 "The person who gives food," the Buddha once said to his monks, "gives longevity, pleasant complexion, happiness, stamina, and intelligence." Amen to that! There are few things that make me feel more at home than chaos in the kitchen. Having grown up in a large, boisterous family and hosted countless pot-luck dinners, I love the hubbub, companionship, and delicious meals that somehow miraculously result from the combined efforts of an excessive number of cooks working feverishly in a confined space. It’s one of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic and was overjoyed to experience again on Friday. My friend Kathryn organized the whole thing, and emails flew back and forth for weeks. My last to her said, “Rich is sharpening the knives!” It was only after hitting “send” that it struck me as sounding a bit ominous — the sort of sentence traditionally followed by, “We’re going to the mattresses!” Luckily we were prepping for a very different kind of occasion: a Zoom course in making Pad Thai, the stir-fry noodle dish that’s a beloved staple of Thai cuisine. Kathryn, her husband Pete, Rich, and I were cooking at our house, while six other friends plus a handful of strangers around the country were joining in via Zoom, letting us all chat with each other as well as the chef.  Chef Rachel seemed astonishingly perky for someone giving a class at 4 am Bangkok time. We asked about pandemic conditions there. She told us they were on lockdown at night, and somehow managed to make it sound like she was grateful to us for alleviating the boredom. Although there were only four of us physically present in my kitchen, we managed to make as much fuss and noise as a small army. I kept glancing down, vaguely surprised no dogs or small children had materialized underfoot. The chatter from our online classmates created a nice background buzz as we chopped and stirred and called out, “Where’s the fish sauce?” and “Who has my pandan leaves?”  These pandan leaves were folded, tied in a knot, then floated in the coconut milk to add extra flavor to the dessert: Kluai Buat Chi, Bananas in Coconut Milk. The truly brilliant part of the Cuiline cooking courses is that they mail you all the hard-to find components, such as proper rice noodles, dried shrimp, and palm sugar, which are all pre-measured and shipped from a supplier here in the US. You then go to your local market for the ordinary ingredients, like fresh shrimp and bananas, and follow detailed written instructions with onscreen guidance from a professional chef in whatever country the dish hails from. (See link to Chef Rachel's recipes below.)  Part of the fun was unpacking the exotic ingredients shipped to us in advance of the course. As I decanted the fish sauce into a mixing bowl, I wrinkled my nose at the fermented anchovy smell (the subject of many revolting comparisons such as wet dog, stinky feet, and zombies). Yes, truly a smell only its mother could love, but a dash does add a piquant depth to the dish, as do the crunchy, salty dried shrimp. I carefully refrained from describing to Kathryn and Pete how I’d once seen villagers drying that kind of shrimp in Vietnam. It was shortly after the rainy season, and dry land was in short supply, so each family threw down a tarp on the main street and spread out the catch of the day. You could just about maneuver a small car down the middle, but if you met an oncoming vehicle, somebody would have to swerve over and drive on the shrimp; I watched it happen, with something akin to horror. To this day, I can’t help feeling the crunchy chewiness of dried shrimp owes something to road grit and rubber tires.  I took this photo of a Vietnam village filled with drying shrimp in 1996. Possibly the shrimp-drying regulations are a bit stricter now. This was not, I felt, a memory to share with Kathryn and Pete just before we all sat down to a dish laced with dried shrimp. Nor was it the moment for Rich’s “that time I ate bad shrimp in rural Mexico” story, which I felt sure he was working up to as Pete trimmed the tails off a pile of glistening raw crustaceans. I shot Rich that “don’t you dare” look all married couples perfect over the years. Actually the story does have a happy ending. I’ll pass over the four days of active torment in the tiny rural hotel, during which Rich subsisted on Coca-Cola and crackers, and I reread the same paperback three times. Finally a concerned neighbor gave me the name of the doctor serving this remote, rural district and suggested it was time for Rich to get professional help. When I broached the subject, Rich sat bolt upright in bed, saying, with more animation than he’d shown in days, “NO! Absolutely not. I’m feeling lots better.” In minutes he was dressed, within hours he was walking around, and the next day we resumed our journey. Sometimes, a good scare is the best miracle cure. Even without the bad-shrimp story, we had plenty to talk about. Rich and I had visited Thailand several times, most notably in 1992 when we took a long trek into the hinterlands. We began the trip at a modest Bangkok hotel full of cheap wood paneling and scruffy backpackers sprawled on sofas, then headed north. There we hiked through hill tribe villages, sleeping rough, if at all. One memorable night we laid out our sleeping bags on a bamboo porch, unaware that the village pigs and dogs would spend the next five hours waging an epic battle just underneath, vying for the privilege of bedding down a few inches below our bodies in what was apparently a particularly choice patch of dust.  Rich and I spent time getting to know the local kids on what would become our sleeping porch. Or rather, the porch where we spent the night; there wasn't much sleeping going on thanks to the barking and squealling war cries of the pigs and dogs. Pretty soon our state of scruffiness made the hotel backpackers look as if they were spiffed up for the Ascot opening race. We spent long, hot, days hiking and only marginally cooler evenings in villages where, this being the dry season, water was scarce and little of it could be wasted on washing.  We could never figure out the elaborate rotation system at the village's single water source. Eventually Rich (yes, that's him at left) just leapt in and lathered up. Everyone was perfectly nice about it, realizing that we were mannerless dweebs and probably nuts, so it was best to humor us. Eventually we wound up on a river in a rice barge, where we were invited to make use of the onboard shower.  Our guide, showing us how to use the shower When the propeller fell off our boat, we limped into a tiny, riverside village. As repairs proceeded at a leisurely pace, I treated myself to the luxury of having my hair washed and combed dry at the local salon.  Eventually we returned to Bangkok, entering our lodgings by a back door. “Wow, will you look at how fancy this place is?” I said to Rich, admiring the glossy paneling and roomy sofas. Then my perspective shifted, and I realized with a shock that it was the same downscale hotel we’d stayed in a week earlier. Only now it no longer seemed frumpy but luxurious, with clean sheets, hot showers, and no squabbling livestock within earshot. It’s been some years since I traveled that rough, and I certainly don't miss the discomfort. But I do look forward, one day, to getting back on the road and discovering more of the world. Last Friday was a wonderful reminder that even if I can’t journey far and wide right now, I can join convivial companions in smaller, more domestic adventures. One of my favorite sayings is that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful. Or, as the Thai people put it, อย่ายึดวันเพียงแค่จี้ท้อง meaning “Don’t seize the day, just tickle its belly.” I’m still pondering the profound significance of that saying, which is no doubt wise advice, especially when dealing with village dogs and pigs.  It's amazing how many memories can be triggered while preparing a meal with friends. The Pad Thai turned out to be absolutely delicious, much better than any version I've had in a restaurant. YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY LET'S KEEP IN TOUCH!
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 Most of us are turning to comfort food, but some are expressing their angst with voodoo cooking. Photo: Tina Dawson, Love Is in My Tummy It happened at the Punjab burrito place in a nearby village. I was so delighted to see it had finally reopened that I didn’t stop to consider whether, after a year of homecooked food, I was ready for the onslaught of their trademark Indian-Mexican spices. Yowser! Zowie! Boing! When I could speak again, I groaned to Rich, “Yogurt, must have…” I staggered inside and begged for dairy to cool the pain, and it was only as the cook placed two small containers of plain yogurt in my palms that I realized I had failed to put my face mask back on. If I had stepped out of an airlock into deep space without my helmet, I could hardly have been more horrified. I stammered an apology and fled. But then a curious thing happened. I realized it probably didn’t matter. For 14 months I’d assumed the slightest slip up — scratching my nose with unsanitized hands, leaning in to chat with a neighbor, letting my mask slide downwards — could result in hideous illness and gruesome death. But the stakes have changed. Here in Marin County, CA, 68% of us over the age of 15 are fully vaxxed, and 85% have received the first dose. The odds of surviving a 20-second exchange with a cook in an otherwise deserted restaurant? Pretty damn good. But I still felt terrible about forgetting my mask.  Ringo Starr tweeted this takeoff of the Beatle's Abbey Road album cover, with the caption "Peace and love everybody stay safe be cool." Navigating the shifting social taboos is more complicated than I ever expected. When all this started, I vaguely anticipated that someday there would be a joyful moment when we were declared officially safe and could emerge from isolation into rip-roaring celebration. This week, a friend sent me this ad, which captures the zany thrill of my fantasy. That fantasy seems as far off now as it did a year ago. Even those of us who are lucky enough to be in areas stumbling toward herd immunity find ourselves in as much chaos and confusion as ever. Every friend, neighbor, and health official seems to hold strong yet differing opinions on safety protocols. For instance, around here, most people are still wearing masks outside, even though the CDC says we no longer have to in most circumstances, whether or not we're vaccinated. A few days ago, seeing a masked woman approaching on the sidewalk in front of my house, I put on my mask as a courtesy. She said “Thank you,” in a clipped tone that suggested it was the very least I could do, and why wasn’t I wearing it as I walked out my door? There wasn’t time to pull up the CDC guidelines on my phone as she zipped past, or to show her the NY Times report that said, "There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table."  In a poll last fall, 70% of Californians supported making masks mandatory. Many are still wearing masks outdoors, despite relaxation of the CDC recommendations to do so. Photo: EMS World Misunderstandings abound whenever society shifts gears, leading to endless muddle and mayhem. According to author William Bridges, transitions occur in three phases: ending, the neutral zone, and beginning. “We cannot move forward until we have let go of who we have been, and what has been, in the past,” wrote Danya Ruttenburg in the Washington Post. “Only after we spend some time in the neutral zone does the beginning of our new selves, our new way of being in the world, emerge in earnest. The neutral zone is a time of unknowns. A time when you’ve left one thing and don’t know what will happen next. A time of terror, of possibility, of creativity, of openness, of uncertainty … That’s terrifying. But it can also be so potent, so powerful. Ripe. No doors have been closed. We are not quite at the end of this pandemic. But we’re starting to see what the neutral zone might look like.” It seems to me something called the neutral zone really ought to be a little less terrifying, but OK, I’ll try to embrace it. “Stories are emerging, as the world begins to reopen,” wrote the AP’s Kelli Kennedy, “people secretly dreading each milestone toward normalcy, envisioning instead anxiety-inducing crowds and awkward catch-up conversations. Even small tasks outside the home — a trip to the grocery store, or returning to the office — can feel overwhelming. Psychologists call it re-entry fear, and they're finding it more common as headlines herald the imminent return to post-pandemic life.” In a pandemic that's already exceeded our most paranoid fantasies, how are we supposed to cope with yet another period of uncertainty? One woman suggests “voodoo effect” cooking. “Sometimes, busting through your stress is as simple as reasserting your dominance at the top of the food chain,” wrote Tucker Cummings in Lifehack. “Maybe it’s a little dark, but chopping veggies and butchering chickens can really take the edge off of even the most stressful days. Have a big fight with your boss? Pretend that carrot is his car and go to town on it. By using your ingredients like voodoo dolls, you’ll find that cutting through a couple of pounds of food has really calmed you down.” Yikes! That does sound a little dark. But potentially very therapeutic. Just don’t get carried away when you’re handling sharp knives. If you find yourself enjoying it too much, put down your weapons and step away from the cutting board.  I have to admit, shooting this photo was a lot of fun. Maybe too much fun. Rich seemed a lot less nervous once I put down the cleaver. Give yourself time to transition, advises Miami psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Bregman, who calls fear of emerging from lockdown “cave syndrome.” After the 1918 influenza, he notes, 40% of the population had what we’d now call PTSD. “It took 10 years for the people to get out of this.” Ten years? I’m hoping for a slightly quicker fix than that. And Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society has one. They recently surveyed 6000 people and learned daily gardening improves wellbeing scores by 6.6% and reduces stress levels by 4.2%. Those with health issues reported gardening eased episodes of depression (13%), boosted their energy (12%), and reduced stressed-out feelings (16%). As the Good News Network put it, “It certainly sounds like it’s time to get your Vitamin ‘G’ on.” Since Rich refers to gin by that nickname, I immediately pictured him with a trowel in one hand and a G&T in the other, and yes, he did look pretty zippity-do-dah!  Vitamin G takes many forms. Photo: The Horitcult Whatever therapies you find most helpful, the first step is accepting that emerging from the pandemic — whenever it finally happens — isn’t going to be as easy or quick as we’d hoped. In fact, it’s going to be another tricky, messy, tumultuous time, and there will be days when the only thing that makes sense is hacking up defenseless tomatoes until your kitchen looks like the lair of a serial killer in a particularly noir thriller. But if we’ve learned anything during the pandemic, it’s that we can survive disruption, uncertainty, and extraordinary challenges. Yes, we can. We already have. I recently had coffee with friends Ang and Ryan, who run a location-independent t-shirt business and are now creating stickers, posters, and murals. They're giving away lots for free, partly as a marketing strategy and partly, Ang explained, because they're about things that need to be said — and heard — right now. “Like what?” I asked. Ang handed me this one.  LET'S KEEP IN TOUCH! CLICK HERE to send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family, friends, and anyone you know who might be struggling with safety protocols during these uncertain times. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/voodoo-cooking-yes-another-goofy-coping-strategy  In my view, Rich is already in touch with his inner grumpy. But he feels there is always room for improvement. “It’s a course about what?” I asked incredulously. “Why would you want to learn how to be grumpier?” The subject was a sensitive one, as the atmosphere around our house has been rather wobbly this week. For a start — and I know just how petty and trivial this is — we completed what was supposed to be a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and realized we only had 999. Somehow that last piece of the puzzle had wandered off, hitchhiking, perhaps, to another room on a fold of clothing, or maybe falling onto the floor and getting sucked into the vacuum cleaner bag; if so, it was already en route to the town’s landfill by the time the full horror of the situation dawned on us.  The nightmare scenario dreaded by every puzzle aficionado A few days later we had to cut down two venerable trees, a pair of 50-foot Liquid Ambers that had presided over our small garden for half a century. One was dead, the other on life support, and the time had come to make the painful decision to pull the plug. Of the ensuing chaos, noise, and staggering expense I cannot yet bring myself to speak. Afterwards, Rich spent hours stomping around the chip-strewn garden fingering plants and muttering, “See that? Used to be a gorgeous hydrangea… Oh my God, the Lamb’s Ears… And the succulents! They weren’t anywhere near those trees. How the hell did they get overturned?” As the final insult, our car — moved onto a village street to make room for the tree fellers’ vehicles — stayed fifteen minutes past the legal time limit and received a $40 parking ticket. “And now you want to learn how to get into a worse mood?” I asked Rich. “Boy, this week just keeps getting better and better.” I probably shouldn’t speak disparagingly of grumpiness, which enjoys a long and distinguished history in other countries, most notably Great Britain, which embraces it with almost unseemly fervor. Hugh Grant, for instance, was dubbed “Grumpelstiltskin” by friends of an ex-girlfriend. Winston Churchill was famous for his putdowns, such as the time Nancy Astor snapped at him, "If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee." To which he replied, “If I were married to you, I’d drink it!” As author Kingsley Amis summed it up, “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”  Hugh Grant, aka “Grumpelstiltskin" According to the BBC article “Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered,” we need to remember that “our feelings are adaptive: anger, sadness, and pessimism aren’t divine cruelty or sheer random bad luck — they evolved to serve useful functions and help us thrive.” Pessimism keeps us from being blindsided by unwelcome events. Anger fuels our flight-or-fight response and gives us an edge in problem solving. Venting our emotions can be cathartic. Imagine how D.H. Lawrence felt after unburdening himself of these sentiments: “Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is so watery it's a marvel they can breed.” Hey, don’t sugar-coat it, D.H., give it to ‘em straight!  "In actual life," says actress Dawn French, who played the Vicar of Dibley, "I am a grumpy old bag." Was Rich hoping to learn how to craft rip-roaring diatribes and rapier-like zingers during the grumpiness course? Just what was this seminar about anyway? “My name is Rabih Alameddine and I’m a novelist,” says the presenter in a short video describing the May 19 course. “I’m excited to be able to share my seminar ‘Five Things I've Learned About Being Grumpy.’” Short pause. “Hmmm. ‘Excited’ may be a little too much. I’m mildly interested in telling you about my seminar. It covers a couple of things about being grumpy. Five things is way too much.” Alameddine explains that the true subject of the course is the elasticity of identity and imagination. “Identifying as a man makes me see the world a certain way. However, being male isn’t my only identity. My work has been described as immigrant literature. Yes, I am one. I’m an Arab, I’m American, I’m Lebanese, I’m an atheist. I’m a soccer player. I am gay. So many identities, so little time. These days, grumpy is the identity that I feel defines me more fully... Drawing on years of experience of being an outsider—and on sixty-some years of being an oddball—I will share a little about what I think works about claiming a certain identity or having one assigned to you by society, and what is limiting about it.”  Rabih Alameddine has lectured at M.I.T, the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and other universities. He received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 2002. In the past he divided his time between San Francisco and Beirut; now he divides his time between his bedroom and living room. Photo: Oliver Wasow The upheavals of this past year have taught us all something about our various identities — the ones assigned to us by society, the ones we choose for ourselves, and the ones that are thrust upon us by circumstances beyond our control. Since I began this blog in 2011, I’ve identified as an expat and a travel writer. And yet I’ve spent the last year in one place, adventuring no further than the supermarket or hardware store, writing about how to cope with the tsunami of domestic change brought about by the pandemic. I consider myself a die-hard optimist, yet I’ve had a lot of days when the world situation left me feeling blue, a state of mind the French describe so eloquently as avoir le cafard, literally "having a cockroach." I doubt I’ll ever embrace a consistently grumpy attitude toward life, but I can learn much from those who do — about honesty, realism, and connecting with others more deeply on the common ground of truth. A touch of grumpiness may help me face up squarely to my responsibilities as a concerned citizen dealing with the pandemic, the economy, racial justice, and gender equality — to say nothing of climate change. If we don’t get that one right, soon none of the rest of it will matter so much. But hey, no pressure! The optimist in me says we’ll find ways to make progress. How can I be so positive? Because Rich just walked into the shed that serves as his man cave, stooped down, and picked this up from the floor. And if that isn’t a good omen for better times ahead, I don’t know what is.  Found! Ready to get in touch with your inner curmudgeon? If you decide to take the course ‘Five Things I've Learned About Being Grumpy" offered on May 19, please let me know. I'll be writing a post on the course and Rich's reactions, and it would be fun to include your comments as well. Send them to me at enjoylivingabroad@gmail.com. Click here to STAY CONNECTED! Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family, friends, and anyone you know who might, from time to time, get just a teeny bit grumpy. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/rich-enrolls-in-a-grumpiness-seminar. YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog. This is a promotion-free zone! I only write about things that interest me and that I believe might be useful for you all to know about.  I don't have a photo of the fraudster I met in Naples, Italy; it all happened so fast! But this picture of the notorious Charles Ponzi kind of captures the spirit of the guy, with his "trust me" attitude and the gleam in his eye. There are guys you absolutely know are going to be trouble the minute you spot them, and the first person I met in Naples, Italy was one of them. Rich and I had been in town just ten minutes, at the tail end of a three-month railway journey some years ago, and already I had a case of the heebie-jeebies. For a start, the train station — said to be a transportation hub serving 50 million people a year — was totally deserted. Pushing through fly-specked glass doors to the street, I saw nothing but shuttered shops, overflowing garbage bins, and empty potato chip packets blowing past like tumbleweed. “What do you figure?” I said. “A nuclear holocaust while we were on the train? We’re the only people left alive on the planet?” “There’s somebody.” Up ahead three teenage boys loitered by the entrance to a dark pedestrian tunnel, the kind moviegoers instantly recognize as shorthand for “mugging about to happen.” “Shall we just throw them our wallets and beat ourselves up to save everybody some time?” I asked.  The local dogs love Naples' frequent, prolonged garbage strikes, which they view as exciting snack opportunities. A few ordinary-looking adults were heading into the tunnel, so we followed. The cavernous walls were decorated with eye-popping graffiti. The ground was littered with broken glass, rotting food, fragments of furniture, and blobs of what appeared to be radioactive waste. “Whatever you do, don’t trip and fall in here,” I advised. We emerged into a busy intersection thronged with Vespas and hurrying locals whose appearance ranged from scruffy to scurrilous. A suave voice behind me said, in English, “Where are you trying to get to?” I turned to find a handsome, silver-haired stranger, impeccably dressed and oozing charm. His smile said, “Trust me!” so irresistibly I naturally assumed he was one of the city’s notorious scam artists. As I drew breath to tell him to get lost, Rich was already showing him the address of our lodgings. I shot my husband a have-you-lost-your-mind look, but he was too deep in consultation with our new best friend to notice. As the stranger explained we’d gotten off the train too soon and showed us the stop we needed, I realized that whatever his regular line of work (fleecing old ladies, corrupting politicians, setting up Ponzi schemes) that day this gentleman was a Good Samaritan. (And before I go any further, I just want to add that after that rough beginning, we fell in love with Naples' high-octane energy and non-conformist spirit. As the pictures below show, it's never dull.) As we thanked our Good Samaritan, I reflected, not for the first time, on the kindness of strangers. People around the world have given us directions, suggested great coffee houses, advised us about neighborhoods to avoid, taken us to their hairdressers, and pointed us towards the most memorable bars in the vicinity. Maybe they’re partly motivated by civic pride or amused pity for a couple of hapless know-nothings, but mostly I think people just like being helpful. And now science is demonstrating that engaging in even brief moments of kindness can improve the health and wellbeing of both parties. This came as a huge surprise to one man assigned to study the subject: New Jersey intensive care physician Dr. Stephen Trzeciak, a hard-science research nerd who placed no faith in all this touchy-feely stuff. Then his new boss, Dr. Anthony Mazzarelli, asked him to find a cure for the rampant burnout among the medical staff and explore whether treating patients with both medicine and compassion could enhance the health of patients and doctors. At this point in the story, I always imagine Trzeciak rolling his eyes; in the book they subsequently wrote together, Compassionomics, he recalls he “thought Mazzarelli was crazy. Literally crazy.”  56% of physicians are convinced there's no time for compassion when you're running around saving lives. Photo of a CA hospital during a Covid-19 outbreak: Washington Post Crazy or not, Mazzarelli was his boss, so Trzeciak got to work studying the data in 1000 abstracts and 250 research studies. He assumed they’d show that compassion might be nice, or even a moral imperative, but couldn’t possibly make any medical difference. To his astonishment, he was dead wrong. Science demonstrated, over and over, that when health care providers act with ordinary human kindness not only do patient outcomes improve, but the medical professionals’ mental health gets a boost and their burnout rate is considerably less. “Expressing empathy produces physiological effects that calm us in the moment and strengthen our long-term sustainability,” reports Harvard Business Review, citing studies on such topics as leadership and burnout. “It evokes responses in our body that arouse the (good) parasympathetic nervous system, and it reverses the effects of the stress response brought on by the (bad) sympathetic nervous system. So not only do others benefit from our empathy, but we benefit, too.”  Getting by with a little help from our friends benefits both of us. Photo: Getty Among the many examples Trzeciak and Mazzarelli cite is a Johns Hopkins study of 1700 HIV patients. It turns out those who believed their doctor knew them as a person were 33% more likely to adhere properly to therapy and — more startlingly — had 20% higher odds of having no detectible virus in their blood. Despite ample proof of its benefits, 56% of physicians say they don’t have time for compassion. So Johns Hopkins researchers did a trial with cancer patients that showed outcomes improved significantly when doctors spoke from this simple script: At the start: “I know this is a tough experience to go through. And I want you to know that I’m here with you. Some of the things I say to you today may be difficult to understand, so I want you to feel comfortable in stopping me if something I say is confusing or doesn’t make sense. We are here together, and we will go through this together.” At the end: “I know this is a tough time for you and I want to emphasize again that we are in this together. I will be with you each step along the way.” Time required: 40 seconds Thanks to the pandemic, practically every medical professional on the planet is experiencing unprecedented levels of stress. In a recent US study “responses collected from the 1,119 healthcare workers surveyed indicated they're stressed out and stretched too thin: 93% were experiencing stress, 86% reported experiencing anxiety, 77% reported frustration, 76% reported exhaustion and burnout, and 75% said they were overwhelmed.” Of course, medical professionals aren’t the only ones suffering these days. Who among us isn’t stressed, anxious, frustrated, exhausted, and burned out? Is anybody feeling serene, sleeping soundly every night, and finding it easy to stay focused on … what was I saying? Maybe it’s time to start looking at every interaction — whether it’s with those closest to us, our doctor, or someone we’ve just met on the street — as an opportunity to be a Good Samaritan. Most of us can spare 40 seconds to share a few friendly words, especially with those who seem particularly lost, frazzled, or freaked out. “There’s no such thing as a small act of kindness,” says Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams. “Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.” Every time we toss a little compassion out into the world, we contribute to the ripples that will spread far and wide; eventually, if we're lucky, they'll make their way back to us.  Hey, we're just trying to be Good Samaritans, not Perfect Samaritans. Photo: Etsy YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY Click here to STAY CONNECTED! Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family, friends, medical professionals, and fellow travelers. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/what-i-learned-from-a-good-samaritan-scam-artist  Next time you're complaining your airplane seat doesn't have enough legroom, remember it could always be worse. Cargo handler Gary Hatch demonstrates how he found Brian Robson and his suitcase inside a crate at LA airport after what some called "a freight worse than death." “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says Brian Robson — in what, as you’ll soon see, is a staggering understatement. At the age of 19, overcome with homesickness yet unable to clear his debts and pay his airfare home, he convinced a couple of pals to nail him into a wooden crate and send him home as airfreight from Melbourne, Australia to Cardiff, Wales. Robson was a skinny kid and figured he and his suitcase could fit into a box 3’ by 3’ by 2’ for the 36-hour journey. He drilled a few air holes and packed provisions: one pint of water, five cookies, a pillow, a hammer, a flashlight, and a bottle to pee in. After marking the crate “Fragile” and “This Side Up,” his pals hammered down the lid and wished him luck.  At 19, Brian Robson thought, "What could possibly go wrong?" Naturally, things began to go wrong almost immediately. Offloaded by careless freight handlers at the Sidney airport, Robson spent 22 hours upside down, sliding in and out of consciousness. “I spent most of my time, if I be truthful, in trying to control myself, i.e. calm myself down, because I didn’t know if I was dreaming it,” he recalls. “Was it a nightmare? Was I really there? And in between all that, of course, I couldn’t breathe properly half the time. I couldn’t move... Most of the water had spilled out.” He was then loaded onto the unheated cargo hold of a Pan Am flight that had been diverted to Los Angeles. There, five days after leaving Melbourne, he found himself on solid ground and shone his flashlight through the air holes, alerting ground staff to his presence. There was a bit of an uproar involving the police, CIA, FBI, airport officials, and a judge. But it never got ugly. “Nobody was mad at me,” he recalls. “They just thought, ‘Oh, it’s this silly kid getting himself into trouble.’” Eventually Pan Am flew him home to Wales, first class.  Not the most comfortable way to travel There are many astonishing aspects of “The Crate Escape” as it was dubbed. For a start, as near as I can discover, no alcohol was involved. (What are the odds?) Also, nobody seems to have considered for one instant that this kid could be a terrorist and should be detained in Guantanamo. Why? Because this was 1965, decades before 9/11 put us into a constant state of hypervigilance. And this wasn’t the first time such a stunt had been tried. The year before, an athlete named Reg Spiers caused a sensation when he successfully airmailed himself home from England to Australia after his wallet was stolen. What made him try it? Having once worked in a cargo area handling live animals shipped in crates, he told reporters, “I thought, “If they can do it, I can do it.”  Reg Spiers' 63-hour journey was more comfortable than Robson's in a larger, custom-built crate fitted with straps. Photo montage: Daily Mail My point (and I do have one) is that we tend to judge the looniness of ideas by their social context. Many regrettable incidents begin with the thought, “If they can do it, I can, too.” Social context can also lead us astray in the other direction, causing us to scoff at ideas that should be no-brainers. Take seatbelts, for instance. Today they’re routinely worn by 86% of Americans and are credited with saving a million lives worldwide. But back in the 1960s they were new and weird and (does this sound familiar?) viewed as an infringement of personal freedom. Opponents — who often cut the seatbelts out of cars they bought — insisted that crashes were safer when you didn’t have to unclip a restraint to get out. While it’s true those who haven’t buckled up are 30 times more likely to exit the vehicle during a crash, their departure usually involves being flung headlong through glass onto pavement, with exceedingly unfortunate results. Despite all the evidence of lives saved, when a Michigan lawmaker introduced a mandatory seatbelt law in the 1980s he got hate mail comparing him to Hitler. A fellow politician called the bill “a pretty good lesson in mass hysteria created by a corporate-controlled media” adding that if they didn’t squash this madness, they’d soon be outlawing smoking. Gadzooks!  While doctors were busy making cigarette commercials, nurses were lighting up in the break rooms and providing patients with bedside ashtrays. In the hospital where Rich worked, smoking was permitted until 1975. As you may have noticed, cigarettes haven’t been outlawed, but they are now banished from many places where they were common when I was a kid. Rich had teachers who smoked during class. I recall sitting in the loge section at the back of movie theaters so my parents could light up during the show. Sixteen years ago, when Rich and I moved to Spain, some of our favorite bars and cafes were so smokey we could hardly see across the room. That was normal then. It isn’t now. But then, the concept of “normal” has always been a moving target. Our ancestors ran around naked eating raw meat from animals they’d killed in the wild. (I’m talking all the way back, not anybody I’ve known personally from my family tree.) No doubt there were Stone Agers who strenuously objected to the idea of clothing as an infringement on their personal freedom and thought the whole idea of cooking meat was just a bunch of newfangled hooey. And cover your feet? Are you nuts?  This shoe design was very avant garde 5500 years ago. No doubt some neighbors mocked Ötzi the Iceman (artist's rendering at left) whose mummy was found in this style of fetching footwear made from deerskin and straw with bear hide soles. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. One of the side benefits of the pandemic (yes there are some!) is that we humans have taken a hard look at this whole “cover your feet” concept and decided to jettison 5000 years of increasingly stiff, uncomfortable dress shoes in favor of sneakers, Uggs, Crocs, and slippers. According to people who track such things, modern footwear is being redesigned as we speak to have wider, thicker heels, more bouncy padding on the insoles, and greater overall stability. Now that’s a new normal I can live with! As we stride into the future in our comfy new shoes, we’ll find it’s changed considerably since Covid-19 began ruling the earth. But some things remain eternal. People will resist any change until it becomes embedded in our way of life, and then they’ll resist changing that. Politicians will blame the media for everything. And kids will continue to do incredible stupid things. If they’re lucky, they'll survive to be scolded and sent home, serving as a welcome reminder that sometimes the world can be kinder than we ever imagined.  "The Americans, the FBI, the CIA, and everything else, they were brilliant," Robson recalls. "I mean, I fell in love with America, because I’ve never been treated so well. Everybody there really looked after me. And they just thought, 'Oh, it’s this silly kid getting himself into trouble.'” YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY Click here to STAY CONNECTED!
Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family, friends, and fellow travelers. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/mail-yourself-overseas-in-a-crate-is-this-the-new-normal  Gloria Gaynor's 1979 hit "I Will Survive" has become one of the anthems of our times. Do you have a pandemic playlist? Me neither. But then, I’m the least musical person on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, the folks giving out vaccines at San Francisco’s vast Moscone Center decided to energize the staff and patients by playing songs that have now become famous around here for reducing people to tears of joy. “Getting vaxxed at moscone and they’re literally playing Here Comes the Sun on the PA and I’m shaking,” SF Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho tweeted on March 17. “I’m gonna f—ing cry.” The Moscone vaccinators soon learned that what people want to hear as they get the lifesaving jab is often the kind of cheerful, sentimental oldies they used to scoff at when their parents danced to them at weddings: “Walking on Sunshine,” “I Will Survive,” “O-o-h Child (Things Are Gonna Get Easier)." Now San Franciscans are going around comparing notes about what was on the loudspeaker when they got theirs and growing misty-eyed when “their song” comes on the radio. As for me, I was in a suburban Rite Aid (the pharmacy originally known as Thrif D Discount Center) and I can’t quite recall whether the loudspeaker was saying, “Cleanup on aisle five,” or “Attention shoppers: we’re having a special today on hemorrhoid cream.” Obviously I’ll never again hear either phrase without welling up.  Will a Yoda t-shirt help you feel the Force of your vaccine? Photo via Etsy.com If you’re not yet vaxxed and would rather ensure there’s a more fitting soundtrack to your big moment, bring along the Moscone playlist (also available on Spotify). 1. “Here Comes the Sun,” The Beatles 2. “Happy,” Pharrell Williams 3. “Lovely Day,” Bill Withers 4. “Higher Love,” Steve Winwood 5. “Lean on Me,” Sandro Cavazzo 6. “Best Day of My Life,” American Authors 7. “ABC,” Jackson 5 8. “Walking on Sunshine,” Katrina and the Waves 9. “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” Justin Timberlake 10. “I Will Survive,” Gloria Gaynor 11. “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” Bobby McFerrin 12. “Sidewalk Talk,” Madonna and Jellybean 13. “Sleepyhead,” Passion Pit 14. “Alright,” Supergrass 15. “State of Grace,” Taylor Swift 16. “Jump in the Line,” Harry Belafonte 17. “Sir Duke,” Stevie Wonder 18. “O-o-h Child,” The Five Stairsteps With or without the right soundtrack, there are moments from this year that are forever fixed in our minds. The first time we went out to the market dressed for the apocalypse. Buying our first mask. Learning Zoom. Realizing with horror that we’d touched our face without washing our hands. Finding out someone we know was hospitalized with Covid-19. Figuring out how to put the happy back into the holidays, in spite of everything. And throughout it all, spending a ridiculous amount of time watching Netflix and ordering on Amazon. Like most people, I try to use Amazon responsibly, only buying things I can’t get locally and clicking the button that says my items will be combined and delivered in fewer packages (yet often, inexplicably, aren’t). But it’s pretty clear that for some, the online retail giant is all about entertainment and indulging in some seriously questionable fantasies, as journalists Shanon Maglente and Katie Bourque reported in “40 Weirdest Products on Amazon That People Actually Love.” How did I not know about these when I was making out my holiday gift list? Which of my friends and relatives couldn’t use a nice chicken leash, some pickle-flavored lip balm, or a potato with their very own photo on it? Now that I’m vaccinated, I’m making a serious effort to cut down on my online shopping in hopes of reducing my wrap rage and packaging guilt. Wrap rage is the the fury and frustration we feel during our efforts to extract a simple object — a lightbulb, a computer cord, a set of measuring spoons — from a plastic clamshell clearly designed to protect the contents from a fall off a 20-story building during a nuclear blast. Every year 6000 Americans wind up in emergency rooms with cuts, abrasions, and wrist injuries incurred while attempting to penetrate protective casing. Of course, excessive plastic packaging is even more damaging to the environment, polluting our land and water, eventually finding its way into the food chain and our stomachs. On top of all that, it’s just plain silly, as writer Phil Forbes demonstrates in “13 Bad Packaging Examples That’ll Make You Cry for the Environment.” We can’t blame the pandemic for superfluous packaging, which has existed ever since the days when you ordered via rotary phone and waited weeks for stuff to arrive by mail. And while I try to be responsible, I do believe there are times when a little retail therapy is as essential to our psychological survival as music, chocolate, or wine. And now my shortlist of necessary indulgences has a surprising new addition: poetry. This week, for the first time in more than a year, Rich and I had another couple over for dinner, and upon arrival Tobey Hiller, a distinguished poet herself, gave me a copy of Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins. I confess I’d never heard of Billy Collins, who turns out to be a Poet Laureate of America and, according to the NY Times, “the most popular poet in America.” I opened the slim volume and it was love at first stanza. As Daily Beast puts it, “Whereas some poetry ignores its reader and seals itself in a shell of its own construction, Collins engages with his audience. One of the ways he welcomes the reader with open arms is through humor. He’s pretty much always funny; it is part of his aesthetic, his poetic DNA.” “There’s something very authentic about humor, when you think about it,” Collins once said. “Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can’t pretend to be funny.”  America's favorite poet, Billy Collins, is a genuinely funny guy. Photo via Daily Beast Here’s the first Billy Collins poem I read. Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks every time they leave the house. They must switch him on on their way out. The neighbors' dog will not stop barking. I close all the windows in the house and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast but I can still hear him muffled under the music, barking, barking, barking, and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra, his head raised confidently as if Beethoven had included a part for barking dog. When the record finally ends he is still barking, sitting there in the oboe section barking, his eyes fixed on the conductor who is entreating him with his baton while the other musicians listen in respectful silence to the famous barking dog solo, that endless coda that first established Beethoven as an innovative genius. That’s an image I’ll treasure forever. And I can only hope that somewhere in the Moscone Center vaccination playlist there is room for that Beethoven symphony with the famous barking dog solo, and that an entire generation of vaccinated San Franciscans will get teary-eyed every time the neighbor’s dog begins to make a ruckus.  What songs have gotten you through the pandemic? What other indulgences have kept you going? Let me know in the comments section below. YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY Click here to STAY CONNECTED!
Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family, friends, and your local vaccination center. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/barking-dog-solo-and-other-survival-songs-we-need-right-now  “You won’t believe what we did last night,” a friend told me Sunday. “We went out to a movie! Every other row was blocked off, and there was hardly anybody in the theater. A few rows in front of us there was a woman with a collie dog. The movie was a classic comedy, and I swear during the funny scenes I saw that dog chuckling right along with the woman, and at the big moments he howled with laughter. After the show, I went up to the woman and said, “I just have to tell you that your dog is amazing. He really seemed to love the film.” And she replied, “Yes, it is amazing, because he hated the book.” OK, some parts of that story aren’t strictly true, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out which ones. (Yes, you guessed it. The dog never even read the book. Although he did skim a couple of online movie reviews before he went.)  A dog-sitter took this photo of our late beloved dog, Eskimo Pie, catching up on her reading. Now, I haven’t been to a movie theater in … wait, what year is this? But I can easily imagine the dizzying effect of the experience, looking around the familiar place and being bombarded with conflicting messages: Hey, this is fun! It’s a disease vector! Run for your life! Let’s get popcorn! That got me thinking about the way perception shapes our reality. We say “seeing is believing” and devote a huge amount of our brain capacity — 30% of its size, two thirds of its processing function — to the visual cortex. But can our eyes be trusted? Not so much. “Sight is an illusion,” says author Isaac Lidsky, who learned this the hard way when he went blind at 25. “Numerous studies demonstrate this. If you are asked to estimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer will be different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. A hill appears steeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you're wearing a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction. What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around you.” Our emotions, Lidsky says, are no more reliable. In particular, fear makes us interpret input that’s ambiguous or uncertain (a rustling in the bushes, say) as a clear and present danger (a sabre-tooth tiger!) when in fact it may be harmless (a light breeze). “Your fears distort your reality,” he observes. “Psychologists have a great term for it: awfulizing.” Over the past year, awfulizing became the norm — and to be honest, it’s proven to be a very useful survival tool. Was there ever a better time than 2020 to assume the worst? Look at New Zealand; the moment they heard about the coronavirus, they reacted as if it were a sabre-tooth-level threat, and in the entire country of five million people only 26 were lost to Covid-19. Most countries, including mine, weren’t so wise or fortunate. Now, we’re pinning our hopes on the vaccines creating a future in which the Earth is no longer ruled by the virus. If/when that happens, we’ll have to stop viewing awfulizing as the default setting and overhaul our perceptions of what constitutes sensible living. In the meantime, we need to figure out how to ease into unfamiliar social territory and update our rusty social skills.  In the Saturday Night Live skit Post-Covid Dating, twenty-somethings in a bar awkwardly attempt to connect. After a series of gaffes and misunderstandings, he asks, “Would you care to dance?” “I thought you’d never ask,” she says, leaping up to gyrate on her own, the way to do when you’re home by yourself and your favorite song comes on. “No, I meant with me!” he says.  Kate McKinnon and Nick Jonas demonstrate just how rusty our social skills have become in the SNL skit "Post-Covid Dating." There are going to be moments like that for all of us. Vaccinated friends, who are starting to invite people over for the first time, report disconcerting results. “I’m so used to Zoom that after forty minutes, I was ready to wrap things up. They stayed on another three hours!” And let’s face it, there are a few features of this era it’ll be hard to give up. “I sleep in pajamas,” tweeted @HenpeckedHal, “just because it’s nice to wake up already dressed for work.” As @danadonly noted, “2020 was a kinda bad year for me but a really good year for my dog who did not have to be alone for a single second.”  Everyone has had to make adjustments. Early in the pandemic, Miles, a mixed-breed rescue dog, took an instant dislike to masks, barking wildly whenever he saw one. (As we all know, he is not alone in this. Possibly he was watching too much Fox News.) “I think it was hard to not be able to observe facial expressions, for him, on people that we came across,” his human, Alex Savas, told the Washington Post. “It was like, ‘What is this new creature I’m looking at here?’” Savas invited pals to come over wearing masks, acting friendly, and bearing slices of turkey for Miles. “He was very physically anxious,” Savas recalls, “making his anxious, whiny noises, very skeptical about going up close to get the treat.” Eventually desire won. “Cold cuts will take you a long way in any situation.” Today, Miles navigates a fully masked world with serenity, keeping an eye out for any bits of turkey that might come his way. Right now, an entire generation of pandemic puppies is about to have their lives turned upside down. No more 24/7 companionship! Two walks a day instead of eight! Hours without treats! How’s a puppy supposed to get through the day? Tearing open your couch and eating all your shoes will help pass the time, but what to do after that? Veterinarians have plenty of practical advice including establishing routines, crate training, food puzzles, smooth jazz, NPR, and white noise machines. You might find it easier — and more cost-effective — to persuade your boss to let you work from home. Not possible? You can always try workshops such as Communicate with your Animal Telepathically or Animal Energy Healing. Do some attention-starved pets simply need the psychological pick-me-up of a makeover? A flamboyant hairdo (known in the trade as “creative grooming”) guarantees everyone will make a tremendous fuss over your dog. The groomers all swear the dyes are perfectly safe and the animals love being fawned over. Personally, I suspect the dogs are just biding their time until they can find a nice big mud puddle to jump into. Figuring out how to navigate a changing landscape is difficult at the best of times (which these are not). “I consider social skills a bit like learning a language,” said essayist and autistic savant Daniel Tammet. “I’ve been practicing it for so long over so many years I’ve almost lost my accent.” This new phase of the pandemic will require all of us, including our dogs, to relearn the language of social interaction, let go of our habit of awfulizing, and embrace whatever comes next. Good luck! Let me know how it goes for you (and your pets). Click here to STAY CONNECTED! Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family and friends. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/just-how-rusty-are-our-social-skills  This is not an actual photo of what my sister's kids could do to a room when they were little, but it kind of captures the spirit. Photo by Cultura RM Exclusive/Henglein and Steets / Getty Images “I read somewhere that your house is a reflection of your soul,” my sister Kate once told me when her sons were little. She looked around at the chaos, rolled her eyes, then laughed. “God, I hope that’s not true.” I could see what she meant; it’s natural to believe our inner lives should be orderly and tranquil, with less clutter and fewer scars. But I thought there was a lot to be said for a spiritual path crowded with books and toys and casually scattered jackets, ringing with the laughter of young boys chasing each other up the stairs. There seemed to me to be plenty of zen in the midst of all that zing. Whether we view them as our souls made visible or simply an expression of our tastes and times, our homes have plenty to say about us. Right now I’m trying to make sure mine isn’t shouting, “A couple of crazies spent too much time here in isolation!” My second inoculation takes complete effect this week, changing the number of people I can safely socialize with from one (Rich) to 52 million fully vaccinated Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide. My head is spinning at the thought that soon family and friends will be arriving to celebrate this first step towards a post-pandemic life. Is my house ready? Am I?  An important message for our times Some changes are already in the works, like removing the jigsaw puzzle from the dining room table. But what about our decontamination zone? Should all our masks and hand sanitizers be discreetly whisked out of sight — or offered to guests? Do I leave the “Don’t Panic!” towel draped over the railing at the top of the stairs? Rich and I find it amusing, and frankly, a bracing reminder on darker days, but will it strike our pals as peculiar? And what about the TV area, where we’ve dragged our chairs into positions that are no longer symmetrical but offer better angles for viewing the screen? Should we shove everything back into apple pie order? Or do we let people see how we really live? And then there are the DIY projects. Do we bore our visitors with a tour? I’m aware that A) gutters are just gutters, even if Rich did put them up himself, and B) after the first glass of wine, we probably don’t want guests climbing a ladder to inspect the solar panels he installed on the shed roof to power our Bad Boy generator. Will guests feel the Apocalypse Chow Food Locker signals runaway paranoia? Do we even show them our succulent garden, which to be honest, looks like a collection of alien life forms just waiting until we fall asleep to take over our bodies and finish conquering the planet? Clearly the road from solitude to socializing is going to have its bumps and potholes. Whether you're facing this transition now or later in the year, and no matter how long you wished and waited for it, somehow it's still shocking. It makes you realize just how much the pandemic changed our relationship to the place we call "home" and our comfort level with fellow humans. “We’re all like feral weirdos now,” comments Kate Wagner, the New Republic’s architecture critic, who says of the past year, “It reminds me of when I was in high school. I didn’t have anything in common with my peers. I would go to school, not talk to anyone and come home and read or write terrible science fiction. I lived a totally interior life. Now I’ve reverted. It’s been so productive. What if this is just better for me, to live a life of isolation?”  Kate Wagner is the architecture critic for The New Republic and creator of the McMansion Hell blog, which chronicles housing excesses. Photo courtesy of Kate Wagner “In our home, we have a ritual of expressing gratitude every day, in prayer or other ways, to little things,” says sociologist Matthew Desmond, who before the pandemic lived in a mobile home park to chronicle the violence of eviction — a subject that became acutely relevant when the pandemic put 40 million people at risk of losing their homes. “We have windows that keep the cold out. Everyone has their own bed. Our kids have separate rooms. Light. When the plumbing stops working, we can get it fixed. Our mail comes; there is hot water. When I lived in the mobile home park, I met families that didn’t have heat. They would crouch around a space heater and cover themselves with a blanket to get warm. Families are really at risk. So many of us are so tired of looking at the same walls, but there is a chunk of Americans that’s just praying they get to hang onto those walls.” Which brings up an interesting question of how much of our contentment is dependent upon the comparisons we make — between ourselves and others, and between current reality and our romanticized images of the past and future. Economist Nat Ware proposed a thought experiment about this in his TED Talk Why We’re Unhappy — the Expectation Gap. “Imagine that you’re competing in the Olympic Games.… Would you prefer to come second [or] third?” Naturally most of the audience chose second place. He then showed photos of disgruntled silver medalists and radiant winners brandishing the bronze. “It’s expectations that explain why a bronze medalist can be happier than a silver medalist. Because the silver medalist imagines coming first, the bronze medalist imagines coming fourth… At a very basic simple level, we’re unhappy when our expectations of reality exceed our experiences of reality.” The inevitable comparisons we make between the way we live now and what we once expected of 2020/2021 are as frustrating as measuring ourselves against the gold medalists. Whenever I’m tempted to go down that road, I remember visiting this basement hideout where some hardy souls rode out long stretches of the siege of Sarajevo (April 1992 to February 1996) with only that little stove for heat and no Internet or TV.  I'll bet your home is looking a little better right now, isn't it? I know mine is. Like every other aspect of the pandemic, being isolated in our homes has tested our stamina and ingenuity. One upside of restricted socializing has been the freedom to reconfigure our spaces without worrying what others might think. It seems lots of us are pulling stuff out of our storage cupboards, digging out paint cans, and finding ways to make our spaces more colorful, more cozy — more us. I certainly can’t claim to have done anything close to those spectacular DIY projects. (Did I mention Rich installed new gutters?) But their creativity is heartening, and possibly a reflection of our times. As Orson Wells’ character said in The Third Man, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” We don’t get to choose the era we live in, but we do decide what to make of it. Living in chaotic times has upended everything, including our dwellings and who we invite into them. But if Kate’s quote is true, it may have also brought depth and breadth and vigor to our souls. And isn’t nurturing our souls what life is all about?  Here's Rich's secret for getting through pandemic rough spots. How's your home weathering the pandemic? Have you done any DIY projects or made any other changes to it? Let me know in the comments below. YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY Click here to STAY CONNECTED! Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family and friends. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/ready-to-leap-from-solitude-to-socializing  In the memory course, Rich learned to attach numerical significance to symbolic objects, such as these two beauties he met in Chania, Crete, in 2019. “So he says, ‘Try to remember these twenty words, in order, with their numbers.” Rich was describing Jim Kwik’s online course Improve Your Memory Now from the Omega Institute. “He said he could teach us to recall them so well that if he said ‘eleven’ we’d immediately respond ‘skis.’” “How’d you do?” I asked. “At that point, I could barely remember three.” “And now?” “One, the sun. Two, socks. Three, traffic light. Four, searchlight. Five, star. Six, soda. Seven, rainbow. Eight, octopus. Nine, cat. Ten, toes. Eleven, skis…” He rattled off all twenty, but I lost the thread because I was completely gobsmacked. This was last Sunday, weeks after he’d finished the course. How did he do that? “What we think of as memory loss is really mostly distraction,” he said. “We spend 45% of our time mind-wandering: thinking about the past or imagining the future. In those moments we aren’t really paying attention to others or to the mental notes we’re making about picking up milk at the market. It’s even worse when we are multi-tasking — something Kwik says is a myth. We’re not actually doing many things simultaneously, we’re shifting rapidly back and forth, doing one thing after another in short bursts, undermining the quality of our work and accelerating the distraction.”  The fact the real culprit is distraction was excellent news. Why? Because we can do something about it. “Kwik says your memory is actually better than you think it is,” Rich told me. “We get into trouble because we keep trying to recall words when our minds are designed to capture images. He showed us how to attach symbols to things we want to remember: One, the sun; there’s only one. Two, socks come in pairs. Three, the traffic light, which has three colors. Four, the searchlight, found on cop cars with four wheels. Five, a star. Six, soda in a six-pack. And so on. You carry those numbers in your mind and use them to construct images that are much easier to recall than words.” Keep forgetting your friend’s address is 25 Eighty-eighth Street? Think of a pair of socks draped over a star followed by a pair of octopuses. “You can create your own images,” Rich said. “Say you’re food shopping and need two avocados, a basket of blueberries, and some salmon. Kwik suggested visualizing yourself with two avocados on top of your head, blueberries coming out of your nose, and a salmon wrapped around your throat.” My mind’s eye instantly saw Rich standing in the middle of the produce aisle, a whole salmon draped jauntily around his shoulders, balancing avocados on his head. Would he, I wondered, have time to shove blueberries up his nose before store security showed up to escort us off the property?  Incredibly, Rich refused go down to our local supermarket and let me photograph him wearing any of these food items to illustrate the concept I'm discussing here. “Want to hear how I remember pretzels?” Rich asked. “Nope.” How powerful is symbolic recollection? In the Netflix documentary The Mind, Explained, I watched Yanjaa Wintersoul memorize 500 three-digit numbers in ten minutes. How? She converted the digits to sounds then images using her own personal code. “So 5 is an S, 3 is an A, and 9 is a G, just because of the shapes. So basically it’s like reading something instead of looking at all these numbers.” The next number, 166, converts to TBB. Wintersoul then turned SAG TBB into a vivid, offbeat image: “This saggy, half-naked person is covered in, like, tabouli.” Her imagination placed 500 such images in order throughout a familiar location — what some call a memory palace — and then she mentally strolled from room to room identifying the numbers.  Yanjaa Wintersoul is an international grand master of memory. (Wondering about the name? She's Mongolian-Swedish.) For those of us who can barely remember if we're out of avocados, Wintersoul's feat is dazzling. But the real challenge comes in trying to recall life events. The process is piecemeal and slippery at best, sometimes leading to false memories, unreliable eyewitness accounts, and stories that conflate separate memories into one seamless tale. The Netflix documentary asks: Why would Mother Nature give us such faulty recording equipment? It turns out the survival value of recollection doesn’t lie in accurately preserving the past but in storing images that help us envision the future and take appropriate action. I grew up watching my mother race around the house looking for her car keys and glasses muttering, “I’m losing my mind. I’m losing what’s left of my mind.” Vivid images of her frustration, and my own during similar frenzied hunts, motivate me to keep my keys, glasses, phone in assigned places. Sometimes our unconscious mind merges separate memories to make a point. As a kid, Melanie Mignucci vividly recalled 9/11. “I remember my mom was working in the city. I remember smoke billowing out over the water of the Long Island Sound behind the building where I went to elementary school.” There are just a few, tiny holes in her story: her mother was working in Connecticut at the time, her classroom windows didn’t face the water, and smoke from the World Trade Center was 40 miles way and drifting in the opposite direction. According to neuroscientists, Mignucci blended memories with screen images to create a narrative that was less technically accurate but better expressed the day’s staggering personal impact.  As a seven-year-old, Melanie Mignucci conflated her memories of 9/11 with what she'd seen on TV. Today, as a health editor at Bustle, she has a more nuanced understanding of how memory works. That got me thinking about our memories of 2020. I know, most of us would pay good money to acquire a case of total amnesia around the whole grisly year. But someday we may need to draw upon those experiences to cope with other disasters that knock us sideways. Among its many other lessons, 2020 taught us about the fragility of memory itself. Throughout the pandemic we've all commiserated with each other over brain fog and memory lapses, which are a common result of long periods of isolation and loss of the structure that once defined our days. Beyond that, we’ve all been living under the knowledge that a killer virus is rampaging across the planet, possibly heading directly towards us; distractions don’t come much bigger than that. It’s a wonder any of us can remember our own names, let alone whether we need those blueberries Rich has up his nose. The good news is we can retrain our brains to retain the memories we care about. Yes, no matter how old we are. “It was once believed that as we age, the brain's networks became fixed,” explains Neuroplasticity: Rewire Your Brain for Learning, Memory, and Mood. “But now, an enormous amount of research has revealed the brain never stops changing and adjusting. Connections within the brain are constantly becoming stronger or weaker, depending on what is being used.”  I saw a meme today that said, “Not only is my short-term memory horrible, but so is my short-term memory.” If you’re having days like that, maybe it’s time to start visualizing a better future. Creating mental images of yourself wrapping fish around your neck and slathering a flabby friend’s half-naked body with tabouli may be just what you need to re-energize your brain, live more fully in the present moment, and create memories that will last forever. This post is part of my ongoing series of articles on surviving the pandemic and, with luck, emerging from it with some remnants of our sanity and good humor intact. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE HERE if you'd like more of my free stories in your inbox each week. Feel free to share this post link with family and friends. www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/richs-memory-course-and-wait-what-was-i-saying YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY "Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window." — Peter Drucker  Lately I’ve been having disturbing dreams about doing dangerous, forbidden things like shaking someone’s hand or entering rooms crowded with people whose identity and vaccination history are unknown to me. Weird, right? Why am I tossing and turning about this stuff when other people are happily spending their nights dreaming about diving into pools of chocolate while winning the lottery and having sex with movie stars? Apparently, my subconscious is feeling a bit jittery about the prospect of rejoining the human race (or at least the vaccinated portions of it) after a year of socializing almost exclusively with Rich. I’m getting my second injection on St. Patrick’s Day (rumor has it they’re dying the vaccine green for the occasion), and I’ll be cleared to interact with other vaccinated folks starting on April Fool’s Day (and yes, I’m really hoping there won’t be any practical jokes revolving around that!). I’m profoundly grateful for my good fortune; friends in other countries don’t expect inoculations until September, maybe Christmas. This week brought disheartening news of Italy’s resurgence and return to lockdown and Europe’s suspension of AstraZeneca inoculations. Despite such setbacks, it’s likely everyone reading this will have the opportunity to get vaccinated this year, and life will be upended yet again. Living in such flux sometimes makes me wish I could consult a crystal ball and get a few hints about the future. Then again, maybe not — as Canadian comedian Julie Nolke demonstrates in this engaging skit about her future self going back in time to give her pre-pandemic self a heads-up about what’s coming. If your future self could pay you a visit right now, what do you think you’d learn about the next phase of the Covid crisis? For clues, I consulted the article After coronavirus: Australia offers a strange glimpse of life post-pandemic. “I'm writing from Sydney in the state of New South Wales at 7 p.m. Friday, March 12, 2021," reports Jackson Ryan. "For the past 54 days, New South Wales — Australia's most populous state, with 8 million residents — has recorded zero new cases of coronavirus. Zero.” Constant daily reports of 0, 0, 0 cases caused the folks Down Under to nickname them “donut days.” With a population of 25 million, Australia has had fewer than 30,000 Covid cases (about half the US daily average) and a total of 909 deaths (our toll is 531,766). How did they do it? “Superb management by our state-based health services in containing and tracing outbreaks, plus a stringent quarantine policy for those returning from overseas.” However, Ryan notes, “The crisis isn't over, and we haven't even agreed on what ‘The End’ really means scientifically or socially. But in Australia, the end feels as close as it ever has. In this pseudo-future place, we've found some semblance of normalcy.” He then describes an evening spent in a packed movie theater. Aaughhh! He's living my nightmares!  When Jackson Ryan recently entered a crowded Australian movie theater, he found the scene surreal and disconcerting. “The normality of it all weirds me out,” he says. I feel your angst, Ryan! I get twitchy just watching crowd scenes on Netflix. For a year, pundits have been discussing “the return to normal.” But is that possible? Or desirable? We tend to view our pre-pandemic lives through a rosy glow of nostalgia, as if it consisted of nothing but Instagram-worthy good hair days with congenial companions in glamorous locales serving phenomenal food with lavish amounts of wine. “I firmly believe most nostalgia for the glorious past is delusional thinking,” says A. J. Jacobs in Thanks a Thousand. “I used to write a magazine column in which, each month, I would research just how horrible past centuries were — disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous... We have huge challenges now, no doubt, but the solution doesn’t lie in a return to yesteryear. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly annoyed about something — the rattle of the air conditioner, say — I’ll repeat a three-word phrase: ‘Surgery without anesthesia.’ It’s a helpful little mantra.” OK, we'd gotten past anesthesia-free surgery by 2019, but let's not forget that the pre-Covid-19 era was “disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous.” Just think about HIV, opioids, babies in cages, the spike in hate crime murders, Harvey Weinstein, gas station rest rooms, QAnon, and the chemicals in junk food. When “all this is over,” all that will still be with us. Except for Harvey Weinstein, whose earliest possible release date from prison is November 9, 2039.  March 11, 2020 In my rosier moments, I believe we’ve learned a lot in the past year and will hold onto the most vital skill we honed during the pandemic: adaptability. As we face new challenges, will we study and adopt smart ideas that proved useful in other countries? Next time around, could innovative approaches prevent half a million American deaths? Of course, what works in one culture may be a hard sell in others. For instance, in The Finnish Way, the author describes moving from Canada to Helsinki, where she cured her depression and revitalized her life by adopting the Finnish custom of taking a daily morning dip in the Baltic Sea — yes, even in winter. “I climb down the metal ladder leading to a large hole of about three by three meters cut into the thick ice,” writes Katja Pantzar. “When I lower myself into the water, the cold shock — about 1 degree Celsius (34 degrees Fahrenheit) — hits me. During the first few strokes it feels as if hundreds of pins and needles are pricking my body. The pricks are soon replaced by euphoria: ‘I’m alive!’” She goes on to describe the many medical benefits of her daily dip, but while I caught a few words like endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin, mostly my mind was reeling from the thought that anyone would voluntarily submit their body to such torture. Yet apparently ice swimming is popular in Finland, the happiest country on Earth. Somehow I doubt ice swimming will catch on here in California, where we weather wimps won’t dip a toe in the Pacific when the air temperature falls below 70. Of course, if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that we really don’t know what we’re capable of until we’re tested by events — the kind that were unimaginable five minutes ago and now define the shape of our world. “Our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told an earlier generation, and his words ring true today. I cling to the knowledge that not all change is for the worse. Chances are we'll somehow distribute vaccines worldwide. The US may one day achieve donut days with zero Covid cases. I might even stop having nightmares about crowded indoor spaces. Could happen! There’s only one certain prediction that my past, present, and future self would absolutely agree on: I am not taking up ice swimming under any circumstances whatsoever. This post is part of my ongoing series of articles on surviving the pandemic and, with luck, emerging from it with some remnants of our sanity and good humor intact. I'd be happy to send you a quick note when I publish new stuff. SUBSCRIBE HERE to get free stories in your inbox each week. Feel free to share this post link with family and friends. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/its-tricky-making-predictions-especially-about-the-future YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY |
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As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things that interest me and that I believe might prove useful for you all to know about. Whew! I wanted to clear that up before we went any further. Thanks for listening.  Karen McCann
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I'm an American travel writer based in Spain and currently living in California. As we journey through the pandemic together, my blog provides a regular supply of survival tips, comfort food recipes, and the wry humor we all need to lighten our hearts on dark days. I think of my blog as an ongoing conversation, so please join in and leave comments at the end of my posts. Sign up below to get updates when I publish anything new. 
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