Dr. Metablog

Inauguration Highs and Lows

I couldn't bear Rick Warren.  I have no tolerance for the unctuosity of preachers, and Rick busted all standing records for unctuosity.  I thought he was entirely too Christian -- if there is one event that should be absolutely ecumenical, it's an inauguration.  Also embarrassing was Elizabeth Alexander's poem -- poetry by the yard, absolutely prosy, undistinguished, predictable, and read in such a pretentious I-am-a-poet-all-hail-poetry-and-me voice that I had to leave the room.  The Perlman-Yo-yo Ma thingy left me cold.  Why not play some proven piece of celebratory music, especially since Aaron Copland had already made a major work out of "simple gifts."  Three cultural low points, as far as I am concerned, but all of them redeemed by Aretha Franklin's hat. Praise to Luke Song, its designer, and all hail the queen of soul, the queen of hats, and also the absolute and utter triumph of undiluted, unparalleled African-American churchladyness. The hat made the whole day worthwhile. 

I also liked Obama's speech and Bush's helicoptering the hell out of there.   And wheel-chair bound Dick, who hurt his back trying to smuggle out boxes of top-secret stuff that he should have left behind.  

Hey, Barack, do you want my advice for 2012?  In a nutshell: less religion, more hats.  

Worst Nightmare Yet

I was a night game, and I was playing left field,  The batter hit a long fly my way.  I saw it clearly as it came off the bat, studied the trajectory, and knew that it was nothing more than a loud foul  --  only to hear the ball plop down not more than ten feet behind me.  The huge crowd of spectators broke into wild laughter.  Runners were circling the base paths.  I turned to run after the ball, but my feet were lead weights, perhaps because I was wearing hiking boots instead of spikes.  Eventually, I retrieved the ball and tried to hit the  cut-off man, but the ball skittered out of my hand and carried only a few feet.  The crowd laughed again, uproariously.

It was horrible. I woke up with a nosebleed.

Two Recently-Sighted Bumper Stickers

A.  "Tattoos Get You Sex."  A forthright, undisguised sentiment.  Here we have an enormous advertising establishment working indefatigibly to imply that the car, the beer, the perfume, the toothpaste, the sneakers will get you laid.  But do they ever come out and say so directly?  No.  It's all implication and suggestion (except for the commercials for Viagra/Cialis -- a special case).  But here's a bumper sticker that lays it on the line.  No sly metaphors or beating around the bush.  But is it true that there's an alignment between sex and tattoos?  Where's the double-blind evidence?  I'll wait until I see the utterly unbiased report from the National Association of Tattoo Artists. 

B    "Ann Coulter is a Man."  This one puzzled me a bit because it didn't say whether Ann was born a man or had recently been surgically tranformed into one.  In any case, I'm not all skeptical about the accuracy of the assertion.  What else could account for the fact that Ann (or Andrew, let us now call him/her) acts and speaks like an ignorant, show-offy, foul-mouthed, testosterone-fueled teen-age boy? 

My evaluation:  A is false in most cases;  B is certainly true.  

January 30.  Here's another bumper sticker, encountered yesterday.  NO MORE DUMB PRESIDENTS.  'Nuff said.       

"Actively Dying"

Grandma is 96+ years old.  She's an accomplished, strong-willed, tough old lady who has survived just about everything life can throw at a person: polio in childhood, over two dozen major surgeries, diabetes, and then two times in the last decade, cancer. Now she's very close to the end.  She has been in a nursing home for four years, declining almost imperceptibly from day to day. Until last week, she could carry on a conversation of sorts. But then something happened. She lost the ability to move, even a little; she became agitated, her long-term memory collapsed, and she could not, however hard she tried, complete a thought (though she was able to say, and repeat, "This dying business doesn't bother me").  She recognized only one person, her eldest daughter, and it was not clear that she knew her own name.

For the last six months someone at the nursing home has had to help her with fork and spoon. Last week, we decided that to prop her up, sit her at the table, feed her cake and then propose that her insulin intake be increased was a senseless, bizarre procedure.  A compassionate doctor suggested that it was time for insulin and other non-palliative medicines to be withdrawn. We readily agreed. We confronted the head nurse at the nursing home; she announced to us that the home's chief of medicine would reverse the order to withdraw insulin;  Grandma must be fed ("We're a nursing home," she said, "we nurse"). Last Friday, we moved Grandma from the nursing home to our local hospice.  Grandma immediately stopped eating and drinking. I would like to think that she chose to give up food, but there's no way to know. Her eyes have a glazed, far away look on the rare occasions that she is strong enough to open them. She fumbles with the sheets.  

Nevertheless, on Monday, hospice told us that they couldn't keep her. She's not "actively dying" -- according to the official Medicare rules -- and is therefore not eligible for hospice. Where to take her?  Unclear.  We negotiated a two-week reprieve. Grandma will be allowed to remain in hospice as a private patient for fourteen days, but unless she starts "actively dying" during that period, she'll be expelled. We cried.

Yesterday, however, we were told that Grandma had taken a step forward.  She's "entered her process" --another bit of hospicespeak.  She's experiencing, we're told, sufficient pain to warrant morphine and her heartbeat has become rapid and irregular.  She is "less responsive."  Good news for Grandma, I guess.  Unless she "plateaus" and stops "actively dying," she'll be allowed to stay to the finish, which, if there's any mercy, will not be very long.  

Here's what Kent says about Lear, at the end.  "O let him pass.  He hates him/ Who would upon the rack of this tough world,/  Stretch him out longer."

January 17.  Grandma died last night, having squeezed the last drop out of life and sliced through the last shred of bureaucratic red tape.

Extrapolation

When you consider an adult whom you've known from infancy, you're tempted to think that their traits at maturity were evident from birth. You saw it in them. Shyness or assertiveness or enterprise or doggedness or volubility or curiosity -- all there right at the starting gate. "It stands to reason that she would have entered the field of medicine -- she was always so compassionate." I'm never convinced when people say such things. I think that it's easy to make retrospective claims. If a child is interested in fifty things, we look back and only remember the ones that "foretold" -- so to speak -- her mature interests. We forget about the traits that didn't develop or which metamorphosized. 

As simple as it is to claim that the mature being is a predictable exfoliation of childhood traits, just so difficult is it to make actual predictions. In my experience it's almost impossible to look at a two-year-old or a five-year-old or even a sixteen-year-old and extrapolate to the adult. In fact, it's far easier to misjudge a child than to get him or her right. No matter how well you might think you know them, children are hard to read.  

These thoughts are prompted by reading Nicholas Murray's skillful new Life of Matthew Arnold. The poet's father, the famous education reformer 'Arnold of Rugby,' a man who should have known better, was absolutely wrong about his son. According to Thomas Arnold, Matt was 'not likely to form intimate friendships;" "He flitters about from flower to flower but is not apt to fix."  "I do not see how the sources of deep thought are to be reached in him." " He  does not know what it is to work because he knows so little what to think."  The best he can say: "I think he is not so idle as he was." 

Idle! and shallow!  Has there ever a been a more colossal misjudgment of a son by a father? Or did Matthew Arnold live the most of his life with a giant "I'll show him" chip on his shoulder?

Come to think of it, I'm rather glad that I don't know what judgments or predictions my father or other adults might have made about me.   

Etymology of the Word "Steerage"

The origin of "steerage," a word used to describe the part of the vessel allotted to the poorest of passengers is not fully established. Some say that "steerage" originally referred to the section nearest the rudder, but for this theory I can find no confirmation. As far as I know, steerage passengers were as likely to be housed fore as aft. Another guess is that the cables that ran from the steering wheel to the rudder passed through this level of the ship. It's also been ventured that emigrants were located on the same deck that was used for transporting steers. This suggestion seems inherently unlikely, although it is certainly true that in pre-refrigeration days, large numbers of livestock were carried on ships in order to maintain a supply of fresh milk, eggs, and meat.  Is it possible that the "-age" in "steerage" is used as in "storage" or baggage?" "Steerage" seems to be unique to English. Other European languages simply say "between decks"; so German "zwischendeck," Spanish "entrepuente," Swedish "mellandaeck," Norwegian "mellomdeck," French "entrepont," etc. Until the nineteenth century, "steerage" simply meant "steering," as in Romeo's picturesque "But he that hath the steerage of my course,/ Direct my sail."