4 October 2020
[Above photo: Just for a little topical levity.]
Words are so wonderful, agreed-upon symbols that can bring you to tears, either of laughter, relief, or sadness. Here are two more I came across this week.
“Don’t piss off old people. The older we get, the less ‘life in prison’ is a deterrent.”—having a special meaning at my age.
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” I fear this is not so in the great majority of settings.
I was at Kelly’s house again this weekend. The trip there felt dicey, as we aren’t supposed to travel between townships. I risked it in a Grab, knowing he was quarantined and I have been, so I wouldn’t be compromising anyone else’s safety. I was prepared to be stopped by the police but the roads were empty and we sailed up in record time. We played Gin Rummy with Jose, Kelly, Connor, and me. Connor is a really nice young guy who worked for Kelly when the latter was Country Director for PLAN International. He joins our online poker games Sunday evenings. Jose is very fluent with computer-speak so I brought up a thorny question I’ve never been able to answer. The main problem is, I cannot actually formulate the question so it appears that I am stoned, dissolving into laughter halfway through the sentence. Here it is: Are we being bombarded by every cellphone call in a given area code in every room we are in? Because if all the people in Myanmar, international country code +95, were able to fit into Kelly’s living room with their cell phones and friends or family rang them up from somewhere else, all the phones would go off. How do the electromagnetic waves know to go to another room, for example? Is everything actually happening all at once, everywhere, denying the concepts of time and space? I know, this does sound like a discussion late at night, fueled by good weed, in a college dorm. Well, no one can understand my concern, or query, and as they look more bewildered, thinking this oldster has had some mini-strokes and is losing it, I collapse into laughter until tears run down my face. Proud to say I didn’t wet my pants but I did have stomach cramps from laughing so hard.
The next day Kelly and I walked out his driveway, turned right and passed the now-closed Kokine Hotel, famed for hourly rates, and turned down Jose and Irene’s driveway for brunch. We ordered from Shwe Sa Bwe, a restaurant and cooking training academy that delivers during covid. The food was fabulous, with fresh veggie-fruit juice, souffle pancakes, bagels with smoked salmon, a divine passion-fruit curd to put on the croissants, Annie’s yoghurt, homemade granola, and Jose’s wonderful Café Americano. Ollie, the immense, traumatized dog which Jose and Irene love and the rest of us fear, allowed me to pet him, only growling deeply and baring his teeth once. Their house, like Kelly’s, faces the same wildlife jungle in the midst of Yangon and we sat on their beautiful deck and mused, digesting, I suppose.
My cooking is taking new and unexpected turns. Having been married for 44 years to Poki, who is half-Korean and half-Japanese and a fabulous cook, I ate deeply from both cultures. Her mother, Mineko, made the best kimchee, even though she was the Japanese half. I’ve discovered a Korean market near Kelly’s and bought a large container of kimchee. I figured if the virus gets really bad and I actually can’t go out for groceries, I can live a long time on kimchee and rice. It turns out that kimchee is great in a burrito with either melted cheese or grilled chicken. A new standby. Kelly uses peanut sauce, which he learned to create while working successively in Benin and Sierra Leone, to spice up vegetables and rice. It is basically, by his ministrations, a jar of peanut butter, a can of tomato paste, some fresh tomatoes, some onions, and water for thinner, cooked. It is good. I plan to sneak in some chopped groundnuts for texture and some chopped peppers for heat.
The great wheel of Karma turned and, lo, Mafia Don is hospitalized with covid, his doctor predictably lying about the severity. “Don’t be frightened of it. Don’t let it run your life”, says Mafia Don. OK, but first I want to talk with all your staffers who are now positive, as well as the 30-50 $250,000 a pop donors you exposed at Bedminster, concealing from them that you had already tested positive. Maybe some Secret Service folks from your glam-drivearound on Friday. Oh, and perhaps the relatives of the 207,000 who have died of it in the US alone. Why don’t we just share needles? And hankies?
As to our own covid numbers, we are at about 1000 new cases daily, largely in Yangon, and up to 444 confirmed deaths. Much of the country is so remotely rural that I doubt much testing or surveillance is occurring there. I want to come home next summer for a few months; the rub is returning to Myanmar but I think I can swing it with a quarantine at both ends.
The students had their final written, 3 hours, on Monday and a 15 minute oral on Tuesday, all by Zoom. Everyone did well enough. Some were pretty outstanding, given that it was all of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry compressed into ¼ the time of a US Fellowship, that we only had a live clinic for 2 ½ months because of the virus, and that all of my teaching and supervision as well as their reading was in English. What is clear to me is that I’ll need to set up ongoing consultation groups every week or two to build upon their foundation. Fun and easy for me to do. It was sad to say goodbye without a formal ceremony, which we’ll have when the virus subsides. [One of the women mentioned that before the course began she bought a new outfit for graduation.]
This isn’t really goodbye as we have continued connections with the weekly Parents Newsletter, the biweekly Webinar Series, and just yesterday two of the students, Nang Yu Yu and Su Su, came to my apartment with groceries and opium. The “opium”, as I labelled it, is a delicious Burmese condiment one makes and supplies to me; she’s my dealer. I persuaded them to stay for tea and we chatted away. A student from last year called for consultation on a case yesterday afternoon. I am not alone here.
In addition to the NYT, WaPo, New Yorker, and Science, I read free online newsletters from Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubbell daily. Both analyze the news and provide excellent perspective on our national scene. 4 million acres in California and still burning. For a tiny donation—-$5-10/month—I have a PBS Passport, which makes available to me an incredible library of film, including all the Ken Burns’ films, many of which I’ve missed. The Island series on Hawaii, Borneo, and Madagascar are spectacular. The Burns’ Country Music series is stunning, with gripping old footage of the roots of that genre. They are a welcome antidote to Fauda and Ozark, both soaked in blood, conflict, and betrayal. And I am so happy to have Spotify.
I listened to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” this morning, a good theme song for the few remaining weeks. It is played at the end of each Giants’ game in Pac Bell Park. Is it still Pac Bell Park? Has someone outbid them? A strange, commodified life we lead.
I can strongly recommend Sapiens, which I mentioned last week. Our great strength is that we can myth-make, which allows for cooperation and coordination of large numbers of people. It also allows for manipulation and persecution of large numbers of people. And the stock market. Great Religions. And so much else. But read it yourself. A giant step back from our current immersion.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 