Flight of Fancy

17 May 2020

[Above photo: Looking down the meadow from my cottage in early morning.]

I just received word that the University of Medicine 1 requested that the Ministry of Health and Sport request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that I will have assured re-entry if I leave the country for a holiday. I’ll have to quarantine for 14 days when I get back but perhaps that can be in my apartment. So, I’ve begun looking into plane reservations. The best so far seems a 35 hour flight—here to Hong Kong, 16 hour layover, Hong Kong to Boston. I can drive a rental car from Boston to Bangor where I can drop it and steer my old Subaru to S. Brooksville. Then I can jump on Stella for the 45 minute ride to Beach Island. Where better to quarantine for 14 days than on a sparsely populated island 6 ½ miles offshore. Aeneas didn’t have to quarantine. Nor did Odysseus. Since it is unavoidable if I want to go, I’ll not whine, as long as I get to that rock-bound, spruce-covered Maine island. It does sound like an arduous journey for a 4 week vacation, though.

Friday and Tuesday are the two days I don’t teach. Last Friday I was bored and decided to make an onion bread. Why not put some oats in it? Awhile later, after much kneading, baking, and much, much cleaning up I had a wonderful loaf of oatmeal-onion bread. Using instant oats, which I generally despise but of which I was given generous quantities by two people, cuts the preparation time by an hour. It is excellent bread, chewy, but airy, as well.

Trying to bake using a small area would seem to suggest less clean-up. However, there is more, as flour and dough seem to fly all over, landing on my shirt, my shorts, the floor tiles, the floor mat, and every horizontal surface in the vicinity, including the top faces of all the drawers leading down to the floor. Perhaps I can be more meticulous next time, though I am doubtful. Wasn’t Meticulous the name of the intrepid shepherd in “Oedipus at Colonus”?

I’m puzzled by the evangelical Trumpers. You’d think they’d read this plague as a sign of the End of Days, of which these folks are always warning with a certain smugness. Like they have already reserved all the good heavenly chariots for themselves. Yet they are treating it as if it is nothing and doesn’t exist, damn the body count. “Liberate!”. Whip the market up! None of those people have skin in the stock market so I’d think his drumbeat about “the economy” would fall on deaf ears. They’ll seem to take any opportunity to carry guns and shout grievances. I realize many people are desperately suffering. I know I am stereotyping and lumping together and making massively false assumptions and I am (only) a little ashamed of myself. Fortunately, this missive is for the Chosen Few, not the Unwashed Masses, so I’ll let it stand. This week’s rant.

Yesterday as I was teaching my weekend group the Termination Phase of Interpersonal Therapy for Adolescents, I received a WhatsApp from two students in my other class, on their way to my apartment with food. I asked them to delay until class was over. They arrived with all manner of fruit and vegetables, some snacks, my “opium”—two fabulous hot relishes they concocted and gave me 3 weeks ago, to be eaten with rice—, and a huge container of chicken soup with glass noodles, mushrooms, quail eggs, etc. One of them told me a joke about a monk. They are so kind and sweet—I think the unmarried one is perhaps a little sweet on me. It is so nice to see people in the flesh. This time they came without a husband in tow, confident I’ll not act inappropriately. Or maybe that they won’t!

I’ve solved a conundrum using Critical Thinking, about which we talk a lot in class. This is as opposed to Reductionistic Thinking, which serves most of Psychiatry poorly. When first showing me the apartment, the landlord told me, and even proudly demonstrated at the kitchen tap, that I had hot water. He referred to “the boiler”.  But I’ve noticed that there is only hot water in the evening, not for my morning shower. I assumed that “the boiler” was on a timer to save energy. I was crawling around the roof yesterday, attempting to see if I could adjust the satellite dish to get CNN on the TV when I saw my two water storage tanks. Against a wall so they get lots of hot sun in the afternoon. Aha, “the boiler”! Mystery solved.

I finally finished John Walsh’s memoir about growing up Irish in London and am onto another immigrant experience book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.  Quite a different book but the cruel tribalism that is expressed in each links them. How newcomers so want to fit in without losing themselves and how the established can be such bullies, either overtly or snidely. Fear of The Other appears to be so primal, residing so deeply (redundant) in our DNA and our bones. And, of course, along come people who want to exploit, fan, and manipulate the fear of difference for their own benefit. Can we not just simply get along together? I may not fancy blood pudding or menudo or monkey brains or whatever, but whatever happened to tolerance, let alone appreciation, of difference, and kindness, respect?

I am definitely going to make the trip to Maine, however arduous and potentially dangerous. Being cooped up here is grinding me down, as you can see from the above. My writing here has the flat, dull taste of mud; kind of like shouting “Shit” when you are angry but not providing any richness of detail. Sort of like those “Liberate” guys. We are much more similar than different, curiously.  We just shout different words.