13 December 2020
[Above photo: Since I am not travelling, I’m using old photos. This is from an outbreak of mass hysteria among adolescent schoolgirls in a small village in Malawi.]
Kelly and I can manage to dissipate hours of time in laughter and enlightenment. And we both seem to have hours to spend. For example, he bakes a standing loaf of walnut-chocolate chip-banana bread which, with a cup of coffee or tea, is breakfast. It includes your nut, fruit, and chocolate food groups, nutritionally well-balanced. If he’s not off playing an early tennis game, we sit on the couch in front of a floor-to-ceiling glass window and watch the birds and butterflies flitting by against a wall of green jungle and chat.
We have revisited our childhood thrills, like the Klondike Big Inch Land Company. Quaker Oats, when the marketing appeal of “shot from guns” for Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice waned, ran a promotion. After buying 19 acres of Yukon Territory in Canada for $1000, they printed 21 million “Deeds” to one square inch of the land, minus mineral rights, putting one copy in each box of cereal they sold. It was a smash, coupling nicely with the radio show Sargent Preston of the Yukon [with his trusty husky, King], also sponsored by Quaker Oats. After a year or so the company increased the appeal by adding a “poke” of soil, a tiny packet of sand from the local riverbank, for 25 cents. Those were simpler times. I also loved the little grey plastic airplanes that came at the bottom of a box of Kix. I vaguely recall a secret decoder ring associated with the radio show, Tom Mix. “Take a tip from Tom, go and tell your mom, Shredded Ralston can’t be beat.” Some of the ads at the end of comic books were bogus—-a World War II surplus US Army jeep for $24.99—but some were great.
From one I bought a little pamphlet on ventriloquism and my siblings and I spent a summer making “high-pitched grunting sounds” and pointing to our spaniels, Sunny and Goldie, or to inanimate bushes and trees. I also bought a box of fireworks from Texas for $5. It was totally worth it. High explosives. Massively powerful rockets, roman candles, and M-80’s in abundance. I carried the firecrackers around on the 4th of July in a glass Mason jar. It would have done a job if, at 8yo, I’d ignited anything inside the jar.
In college Peter Barnes and I bought a “weather balloon” from the same source. We lived on the 7th floor of the new Leverett Towers and were going to inflate it out the window and stencil foot prints on it. We inflated it up to about 8 feet in diameter inside our suite with someone’s portable vacuum cleaner. Peter touched it with a magic marker, and the balloon, probably a leftover from WW2, exploded with a soft “Poof!”.
Just to add to the Indoor Wildlife saga here, we are infested with weevils. Actually, they are only in one section of the kitchen and have caused us to dispose of two bags of rice noodles and a small open container of rice. They seem indifferent to wheat, such as fettuccini or macaroni. They like corn, though. Now that we’ve protected all the rice products, we see them forlornly creeping across the kitchen counters. They are rather amazing; you can press on them as you would to kill an ant but they keep trucking along. They actually are easy to get out of rice, since they float and a fairly heavy contamination is completely clean with 3 or 4 rinses.
Kelly called me to the bathroom a month ago. There was a plump frog sitting on the top of the reservoir tank for the toilet on the 3rd floor. How did it get there? We left it alone and it was gone in a day. Two evenings ago we were sitting outside with mosquito coils, on the 3rd floor balcony and, lo and behold, there was a frog of the same size and shape hopping about. It may be our earlier guest. I assume it has a plan and a map. I hear its soulmates chirping outside my bedroom window in the marsh all night.
The Dutch National Public Health Directorate suggested in May that single people find a sex partner for the duration of covid restrictions. How enlightened! Imagine our Surgeon General doing such a thing. “It’s our civic duty.” It could decrease the viral spread associated with desperate and furtive couplings. Recall that Bill Clinton fired Joycelyn Elders for suggesting that masturbation should be included in sex-education classes. Then he and Monica…. I’m pretty sure Bill didn’t give a fig but the political pressure was too great for him not to act.
Part of why the Soviet Union collapsed was widespread alcoholism and low productivity. Vodka was abundant and cheap and people felt unmotivated and quite despondent that their efforts weren’t commensurately rewarded. “To each according to his need.” Soviet communism neglected one great fuel source of capitalism: many, if not all, work harder and smarter if they are rewarded for it. We don’t get very far in our social engineering projects if we deny fundamental human nature, like sexual impulses and a desire to be rewarded for hard work. Why not recognize, accept, and channel them?
Our Christmas dinner plans fell through as we discovered that the hostess had invited 4 more people, bringing the number to 9, which felt like too many to both Kelly and me. It’s just a meal; we’ll do better with a smaller gathering, I think. This is a beastly disease and I want to avoid it.
Think, more Americans have died in 9 ½ months from Covid-19 than in all battle theaters in the 4 years of our engagement in WW 2. And many who haven’t died are left with lasting pulmonary and neurological sequelae. US ICUs are bursting, health care providers exhausted, and Bozo golfs and drums up phony claims to overthrow our democratic election, all dismissed even by judges he has appointed. “4 years of this nonsense. It’s time to stop, Fucko. You lost. Pack your boxes.” as one articulate Yankees fan delicately puts it on YouTube.
I’m lining up international faculty from the US and various ASEAN countries to teach virtually in my course. It will be good for the students, good for me, and good for sustainability. I’m also hoping to develop the Myanmar Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. I initially thought to add “and Allied Professions”, which makes great sense to me except that I want to develop child psychiatry as a viable specialty here and it is too delicate in its infancy. Maybe in time we can add the others, including psychologists, special education teachers, art therapists, etc., if they are interested. It would make for a more interesting organization and potentially more powerful advocacy group. I need to get permission to form a group, however.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 