The Hours in a Day

I have full schedule of things I would like to do every morning, but I discovered that if I do them all, I am exhausted by noon, which is when I begin actual work. Some mornings it's blog or read Polish, and most mornings it's Polish or Italian as you can see here:   

I attempted to explain to my therapist how important becoming trilingual is to me but seem to fail. I described conversing (reasonably) fluently in another language like moving into another world, into breaking through to another dimension, and like flying. I don't actually know what flying is like, mind you, so it would be more authentic to say it is like sledding down a snowy hill, hoping to make it to the bottom and not hit the fence at the end. 

The work at becoming a polyglot can be very gruelling, though, because I am simply not a language-absorber like the more linguistically-talented members of my family. So if I don't become very fluent--

"... It doesn't matter," said my (bilingual) therapist comfortably. 

Okay, one the one hand, yes. But on the other strony, nie.

50%

Well, I learned this rather late in life, but it is a very good thing to bank/invest 50% of what you make and learn to live on the other 50%. 

I wish I had made this connection when I was, you know, 14. However, it's not too late even for me (though still a work in project thanks to lockdown), and now I try to tell this to the younger generation. Unfortunately, they so far look dubious or--apparently--even laugh. Tact and timing is needed--and also understanding because the young have little dreamy dreams, and it is sometimes hard for them to understand that although life should be a bed of roses (shouldn't it?), it so rarely is. 

Young People are also averse to the idea of working a difficult job for 10 - 12 years, investing as much of their pay as possible and then retiring at (or before) 34 to do a super-fun, potentially ill-paid job--or start a risky dream-business--as their investments merrily pay their way.  

And, having looked at this from their point of view, I get it. If the teenager is female, she doesn't want to work a difficult job ever, but do something interesting and worthy of her precious youth--like get married and have children ASAP, or go to graduate school and become the next Edith Stein, or write short stories and then novels and become celebrated ...  

I'm sympathetic to this because, let's face it, the years between 20 and 30 (or, post Bachelor's degree, 22 - 32) are way more golden and interesting than the years between, e.g. 40 and 50---are certainly seem so when you are 18, and 40 is SO OLD!

If the teenager enjoys worldly stuff, the idea of living on only 50% of his salary (whatever it is, and it is always smaller than you think, thanks to taxes and other deductions) is going to be terrible. I am less sympathetic to this unless the teenager expects to be very poorly paid indeed. 

If so, why? When I was a teenager (so forgive me), I thought that only the dumb girls would leave school at 16 and study hairdressing, or some other trade. Then in my 20s I met a young salon owner, and she was not dumb at all. She was a good businesswoman, having taken management, etc., classes when her fellow beauticians were partying and saved money towards her own shop. These days I am not as interested in how much cache a job obtained by a young person has but how much they are able to save without becoming unhappy. 

Obviously the best thing of all would be for the Young Person (or the Young Person's Future Husband--although depending on the Young Person's Future Husband is a risk rivalling Bitcoin) to train for/be educated for a field that they will truly enjoy and will actually earn them good money--that is, enough for them to invest 50% without living like Uncle Ebeneezer in Kidnapped.

Sadly I grew up with a lot of expectations that everything would be magically handed to me on a plate (why?) and that I would never need to worry about money, really, because I would marry someone with a job as solid as my Dad's and I could just focus on developing my lovely brain and my precious art. It could actually have happened that way, but as history unfolded, it did not. But I think this "save and invest 50% of everything you ever make" is future-proof, and the difficulty is convincing the very young that this  really will pay off.  

Update: By the way, I too still have little dreamy dreams. The biggest difference between the dreamy dreams of my teenage years and of my middle years is that I now know exactly what steps to make them come true. Well, that is, some of them. Some of my little dreamy dreams involve being able to play with my Godling in Poland and my other Godling and her brothers in Canada and seeing my family in person. These, sadly, depend on various governmental fiats.  However, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns and restrictions, police beatings and proposed vaccine passports can be used as a Teaching Moment to the young that you never know what is going to happen, and therefore, save 50%. 

A Walk in the Country

My Papier wellness journal which I love--hence the plug--has a series of frowny and smiley faces in the top right corner of each day's journaling. This is useful for tracking depression or sorting out what really makes you happy. Well, I am happy to report I circled the smiliest smile yesterday for the first time, thanks to a really splendid walk in the countryside. Photos will follow.

It was all splendid--the sun shone, the sky blued, the birds chirped, the bunnies scampered, the cold wind blew but rarely--and one particularly memorable and brilliant moment was when B.A. and I sat on a bench in a suntrap by an old mill and had a snack. B.A. had brought coffee in a thermos, and when we alighted from the bus, we bought from a top patisserie* a slice of pecan tart (B.A.) and a hazelnut pain au chocolat that was the very height of gustatory decadence (I). Drinking the coffee and eating that pain au chocolat in that sun-trap, while looking at the greening fields, the old stone walls and the mill pond, was earthly heaven. 

Afterwards we continued our journey along the John Muir Way, reminiscing about the crops we had seen along that stretch before, and going off-piste along a river and through a flower-strewn forest to look at a grand country house B.A. had been told was now flats. There was a sign discouraging going the way we wanted to go, but B.A. called upon the name of the Scottish Countryside Access Code and ignored it. We saw a walled garden, sheep of many colours, gardeners' cottages and, in the distance, the red sandstone great house itself. The grounds were so well maintained, the sheep so striking, and the signs so frosty that we began to doubt the place had been sold and divvied up into flats. (B.A. looked it up when we got home, however, and it had been.)

This grand house had been our destination, so we turned back down the drive and headed for the town in which we could catch the bus, going through a pretty village whose for-sale houses we could not afford when we checked. We had planned to catch the 17:42, but it was already 17:30 when we turned around. Happily, this meant we had 70 minutes to get to the bus stop for the next one. We strode right along---well, I strode right along. B.A.'s rubber wells, so handy for marching through fields, are not suited to paved roads and so he hirpled along. 

We got off the country bus at a supermarket and bought the week's groceries. Very tuckered out, we returned home. B.A. shucked his boots and heroically made oven chips (fries) to go with our breaded cod, and so we had quite a delicious supper (after 21:00!) before we collapsed into bed.

The mill and world's worst haiku.

Flowers of the forest

Also in pale yellow and mauve

 A glamorous garden

 

 

*Yes, it is a bit odd that a top patisserie is just there in the countryside, but it has a carpark and people come from miles. 

Small Note Marking the Passing of the Duke of Edinburgh

American readers with any familiarity with Britain may now be somewhat startled by the effect the death of the Duke of Edinburgh has had on British media, if not on British life. However, the first important thing to realise is that, just as women are not men, and men are not women, Britain is not the United States. Having been drawn into a brief Twitter spat with a fellow Catholic journalist (American), I have been trying to imagine who, in the USA, has played the role of Prince Philip of Greece in public life. 

Oh golly. It has just hit me that it might have been Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Surely not? American Royalty is just not very royal, for there is usually too much party politics involved, which is why "senior statesmen" like the grubby Edward Kennedy (may he rest in peace) don't fit this bill. Also, the Royal Family is about continuity from one century to another, providing reassuring tradition and stability in a crazy, rapidly changing world.

Anyway, after the Duke's death was announced, the BBC newscasters (at very least) changed into black, and so did I, just in case anyone wanted me to opine onscreen on his passing. (So far, nobody has.) During work prayers, I asked for prayers for the repose of the Duke's soul and the sparking of a "national conversation about the truths of the Resurrection." As a matter of fact, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been very good in this regard, as the Duke of Edinburgh was a committed  or at least a believing Christian.

Meanwhile, the British (or BBC) TV and radio schedules were wiped clean of anything non-Philip. It was non-stop news bulletins about the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh all day, and I shall certainly take a photo of the newspapers at Tesco this morning, for they will certainly have "RIP PRINCE PHILIP"or "DUKE DEAD AT 99" all over them. The Queen has gone into mourning for eight days, and possibly government offices will, too.  The thing is, bewildered American readers, the Royal Family are not (or not just) celebrities but part of the historic fabric of British life.  

A Senior Royal has not died since 2002, so I have never been around to witness/participate in the national mourning from the ground, so this is very interesting. Of course, it is also sad because I first became acquainted, as it were, with the Duke of Edinburgh as a very small child waiting in the school entrance for the school bus to take me home: there were two portraits on the walls for me to look at: the Queen (circa 1953) looking very pretty, and her husband, looking very handsome indeed. At home we had a softcover book of all the Kings and Queens of England, right down to a photo of the Queen's third child, Prince Andrew's christening (1961). Not having much of a sense of time, I was under the impression that the Royal children were all still children, like me. This illusion was, naturally, dispelled by the hoopla around the Prince of Wales' engagement to Lady Diana Spencer. 

Speaking of the late Princess of Wales, one thing nobody ever tells you is that by the night of her sad and sudden death, she was a bit of a national laughing stock. Her numerous affairs and overly-painted eyelashes had made her a tabloid joke by 1996, as I witnessed, having been in England that summer. But then she died, and suddenly she was Saint Diana. Britain cried, and in the small Canadian city where I was then living, flowers were heaped around the statue of Queen Victoria as the most logical place to put them.  The inscription on Queen V's monument was "A model wife and mother," which I thought very funny, having emerged my deep sorrow the day the news broke. 

Ten years ago, people disapproved of the Duke of Edinburgh for his "outdated" remarks and certainly the worst 1 or 2 of the approximate 1 billion jokes he has made over the years have been repeated over and over again and sound rather worse as the years go on. However, yesterday was (and today and tomorrow and the rest of the week will be) rather different, for his antiquity was seen as a rather good thing: married to the Queen for 73 years, a war hero, a naval officer, a last link with the Greatest Generation, a manly man of the old school, a Stoic who just got on with it, et alia. 

I rather like the last identity, for the "celebrity" type of fame implies comfort and luxury, whereas the Royal Family sort implies pulling on rubber boots and going outdoors to be cold and wet in the pursuit of fish, fowl or game, or to ride horses or walk dogs, or to survey gardens and perhaps do some digging, and that's just when on holiday. Normally it's up at 6 to go out and be interested in what strangers have to say all day long, and write and give speeches, and spread comfort and cheer at hospitals. It is not looking fetching in a headscarf with your yoga-toned arms full of orphans, a la Angelina Jolie. 

My small note has become long, so I'll stop and cram some Polish in my head so I can speak reasonably fluently to my tutor in an hour. I'll just note that I will always associated the Duke of Edinburgh with my "practise" Duke of Edinburgh Award hike, and so I will forever associate him with gruelling (thus heroic) adventures in the outdoors, as well as  with the handsome man in uniform smiling down from the school wall.

"Genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity"

That, my friends, is the kind of thing that was drilled into me at Canadian theology school before I (and shortly thereafter my academic career) went South. It's a teaching of the late, great Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J. (1904 - 1984), and it contains an argument that things can really be known and there really is such a thing as THE truth. (By the mid-20th century, people were casting great doubt on this, and of course today there are ideologies presenting outright lies as "my truth.") 

According to Fr. Lonergan, the way to get to the truth is to examine your own mental processes. It's not navel gazing as much as stepping outside of your brain, for a moment, and asking yourself what you are experiencing, and what you think it is, and if you might be wrong about that. It's an incredibly useful exercise if you are prone to catastrophizing--as I currently am. 

Here is a sadly common train of thought for your poor cooped up correspondent:

"OMG, Revenue Canada has sent me another letter, and they think I owe them money, and I don't understand, and I pay taxes in the UK, and I'm going to end up in jail and lose EVERYTHIIIIING!"

or

"OMG, the investment platform doesn't like that I signed up with my maiden name when my married name is on the bank account. I'm going to lose EVERYTHIIIIIIIIING!"

or

"OMG, I didn't remember to cancel my free trial of Amazon Prime in time, and now I have lost almost NINE POUNNNNDS! HATE SELF! HATE SELF!"*

or

"OMG, I only got one article done today. I don't remember when I last got three done in a day. I'm going to be FIRRRRRED!"

This is obviously not unique to me, and I would not be surprised to find out that there is a genetic component, since in her last year at home my grandmother used to lie awake at night worrying. 

"What are you worrying about?" I asked.

"Everything!" said Grandma with a small sad giggle. 

Happily, Benedict Ambrose--who does not come from a "call a therapist" background--told me to call  a therapist. So I got a [Catholic, naturally] therapist, and he is very helpful, for he tells me that tax stuff and financial platforms sort themselves out and also that I probably have PTSD and need a long vacation. 

(Incidentally, there is also an accountant in Canada to whom I sent all the Revenue Canada paperwork who said what every frightened woman wants a man to say, i.e., "Don't worry about this. Leave this to me.")

Sometimes authentic subjectivity means you accept the view of people who really do care about you (either professionally or personally) that your reasoning process is sometimes (or often) quite faulty. And this is a good reason why you should, occasionally, ask proven-to-be-very-trustworthy people questions about yourself. It is just possible that they may know better than you do, since they see you from the other side of your eyeballs, if that makes sense. They are also more familiar with the up-to-date you than with the teenage you, which is when you may have taken onboard a lot of negative remarks (possibly justified but possibly not), which sank into your very marrow.

"Am I too hard on myself or too easy on myself?" I asked Benedict Ambrose, whose eyes bulged with concern at the naiveté of such a question. 

Recently I asked "What really makes me happy?", and I was surprised to hear that B.A. thinks I like being a guest better than being a hostess because when I am a hostess I get very distressed if the smallest thing goes wrong in the kitchen. (HATE SELF! HATE SELF!) 

I first learned the secret of asking the trusted person 14 years ago or so when I asked my dear friend Lily why I was still Single. Lily went away to think about it and then told me that it was because I wanted to marry someone more intelligent than me, and there were not actually a lot of men like that, so I was stuck. 

"Are you mad?" she quavered.

Naturally I was not at all cross, for that struck me as a highly flattering reason to still be Single. (And subsequent research has led me to understand even highly intelligent men are not as supremely interested in marrying highly intelligent women as vice versa.) I deeply intuited that she was quite right and subsequently married a fellow impractical, impecunious PhD-dropout. We lived happily ever after, despite brain tumours, PTSD, a catastrophic flood and other such recent disasters. 

However, you must be careful to limit these heavy questions about your precious self because otherwise you will bore and exasperate your loved ones. Asking someone to drop a truth bomb on you is rather a big deal for the truth bomber, who naturally doesn't want to blow up along with your faulty self-image. 

Here's another bit of advice about men, incidentally. Although men are definitely men, and should not be thought of as bigger, stronger, emotionally dumber women, men of your generation are not necessarily like men of your father's generation. In fact--astonishing thought--in some ways (if only one or two) YOU might be more like your dad than your husband is. When you figure this out and accept it, you may cut your husband more slack for not doing stuff you (however secretly) think is men's business, e.g. business.

"Look at you reading money blogs," said B.A.

"Arr," quoth I. 

*Happy ending to that story: I swiftly cancelled Amazon Prime and got back the almost £9.

UPDATE: Speaking of men, have you checked up on yours recently? I mean the brothers, nephews, grandsons, friends and colleagues. Whereas lockdowns are unpleasant for almost everyone, they seem to be particularly bad for the mental health of boys and men, young and old, and I saw one Facebook post--from a friend--that alerted me to the fact that some feminine sympathy was in order.

Two Days (Mostly) Off the Internet

I stayed off the internet Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, checking only social media on my phone once an evening to see if there were messages from family and work. I read a bit of a Polish textbook and a couple of Agatha Christies I hadn't read in some years. Benedict Ambrose and I went on a long walk in the countryside with friends. We ate hearty Easter foods, like roast lamb and chocolate cake studded with bright candy-coated chocolate eggs. We had gone to Easter Vigil and, to our amusement, our priest sent us emails asking us not to come to Easter morning Mass, too: the demand was outstripping the places on the reservation list.

The great thing about being off the internet was knowing, really knowing, that there wasn't really anything I could do about World News or the Stock Market and that my only real responsibility, besides being nice to be around, was active resting. On Saturday I felt that if I didn't report the profanation by police of a Polish Catholic Good Friday service in London, it would not be sufficiently well-known and I would have betrayed (1) fellow Catholics in Britain (2) Poles in general (3) my employers (4) their readers. When B.A. came into my office/our dining-room to tell me that CNA had just published something, I began to cry. Until that moment I had not been worried about being scooped by CNA or anyone. In fact, I was delighted when Spiked got something out first. But suddenly I felt that I Had FAILED.  In fact, my brain was just being utterly overloaded.   

One of my colleagues had assumed that I would easily understand the Polish priest's address to his congregation, but hearing recordings has always been very hard for me. Thus, I listened to that recording over and over, and over and over the celebrant said, "Quickly leave the church" while his congregation looked and sounded reluctant to do so, and I longed for him to tell them to stay and risk paying the stupid £200 each/each child. (Not a small sum in pricey Britain, I admit.) But the way recordings work for me is that the more often I listen to them, the more often words pop out. (The interesting thing about listening to my Polish tutor is that he uses words that normally I never hear but only see written down. ) The sounds inspire printed words to appear before my mind's eye. But it's a long process and a gazillion times more difficult than reading. What an utter relief when I discovered wPolityce had a transcript and the priests' actual names. 

Anyway, I needed two days of no responsibilities and no internet to remind me of them, and that's what I had, so I'm happy. I'm also happy that I was advised to take a whole 10 days off  and go away with B.A. somewhere soon so as to have a total break. As foreign travel is forbidden, we are going somewhere where I will have no opportunity to stress out over declensions, conjugations and forced train route diversions in Lower Silesia.  Beforehand, I will take the computer to the repair shop. Amusingly, the seaside (Firthside) town where we are going could be likened to a Dorothy repair shop. 

I suppose we all need to go to a repair shop eventually, and the state of our computers may say something about our own inner states. 

I don't recall going anywhere for "March Break" or "Spring Break" as a child or teenager, except for epic hikes through Toronto's Don Valley ravines behind my mother, who sometimes led this expedition with a baby on her back. We scrambled along river banks, climbed over fences, looked up at soaring bridges, thought about what the now-gelded river had done in 1954 during Hurricane Hazel and how Toronto had been revenged upon it. 

Summers were different, for I was sent for a week or two to Girl Guide camp in somewhat wilder wilderness. And some years my family also went to a cottage by a lake for a week or two. This was sometimes in Ontario, and sometimes in the American Midwest, not far from our American relations. The beaches of the Ontario lakes were not particularly sandy, although I seem to recall the American beaches were. I had high expectations of beaches, thanks to comic books, so these beaches were a bit disappointing. (I must write about my new discovery of the Law of Low Expectations.) However, a beach is a beach, so there was swimming and looking at tadpoles. In addition, we were in the country, so sometimes there was getting candy at a country store (besides being frightened by snakes, stung by wasps, and checked for leeches). There was also sitting around for hours reading books and unfamiliar magazines (like Redbook) and playing such board games as Monopoly. There was badminton and writing letters and, in the USA, visiting relatives who might give us interesting presents--and I must say Aunt Jeanette covered herself with glory by giving me a wooly walrus one year. 

In the USA, there were exotic shops with unfamiliar brand names--and foodstuffs only seen on TV, but in both countries there was Junk Cereal. For one week (or were there two?) of the year, only at The Cottage (whichever cottage it was that year), we children were allowed the sugary, processed garbage so important to Saturday morning television advertising: Frosted Flakes, Sugar Corn Pops, Kellogg's Sugar Smacks, Fruit Loops and possibly Cocoa Puffs--although my mother may have drawn the line at Cocoa Puffs. (Or Count Chocula, as I now see Cocoa Puffs was in the Kellogg's Variety Pack.)

Although Junk Cereal was most definitely the sign that chaos and carnival now (temporarily) reigned and we were all on holiday, I was not totally dead to the beauties of nature. The most beautiful cottage in which we ever stayed was on the shores of Georgian Bay and had a wall that was almost entirely glass (I think) looking out at the water and the islands in the middle.* My family shared it with a Polish family--this is where it all gets exciting and amateur shrinks can take notes--consisting of my father's Polish work colleague, his Canadian wife, his very glamorous sister (who wore a BIKINI!!!!), his brother-in-law, and his nephew Paweł (whom we called Pavel, as ł was beyond the Canadians' ability to pronounce). This was the 1970s so goodness knows how and why Paweł and his parents were allowed to come to Canada on holiday. 

Paweł was a year younger than me, and was rather frustrated that I couldn't understand him. He was fond of me all the same, however, and was not only the first but the only boy to take any interest me for the next several years. I was very distressed later to discover that I was unlikely ever to see Paweł again and that he and his family lived in what we would consider grinding poverty (i.e. he lived in a Communist country). 

As a matter of fact, I did see Paweł again forty years later when it occurred to me to find him on Facebook. He had emigrated to Canada, was married and (with some reasonable accommodation for age) looked exactly the same.  

Thanks to the third person to order something from Papier in my name. Now I have enough credits to buy my next-to-next wellness journal, which is awesome, as it is a tad pricey. Fancy paper products are my financial achilles' heel--along with good coffee. If you are in the UK and also have a weakness for good stationary and beautiful notebooks--and would like to toss me some credits--just click here. 

*I rejoice that my brother Nulli's in-laws have a similar cottage, only on the shores of a lake in Quebec. The Canadian Dream.

Resurrexit Sicut Dixit!

 

Alleluja!

I'm going to send Easter greetings to my family, and then I'll be off the internet for a solid 2 days. It's been a hard-working Lent--and thanks to a police action against Catholics in London yesterday--I was working right up until mid-afternoon on Holy Saturday. 

However, we went to a beautiful Easter Vigil--beginning with the New Fire--and it was not disrupted by the state, and now it is time to rejoice, give thanks, and let world events pass us by. 

Happy Easter!

P.S. It's a mazurek.