The heat-wave occupying the midwest moved into the East Coast yesterday, and today it chose to center itself in New Canaan, CT. I felt disgusting the entire day, sweat oozing in gross little beads all over my body. I wore my skimpiest clothing - which isn't really all that revealing anyway, since it is me after all - but to no avail. Unlike everyone else with half a brain, I spent a large part of the afternoon on the streets in Greenwich with my friends, hastily pottering from one air-conditioned venue to another.

**I had a much longer entry here but deleted it because it was really a self-pitying moan. But here's something from today's readings that managed to comfort me a little. It's where I drew my bookmark:

Sailing to Byzantium

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--- Those dying generations --- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-- Yeats, but you knew that