I had a flu some weeks back, and I feel I have not ever really recovered.
This whole week I have slept at least two hours longer than my normal sleep time each night, which for me a reliable sign that something is amiss with my general health. Despite my occasional bouts of hypochondria, I don't think worry about cancer is well-placed, since just a few weeks ago I passed my semiannual inspection successfully. I'm just feeling unhealthy and consequently rather glum about life.
I should add to the above the fact my normally predominant escapist hobby - my geofiction - has been on indefinite hold due to a strong sensation of burnout with respect to what you might call the internal politics of the website where I was engaged in that.
So I have been feeling adrift and painfully uncreative - allowing a possible exception for my daily effort at poetry, but with the caveat that even there, I am "depleting my reserves" rather than doing much that is new.
So what am I doing with my time, outside of work and sleep?
I have been reading history. Almost exclusively, and for many hours each day. I began, a few weeks back, with a curiosity about the Byzantine Empire, I have been wandering off wherever my interest leads: Sassanids (Persian pre-Islamic); Avars and Lombards and Franks and Visigoths; Khazars and Göktürks. It's notable that with the internet as it is today, one hardly needs to go out and buy books to pursue these eccentricities.
From this reading, I have only this generalization to draw:
The world is always just about to end. There is nothing new under the sun.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Apparently Ursula Le Guin has died.
I thought she might not. She seemed a forever type of person. But actually everyone dies.
She was a great writer. And a philosopher, though not in the conventional sense. I don't need to review her life or work - others can do that better than I can. But her writing has influenced me profoundly.
I was 12 years old when I first read the Earthsea series of fantasy books. And I really doubt that I have spent a single day in my life since then when that imagined world hasn't crossed my mind in some way or another. It's a visceral thing - I don't know that the philosophical and psychological ideas there were so impactful - though they're undeniably present in the books. I only mean that I imagined that world quite vividly, in reading those books. and so 
now I think of it, much as one remembers a memorable trip, perhaps. For example, I think every day of the years I lived in Mexico, or the two months I spent in South America, or my one month studying in Paris, or my six months in Chicago. They were profound and memorable experiences, which shaped who I am. Likewise, the reading of those books, at that time in my life, left a similar type of indelible impression.
Her novel The Dispossessed had a more philosophical impact on me. I consider it a great philosophical novel. The "sci-fi" aspect is nearly irrelevant, except as a way to set the scene - the same story could have been written in a different way, set on Earth in some slightly altered historical context. I would put this book in my Universal Recommended books list.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
Another picture in what seems to be turning into a series of student artwork inspired by my whiteboard cartoon alligators. There seems to be a sort of competition emerging among the youngest cohort of students, as to who can present me with the most elaborate drawing of alligators. These alligators are a "couple" (커플 [keopeul] a "konglish" borrowing into Korean) on some kind of romantic getaway to Paris, evidently.
I like Yejun's work because it's actually rather sophisticated, in a technical way - note how she's drawn the screen of the "phone" (the 2010's version of what was once called a "camera") being used to take the picture of the alligator couple. She's got a reduced-size version of the scene being photographed, represented in a rather realistic way. This shows quite a bit of understanding of things like points-of-view and even perspective, for a 2nd grader, and exploits a conceit common to much great art: that of the "picture within a picture."
[daily log: walking, 7km]