Ready For the Weekend?

17 January 2021

[Above photo:  Our friend, Jose, exhausted after cleaning all day. He’s an attorney with two additional Masters degrees, running a very successful consulting business here. He was for years the Director of Save the Children in Sri Lanka. His parents were physicians at Mayo Clinic and his grandfather was the Mayor of Manila.]

This is wearing, all this dangerous nonsense from so many Congressional Republicans. Of course, there are many people everywhere in the world who feel, and often are, left off the train. The lies, for expediency to advance or protect careers, out of fear of The Donald and his Base, simply as an expression of their own grievance at being in a minority party, and finding life, jobs, and the color of lives about them changing rapidly, are not harmless or in any way innocent. We cannot go back to times that some nostalgically imagine were simpler for the white people (read “men”) on top. The train continues down the tracks; jump on or don’t, but it’ll never stop and back up.

Kelly and I were drinking our morning brews—he coffee, me mint tea since caffeine makes my bp soar and they don’t have decaf anything here (except ½ pound of decaf German coffee for $45)—and eating breakfast on Friday, seated on Annie’s pink overstuffed couch looking at the jungle. She, a long-time Yangon-resident, started Pomelo, the first fine general crafts store here. She is sheltering with her husband in Australia and storing much at Kelly’s. The latter has his own banana bread, toasted, each morning. I find the sugar shot too much and make muesli with added fruit and Oat Milk. We were trying to think of songs about the weekend—Ready For the Weekend.  You know the genre: the job sucks, I want to get drunk/stoned, have a fling or a fight, recover, and return to work on Monday—“Monday mornin’ my head is bad, But it’s worth it for the fun that I’ve had”. They come in Rock, Pop, R&B, Blues, and Country versions. Hell, Bach may have written the Coffee Cantata with that in mind!

The problem is, at the moment, holidays and weekends are indistinguishable from “workdays” since I regularly have work on Sunday (webinar) and do not on most weekdays. When time blurs like this, I find it passes all too quickly. It seemed the election and the results took forever to arrive but the 2 ½ months since have flown. I shall resume attending clinic Wednesday mornings next week with two of my former students, shall teach a two-week course in brief psychotherapy for a group of General Psychiatrists starting February, and shall resume teaching my Child and Adolescent Psychiatry certificate course in March, with luck. I have determined, and let my professor know, that I’ll be in the US June-September each year. As I approach returning to the US and getting out to the Island for a 3 month stay, will time move quickly or slowly? It feels very good to anticipate resuming substantive work here. 

I feel gradually duller and less interested in life when I don’t have meaningful goals to address. I woke up one morning with “Goodnight, Irene” going through my head, Pete Seeger’s version. Specifically

“Sometime I have a great notion, To jump in the river and drown.”

I quickly decided to paint my room over the weekend. My face had been looking green on Zoom, from the yellow walls and the blue door, I thought. I gave it two coats of a lovely off-white and changed the blue cloth on my worktable to dark red. Now I appear as a normal, ruddy European, not a bilious, anemic Romanian bloodsucker-in-need.  I also simplified things, eliminating unnecessary stuff, including the 30year old dusty floral drapes. The room is now bright and cheerful, a pleasant place to work. I’m beginning to think I happily could live in a tiny, nicely engineered house. Not that I shall.

While I worry about aging, I can still recall the 4 things I was supposed to purchase at the grocery store yesterday—red wine vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes, cream of tartar, and arugula—so I guess my mind is mostly, except for recall of names, functional. The cream of tartar is to help the aquafaba whip up stiffly. Since we rarely use eggs, the fluid from cooked chickpeas (which I boil regularly to make hummus) serves as a vegan egg white substitute. I never thought I’d eat vegan. Kelly has been plant-based since March, so it works better for us. If I go out and meat is available, I may have it. But thinking about the cruelty and environmental damage wrought by cultivating and harvesting animals for food makes it easier to avoid eating them. Kelly does it for health reasons, although I don’t know why. His mother is 97yo, his father 96yo and he is slender and fit at 64yo. I can make a better case for not eating meat for my health than he can, since my parents died at 55yo (coronary) and 78yo (pancreatic cancer).

Joe is a calming father figure, after a deeply disturbing one. And he has some smart and principled people around him. I expect good things to happen, all within the law, once the dust settles.  DT may actually get a legal reckoning, for once. Cy Vance Jr. and Letitia James are motivated. What a murderer he is, through both neglect and incitement(s)!