Downtime

 Very strange weather in Bali this past week and more said to be on the way. At a time when we should be in the height of our dry season, it has been raining cats and dogs, and consistently throughout the day. It has been a good time to catch the flu, which I have managed to do, and this has made me not want to do anything or go anywhere anyway. If ever there could be said to be a fortuitous time for the flu, this has been it. Coincidentally, this inclement weather started the day after Eveline flew back to Java. Talk about a woman taking the sunshine with her.

So it has been a week of watching TV and reading books and rushing out between rainstorms, though sometimes unsuccessfully, in order to buy cold pills or aspirin or food (mostly of the comfort variety). I am nearing the end of Elif Batuman's novel Either/Or, and have also been reading, in the Indonesian translation, a long novel called Maria Beetle, by Kotaro Isaka. It was from this novel that the film Bullet Train derived. I saw the film but, as is usual for me, I remember almost nothing of it. I am finding this story of multiple comical hitmen and other low sorts of shady characters all coincidentally on the same train and at various cross-purposes to be quite quirky and entertaining, even at 600 pages. 

In the meantime, I have noted down a title that I want to purchase in the near future--Science After Babel, by David Berlinski. I've heard several of Berlinski's lectures over the years and appreciate his keen intellect and provocative viewpoints. He is the consummate doubter--not of those things we have been intellectually trained in our time to doubt, but of the things that are in need of doubting, such as science, because we have really taken too much for granted, by faith as it were.