Truly there is nothing more boring that other peoples' happiness. I'm reluctant to say something so apparently misanthropic, but it's true. Specifically, I mean there's nothing more boring than the specific details of other peoples' happy, functioning relationships. The things they like to do together, the little intimacies they share, their little trysts, the things they like about each other. The fact of peoples' happiness, particularly if they're your friends, is relatively interesting, but there's no getting away from the fact that the specific logistical details of that happiness is thunderously, profoundly, titanically boring. And yet people take it so personally if you yawn or check your watch or anything like that. Sheesh.

Woke up this morning with rather ghastly influenza. Seem to be getting over it thanks to having stayed wrapped up in bed all day despite the heat, not taken anything and not having tried to pretend I wasn't sick.

The photos I took yesterday came out quite well. I take better pictures with the digital than I do with film, but the noise levels on the sensor constitute an inescapable limitation. A better camera would be nice, but it'll be two or three years before such a thing becomes affordable (and it'll probably be an eleven megapixel 4/3 sensor SLR). Not that it matters, I suppose; I'm not a photographer and I don't seem to have the drive to become one. Although everybody's a photographer these days.