Mom & Me Four Archive

    I'm sure you'd assume, upon hearing my mother say this, that we were either discussing or watching something about some aspect of education.
    Try again.
    Last night previous to Mom's retiring (which has been recorded over at The Dailies as "0045" this morning but, after that, included three separate up-and-downs, each of which started in the bathroom and reconvened for a half hour or so in the living room) we were scrounging the TV schedule for something to watch. She didn't want us to read aloud last night, wasn't interested in watching one of our movies. I suggested several and whether she actually did remember seeing them, she said she did and didn't want to repeat them last night, she wanted something "new"). I ran across a show beginning at 2300, one we've never watched but which MCS recommended to me some time ago, Monk. I hadn't remembered that the main character has OCD, although I did after the show started. Needless to say, Mom was hooked. It will probably become one of our regular shows, assuming that we're not doing something else when it airs.
    This particular show featured a scene in which Mr. Monk decides that he is finally "getting better" and can probably be trusted to attend a work related back yard barbeque, during which he judges the appropriateness of the hamburgers as they come off the grill, throwing one away that isn't shaped right. He goes on to comment on the placement of a bun top on one of the guests hamburgers. It was during this scene when Mom said the title sentence above.
    "You mean barbeques?" I asked.
    "No. What that man is doing. His nervous behavior."
    I was stunned. All I could think of to say was, "Really."
    The more I thought about it, the deeper went the mystery. Obviously, people did, indeed, display OCD when she was teaching. This isn't a new disorder. I'm not surprised that she can't remember ever meeting anyone who did, of course. This disorder is probably fairly invisible to others in most of its manifestations. What I couldn't quite get a hold of was that she mentioned, specifically, that "people didn't do that when [she] was teaching."
    So, of course, I've been pondering this. I've come up with a possibility. It seems likely that most of the times in Mom's adult life when she felt most herself and most alive were when she was teaching. This is probably also when she was most acutely aware of her environment and practiced automatically deep notation of the people in her environment and their habits, since she was the, hmmm, environment leader, so to speak. Thus, when she notices some type of behavior that is "new" to her, in order to determine it's novelty she, now, flashes back to those times to see if she has a referent.
    It's funny because whenever we talk about her life I am always aware that her head is full of constantly running personal videos of the thousands, perhaps millions, of incidents in her life. As you know, I haven't yet discovered a way to encourage her detailed description of these videos. I hope I'll manage to achieve this, some day, but she's not a woman given to talking much about herself and life, as a rule. In the meantime, my guess is that most of her "most popular" personal videos involve her teaching days.

...is covered over at The Dailies; the highlights and categories, anyway. For a day or so I worked hard on finishing the TOC compiling. I've still got a little left to do. There have been errands, and Mom's been up a lot despite her very late awakening times. Her retiring times have been equally late. Her energy level's been good, although she is still refusing to go out. She continues to love receiving the morning paper. Funny, though, she doesn't pay that much attention to the Sunday paper. I finally asked her, this last Sunday, why she's ignoring it.
    "It's too big," she said.
    This clued me that if I shave it down, take out the classifieds, sports section and most of the ads (there are some that she likes) before she awakens, she might be more prone to read it.
    The main reason I haven't been here, though, is that I am, once again, having a minor health problem that is affecting the way I feel over all. I am prone to boils. I inherited this delightful little tendency from my father. I'm pretty good at preventing them. For decades I've dosed myself generously with a variety of antibiotic spices and supplements (garlic; all kinds of peppers including ground spice and chopped fresh peppers; all kinds of onions; potent one or combo spices like saffron, curry mixtures, etc., detoxifying teas) and, of course, I see to it that I drink lots of water. My grooming habits also take this tendency into account. All these usually work. It's been several years since I've had a boil. Can't even remember the last one. Toward the end of last week, though, I noticed a suspicious, angry lump developing in a very odd place (I usually develop internally caused boils at pressure points, like my ass, for instance, or the inner side of joints like underarms, the backs of knees): The outside of my upper right calf, centimeters from the same place I developed my Guam Sore when I was 9. For those of you who aren't familiar with Guam Sores, they occur when you are bitten by a mosquito, you scratch it open, coral dust settles into the wound, begins to grow and develops into a boil-like sore that takes several days, soaking and antibiotics, both topical and internal, to heal. From that point on you typically are no longer tasty to the mosquitoes on Guam.
    Anyway, I've been treating this boil carefully and thoroughly but it's taking a long time to drain and heal. I've also been considering it a localized infection. Today, though, as I was soaking the boil, cleaning it and applying more drawing salve (it's just about clear; the core has been expelled and the area of infection and pain has significantly reduced since yesterday) I realized that it's probably the reason I've been feeling so low physically, lately, which also tends to cause me to feel temperamentally removed. I've been easily tired for several days, haven't felt much like eating, have taken naps every other day, which is really unusually for me, and have not been prone to initiate any excitement around here for any reason. The two times I headed out to do yard work I way overestimated the sturdiness of my available energy and left my projects before they were finished.
    The crux of my realization that the boil was having an effect on my overall health and well being was when my mother mentioned, tonight, in passing, "You seem to be feeling much better, tonight, than you have for several days."
    Yeah. I do. And, frankly, I didn't realize it until her comment.
    The truth is, this episode worries me a bit. The last nine months or so have found me sloshing around in a swamp of colds, unusual physical irritations and then, well, then last week I develop a boil. This tells me that I am seriously run down, more than I previously thought. I'm not sure what I can do about this but I'm thinking about it.
    So, anyway, I expect I'll be picking up my usual reporting schedule here as my body ramps itself back up.
    Later.