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!

Alone in a Crowd

As Numenius mentioned yesterday, we attended the No Kings rally in Davis. He peeled off early from the march, but I stayed on almost until the end. I did see people I knew over the course of the couple of hours that I attended, but mostly I was surrounded by people I didn’t know.

There is something very comforting about being alone yet in a crowd. I am someone who has always sought the company of others, but I’m learning, in my advancing years, to enjoy my own company. Maybe this is why people like to study in coffee shops: to be there, surrounded yet alone. It’s a particularly urban experience I think.

Meditations On Probability

After almost six years since the start of the pandemic, I finally caught COVID. Since Pica and I are two of those rare people who still continue to take infection risks seriously (e.g.. we avoid indoor gatherings, and are scrupulous about masking in public indoor spaces), I have been pondering the nature of rare events. Or given enough repetitions of a low probability event, it is not surprising to see it occur eventually.

Here is the timeline. Pica spends three weeks back east with her family, During this period I am not venturing out much, except for walks and a weekly trip to the grocery store. Pica returns on Saturday 4 October. Because she passes through the infectious soup that is modern air travel, we follow an isolation protocol for five days: she sleeps in the spare room of our next-door neighbor, and doesn’t come inside our house without being masked. (The weather is nice, and we can eat outside happily).

On Tuesday 7 October one of our two cats Esme starts sneezing a good bit. I wonder if she picked up a leurgy from Pica’s luggage still sitting in the living room.

On Thursday 9 October I feel a touch like I’m catching a cold, and by the morning of Friday 10 October I am clearly crook with what feels like a mild cold. Pica meanwhile Thursday tests negative for COVID, and we exit our isolation protocol. I’m wondering if I picked up a cold from Esme, who was still sneezing a lot. Though on Saturday I read that cat-to-human cold transmission doesn’t in fact occur.

On Sunday it still feels like a mild cold but since I had a dental appointment on Monday I decide I had better test for COVID. Oops. The antigen test comes up positive, as does repeating with another test kit from a different manufacturer.

Based on the timing of things, it was likely I was infected sometime between Saturday October 4 and Monday October 6. The possibilities I come up with are all low probability events:
a) On Saturday I went to the co-op to pick up some groceries. But the co-op is well-ventilated, and I am masked with an N95.
b) On Sunday I pick up takeout burritos from Chipotle. But this is a two minute task, and I am wearing an N95.
c) I pass through somebody’s infectious plume on one of my walks. Perhaps this was when I was sketching the jazz band on Sunday.
d) Somehow Pica’s return introduced COVID to the house, although she’s been asymptomatic throughout. Fomites on the luggage?

As for Esme, cats do in fact get COVID, and there has been at least one documented transmission event of COVID from cats to humans. I don’t think that’s what happened here though. She is not sneezing now, and is leaping up the walls with high energy.

I am isolating now in the spare room, and feel quite fortunate that I got my annual COVID booster almost three weeks ago on 18 September.

Puzzles

My mother collected postcards from wherever she went throughout her life, and used them in her latter years to send notes to people where she lived — notes about who has the bridge scorepad, or enclosing some of her recent writing, or just happy birthday. She offered me a huge stack of postcards when I was there last year, which I took happily (Postcrossing is a passionate hobby of mine).

There were lots more, though, which I picked up and deposited in the box I was sending back to Davis last week. One was partially written to “Pete.” I think I know who Pete is: her date at a dance, the only person tall enough to dance with her, or maybe he wasn’t, but he later went on to work for NASA or somewhere fancy. She was traveling around Europe with her friend Marianne, and this postcard is of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, black and white, serrated edge. In her cryptic style (which got ever more cryptic as the decades passed), she writes: “Dear Pete – Am ver’ sorry I haven’t written in such months but what I have to say would burn up the page – so I’ll tell you all about the rivers valleys and sunsets again & let you guessabout the rest. We have been to Nice which is ideal for peoples like you – there are islands all over & you can sail between them till you get out into the Mediterranean” [text ends abruptly here, though more than half the available space is left, no address is written in]. I’m guessing the year is 1954.

I don’t think she liked Pete much, and I’m wondering if this was a draft of a dear John postcard, which I can’t imagine her sending, because that’s like breaking up with someone by text (which everyone including the mail carrier can read). I wish I could ask her about this, but this is my life now: wondering about things (mostly trivial) I could have asked but never did. Whoever you are, Pete, I hope you found a good life partner, someone who respected and valued you. And I hope you respected and valued them.

A Zettelkasten Adventure

A major part of my eighth grade English class was being taught how to write a research paper. In my recollection, there were two big elements to what we were taught: the first element was developing a formal outline for the content, with topic sentences for each major and minor point, and the second element was a system of notetaking using notecards, where we would write out individual ideas and quotes from our sources on separate notecards and later be able to sort them into an order that made sense for writing out the paper. In retrospect, I don’t think this notetaking system differs much from what nowadays goes by the name of the Zettelkasten method.

(I was quite happy with how my research paper turned out, by the way. I was very interested in World War One aviation then, having spent a lot of time playing the boardgame Richthofen’s War, so my paper was on fighter tactics in World War One. I was pleased because I knew enough to be looking at original sources, especially pilots’ memoirs.)

There are lots of variations on the Zettelkasten method, but a couple points seem key. First, each notecard contains a single atomic concept. Second, there is an indexing system in place to allow individual notecards to link to other notecards; that is, it’s a hypertext system.

Some of the practitioners of the Zettelkasten method in the analog era would accumulate massive collections of notecards, for instance the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann created a Zettelkasten of about 90,000 notecards which he used in writing 50 books and over 600 articles. The digital era makes the process much easier, with a number of different software systems available for creating Zettelkasten, and if nothing else one doesn’t end up needing to get cabinetry to store all the notecards.

I have just started a new Zettelkasten since I have many research ideas but am a long way from turning these into essays and the like and need to be taking a lot of notes. (A current research project is learning about empires and the rise and fall of the nation-state.) For now I am using a software package called Zettlr, though there others I might explore as well. I’ve used Zettlr previously to help me write my last paper when I was working at the university. One thing that is nice about Zettlr is that it integrates well with citation management systems such as Zotero, which I have been using for many years.

With this Zettelkasten I am beginning a new practice: make sure to write a couple notes into it every day. This could be taking notes on an essay or paper, interesting quotes, or just general thoughts. We’ll see where this all goes in a little while.

Lessons From My Mother On How To Die

a) understand exactly what you want
b) communicate this, over months or years if necessary, to your loved ones. Repeat.
c) continue to learn your options because they change over time and over your health condition(s)
d) keep a sense of humor about it all
e) filing? damn the torpedoes… (actually, no. Don’t damn the torpedoes. Mum’s filing system must have made sense to her, but we are continuing to find surprises)
f) try and keep your marbles; it expands your options (see item c) above)
g) write your own obituary. Ask for help if this seems overwhelming.
h) be clear about who you want to be present, and almost more importantly, who you DON’T want to be there. Appoint a gatekeeper if necessary.
i) let there be ice cream.

What I wish:

Is that she hadn’t told us all not to cry. As Gandalf says, “not all tears are an evil.”

The Call of the Loon

This past week has been very busy with getting things packed up, distributed to various places, visits to lawyers and accountants and funeral homes, all the kinds of things that need to be done and nobody much feels like doing.

We did take a break, though, on Friday morning, to distribute mum’s ashes along with the remaining ones of my father. As we walked silently back to the car, a couple of loons began to call.

Mum kept her sense of humor to the end: writing “sayonara” on her calendar to all future doctor’s appointments, she really left on her terms and on her schedule. I will be making a donation to Maine’s Death With Dignity foundation.

Goodbye

Yesterday we took my mother to Paul’s Marina on Mere Point Road in Brunswick. We sat outside and watched the ospreys fishing, the boats turning into the incoming tide, and my mother greedily eating two scoops of peanut butter pie ice cream.

This morning, she was gone, surrounded by all of us and doing it exactly like she wanted.

Farewell, mum, good travels. I have so much to thank you for. (Not sure who I’ll call now with bridge questions, but we’ll manage.)