Holiday woes

You’d think that, during the holidays, I’d have found time to watch High Hopes. Alas, no. So far, my holidays have been as congested as my job days.

Today was the least taxing day in recent memory. Even so, I kept having to get in and out of the car. Karin & I traveled to:

(a) the doctor, for the removal of Karin’s stitches;

(b) the barber, for my haircut;

(c) Karin’s friends’ new house, for a tour; and

(d) Goodwill, for no good reason.

Yesterday, we drove to Michigan to go to church with Karin’s family members. They never showed up. It turned out, they’d gone to church in Indiana.

We were reunited with them at night. After the meal and the gift-giving, they asked us to stay for a quick game of Phase 10. This game did not end until three hours later. Phase 10 is supposed to be brief, like Uno or Skip-Bo, but last night it was more like Monopoly.

Between each hand of Phase 10, I loaded up a new plateful of crackers, cheese, and Christmas ham, in keeping with the seasonal gluttony. … Karin also has eaten a great deal these last few days. She has shattered her personal record of fatness. Today she began to address this plight. At Goodwill she bought a vinyl record of aerobics music, and, right now, she is marching in place while she watches the TV show My 600-lb Life.

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R.I.P. Carlos Muñoz. It’s the twenty-third anniversary of his death. I never will look much like “El Frentón,” and so today I decided to dress like Julio César Rosero, “El Emperador.”

High hopes

Please, all of you, don’t watch it at the same time – I don’t want YouTube to take it down – but Mike Leigh’s High Hopes was uploaded a couple of weeks ago. There are precious few movies anymore that I’ve been waiting for years to view. High Hopes is the foremost of them.

The movie features the great Mike Leigh regular, Ruth Sheen; and, even better, the great Mike Leigh occasional, Philip Davis. Young, woolly Philip Davis. Sheen and Davis star as Thatcher-era hippies.

(Leigh depicts hippies brilliantly in Nuts in May, also viewable on YouTube.)

Philip Davis is one of the world’s best actors, along with, oh, David Gulpilil, Noah Taylor, and Robert Mitchum. You may have seen him in “A Study in Pink,” the first episode of Sherlock (he plays the cab driver). He’s also in the TV show Whitechapel and Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake.

Here’s another still of him in High Hopes. See how sadly he regards the kettle.

I plan to watch this movie tomorrow, first thing after work.

A visit to the E.R.

When I woke up today, it was minus-thirteen degrees F. There was no school, thank goodness. When Karin left for her job, she had to struggle to open her car door because it was frozen shut.

At this moment, I’m at home, figuring out my Bethel students’ grades, which are due tonight. The kitties are glad I’m here. We snuggle together. Right now, though, they’re fighting.

Karin & I were away most of the weekend. From Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, we celebrated Christmas with Karin’s father’s family. Then we went home; but, a little later, we had to go to the hospital because Karin had stabbed her arm with a knife. She’d been using the knife to dig food out of a pan. The stab-wound looked about the size of a nickel, and it bled plenty, and, inside it, we could see a ghastly white tendon (at first we thought it was a bone).

Mary – rather jubilant, having just received an “A” in her Anatomy and Physiology course – drove us to the emergency room. We waited until it was Karin’s turn to be sewn up. The waiting room was quiet. Then someone began to play a TV show on his phone. There was a faint odor of marijuana.

I read in the South Bend Tribune that my students on Bethel’s basketball team had been robbed while deep-sea fishing. Those students had taken their exams early, I recalled, so that they could travel to Miami.

At last, Karin was sewn up by a doctor and a youngish nurse who cracked jokes that were full of medical jargon. Then the doctor left the nurse to finish things. The nurse asked Karin where she worked.

“At _____,” said Karin.

“Which branch?” said the nurse, and Karin told her. “I worked at that branch for nine years,” said the nurse. “I was the manager.”

How miserable, I thought. To be at the mercy of some healer; and then to find out that this person not only could do your job as well as you do it, she actually has done your job, and probably better than you do it, and for nine years.

But Karin took it in stride. Karin is much humbler than I am.

“En España critican el trofeo que el United dio a Antonio Valencia”

He was named the best player of the month at Manchester United.

Here he is with his little trophy.

As El Universo points out, this trophy is not being treated kindly in the European presses.

They say that it looks like a Christmas ornament.

Also, that it can be bought on the Internet for £12.99.

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This morning, due to the snow, the high school where I work was closed. I went to Bethel and trudged around to various departments, looking for blue books for the exam that I’m going to administer on Wednesday.

The students whom I talked to didn’t know what blue books were.

I suspect that the departmental secretaries whom I talked to didn’t know, either.

Blue books seem to have gone out of fashion at Bethel.

At last, I found a sympathetic professor. “I have a secret stash of blue books,” he told me.

And so my preparations for this semester have been completed. I would’ve been disappointed if I hadn’t been able to use the blue books. Giving a blue book exam is one of the few joys that remain in the academic profession.

A brave couple of games

South Bend is powdery now. Jasper, who used to run out into the yard every time he could, has been staying well away from the front door. Karin & I’ve been doing seasonal errands – retrieving my coats from Martin’s & Mary’s house; buying salt for the outdoor staircase.

Yesterday, I walked to Bethel in the snow. It wasn’t a difficult walk, but in the classroom the melted snow dripped down from my curly, long locks.

I’m on Cloud Six or Seven because all of my course prepping is done. What remains is to give exams and to grade.

Today, I allowed myself a break and watched two soccer games. In the first one, Leicester City demolished Manchester City with some fine counter-attacking and less than thirty percent of the total possession. The British announcers enjoyed skewering Pep Guardiola, the possession guru, manager of Man City. “He won’t win the League this way,” they said. It was a proud moment for British soccer. And, truth be told, on the counter, Leicester looked lovelier than Man City ever did.

Then I went to Stephen’s and we watched B.S.C. play the last game of the season – the “victory lap” game (the championship had been clinched the week before). Though I’d watched plenty of games this year, I’d yet to see Barcelona take the lead in a game and win. In the first half, our lead was 3 to 0. Even our goalie, the brave Máximo Banguera, scored. Then, in the second half, the game fell apart. An offside goal was wrongly given, our opponents scored twice more, and I had to settle for watching a draw.

Karin has just come into the house. When she opened the door, both kitties rushed out onto the snowy porch. The goose-brains (Karin calls them).

I dream of hippos

My health is improved but does not, shall we say, sparkle. Tonight a winter storm is forecast. I’m hoping that tomorrow my high school workplace will be closed, or at least that its classes will be delayed for two hours; and that Bethel will not be closed. It’ll be the last day of regular classes there. I want to finish watching The Two Escobars with my students. It was gratifying, yesterday, to listen to them gasp at René Higuita (his famous escorpión play) and at Carlos Valderrama (his mere physical appearance).

Reflecting on Colombia, I am pleased to think of its wild hippos, whose ancestors escaped the finca of Pablo Escobar. Sadly, this article reports that the authorities have set out to castrate those hippos. Happily, this article suggests that it will not be easy to subject them to the knife.

Karin put up our Christmas tree last night, and while we slept the kitties knocked it down, which surprised us zilcho. Now we’re home from work. The tree is still upright. The kitties seem to have accepted the tree. I have two or three chapters of John Charles Chasteen to read this evening, and ten study questions per chapter to write, or else my students will get off easy when they take their final exams. As I said, the semester is nearly ended. I’m making a mental list of holiday readings for myself. I hope that over Christmas I’ll enjoy a respite from illness so that I can lie on the couch and read and watch TV.

Awake

It’s three-something a.m., the fourth night of a painful cold. I’ve switched from bedroom to livingroom because I don’t want my coughing to wake up Karin. The twerps, Ziva and Jasper – who’d been sleeping peacefully, obeying the human timetable – now wrestle at the fringes of my blanket and compete for my attention.

It’s distressful to be awake at this hour, but sleeping is worse. Asleep, I can’t stop thinking about tedious details of Spanish grammar. Awake, my mood is OK. I remind myself that I’m married now and that being sick and married is immeasurably better than being sick and single, which was how it was for me in grad school.

Lately, at the high school where I work (and from which I’ll be taking tomorrow off), certain English teachers have been assigning Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” In that story the carelessness of one man leads to the disastrous, apocalyptic election of a ruthless president named Deutscher.

People are taking this Trump business very hard.

Trump’s actions so far have not been to my liking. But I refuse to give in to despair. I’ll continue to think kindly of Trump, if only by dwelling on how lousy the opposing candidates were. For example, they did nothing to check the lie that America is great. Trump at least acknowledged the falsehood of that belief with his slogan “Make America Great Again.”

What? Trump the most honest of the field? Doesn’t the sheer frequency of his lying disqualify him from that?

It doesn’t. The other day, I read this passage by Mark Twain that puts the idea rather well:

When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals? Why should we try to make it appear that abstention from lying is a virtue? Why should we want to beguile ourselves in that way? Why should we without shame help the nation lie, and then be ashamed to do a little lying on our own account? Why shouldn’t we be honest and honorable, and lie every time we get a chance? That is to say, why shouldn’t we be consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all? Why should we help the nation lie the whole day long and then object to telling one little individual private lie in our own interest to go to bed on? Just for the refreshment of it, I mean, and to take the rancid taste out of our mouth.