28 July 2019
[Above photo: Omaung, my guide, with a woman in traditional dress bringing sugar cane as an offering to the 400 year old Topankam Village (Palaung) monastery, high in the Shan Hills, in celebration of the Full Moon of Waso holiday.]
I talked with my sister yesterday, wishing her a happy 90th. She is in good spirits, despite not enjoying the East Coast heat wave in her daughter’s tiny house in Bethesda with no air-con. She’s just returned from several years with her daughter et la famille in Cape Town. Quite a lot of flexibility for someone her age but, then, who’s talking. Her other children and their families arrive today to celebrate. To think, she was born the year of the Great Crash (in which our father and his brothers lost their entire fortune), and has seen a world war, the rise (and approaching demise) of the internal combustion automobile, several other major wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the expensive and spectacularly failed “War on Drugs”, and dare I say Yemen, since we are the Saudi’s advisers and arms suppliers?), penicillin, globalization, heart transplants, collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of computers, which have handsomely rewarded two of her kids and engaged the third, a whiz with them.
Now the world seems to have moved to a new phase—populism and demagoguery, lies, lies, and more damned lies, disqualification or outright murder of the independent press, and the planet heating out of control while our Neros fiddle. I saw a chilling video yesterday, in between watching bits of Stage 20 of the Tour de France, in which an academic IT guy demonstrated how simple it is to hack and tilt the returns from electronic voting machines. He even turned one standard machine into an electronic musical instrument, a little pirouette at the end of his talk. You can bet the elephants in the room will work to steal the election from the donkeys, making jackasses of us. I can easily imagine the Republicans having a central strategy to cheat the machines, whereas I cannot imagine the Dems. OK, maybe a rogue or two here or there but nothing coordinated.
So I cannot imagine why the sociopaths haven’t always won, since they can do easily that which we of conscience cannot. Electronic media floods us, amplifying the seductive (to some) message of the liars and drowning out reason. As Yeats wrote, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.” In the past people could think more independently and make decisions in their best interest whereas now, given the addictive quality of smart phones and TV, any bozo or evil-doer can tailor their ?appealing (dishonest, racist, fear-engendering, and divisive) message to millions of people who are struggling and poorly educated and convince them that red is blue and a fierce cold spell is evidence against, rather than for, global climate disruption. When DT heard about the Special Counsel, he said, “I’m fucked”. Rather, Mr. Fuck-everyone-else, you seem to have the nation naively bending over to pick up the bars of soap you intentionally cast about the shower room. I don’t worry about the Dems squabbling now; people’s memory is so short the weaknesses revealed will be forgotten in the real run-up. And DT, racist and misogynist that he is, won’t be able to make many points out of the Dem’s concerns. A Biden-Harris ticket now looks good to me and hopefully palatable to many.
Since my giardia, or whatever it was, stirred up my gut, I thought I’d lay off milk for my tea and cereal for a few weeks. So I bought some soy milk. Turns out it also has sugar and whole milk powder in it. So what’s the point of the soy? Extra amino acids, I guess, and a profitable outlet for the soy crop. Untruth in advertising.
I sought out Ingyin Nwe South Indian Food Centre yesterday, about a mile from my apartment, as I was craving some Indian. At 3 in the afternoon it wasn’t wildly busy and I sat on a stool at one of the long stainless steel tables with dishes of different condiments and checked the menu. I ended up with a lassi and a masala dosa, both familiar to me. I worried about the ice in the lassi; surely it is tap water, which I avoid. Both were tasty but Viks Chaat in Berkeley has much better of each; lots more mango in the mango lassi and lots more filling inside the larger, more sour, and crispier dosa. Still this cost $2 whereas Viks would charge me $10, at least. Few skinny Indians in Berkeley, I think, with Viks’super-size-me portions.
It’s cool enough that I have taken to climbing the stairs to my apartment, 9 floors up. I did it twice yesterday. It just seems stupid to me to join a gym, since everyone in the two I visited looks about 18yo and trim and I have the stairs of my building handy. Of course, when the neighbors see me trudging up they are puzzled. Agoraphobia? Claustrophobia? Acrophobia, they must wonder. Senesceophobia is more like it.
A 16yo girl who cuts herself repeatedly came for her therapy appointment with her mother this week. Each time we meet with them the picture becomes increasingly convoluted. The girl was given up at birth by her bio-mother who had a puerperal psychosis and a prior mental illness. Somewhere along the line the biological father died. Her adoptive mother was a childless, unmarried woman, a cousin of the mother. Then the plot thickens, since both sides of the girl’s biological family are wealthy. Now everyone resents the girl because she will inherit both her father’s and mother’s share of the fortunes, and the family animus generously includes her adoptive mom. The latter is an accountant who gave up her day job to care for her demented, alcoholic younger brother and her daughter. So she, the adoptive mom, depends on the largesse of her older sister who lives in another city and runs the family businesses for that side of the family. Most striking is the coldness all feel toward this girl, poor thing, and how it is all tangled up in money, old jealousies and dependencies, and generational dislike for anyone who might have a claim to some of the family fortune. My impression is that the courts here can be bought by the highest bidder, so why all the fuss?
In any case, talking with us—and I have one of the students listening to the mother weekly independent of the girl’s appointment—seems to be improving things somehow. Letting the pus out of a boil, I’d guess. The adoptive mother, in a constant position of supplication, despite doing the family a massive good turn by caring for the wretched younger brother, has had no outlet for her feelings of rage, pain, and helplessness except to focus on the girl’s shortcomings (And what teen doesn’t struggle?). At first it all seemed like one of those hopeless tangles of monofilament line that occur when the bale on your spinning reel doesn’t click in place. Others are reeling in perch and bass and you are trying just to prevent yourself from either cutting out the entire messy section or tossing your pole in the water and slumping to the bottom of the rowboat with a beer. But if the line was once not tangled, it can likely, with patience, be sorted. It’s an excellent example with which to instruct my students about countertransference and splitting and the dangers of each, if unexamined.
The students want, I think, to take me on an outing. I say “I think.” because their natural ana (Burmese for holding back) makes their assertions at times seem like a soft zephyr or a wisp of cotton drawn over the back of my neck. Did that just occur? They tentatively suggested going to a place where for $20 you can be suspended for 3 minutes in a column of air, encased in a protective space suit and helmet. I think $20 x 11 of us=$220 and it seems silly. The many daily rain showers are so reliably unpredictable that a walk in the park with a picnic isn’t appealing. I’ll think up something else, which we can always complete with a nice lunch at a restaurant.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 