living conditions a bit dire.
The Project might bear fruit, but by design, that's a bit further down the line. Right now, I'm reading as much as I can in these areas. The only improved thing I have to show after these five months of superhuman survival is the mind (and the notes), and that's precisely the point that's being presently stressed a bit. Like using the blackboard on which the entire set of equations has been written to hold the wall together in a storm.
Top tier law degree; top conservatory masters and a decade in the art, and Midwestern monolithic (and corrupt) university ABD, and decent scholarship from all of the above in the portfolio, and in progress.
The difficulty is that the international positions seem to be looking primarily precisely to the corrupt folks who explicitly told me that they were going to blackball me, and the latter appear to be following through on their promise.
So despite the extraordinary physical difficulties, the extraordinary professional difficulties, and the present living situation, I still have hope. Arguably, this is the least rational choice that my mind has made, but it is the one in which I have the strongest confidence.
Onward.