coldhearted scientist وداد

Most of this post was written before Hurricane Gustav came into being, but these first paragraphs are written from my very couch, with the help of electricity restored by workers from northern Texas! Other emergency workers I saw were from Kentucky, Indiana, and Oklahoma, and of course from here. There must have been many more, but I am shouting out to the Texans, who were very nice. All the emergency workers put in a long, hard day, much of it in heavy rain.

During the storm I made mushroom omelettes, pita sandwiches with tuna salad (that, of course, included chives and scallions from my chive and scallion fields), roast chicken marinated in rice vinegar and studded with ginger (it was very good, and and it was filled with mint from my mint fields and limes from my lime orchard), and ratatouille. I had just gotten used to the lack of electricity when it was restored – except for the fact that to work, I need it, and people in other states were NOT AT ALL understanding about my not having full access to all files at all times. Why are only some of your university’s web pages coming up? inquired one professor.

I am already shopping for the next storm. Very successful this time was packing every nook and cranny of the refrigerator and freezer with frozen small bottles of water and blocks of artificial ice – as well as with regular ice, of course. Also successful was keeping a thermos of hot water, because the stove had to be lit with matches and it seemed silly to do that just for the individual cup of tea. I would like a larger thermos next time. For the heat, I would really like battery powered fans. Do these exist?

For the next storm I have acquired a wind-up radio that is also a cell phone charger, a lot of batteries so that I will be ahead of any runs on them there are next time, a battery powered lantern in addition to my extant candles and flashlights, and a corded phone. (I forgot this time that if all you have is a cordless phone, your land line will go as soon as your electricity does whether your phone is really out or not.)

I also want a larger ice chest, in case of evacuating by car; a gas can; a second battery for the computer (maybe) or (better) a way to charge computer batteries; ziploc bags with all my relevant documents already in them (abroad I think first of documents, but here I think of them last); and a walking stick. I plan to shop for everything the house needs far ahead of time.

For the next storm, I also plan to emulate my colleague who had a backpack ready with all necessary materials for emergency evacuation in difficult conditions. It is important to pack these things way ahead because when the storm is bearing down and you are securing your house and worrying about New Orleans, you will not be in a state to dig out your most useful backpacking and camping equipment in a rational way.

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The herbs I am using now for omelettes fines herbes are basil, chives, and scallions. (If I started a ‘meme,’ with instructions of listing five, seven, eight things you have that you really like, one thing I would put on my list is fresh herbs from the garden.) You need a larger handful of herbs than you think for one omelette, because you want it to get quite green (the herbs are as important as the eggs). I have decided that the best way to make the omelette – in cast iron skillet, of course – is to slightly sauté the herbs in olive oil, butter, and salt, and only then put in the eggs (two eggs, to be precise). I had always imagined the herbs were mixed with the eggs, or folded into them as they cook, but I do not think so. Sautéeing them, very slightly, first, putting them in the center of things, works much better and comes out much more like something you might get in France.

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What I am really reading for pleasure are all the magazines and journals that came in over the summer, while I was gone. From them I have learned that one book I would like to read for pleasure is Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Apparently city water now contains traces of many pharmaceutical products, including psychotropic drugs, so we are living the Thanatos Syndrome.

I, of course, only want to read this book to confirm my convictions. Don’t get me wrong, I like psychotropic drugs as much as anyone else, but I clearly remember the first suggestion that I should get on antidepressants. It was a few months after starting Reeducation and I had decided it was being antifeminist and destructive. I thought this had to be a temporary error on its part – after all, if it were that way in its essence, it couldn’t be licensed, could it? so I pointed out the phenomenon and requested a change of direction. I ended up on a series of drugs that made it hard to get through the day, with the explanation that they wouldn’t be perfect, and that one just had to experiment. I pointed out that this was what the men in the convenience store parking lot near my house were telling the middle school children: “I’m out of weed, man, but I can get you some stones.”

I, of course, went on drugs due to depression caused by my very sincere attempt to adjust to antifeminist psychotherapy, in the days when psychotherapy for the masses was even more faddish than it is now. I had said that this therapy was doing me no good, and that I could tell because I had stopped enjoying life and was having trouble getting things done. They said it was not required to enjoy life, and that the way to accomplish things was to go on drugs. Many of my academic friends were in fact on drugs, and said one had to be patient with the psychiatrists. “They’re just M.D.’s, they do not have the psychoanalytic education you imagine, you cannot expect them to be as subtle as you, use them to get the drugs you need, and don’t worry about it.” Since when do we know I“need” drugs? I wondered. Eventually one of my friends did raise this question but I had heard so much else by then, I could not hear her for some time.

On drugs I remember reading articles and writing abstracts, for instance, but not being able to hold a connection to an idea long enough to read books or write articles. I pointed this problem out, saying it might not matter if I were working as a shop girl, but that I wasn’t. The psychiatrists’ response was that perhaps I should consider it. I remember explaining earnestly why this would be impractical. When Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed came out later, I thought of sending them a copy.

All had the effect of alienating me from feelings and dulling mental acuity. But the most frightening effect they had was the alienation from the body. Was I hungry? Tired? Did I have the flu? I did not know: the drugs masked what would have been telltale signs. I still knew was whether I was warm or cold, and I would have  been aware of injuries, but really, that was about all. I remember the reaction of my horrified psychiatrist when I said I was quitting so as to get my body back. “But your mind?” she asked timidly. “It is also a piece of my body,” I answered. “I realize it is impaired, but what worries me is that this impaired mind is all I have left. I want to see whether, without drugs, it will be able to tell what the rest of my body is doing – as it did before.” She was sure I was entirely insane at this point, but there was nothing she could do.

It took a few days to detoxify myself. I drank a great deal of ginger tea. What I remember most clearly about it is how, first, my muscles began to relax, and my thoughts slow down to what I would consider a normal rate. I began to be able to contemplate. Then I began to feel my blood flow. That is to say, when I took walks and my pulse rose, I could actually feel the blood pumping. I remember how it coursed through my back. Then it reached my calves, which I suddenly realized were not inert, but constituted an intricate universe of their own and were also part of me. One day I curled my toes and felt the muscles work. I walked out on a lawn and could feel the grass.

Without drugs, my mind grew smaller, quieter, and more ordered once again. Consciousness and breath were clearly larger than the mind. My physical being seemed real again, and the world outside, so wide. I felt so much younger – perhaps because I was much younger before the drug craze, and one thing I have in common with my younger self is not being on pharmaceuticals. I also felt younger because I was so much healthier physically. Mostly, though, I think I felt younger because that thick psychotropic veil between myself and the world was gone. I could touch plants, for instance, and feel the life in their leaves.

My actual ailment, of course, involved various forms of subjection, living in places that are antithetical to my being, trying to “rise above” circumstances I would have done far better to leave, and never having taken seriously enough my own ideas about what I might like to do with my life. These are not mental illnesses, however, and trying to alleviate them with pharmaceuticals is no answer. And as we all know, other drugs – alcohol, the opiates the dentist gives you, VALIUM if you are in a country which will still prescribe it, some South American plants – can in fact open Huxley’s “doors of perception” and help you see how you really feel. They will relax your mind like yoga and let you turn your attention to any new ideas which may come in; they quiet the internal censor and you remember what your own primary interests are. I have never found anything sold to me by a doctor to do that. And the modern psychotropics are, furthermore, designed to stay in your system. They do not merely offer a few hours’ perspectival shift. They lodge themselves like parasites, using your body to project a CEO’s dreams.

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A related article I read with great pleasure, and which discusses a book (Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture), is Helen Redmond’s Raunch Culture is Everywhere. The article reference came from E. Kitty Glendower and it is an important piece that everyone should read. I have long had students who were terrified, moralistic virgins, and others who were hypocritically judgmental parents of illegitimate children, but now I have a new group: people who were surreptitiously filmed having sex for use in blue materials, and who when they were told of this and informed they could sue over this abuse, were thrilled: they had been “in a porn!”

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In any case, I have just made the perfect omelette fines herbes, using eggs from the country and gathering pungent plants in the sunshine. I said at the beginning of this post that one of the first signs of my decline was to stop doing pleasant things on weekends. Having just spent a very difficult summer, in a misinformed and misguided, although quite sincere attempt to take a working voyage, I have realized that precisely, since the time of Reeducation, I have traveled a great deal but hardly taken vacations.

I have thought about this. We took days off and vacations when I was a child, so it is not that I do not know how. I did it in college and graduate school, and also as an assistant professor … until I hit REEDUCATION! After that I had the combined problem of low energy and low self esteem. Could I really get to the beach, for example, without getting too tired on the way, or falling asleep at the wheel on the way due to a drug effect? If I did, would I feel free enough to enjoy it? Most importantly, did I like myself enough to desire my own company on a trip to the beach? CERTAINLY NOT!

But my “working trips” often turn out to be more more harrowing than any reality tours. Even this weekend, for instance, I was going to visit the state penitentiary, on the theory that besides getting business done, this would be a relaxing change of scenery and social experience, but I remembered just in time how exhausted I am emotionally the day after I do that.

Clearly, I need to make a plan to reform, involving actual vacations, weekends away, and days off, also a reworking the weeks and days. Days are in fact the basic building block of everything, and part of my problem is having been lectured at to so great a degree about how one should use time. One should stay at work until 6 PM each day, but not work at night; one should be available for whatever others want on weekends, and on, and on. This is not at all how I used to live.

Whenever possible I used to leave work at three, not six, and come back for three hours many evenings. I have always been useless from mid afternoon until after dinner, and when I was a really productive person I always used this time to go swimming, lie in the sun, take walks, and do errands. This builds vacation into every day, although people who are committed to suffering – as many Americans seem to be – call it decadent. (Note, though, that they call evening work martyrdom. They should just be quiet.)

Some days I would come in between six and seven, leave at three, and not come back at all. This was so that I could go out on a weeknight – sacrilege again, but vacation. Other times I would come in at nine, leave at three, and not come back in the evening, but make up the time Saturday night. This is further sacrilege, but it’s one of the quietest and most private times to study, and it’s a great night to stay up writing. You can then sleep late, doze at the pool the next afternoon, revive with shrimp udon or something like that later on, and go to the movies. More vacation. Decadent. Irresponsible. Don’t I know how old I am? Well no, I suppose I don’t. Yet once in a while I meet people who truly do as they wish, and they always seem very grown up.

Axé.