Calling In Sick

My Daily Task List, saturated with the Get Me Ahead, will need to take what I hope is a one day snooze.  My Covid booster got a week overdue.  Now, the Influencers from the synagogue could have sent be back to the parking lot, but for the last two Saturday mornings I was pretty useful to them.  And they have no way of tracking who is up to date with the congregational policy of up to date immunizations as a precondition for attendance.  There is still some Covid floating around, though the deadly form seems to have gone the way of cholera, plague, and influenza meltdowns through history.  Still, catching up on my immunization seemed prudent.  I picked a day and time.  After a rather pleasant Open House at OLLI, I braved the rain and drove to the Super G Pharmacy as a walk-in.  No problem accommodating me.  Within a short time, my left deltoid had been punctured with Moderna's latest.

About five hours later, shortly after supper, I realized that not only had I taken something, but that my innards had been primed to generate cytokines.  My arm got sore.  I got edgy.  I felt a little warm, though not feverish.  And nausea.  And no end of systemic symptoms, from sore muscles to unsteadiness of gait.  I toughed it out until my usual bedtime but could not get comfortable.  Eventually I must have dozed, at least until 2AM, then spent the rest of the night looking at the red numerals on the clock radio, experimenting with postures.  I felt thirsty.  So thirsty that I went downstairs to the kitchen and brought my best insulated water bottle to my bedside, sipping it a few more times during the night.  By my customary wake time, those cytokine symptoms were still dragging me to unsteadiness.  Coffee not only did not help, but my customary k-cup brand did not taste right.  Back to bed.  It would take until late morning for those systemic symptoms to abate.  No treadmill today.  No petty errands.  Effectively a loss-leader of a night and following morning.

While the innards feel better, the deltoid injection site does not.  That will have to wait another day.

And the ultimate irony.  My incentive for getting the injection was to maintain the honor system of eligibility to attend shabbos services at my congregation.  And I'm really looking forward to not being there the next two Saturday mornings.

Spring Getaway

Travel had been scheduled next week.  I had reservations at an attractive consumer level hotel, a franchise of a major chain, with indoor pool and hot tub, at the eastern reaches of Long Island where I could indulge a bit for three nights.  As restful as this seemed, I cancelled.  When I travel to a new place, I like to visit the attractions that make it unique.  Long Island has wineries, which left me mostly unimpressed when I visited a few not that many years back.  Theodore Roosevelt lived his final years there.  The homestead would be burdensome to visit with scheduled hours only minimally intersecting my time there.  Sag Harbor has remnants of its whaling heritage.  Closed for the season.  And Montauk Point with its lighthouse and park is more of a schlep than I really want to pursue in mid-winter.  

Spring Break, the final week in March, offers more opportunities.  My wife's choral obligations will have eased, leaving us an extra day or two of travel.  This means either a longer trip or more time at where we decide to visit.  Think of this as a box of time:  leave Sunday/return Thursday.  Ground rules a little up in the air.  Basically, as sole driver, I do not want to stop overnight en route, so not more than eight hours of driving, or about 400 miles.  There are now maps that draw a radius from my home.  There are maps that will draw a radius.  Allowing 350 miles, as highways have their curves and turns, North gets me to about the Thousand Islands, South to the Southern Outer Banks, East deep sea fishing, and West to Central Ohio.  And just beyond range:  Ottawa/Montreal, the LL Bean flagship location, and Duke University.  And a good deal of stuff within the circle:  all of Pennsylvania, eastern West Virginia, all but Western Virginia, all of NY State, all of southern New England.

And let's not completely dismiss a short air trip with car rental, especially now that I have access to a convenient discount airline.

Some will depend on what I like to do.  I like visiting museums, historical sites, and national parks.  I like hotel aquatics.  I like having supper at brew pubs and visiting wineries or breweries or distilleries.  Amusement parks leave me indifferent.  I prefer going out for breakfast to a hotel buffet.  And I like stopping at a place or two along the route, if only for lunch and a driving break.

My wants seem few.  The travel radius large.  The need for a change of scenery, which by then will be about six months after my European trip, fairly large.

Viewpoint Fatigued

I'm newsed out. I'm shuled out. Opinioned out. Not yet crossed over the line to Jewed out, but I can see that line not very far off. And the Iggles season endured too long.  I kinda know what Trump is about and who supports him.  I can tell who marches with a fist in the air while shouting a slogan for the disappearance of Israel.  And I know who refutes them and how they respond.  And I can tell who wants to manipulate me in some way.  I don't even have to go to Twitter for that.  The notices from my shul where the Influencers think I should comply with what they want me to do come to my email a few times a week.

I got the hang of this by now.  And I'm really not receptive to the next post on Twitter or even the FB politically oriented pitch, despite their being generated by some of the dearest people you can hope to know or the finest friends you can hope to have.                        

To make this more unbearable, somebody who attended lectures at a university that wouldn't let me attend took classes on how to keep me glued to my screen by selecting what to toss my way.  Eventually they are no longer right.  It moves from engagement to the rejection of the very engagement that the expert with the algorithm thinks I might most like to have.

Part of the limitation may be that very little of this is truly interactive.  My forty years as an active physician had me interviewing people multiple times a day, whether patients at the bedside or in the exam room, nurses on the in-patient units, residents sharing the care, or consultants who come to help out.  Art Linkletter knew that Kids Say the Darndest Things.  So do patients. So do people at committee tables. Often their comments or questions are not what I anticipated.  Yet each situation intentionally included me in the dialog.  And it is a dialog.  It is a back and forth of ideas that can take unplanned directions.  It is sometimes having more expertise, sometimes upgrading my ability, since I started with less knowledge or experience than my partner.  And because the directions shift within seconds, at least in my medical world as new information is piled atop what was there before, there is something engaging about it.

Our screens really don't have that.  On Twitter, properly now rated X, where I have had the good fortune to avoid the truly viral toxins, I can comment to people of public prominence and accomplishment, but it is never on their agenda to respond to me, and for the most part they don't.  Had I made the same comment in a public seminar, they would have to respond.  Indeed, my Senators and Congressional representatives have done just that live and in person.  I know not to pose a question whose answer I can anticipate.  

On FB I know most of the people.  I've seen some of them live since enrolling on the service in 2009.  They are very different live.  While I admire the things that interest them as individuals, be it science, their trips, their fondness for restaurants, coping with Covid, their interests in cooking, even their political stances which often differ from mine, the screen is not interactive.  They can figure out from my messages that I time my week to shabbos, like cooking dinner, and analyze a professional report expertly, and am part of the sports fabric of my hometown, they really don't quite know how my mind works, nor do I have a good grasp of any of theirs.

Of the places where I express myself, the most suitable may be Reddit in is various subdivisions.  People sometimes come to pitch their agendas, but they often come seeking guidance, and this is generously offered.  I do not know what question will be posed on r/Judaism tomorrow.  I do know that when I open my Twitter screen, there will be attacks from the Left, from the Right, the retired CEO of AJC who I thoroughly admire professionally will tell me the same facts too many times, the Opinion Editor of The Forward, which I read daily, will have comments not very different from the usual comments, somebody will call Trump a criminal, which I think he is, and somebody will respond how the Trumpists brought America closer to its potential.  I just don't want to be there, and I really don't have to.

Interestingly, my shul has started inviting me to do stuff worth doing, though it is not the Influencers who took that initiative.  They still run Nominating Committees who populate the Board with Vacant since Nobody could offer more insight than me.  So while I am excluded, I presume by intent by Influencers, from the creative elements, I have more of a niche that bypasses the Gatekeepers.

What none of these forums, not synagogue, not Social Media in its various formats, has been able to do is what David Brooks in his most recent book regarded as the essence of personal interaction.  That is the ability to get people who want to tell Their Story to tell it.  That is the essence of medicine which may be why I found my time there so captivating.  To a large extent, it is the essence of Jewish Scripture, yet squashed in the name of Leadership, both in Torah to some extent, and in our Jewish institutions by design.

Our social media, X, FB, Reddit, all attract millions.  But they don't really have millions.  They have one person replicated a million times who makes a comment to a poster who really was not somebody who accomplished anything on X but may have accomplished quite a lot external to X by the position they hold in Journalism, elected office, or some other form of celebrity, where they already have a forum to promote Their Story.  The rest of need a forum to tell ours.  And X, FB, Reddit, and my shul all seem not quite up to this challenge.

I'm screened out.  I'm shuled out.  I need people to tell me the Darndest Things.

Morning Routine

Brief chat with old friend on our morning routines.  Having one frames the rest of the day, maybe keeps people productive in retirement.  His seemed simpler than mine.  He gets up at a time when working people are already at work.  He makes coffee in a large French press, sips it from a double sized mug as he reads his subscriptions to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal.  Then we chatted about what we think of his two journals and a few other pundits whose thoughts we both seek out.

My routine is more involved.  Ideally, which does not always materialize, I make my best effort to arise at 7AM, later than in my working years but before people other than nurses and baristas are already toiling away.  My next destination is dental hygiene.  Then coffee.  Mine comes from a k-cup, usually selected from among three varieties, with the 8 oz option selected on the Keurig Mini-Express.  While brewing, retrieve the daily local paper for my wife to read when she gets up, placing it right outside our front door.  Then some dishes left over from the previous day.  I tend to do cups first.  On some days, I am scheduled to check on the indoor herbs which grow in an Aerogarden and three Chia pots, as well as a new Bonsai starter.  I keep a bottle of water next to them, sometimes having to refill the bottle before I go upstairs to My Space with the newly brewed coffee.

On Sundays I plan my week while sipping coffee.  On the other days, I planned my day the night before, so I review it.  My medicines are filled in their weekly containers every Sunday.  I take out the day's pills, one set of four, another of two large OTC tablets, and swallow them with coffee.  

Next I check my messages:  email, FB, Reddit, X.  Never an overwhelming number.  Then I start, and often finish, and entry in furrydoc.blogspot.com and begin the daily crosswords, where I usually do five.  More often than not, I return to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee, either a different variet of k-cup or bagged ground coffee of good quality in a k-cup adapter, splashed with generic creamer.  Back to My Space.

My rate limiting step seems to be the daily treadmill sessions, two days on, one day off, with a three day recovery at the end of each month.  I target 8:15AM for this, and afford it a priority appointment with myself.  Once completed, I am ready to get dressed and declare the morning routine successful.

There are some specified mornings as well.  Shabbos is a time to look at what I have done and fallen short of doing.  Sunday I plan the ensuing week.  I remove shabbos dinner from the freezer Thursday mornings.  On Sundays I fill out my appointment list on a whiteboard so that my wife can see when I need to be away from home.  So even the routine has its variants, but enough is fixed as to be a framework that keeps me accomplished when morning has passed.

Baking for Synagogue Committee

Made a batch of Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies, 46 of them, for our Kesher Committee to take to the Emmanuel Dining room on our synagogue's behalf. I think our turn, three a year, is on Sunday. Made in the style of Frog/Commissary, of blessed memory, a destination for my wife and me decades ago when we had reason to be in Center City. Many of the pioneering yuppie places that transformed the Philly dining scene in the 1980s to early 1990s are long gone but I still make Fish Market Apple pie and these Commissary cookies from recipes that have been preserved in print. I found that the texture is better when I use half butter/half Crisco instead of all butter. Usually I mix in walnuts, which the cafeteria did as well, but omitted them this time. Not that hard to make. Stand mixer combines everything but the oatmeal and chocolate chips, which are stirred into a rather stiff dough with a wooden spoon. Can only make about a dozen at a time on a tray, twelve minutes followed by five minutes cooling each batch, so it takes a while. Since these are for donation and they fill up two big milchig bowls, I ran out for a foil turkey roaster from the Dollar Store which should hold the entire batch, to be delivered to the head of the project tomorrow. None for me this time.

Since it is a synagogue project, there are some ethical issues. First, can I use Crisco? When it came out in the Depression era, it was advertised as Kosher as a promotion, and since pareve, it became a staple of Jewish baking and frying. However, it was originally made by hydrogenation of liquid oils to create a solid of long shelf life. The hydrogens were in the trans position, which made them among the most atherogenic foods around. The process has been revised to change the trans positions of the hydrogens but keep the shelf life, so less unhealthy.

The other issue is whether one may make what are considered luxury products for a safety net institution. The traditional Jewish view is My Food is Your Food. Sharing is mandatory and I cannot begrudge another person a treat that I take for myself. The people who run the soup kitchens do not always concur with this. They often regard their service as what the people need to sustain themselves. If they are given what they cannot realistically hope to be able to acquire for themselves, they may have been done a disservice. The purpose of places like this is so that the patrons may be able to not need it in the foreseeable future. Interestingly, this is the same view taken by Rambam in his discussion of Tzedakah. But for now, I pitch in my best effort, rugelach last time, top notch cookies this time.

Choosing My Courses

OLLI Catalog print version came in the mail.  Electronic version arrived in my Inbox some time ago, presence acknowledged but e-booklet not opened.  There is an approaching window of time for submitting course preferences.  If submitted in that time frame, all submissions have equal chances of acceptance into those classes that are oversubscribed, so there is an incentive to complete the selection process on time.  Going about it takes some effort, but it pays to be methodical.  It also pays to have rules.  Start days are fixed.  There is a University intercession the final week of March, which I have designated for personal travel.  Fall semester Yom Tovim all fall on the same days of the week except Yom Kippur which occurs one day after the others.  Spring Yontif is usually limited to Pesach, as the semester ends before Shavuot.  This year Pesach yontif has one Monday, two Tuesdays, and one Wednesday.  That means Tuesday would not be suitable for courses that meet only the second half of the semester, and MW courses in the second half may be at a disadvantage.  There is not much I can do for full semester courses, but it would mean missing consecutive Tuesdays during the semester.

I start by making a grid, fifteen squares, one for each day of the work week, then early morning, late morning, and early afternoon starting times.  I do not like going to late afternoon courses, so stopped considering them a few semesters ago.  When I first began OLLI pre-pandemic, all courses were live.  The center was packed with seniors, filling up chairs in the lounge, chatting with strangers whose names you could read on their ID tags.  And courses were interactive, mostly lecture or discussion format, that one would expect from a college course, though some with an DVD or Great Courses format followed by discussion.  The pandemic altered that dramatically.  The center is never crowded, tables have replaced many of the cushioned chairs, as the cafeteria where people would congregate with either a purchased or brought lunch closed and never re-opened.  Classes became available on Zoom.  For a while only on Zoom but then a more eclectic mix.  Some are only offered electronically, some only in person, others give the student a choice.  There is one very big positive in that classes held in person at either the main center or the satellites a hundred miles away can now be accessed by people who live at the other end of the state.  And some of the best teachers have retired to the beach communities far away from my home.  Yet given the option, I prefer a live class.  And now nearly all have a format where people watch a video.  The professor's PowerPoint presentations and classes where individual participants are assigned a week to present have become infrequent.

With some experience, I've accumulated a list of preferred teachers and those I never want to sit through, and a few who I think the University should simply disallow but don't.  And then there is content.  There's a fair amount of woke.  Those people who think everyone who is of European or male background in the gene pool has harmed them and they need to shout that out.  And there are agendas, whether cleaning the environment, keeping undesirables from replacing us, redistributing other people's wealth.  Those soapbox courses don't get a place on my preliminary grid either.  There is more than enough good history, some science, exposure to travel and culture to saturate my preliminary maybe courses to move onto Round 2 of selection.

I then take a separate page for each day, divide into thirds, early AM, late AM, early PM.  Then going through the preliminary grid, live goes on the left, Zoom goes in the center, half semester courses go on the right.  A few musts stand out, usually live from a professor I've attended before.  I only want to make one trip, so I will not accept a day that has an early morning course and an afternoon course with a big gap in the middle of the day.  And the subject begins to matter more.  I like history and travel, but I also like to get a new skill, whether learning Excel or basic watercolor painting techniques.  Eventually I will have about five courses, usually spread over four days, submitted in time, and mostly accepted by the OLLI computer for registration.  The University offers a Drop and Add time after the classes begin their sessions, but I've never taken advantage of this.  They also offer, for a nominal fee, the option of taking a regular university course at the main campus.  As tempting as this is, I really don't want to drive there two or three days a week, pay for parking, and have homework or papers to write.  Though I probably wouldn't mind, likely even enjoy, sitting in a lecture room with kids who could be my grandkids and having them stare at me.

But ultimately I am an adult lifelong learner.  Osher offers in excess of what I need, from which I must select but a few.

Current Initiatives

SMART Goals set for next half year.  In my line of sight on whiteboard to the left of my desk in My Space.

1. Optimize closet space in my living areas
2. Optimize My Space
3. Write 80K word book draft
4. Read 3 Books
5. Visit 3 New Places
6. Publish 3 Articles
7. 3 New Experiences
8. 3 Guests
9. 2 Organizations
10. Spousal evenings
11. IRA withdrawals
12. Health Targets

To do these, I will have to work a little differently than I currently do.  Longer stretches, focused only on what I am doing at the time.  Instead of for the next 20 minutes I am going to work on something, it will need to be for the next 2 hours.  I can probably do quite a lot in two hours.  Or at least get a lot closer to completion.