Health:  Found out that my chronic stomach problems were most likely some form of "functional dyspepsia", which is sort of like heartburn, maybe, or reflux...?  All they really know is that everything I enjoy in life causes this disease, and I must give them all up to be able to eat: spicy food, coffee, tea, alcohol, eating late at night, citrus fruit, citrus juice, overeating, tomatos and tomato sauce, sleeping on beds that are not inclined planes... etc.  I've given up coffee and strong tea already, which essentially eliminates caffeine from my diet.  I'm still hoping I can keep having a drink in the evening, but every time I've done it so far I've been rewarded with abdominal pain.

Which is affecting my kung fu, which I cannot allow.  I ended up leaving my class halfway through on Monday, which was unutterably embarrassing.  As a result I overworked myself pretty hard on Wednesday, trying to prove that I'm not a wuss.  And I can't really afford to blow my energy in the first half hour when I've got to spend the last twenty minutes practicing my Lau Ga Kuen over and over.  Anyway, everything is screwed up.

What food is there, besides spicy, acidic food?  If you're a vegan?  I'm going to end up eating nothing but shadows and dewdrops before this is over.

Anyway, finished Sodom and Gommorrah, book 4 of "In Search of Lost Time", and the last book published during Proust's lifetime.  As he ages, the works become more melancholy.  The precision and depth of his insights continue, unabated, but his discourses on romantic love are still really alien to me.  I married the only girl I ever dated for more than three months; I never "took a mistress", as it were, so I don't really understand a lot of his motivations; they are bizarre and shameless, cryptic and evocative.  His "love" throughout the book, Albertine, seems singularly devoted to him, but he's bored of her and considers their time together to be a loss... until he discovers that she probably had romances with other women in her adolescence, which will soon be resumed, and he decides that he must possess her to prevent this from happening.  It makes no sense... or does it?  When you cease to love someone you are with, are you pleased when they also seek new love, or are you jealous?  Is it universal?  He presents his love (his desire, more accurately) as this thing that exists as a fact, independent of any volition; it is a desire for an ideal which he seeks in the women he dallies with, but never enjoys in them (consciously, as he writes, but unconsciously as he lived).  It's a very different concept of love and life than any I'm familiar with, restless and selfish, after being brought up with endless sermons on selfless love and hollywood visions of eternal (repeating) crush.  It's consuming, and it consumed his life... only it didn't, because he lived to write it, to make something of all the wasted time, to understand the unslakeable passions that drove his life and the lives around him.  But the fruit wasn't his to enjoy; the author is dead when book 5 is published, and he is still only a young adult, having just declared that he must marry Albertine... how must it be to die with nothing but your fictionalized follies of youth on display?

So I'm pushing into book 5, reminded of my own young reading habits, when I would devour trilogies of pulp fantasy, always wishing to prolong the series indefinitely...