27 September 2020
[Above photo: The jungly view from Kelly’s top floor, set in the middle of Yangon.]
I am back to solitude, although I’ve broken it up with 3 days at Kelly’s. I also have done lectures on Zoom, conducted Journal Club 2x this week on Zoom, watched an excellent film with my students on Zoom (“A Brilliant Young Mind”), conducted 2 hours of psychotherapy by Zoom with adolescents, provided individual psychotherapy supervision for 3 hours by Zoom, had a mandatory late night rehearsal for my AACAP Q&A session on Zoom, and led the a webinar last weekend on Zoom.
The webinar included a lecture about the basics of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for which I wrote a mock therapy session. The students did a great job of it in Myanmar language; the non-verbal 65% was very convincing and they seemed to enjoy doing it. It was interesting to write. I’ve never created dialogue and never thought I could write a novel because of it. I procrastinated starting to put it down. Once I began, however, it flowed very easily and I ended up with 4 therapy sessions, lasting something over an hour altogether. So perhaps, just like I can easily sustain a blow to the head, I can develop character. I know, I am a character but I mean……. One never knows what you can do until doing it.
On the micro level, my kitchen is so clean that the little ants I did daily battle with gave up. I haven’t seen one for over a month. Now, however, I note that an almost microscopic variety, tiny but speedy, has come on the stage, filling the empty niche. I suppose if I achieve yet one more level of cleanliness, they’ll be replaced by another subspecies so tiny my waning vision won’t notice, which is fine with me. They can tidy up the counters at that level. Do you know that there are USDA standards for how many insect parts and rat hairs are allowed in a jar of peanut butter? One example of our uneasy relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom.
I read in the NYT that the US has a shortage of N-95 masks. I have a box—a gift to me—of M-95 masks. Of Chinese manufacture, I believe. They are masquerading as the real deal but in fact are just those pleated powder-blue jobs. Funny how even the mask manufacturers are lying, trying to trick and cheat us, even with our lives at stake. Business Ethics is clearly an oxymoron, like Military Music. And I just learned that one of my students from last year, he with diabetes and hypertension, is hospitalized with Covid-19. He’s apparently improving and not in ICU, so I expect he’ll survive it. Another student who had contact with him at work called me; she’ll be in quarantine for 4-5 days, awaiting her 2nd or 3rd test to be returned. She has an autistic 5yo son at home; the boy, fortunately, is very attached to his father.
News alert: The count is rising and another of my students from last year is positive, as is my professor, the head of psychiatry at University of Medicine 2, and two more members of the University of Medicine 1 Psychiatry faculty who I know. People are getting a bit scared and the streets are quite vacant. We are pretty much at 1000+ new cases per day, virtually all in Yangon. It’s a little unnerving.
The three days I’ve spent at Kelly’s this weekend have been fun. We both stumble around in the kitchen but produce good food. He’s mastered banana-walnut bread and smoothies. His diet has been entirely plant-based for the past 6 months. I did make a putanesca sauce for fettucini last night which had a couple of tiny anchovy fillets in it but they hardly count. It was a low-key celebration for Jose’s birthday. He is very quiet about his birthdays; Kelly has known him well for years but doesn’t know how old he is. We guess he’s early 50’s. We had a nice supper for him, including his wife, Irene, their rather challenging dog, Ollie, Kelly and me. Champagne toasts. Presents including a complete set of Superhero action figures and a feather duster, since Jose really likes to keep his house clean. Not exactly inspired gifts, but almost everywhere is closed.
Anyway, Kelly and I are deep into Gin Rummy, trash talking the other. He has a large house and rattles around in it. Since we get on well, he suggested I just move into the bottom floor, which has its own bathroom, patio, and separate study. I’ve determined I want to regularly spend time with my daughter and my US friends. I’m going to exit Myanmar for Maine and California from June through November in 2021, it would be a great help to me when my lease runs out Dec 31, 2020 just to move in here. It is really comfortable and I enjoy Kelly’s company a lot. The idea of paying $1000-$1500/month to keep an apartment here for 6 months when I am absent doesn’t sit well with me. His rent is paid for by his job. I can pony up for food+.
I’ll have to think more about it. If I do move in and it isn’t working out or if, for example, his wife moves back from the US, I can easily get a place. But it is a lovely and open-plan house with 5 floors, fast internet, an exceptionally nice kitchen for here, and set on the edge of a jungle with a stream in the middle. A variety of birds fly in; I saw an egret landing this morning. I saw a healthy mongoose run across the back lawn a week ago and Irene found an 8 foot long, large-circumference snake skin on her back patio yesterday. Likely a Burmese python lives back there, along with other beasts. They shed when they grow so I’d guess he has enough to eat. Or she.
I have little to say about the US. It stuns me, how crudely partisan it has all become. I suppose this new Supreme will help to take us back to “the good old days”, when women and blacks and foreigners knew their place. Just say “No.” to sex and the risk of pregnancy, don’t think too much about those poor folks and their children with no health care insurance. If they just bucked up and were more responsible, they could afford it, right? ACA and the right of women to choose are current targets of Mafia Don, cynically, since he lacks beliefs other than in the acquisition of power and imposing vengeance. He just sees attacking them as a chance to boost his standing with the Base and to try to exact some revenge on Obama.
I’ve concluded that religion is many things to many people but at heart is a power move, imposing its vision of order on the world and, in most, suppressing women. When I hear that a Muslim man can simply walk out on his wife but that she cannot divorce him, that until recently Jewish women have played a very second fiddle in Judaism, that Catholic women must be forced to have a baby, or an illegal abortion, if they get pregnant (even if it is the 6th baby and they are 38yo), and on and on. I don’t believe that there is a god in a heaven, certainly not a benevolent one, having seen the beating and raping and starving and suffering that I’ve seen in this world. And praying to a neutral or unforgiving deity seems pretty silly to me. Religion can provide hope, community, support, caring, and tradition, as well, but that all comes at such a price of thinking and behaving rationally. We can just create those for each other as humans and perhaps honor equality, science, and kindness more truly.
Time to call it quits for this week. I’ve gotten myself into a foul mood or perhaps unmasked a latent one.
I’m reading Sapiens which is a fascinating look at our ascent—or descent, as he suggests—-from hunter-forager to IT monkey-addicts. It dispels some important myths, like how the rise of agriculture helped us so much. We could, it is true, live in larger groupings which has allowed for a lot. We’ve paid a steep price for Zoom, however, as many before have noted.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 