[Above photo: Seated Buddha, unattached and indifferent, among the 13th century ruins of Sukhothai, the ancient capital of Thailand.]
9 March 2020
Today, Monday, is the above-noted holiday, the full moon day of the third month of the Buddhist calendar. There are supposedly many and varied celebrations, although I haven’t been out this morning to see.
The holiday is a blessing, since we are not yet able to have morning clinics,so I must lecture morning and afternoon 4 days per week. It isn’t that much and I have a lot of the material prepared but it gets a bit dry and dull for me and, I suspect, my students without live patients. If my students felt that way I’d have to pry it out of them. I think the fact that I also am teaching 9-4:30PM on Sundays contributes to my pleasure in having this Monday off.
I am running 10km on my elliptical—it wouldn’t lie, would it?— in less than 40 minutes with the resistance turned up high. Can my calculations be correct? Am I running 6 ½ minute miles? I know I break into a remarkable sweat. Then I do 20-30 minutes of weights and floor exercises. I do feel pretty fit but hate to think of what I’d feel like if I didn’t do it all. These treacherous last few chapters.
Two of my very best friends have just had back surgery. They were at the premier facilities in NY and Boston, so probably in the World. One felt fit as a fiddle in short order and is pain-free and fully functional. The other had a much more complex reconstruction/fusion and has had a very, very difficult post-op course. Both were in my class in medical school. Both have enjoyed active lives—one bikes everywhere, plays tennis, and backpacks/hikes when opportunity avails. The other ran the Boston Marathon 2x plus other exploits. Both are fine, funny, smart, virtuous, hardworking, and responsible people. “C’est la vie”, say the old folks, “It goes to show you never can tell.”
My social life jumped a notch this week with supper out x4 and lots of other interactions (two meetings of private school counselor groups, a lunch, a group of private therapists, etc.). Saturday night I was having an Anchor Steam Beer with Kelly (He can get them at the US Commisary.) when he put on a playlist from Spotify. Suddenly the Beatles were singing “Here Comes the Sun”. This has changed my life! The Beatles were holdouts for Spotify and I couldn’t ever get them; now I can play virtually all of their music. I do it and happy memories flood in of early times in my marriage when Poki and I were friends, footloose and wandering toward our later livelihoods. 2AM trips to Sam Wo in SF Chinatown for Thick Duck Rice Soup (Remember Edsel Ford, the fierce waiter there?) or runs to Point Reyes to sleep in Casa Chiquita where Peter Barnes was writing his first book, Pawns: The Plight of the Citizen Soldier. We had a lot of good, young times. No regrets.
I’ve met such interesting people recently. A young man with a wife, two kids, and his wedding ring a tatoo on his left 4th finger is directing psychosocial interventions and research in the conflict areas through Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And has been doing this, here and in Thailand, for >10 years. A contemporary dancer who got involved with refugees in camps on the Thai boarder and has been doing that sort of work since. Her husband is a Burmese who lived in Lowell, Massachusetts for 10 years doing community work among the 300 Myanmar residents in the area; he’s now casting about for similar work here. Others who have spent their lives working in Africa and then SE Asia doing humanitarian work. The amazing Myanmar woman, a physician who organized the UNICEF contract under which I teach on Sundays, spent 3 years in Manila getting a PhD in Psychology, raising her son there on her own. My mother was an adventuress, but she was breaking into then male-dominated professions—medical school, public health, psychoanalysis—, not moving to another country into dire circumstances where your language and cultural reflexes don’t work. Anyway, I am impressed with their vision and courage and perseverance. It’s not like they simply taught a week-long course in a foreign country. It seems worth it just to wear flip flops (outside) or go barefoot (inside) all day. Then there is all the exotica.
INTRUSIVE THOUGHT: I do hope we get a clinic space soon, which statement reflects my frustration at working in a “developing country” with a dysfunctional bureaucracy. It’s not like Child and Adolescent Psychiatry training and service are supernumerary.
I’m handwashing like crazy. Footwashing, too. I shower at least once per day and often twice. It is heating up and will get to 98 today and 103 by next Saturday. I am assured that last year was an aberration in that the rains didn’t start until June. Thingyan, or the Burmese Water Festival, is the second week in April which is when the monsoon usually sets in. Last May, dear reader may recall, the mercury (how quaint!) rose to 105 every day for a month. I pray for rain as I am writing, so I guess I can actually multitask. Although my hopes that he-who-shall-not-be-named will acquire Covid-19 are of a much higher order. With his wretched diet and aversion to exercise—-except his fingers and tongue—it is amazing he remains vertical. Some justice here, please.
Giggles of the week, seen on the instruction brochure for my new $3.50 travel alarm: “Don’t put clock in the sloppy, dusty, and rusty place.” I know I am not a fastidious housekeeper, but, jeez……. Also, “avoid exquisite impact and shake”. Sadly, there isn’t much of that going on here.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 