life in rehab

I have been back in in rehab for a few days now, and it’s time to write about it. My first facility was the highest rated in the area, but while the staff were dedicated, competent, and willing to do even the yucky parts of their jobs without flinching, the place was seriously understaffed. It often took half an hour to get a response from the call button.

After I went back to the hospital for a few days, I was taken to a different facility, a bit less glossy but better staffed, and just as well served.

None of these have private rooms; i share a room divided by a cutain. My first roommate left the tv on all night; fortunately his tastes rann to old crime dramas like Castle and Veronica Mars and not infomercials. My second groaned literally 24 hours a day: some of this was evidently supposed to be words. Strangely this was less annoying than it sounds. Today I was moved to a different room, where my roommate just wants to Iisten to baseball games quietly on the radio. I can live with that.

I’m here for physical and occupational therapy, which is going very slowly. The rest of the time I’m in storage, basically. It would be a lot more boring without my iPad to read and slowly peck out this post on. Oh, people come by regularly to give me pills and take my blood pressure or bring me meals. The food is nutrionally adequate but dry, usually cold by the time it gets here, and very dull tasting. But my condition is such that I can’t eat much anyway.

I have a hospital bed with user controls for raising and lowering various parts, but it’s hard to find a position in which it’s comfortable to lie for extended periods. I spend most of my time sitting on the edge of the bed, bending over a rolling table where I keep my iPad, phone, jug of water, and other things I might need. I clear off a space for meals. With a walker, I can hobble ten steps to the bathroom, but any further requires someone to push me in a wheelchair.

And so I sit, day after day with many more to come. That’s my life.

two steps back

I was going to write about life in a physical rehab facility, but now I’m back in the hospital instead. Steps back indeed: I am not judged ready to do that, and must lie in bed until my tuckus aches.

well, that's torn it

This post was supposed to be a review of Saturday evening's Redwood Symphony concert, featuring the Paganini Rhapsody (which is by Rachmaninoff). References from my posts of the last few days about my health issues would serve only as background to illustrate what physical challenges I overcame to get there.

It didn't work out that way. After a few bites at a local restaurant (my laxative had done its work, so I wasn't stuffed but I still had no appetite), I was driving down a residential street towards the theatre when the car drifted over, as it's been doing a lot in my hands lately, smacked into a parked car and then slammed into unoccupied kerb. Obviously it was going nowhere under its own power tonight. Strangely, the car I'd hit was not at all damaged. Me, I was shaken but not stirred.

B. had told me, before I left, that she didn't think I should be driving tonight, and she was right. The answering cop told me he was suspending my license, and I agreed that was the right thing to do. So, since B. couldn't do the driving - she fears traffic and hates going out at night - that puts paid to most of my concert going for the foreseeable future. I will be looking out for substitute methods of travel, but not too much of it. I said before that my illnesses over the last year and my recent hospital stay are a major life transition, and they surely are.

But though the circumstances were miserable and my evening plans were ruined, I couldn't have had a better time of it, thanks to the extraordinary kindness and helpfulness of several neighbors, including even the owner of the car I hit, who came out of curiosity and promptly pitched in to find me a chair to sit, call my insurance, fetch a tow truck for the car and a Lyft home for me, etc etc, and otherwise just hang out and pass the time with agreeable conversation.

jabbed and otherwise assaulted

Yesterday afternoon I went in for my flu and covid shots. Unlike others reporting this year, I did not feel seriously wiped out by the shots. But that may be because I was already so enervated that there was no more wiped out to get.

I've been using a cane when I walk for some years now. Originally it was a response to attacks of bursitis, arthritis, and other itises, but more generally it's to keep me steady on my feet, and not to wobble and fall over, which I have a tendency to.

But since my latest hospital stay, that's changed and I've entered a new phase of aging. Those four days of lying in bed doing nothing, plus two surgical operations, did seriously wipe me out, both strength and stamina, and I came home ready to curl up and forswear everything. Gradually I've been recovering just a little, and by pacing myself carefully and devolving to B. some household tasks that I'd thought I could still do until I tried them, like taking the trash bins to the curb for pickup, I've gotten to the point where going up and down stairs two or three times a day is manageable.

But I'm using the cane indoors almost all the time now, where previously I'd just held on to handy objects, and outside I have graduated to a walker, one of the cheap metal four-legged ones (but only two wheels! why not four?) which is much more stable and allows me to walk faster, though still very slowly, than with a cane.

Other complications, such as bags hanging off accumulating strange fluids, aren't worth much discussion (this is not supposed to be permanent, but I have to wait for my next operation), oh, and you know the stuff you take before a colonoscopy to clean you out? I've been chugging it by the gallon without much effect.

concerts not attended

I had tickets to all of these:

Friday, San Francisco Symphony, A Concert for MTT. The eagerly-awaited memorial concert for the beloved former music director, Michel Tilson Thomas. Critic Joshua Kosman called it "part concert and part Jewish wake."

Saturday, South Bay Musical Theatre, Once Upon a Mattress. Musical by Mary Rodgers based on "The Princess and the Pea," the show that originally made Carol Burnett famous.

Sunday, Symphony San Jose, Copland Billy the Kid, Dvořák Symphony from the New World, and a new piece by Jonathan Leshnoff, Rhapsody on America.

I didn't get to any of these because I was in the hospital, again. Frustrating to sit there waitng to learn what they're going to do next. (MRI - that's an interesting experience.) In fact they only let me out so that they may spend a few days cogitating on the next step, and in a couple weeks I'll be going back in again, more concerts to skip I'm sure.

My tablet has accompanied me on this, so I could theoretically have written posts. But one feature of being ill is that I don't feel I have much to say, or the ab8lity to say it cogently if I do.

anatomy of a scandal

Of all the silly things happening in politics lately, my candidate for the silliest is Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO)'s attempt to play "gotcha" with Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who pulled up so many cases for DT's criminality, earning from his antagonist the label "deranged." You can see the whole thing outline by Seth Meyers here; I've cued this to delete a couple minutes of preliminary fooforall.

But here I'd like to deconstruct it slightly. Schmitt's idea of a gotcha was to imply previously-unknown collusion between Smith and Fani Willis, the Georgia state prosecutor who was pursuing her own cases against DT for election fraud. And to show collusion would prove what, exactly? We never got that far, but presumably if you could get Smith to deny it while showing it was true, you'd have presumption of malfeasance.

But it never even got that far, either. All we had was Schmitt claiming and Smith denying that he'd been in Atlanta on a given day. All Schmitt claimed he had evidence of was Smith attending a basketball game that day, an NBA match between the Atalnta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors. Anything involving Fani Willis would have to lurk unspoken.

But, of course, Schmitt didn't even have that. Asked about the game, Smith said he wasn't there; where he was, he said, was at a college basketball game hosted by the University of Maryland, near D.C. where he lives, vs. the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.

Hawks. Hawkeyes. It was Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) who suggested that Schmitt had just confused the teams' nicknames. And that's how the story is being told.

But in fact it didn't even get that far. The posterboard showing the supposedly damning e-mails from Smith's staff was waved around but hard to see. But it does appear clearly between 9:45 and 9:50 on Meyers' video. At which point it reveals that the e-mails were just a qu8ick exchange about Smith's seating arrangements and confirming he was there. It doesn't even say it was a basketball game! Maybe Schmitt had other documentary evidence on that, but he admitted (clips at 11:07-11:15 of Meyers' video) that he just looked up the NBA schedule for that day, found the game in Atlanta, and figured he had his gotcha. The similarity of the team names was a pure coincidence.

What a moronic excuse for a political scandal.

play and concert review

When I visited the Eugene O'Neill home in Danville last May, I noted that every fall a local theatrical group does an O'Neill Play Festival: usually just one of O'Neill's longer plays for a run of a couple of weeks. And this year the main play was to be Ah, Wilderness! known as his only comedy. Would I be willing to give that a try, after having had enough for a lifetime of intense and garrulous O'Neill tragedy?

Well, I wouldn't make the drive just for that, but since a matinee performance coincided with an evening on my subscription for the California Symphony in Walnut Creek nearby, I went ahead.

Ah, Wilderness! takes place in 1906 and was written in 1933; this production was staged as a radio reading from the '30s, with the actors supposedly standing in the broadcast studio. This simplified staging a lot.

Unfortunately I had slept poorly and nodded off enough during the play that I didn't always follow the action. But I followed enough that it was clear that, while the characters behaved like O'Neill characters, they weren't as annoying as other O'Neill characters, and the dialogue was passingly amusing. The acting throughout was strong and clear.

As for the concert, the gimmick was that all three works were written for performance in the U.S., though only one of the composers is American. Sibelius's The Oceanides, inspired by Greek mythology instead of his usual Finnish, doesn't sound like most Sibelius but depicts the rising and falling of an ocean surge pretty well. There followed an equally dynamic run through Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, more energetic than it was exciting, but still crisply produced. And, for a new piece, Jennifer Higdon's Cello Concerto, which its dedicatee Julian Schwarz has been taking around to various orchestras. Higdon has mastered the trick of ensuring that the solo cello is never drowned out by the orchestra; generally it's a meanderingly lyrical work without much particularly to note it by.

remake

I was never particularly fond of this classic Seventies rock song, but arrange it for the traditional Chinese guzheng (clever of those traditional Chinese to be able to make tape loops) and it becomes absolutely hypnotic.

three days at Oregon Shakespeare

B. and I have returned from our annual driving visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The weather at the shoulder season was pleasant, warm and mostly dry but not hot, but the physical rigors - walking around the hilly and irregular grounds, slotting in meals, and the long drive there and back again - were very hard on aging bodies, and this may well be the last time we go.

Nevertheless we saw some good productions - two A's and one B among six shows, not too bad a ratio.

Best of the Shakespeare shows was A Midsummer Night's Dream, a traditional production, with the usual double-casting and undercutting, great ensemble and teamwork among all the actors. The Pyramus and Thisbe play put on by the mechanicals at the end was so goofy in its acting as to be the funniest thing in the show.

Come From Away, the musical about the passengers stranded at the former transatlantic refueling stop at Gander, Newfoundland, during the airspace shutdown after 9/11 (so there was room to park lots of planes at a small town) and the locals who hosted them, was the feelgood show of the season. This despite it beginning with a number describing the passengers trapped on the parked planes for a whole day without being told what was going on, while the locals scrambled to assemble supplies. The fact that this was both energetic and entertaining was the amazing part: like Midsummer the show's ensemble teamwork in a very complex script was outstanding. The music was functional rather than memorable, but this was a great show.

How much of Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang is as autobiographical as the text claims is not clear to me. But Hwang, known for his opposition to using Caucasian actors in Asian roles, apparently got caught up in such a controversy involving another play of his, and wrote Yellow Face about the experience. The director of this other play - Hwang himself had no part in this - hired a white actor for an Asian part, thinking he was part-Asian. Apparently while such a casting is now utterly un-woke, Equity anti-discrimination rules prohibit asking actors what their ethnic origin is. The irony in this seems to me to be the real point of the story, though the play focuses on Hwang's embarrassment. Anyway, well-performed.

The Taming of the Shrew failed to follow through on the director's concept that the script depicts sexism rather than being sexist, and ended with the usual abjectly defeated Kate. Even more unfortunately, it was slowly and dully presented. Never have Bianca's suitors been more boring to watch. The set included what was evidently intended as a topiary of the word LOVE in letters six feet high, which gave the impression that the show was set in Pepperland.

Henry IV Part One was well presented - again, excellent byplay among the actors - whenever it wasn't depicting battles. Though costumed roughly for period, the battles were accompanied by huge clanging music that sounded like minimalist rock or sometimes like alarms going off. Since the ending of the play is one big long battle, it was brutal and spoiled the experience of the better, earlier part of the play. Should have left at intermission.

We did leave at intermission for Emma, a ghastly adaptation of the Jane Austen novel that turned all the characters into juvenile nincompoops. Worse yet, it was well-performed for the conception. Watching a lot of good actors deliberately performing badly was too painful to continue with.

panel on Earthsea

In celebration of the Library of America's new issue of a definitive collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea stories, the publisher sponsored an online panel today about Earthsea, with Brian Attebery (scholar who worked with Le Guin and has edited the LoA's Le Guin volumes), Karen Joy Fowler (fiction author who knew Le Guin well), and Nghi Vo (representing I guess the next generation of fiction authors, influenced by Le Guin).

They discussed a lot of points, among them that the original Earthsea books were published as children's fantasy but they're not really children's books. Sober, Fowler called them, and she doubted she'd have appreciated them fully if she hadn't been in her 20s by the time she read them. I'm in somewhat the same place, having come across Earthsea when the first uniform paperback edition was published when I was 18. That's what sold me on Le Guin: I took one look at those maps and said, "This author has seen within my soul," and after that I'd follow her anywhere.

Later on they touched on Le Guin's comment that she was lucky she was in her 20s by the time The Lord of the Rings came out, so that she was mature enough to absorb it without it overwhelming her. The book from her childhood that did overwhelm her that way? She told Attebery it was Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright, and Attebery said he sees Wright's influence in the societies of Gethen (Left Hand of Darkness) rather than Earthsea.

One of the audience questions was about the current breed of libertarian society leaders who grew up reading Heinlein. What did the panel think would have happened if they'd read Le Guin instead? Answer, not much. Vo quoted the line that personality precedes politics, and Attebery chimed in by saying that they'd probably have misread Le Guin the way they've misread Tolkien.