Catching up with Old Friends

I arrived in London yesterday afternoon and made my way to the Cortauld to meet up with two college friends. I’d seen them since our school days but not much and also not recently. We saw the special Seurat and the Sea exhibition which was astonishing. I’m afraid my feet have decided they’ve had enough and made sure I didn’t give the paintings the full attention they deserve, but I was very glad I went.

I spent the night at Carol’s in Kingston south of London and saw Richard, her husband, a fellow birder and someone I hadn’t seen for 40 years. We’re all older and grayer, but it was fantastic to catch up.

Today I made my way to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see two other friends and meet up with my niece, who then drove me to her house in Worcester.

Staying in touch with old friends is an interesting exercise… Do you because they were your BEST friends or because they, and you, are good at staying in touch? I think at this point my Christmas card list is well winnowed down. And whatever past I’ve shared with the friends I saw, we still have plenty of points of connection, well beyond cataloging recent minor or massive medical issues (Martin said once you’re in your 60s you’re in Sniper Alley, which seems sadly accurate).

I did a lot of drawings but haven’t yet colored them in, see below…

A Day at the Emergency Room

Last night I noticed some weird bright flashes in my peripheral vision (left eye). I knew enough to know that this is likely not a good thing and I called the duty nurse for instructions about what to do: got a bot. The other bot, the “nurse,” called me back four hours later at midnight and by this time I was in bed and groggy. I got up this morning and began a series of calls to find out, again, what I should do. I finally reached a real nurse who was very helpful and who urged me to go to the ER.

Which I did. I went to the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento by Lyft, not choosing to drive with an eye that may or may not be functioning well…

I received good, if slow, care. Whenever something bad happens it’s bound to be at the weekend or, worse, on a holiday. There were several people in there for eye-related issues. Given that my symptoms might have indicated a retinal detachment, which is definitely an emergency, they were perhaps a little cavalier about it.

In the event it was an age-related problem of the vitreous body pulling away from the retina, and the symptoms have subsided on their own. But I am to go back for a re-check.

Emergency rooms are a strange mixture of boredom and anxiety. I’m glad I had my knitting, my sketchbook, and my audiobook, all of which kept me occupied without too much of either feeling getting in the way.

I went home by way of the local yarn store and picked up a nice tape measure, which I really need and which didn’t break the bank. (I didn’t even look at the yarn, for extra brownie points.)

Taxes

Everyone I’ve spoken to in the past few days is deep in the mire of sorting out their taxes. These are all people who have an external tax preparer, so the hours they are spending on this grim task are BEFORE a professional actually starts to work on them.

Makes me nostalgic for when I filed taxes in England: they sent me a statement, asked me to review it and let them know if I disagreed, and it was all done. Five minutes. The millions of dollars that are spent every year just so people can get their taxes filed — not counting the thousands, nay millions, of hours of thankless slog just to get them in — are a capitalist absurdity.

The drawings at right are of my siblings as we went through my mother’s tax records for the fourth? fifth? time today. Now to work on ours.

The Naggening

Last year my mother complained persistently that one of my dad’s British pensions was now being wired to her account rather than some other way that didn’t involve a fee. She asked me to call the UK on several occasions, each time securing a promise that this was a “Mistake” and that the money would be refunded.

After her death in late September I called them again to notify them of this, and to remind them about the promised refund.

I called again this morning. It’s been referred up the ladder. Honestly, it’s not that much money and certainly not worth the time it’s taking to get it, but as my sister reminds me, she was really adamant about it.

If nothing comes of it this time, or if they say it can’t be done, I’ll be fine with that: I just want to know so I can take it off the list of things that I need to take care of (and it’s me rather than my siblings because I don’t get charged extra for international calls). You wonder if it’s simple incompetence or a simple delay tactic: leave it long enough and people will drop it because it’s too much trouble.

A Visit to the Dermatologist

I crossed the Causeway today for the first time in a while. I had a 10:15 appointment. They wanted me to get there at 10. I left super early because there are road works on I-80 and, well, there’s fog. I did end up missing the turn to get onto 50 and had to turn around, but I was still very early. They were thrilled, because they were very busy but I was giving them a chance to catch up.

Clean bill of skin health. I took myself off on an Artist Date to Rumpelstiltskin, a yarn store on the way home, by way of celebration.

Cold Remedies

Both Numenius and I have colds. A friend who has spent some time in Peru recommends a concoction that is basically an onion, stem ginger, stem turmeric, and an orange and/or lemon. Add honey if there is a sore throat component.

Speaking with my Iranian tutee on Monday, I discovered there is almost the identical recipe given as a cold remedy in Iran.

Grocery List Talmud

Before setting out on our weekly grocery shop early this morning, I looked at the back of the grocery list. It turned out this was where Pica had written down the quotation from Pirke Avot that she used a couple weeks ago in her comic art post The Work.

The quote reads “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” This seems equally applicable to grocery shopping as it does to charting out one’s life path. There is always one more item.

Thanksgiving

Growing up in Spain, we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving — nobody had the day off, and the only person in the family who was really American was my mother, and getting absolved of cooking massive meals 5 weeks apart felt like a relief to her. So I didn’t grow up with it.

This is one of those holidays that people are pretty aggressive about: if you’re not cooking, they issue you an invitation to join their own turkey extravaganza, and are pretty upset if you refuse. By now my friends in Davis know not to bother inviting two reluctant vegetarians (Oh! but we can do tofurkey especially for you!). So, I’m a card-carrying Thanksgiving grinch. I have nothing against the holiday itself, though native Americans I’ve known certainly do. It’s at least mostly non-commercial. But issuing in the frenzy of the weekend of spending: that really does seem worth getting away from, and we are participating in the #AintBuyingIt boycott.

I just went for a walk and took myself past the Davis Food Co-op, a place I visit often in the course of a week. It was a madhouse. I just kept right on walking and carried on around the neighborhood.

Our tradition on Thanksgiving day is to walk up Mix Canyon and then order take-out from our local favorite Indian restaurant. Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate…

We Hates It, Precious

There used to be a good reason for daylight savings, when most of the population was engaged in agriculture and mechanization was rudimentary. There isn’t a good reason now: most of the arguments I’ve heard for the delay in a return to daylight savings time in November is so that the kids can have some daylight in which to go trick-or-treating. What this twice-yearly travesty brings us is millions of people (and their pets) grumpily going through a Sunday off-kilter; it can take some people days to adjust.

In California a proposition passed in 2018 by 60% of voters to make daylight savings time permanent. It hasn’t gone anywhere, even though Arizona and Hawaii don’t change their hours. In Spain, Prime Minister Sánchez asked the European parliament to consider the same thing last week: it doesn’t save energy, he says, and it impacts negatively on human health.

Spain is in a peculiar situation because most of it is really in the same time zone as the UK, but Franco pushed to have it be on European time, much further east. This is purportedly the reason the Spanish eat dinner so late: it doesn’t get dark till much later than in France. I hope this whole custom eventually gets abolished everywhere. For now, we grump.

Alchemical Psychology

I’ve been reading/listening to a course by James Hillman, The Alchemy of Psychology from the mid-oughts, on alchemy and the light it can shed on psychology. Hillman takes his cue from Carl Jung with whom he studied in Zurich and who was deeply interested in alchemy. Hillman returned to alchemy again and again in his writing. In Re-Visioning Psychology, for instance, he writes:

The materials, vessels, and operations of the alchemical laboratory are personified metaphors of psychological complexes, attitudes, and processes. Every one of the alchemist’s operations upon things like salt, sulphur, and lead were also upon his own bitterness, his sulphuric combustion, his depressive slowness… By means of concretely physical fantasies, the alchemical psychologist worked at the same time on both the soul in his materials and the soul in himself… So much is this the case that when we enter the thought of alchemy these events lose their stigma of sickness and become metaphors for necessary phases of the soul-making process.

Hillman is very concerned with soul and psyche and, obviously, metaphor, though he is less charitable when others draw the “wrong” conclusions about the metaphorical significance of alchemy, specifically, moral. The lectures are chaotic and brilliant, but the audio is so bad that the questions are not audible, so the answers to them are puzzling. Still worth a listen, though. I have not dipped my toe much into alchemy and I imagine there are worse ways to do so!