Today, after finally waking up before noon, I wandered city centre for several hours. I looked into the shop windows and I watched the street performers. I bought the paper and two pairs of black lace tights. I read Foucault over a coffee at a busy cafe staffed by one unhappy Spanish girl. When I arrived home, I wanted to bake a chocolate cake, to perfume the darkness with succulent warmth.

Instead I unsubscribed from a bunch of news sources and blogs, which meant reading them and wondering why I had even bothered in the first place. Sift, weed out, and consolidate.

Is my malaise merely exhaustion from my ongoing paper or do I suffer from too much information? "[A]s long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action, scene. . . . Today there is a whole pornography of information and communication. . . . There is in effect, a state of fascination and vertigo linked to this obscene delirium of communication."--from Baudrillard's essay, "The Ecstasy of Communication"

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