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Spoons: cower in place 26

– in which Dorn explores flatware iconography in the time of pandemic.

iving in pandemic-induced isolation for two months now has had some strange effects on us. A few days ago we decided that we needed some grapefruit spoons. Never mind that in the past we rarely ate grapefruit (the last time I remember craving them was when the doc had given me a course of pills with the instruction that I couldn’t eat grapefruit while I was on them, and suddenly I yearned for them). We got a couple of ruby-red grapefruit in one of our curbside-pickup orders and they were delicious, and now we’ve vowed to live on nothing but grapefruit, and to eat it as it should be eaten, with a grapefruit spoon, small side up, in a dedicated grapefruit tureen.

The stores might only just now be re-opening, but Amazon and others have been there for us stir-crazy consumers all along, so lickety-split, before I had a chance to rationally weigh the pros and cons of the decision, I ordered us a matched pair. They’re arriving tomorrow.

I wonder if the relationship between being quarantined and pining for specialized spoons has ever been studied scientifically? It has certainly been lauded in song and story often enough (and by “often enough”, I mean at least once, which I think you’ll agree might be enough).

We saw a simulcast last year of the Metropolitan Opera production of The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. It was one of those modern operas sung in atonalities, about guests who are trapped by their own tortured psyches at a dinner party, and can’t leave it. Like us, perhaps, they felt a foreboding of doom so strong that they couldn’t just open the front door and walk out.

Alert: spoilers about the opera follow.

Disclaimer: these spoilers won’t answer any questions about the plot or outcome of the opera. In fact, they won’t really help you understand the opera at all. I saw it, and even watching the whole thing didn’t really help me understand it (though I did really enjoy it).

In one of the opera’s most famous scenes, the counter-tenor sings a frantic ode to coffee spoons, and bemoans his tragic fate at being forced to drink coffee with a tea spoon. (The coffee spoons are back in the kitchen, see, and are therefore beyond their reach.)

Though they can’t get to the kitchen, luckily they can make it to the bathroom (although one couple uses the bathroom for a tryst, and as a consequence feels they must commit suicide). During the course of the story, the company breaks through the dining room walls to find the water pipes so they can drink. And for food, they slaughter one of the sheep from a flock that fortuitously wanders through the room (did I mention that I didn’t really understand this opera?).

Exterminating Angel is noteworthy for including the highest note ever sung in the history of opera: high A about high C. I couldn’t find a working link to this achievement, but here is a link to a number of sopranos singing the second highest note in opera, A-flat above high C. This pleasant little ditty is from Jacques Offenbach’s tuneful Tales of Hoffman. The singer is supposed to be a mechanical doll with whom the hero has fallen in love (don’t get me started on the whole history of sex-bots in opera!).

We have a personal emotional link that ties spoons with being trapped, in a way. Back when Kathleen was first diagnosed with lupus, much less was known about it than is now, both by the medical community and the general public. The Lupus Society of America called it the most unknown common disease, and we’ve spent a good amount of time since then trying to learn more about what it is, how to cope with it, and how to talk to others about it.

One touching article that we found very useful in understanding the disease was a blog post by a fellow lupus sufferer called “The Spoon Theory“. In it, Christine Miserandino asks the reader to imagine that each morning, you are handed a number of spoons. When you have lupus, every activity (and that’s every activity, including waking up, and getting out of bed) costs you a spoon. When you are out of spoons, your day is over, period. You can’t hoard spoons and use them the next day—in the morning you will get your allotment, whatever it is for the day, and the care you took yesterday with them won’t help you today.

There’s nothing magical about spoons being the item with which your daily activities are counted, of course. The point is that they are discrete, tangible objects, and there is never any flexibility to how many there are, no matter how badly you want there to be more. They represent the hard limit lupus imposes on how much you can do in a day, that you can’t tough, bluff, or finagle your way past. It was a hard lesson to learn, and we still find it hard to teach others.

And on top of its incapacitating characteristics, those with lupus are especially vulnerable to other diseases, like covid. So now, in addition to all the limitations lupus had already put on our lifestyle, we are trapped by the knowledge that if either of us were ever contract the coronavirus, Kathleen’s “underlying health issues” make her a prime candidate for not surviving it. So we take every precaution, and take it double, to try to prevent ever catching it. It’s a pretty frightening place to be.

Not to end on too stark a note, here is one more spoon association. This is a picture of a banged-up, misshapen spoon being sold at a premium price (I could buy 8 grapefruit spoons for the cost of one of these!) because it epitomizes wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. I am a firm adherent of this aesthetic, especially when Kathleen, in the throes of cabin fever, suggests that it’s time to repaint the walls, or shine all the furniture, or re-sculpt all the topiaries. I can heartily recommend it!

May the eleventh be with you!,
Dorn
5/11/2020

Year of the pig: cower in place 25

The unprecedented nature of the coronavirus lockdown has resulted in new heights of boredom. I blush to admit it, but lately I’ve even been bored at the terrible, awful news we get each day. More deaths? A new category of disaster? Ho-hum. (Yes, I hate myself for the feeling, but it’s there if I’m honest.)

I had congratulated myself on all the library books I scored before the library closed, but I find I’ve become bored of the whole concept of reading a book. In an attempt to revive some literary enthusiasm, I’m trying to resume my study (if you can call it that) of hanzi, the Chinese written language, which I had originally taken up to dispel the almost-as-bad boredom of commuting two hours by bus to work. It was a good time-passer, even if little of what I “studied” actually stuck.

The commute to work took even longer before the bus route was established.

It was so fun because I didn’t use just any old Chinese lesson book: my study was from something I had downloaded from Google books called Progressive Lessons in the Chinese Written Language, written by Oxford Professor T. L. Bullock back in 1902.

This treatise teaches written Traditional Chinese (not that decadent Simplified Chinese introduced by the communists in 1949). At the time the book was written, China was still an empire, and I swear that a good 20% of the vocabulary must be different words for imperial decrees and punishments for disobedience. And it uses sayings of Confucius in its sentence lessons. It’s really quite arcane and neat, and sure to take a lo-o-o-ong time!

Here’s a sample:

I’ve still got that poorly-scanned PDF of Progressive Lessons that I downloaded all those years ago. My only problem is it’s 300 pages long, and I don’t seem to have any e-book reader that handles it very well, so it’s hard to read (even the English parts!). My biggest regret about retiring is that I didn’t print the whole book out at work when I had the chance. I’m sure not going to do that now when I’d have to pay for it.

You should try it. As incentive, here is a Norwegian pig joke that you will be able to enjoy only after you have mastered Chinese hanzi. (Or you could paste it into Google translate, but it won’t seem as funny if you don’t work for it.)

當員警把他拉過來時,拉爾斯和他的豬正開車在路上。
員警問他:「你不知道在卡車前面和豬一起騎車是違反法律的嗎?
拉爾斯說:”我不知道。員警說,
「如果你答應到城裡時帶豬去動物園,我這次就放你走。
幾天后,同一個員警又拉過拉爾斯,豬又在前面。
員警說:「我以為我告訴過你帶這頭豬去動物園。
拉爾斯回答說:”我做到了,我們玩得很開心,所以今天我帶他去特羅姆瑟。

Thanks for indulging me,
Dorn
4/30/2020

Tough choices: cower in place 24

– in which Dorn has to decide between two misgivings.

s I mentioned in the last post (here), we’ve started hearing strange noises in our attic. They’re mostly early in the morning, but can happen any time. Kathleen can have just lit the candles, turned on Calm Radio, and slipped into the scented bathtub, when suddenly she hears a caterwaul of scratching and rasping that sounds like Gollum frantically clawing a tunnel through our roof to get to his preci-i-i-ious (well geez, I don’t know, how would you spell it?).

This would be enough to unnerve the hardiest soul, but Kathleen and I both get especially spooked at unexplained sounds in our house, for good reasons that I’ll explain in some future story (best told on a dark and stormy night).

So we had a desperate choice to make: live with our fear of things that go bump in the night, or face our fear of exterminators (or anyone else) entering our house and breaking our covid isolation safety shield.

Things in the attic can do more than unsettle us, of course, they can carry germs, bite the wires, leave a stinky mess, die, and generally mess up the smooth internal workings of the house. So we had to opt for discomfort number (2), and called in an exterminator.

We called Tommy’s Pest Management because we had used them before with success. We had originally picked them because of their ad in the yellow pages (you won’t remember these of course, as this was long before you were born, but they used to publish thick books of telephone numbers of all the local companies. By social convention, these books were printed on yellow paper, and consulting it was how you knew how to contact someone you wanted to do business with, before Gooogle.)

We picked Tommy, as I was saying, because in their ad in the yellow pages, they had included an exterminator joke about alligators. I wish I could relate the joke, but I just can’t remember it, so instead I’ll provide a Norwegian alligator joke I found while researching my master’s thesis on Norwegian pig humor (here).

Lars is walking down the street one morning leading an alligator on a string, when he meets up with Ole.
“What on earth are you doing with that pig?” asks Ole.
“That’s no pig!” Lars exclaims.
“Hush Lars, I’m talking to the alligator.”

Anyway, we arranged for the exterminator to come out, but he wasn’t allowed into the house–external inspection only. That was fine with Tommy, he got paid either way.

Tommy brought an assistant with him. The assistant was garbed for the season in face mask and gloves, but Tommy wasn’t. With only one of them masked, I figured, my chances of getting the virus were about half of what they would be if neither was masked, and I decided this would have to be good enough. They weren’t coming inside anyway and I was properly protected and keeping my distance from them. (I did feel, though, something like when I reduce my chances of my car getting broken into by 50%, by only locking the doors on one side.)

They looked around outside some, and pronounced, “mice!”, and pointed out where they were probably getting in. They offered to come in real carefully and place some traps and materials inside, as well as set some outside traps. I said no thanks on coming indoors, just tell me where and how and I’ll do it.

So now I have some rodent death traps, that ironically I’m leaving in quarantine until I feel like any virus on them has died of old age and they are harmless enough to deploy. Full story at eleven (or when something interesting develops).

Thanks,
Dorn
4/xx/2020

*Journals will be collected periodically and will be graded at the end of the semester.

Looking ahead: cower in place 23

– In which Dorn tries to plan for the future.

verybody these days is struggling with new kinds of planning for the future. In the most basic sense, we are all doing what we think is needed to prevent a painful and debilitating disease from slowly claiming us, or someone we care about. I’ve found that my lizard brain—the oldest part of the brain, responsible for primitive survival instincts like fear—doesn’t really seem able to get the concept of catching the virus. I think about it a lot, sure, and it controls (or at least colors) every decision I make these days.

But the fear and anxiety that I feel is much more immediate: I feel fear about doing something that will disrupt the routine of safeguards that we’ve put in place. When I have anxiety dreams at night, they aren’t about getting sick, they’re about forgetting to wash my hands or change my clothes, or accidentally touching something, or being forced to call a repairman into our house*, or to visit a doctor.

My lizard-brain priorities make sense to me. Our survival mechanisms evolved to urge us away from behaviors that could kill us at that moment. Our higher thought processes are the ones devoted to working towards longer-term future goals. I’m gratified (I think) that I’ve internalized the threat posed by not washing my hands right down at the lizard level, so don’t have to rely on my logical Spock brain to keep me conscientious.

**How the brain functions**
source: https://hombahrani.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/python-game-rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock/

* * *

The part of my brain responsible for logical thinking already has plenty to keep it busy. Like grocery shopping. When I used to shop, I would forecast my meals and other needs about a week in advance. But now I buy my groceries online, and there’s sometimes a week or even two between when I order my stuff and when I get it. So I am now planning meals three or four weeks out.

Plus there’s the added complication that stores are often out of certain things (like toilet paper!), and I have to plan for the possibility that something I waited a couple of weeks for doesn’t arrive, and if I didn’t have contingency orders in, I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks for even the possibility of getting it.

We had luckily stocked up on toilet paper right before the decree went out that everyone should immediately go buy every existing roll, and we’ve been living on that stockpile ever since. I ordered some about six weeks ago from a place that promised they’d deliver it in six weeks, and did the same thing about four weeks ago. Plus every grocery store order I makes includes toilet paper on the list (and every grocery delivery so far has come in without said toilet paper). My strategy has been to keep requesting it in every venue, and hope something comes in before I’m all out. That time is getting closer.

Yesterday, Kathleen got a message from a well-stocked friend who’s offered to bring over some of the precious paper commodity, and we also got a call from our daughter who said she’s scored a source and is mailing some to us. Plus the 6-week and 4-week orders, and three grocery store orders, are all falling due in the next seven days. So by this time next week, we’ll either have more t.p. than we know what to do with, or have almost none at all, or somewhere in between. At this point my ability to forecast my situation has completely broken down. But we’re not out of t.p. yet, so my lizard brain is still completely happy.

* * *

Let me switch to a more serious kind of forecasting for a minute, where my lizard brain falls short. We’ve all been seeing or hearing forecasts of when the number of coronavirus cases will start to go down, so we can start going back to work, seeing family members, and generally resuming something of our former lifestyles. The need to protect ourselves and our loved ones from both illness and from joblessness and poverty affects us on both the logical and the visceral level.

And unfortunately, for many there’s no clear way to do both. Many jobs require human contact, but resuming higher human contact levels is forecast to increase the severity of the pandemic.

But not resuming increased human contact means that the jobs that require it can’t fully (or even partially, sometimes) reopen. And these businesses are running out of time—most have less than 30 days of buffer funds.

Clearly some middle course is needed that will keep both the threat of disease flareup and the threat of bankruptcy and penury at minimum possible levels, but this sort of balancing is not something that our lizard brains do very well. We, all of us, need to work as hard a possible to find a solution that is reasonable for everyone, and not just comforting to our emotions. It’s hard to keep our lizard brains in check when very real threats are all around us, but we’ve just got to try!

Thanks,
Dorn
4/24/2020

*Coming up: our worst fears realized—we need to call an exterminator for something in our attic!

The Nurse

I’d done some sketchbook tributes to Ysa, my niece the brave nurse that is on the front lines of the Covid-19 epidemic, but I thought such heroism deserved a real painting. She took a selfie for me while all suited up so I could have a reference. So I painted her from the photo and then I added the butterflies. I’m not sure exactly why I added them, but when I looked up butterfly symbolism after the fact I got this: Around the world, people view the butterfly as representing endurance, change, hope, and life. That works! Stay safe, everyone.