Blogelstein!

On Take Care of Yourself

I saw Take Care of Yourself today at the Whitechapel Gallery. I expected to find it interesting, in light of my professional expertise, but I didn’t expect to find it so familiar, and not a little bit painful.

The artist, Sophie Calle, received a most horrible break-up email from a lover, and was inspired to share it with dozens of women from different fields of expertise to get their particular take on the matter - a judge finds that he’s broken a contract, a psychiatrist decides that he’s a perfectly sinister personality type.

With the exception of one woman who protests that Calle can’t have loved him very much if she is moved to share this most private statement in public, all of the women agree: despite the manner in which he couches his rejection in the most florid of prose, Calle’s ex-lover is a jerk. And this near-universal recognition made me think about how easy it is to see when someone else is in a relationship with someone who you see is clearly abhorrent, but how easy it is to lose this perspective when you are in a relationship yourself.

And I thought of all of the times that I had received similarly horrible missives, or speeches, or whatever (not very many, but too many all the same), and still longed for a way to see the good in the men rejecting me even when my friends - both women and men - assured me that I was better off alone. Life would be easier, no doubt, if we could maintain that clarity of view that we have with regards to partners of other people, I suppose, but perhaps it would also be impossible: only with the loss of that critcial perspective can we dupe ourselves into risking love.

My top 10 books of 2009

Inspired by Publisher’s Weekly, who have just published their list of the top 10 books of 2009, here are my own top 10 picks:

1. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

2. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

3. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

4. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

5. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

6. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

7. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

8. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

9. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

10. Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don’t Get Why Men Don’t Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein

Gosh, would you look at that? How surprising. Rest assured, of course, that I gave a fair chance to all the ‘big’ books of the year, but made them all stand on their own two feet. It disturbed me when I was done that all of the books on the list were the same one, and by me. But, naturally, I published it anyway.

On having the flu

It’s awful, but you knew that already. But I’m not sure when I last stayed in my bed for three days in a row, except perhaps when I had the flu - the Real Flu, I think this is but a pseudo-flu, a cold for anyone with a hardier constitution than mine - when I first moved to London. It must have been the second or third week that I lived here and I really couldn’t move at all for most of a week; then-boyfriend kindly ministered to me in my miniature horrible dorm room, and I lost ten pounds in a series of sweaty, feverish sleeps. (Emaciation-by-virus naturally elicited a slew of compliments from people, which was weird.)

Non-existent-boyfriend has, obviously, not been of any assistance this time, though Neighbour Jude did kindly bring me orange juice and an armful of satsumas on Wednesday, and Flatmate Ben has lifesavingly lent me his laptop (mine is still at the Genius Bar). But I have had to make my own soup and yesterday it was an utter failure; the matzo balls dissolved entirely, turning the soup into a sort of Kosher chicken porridge, and because I was hungry and ill and alone I ate it and it was awful and I felt very full of self-pity.

But this is not really about satsumas or laptops or even bad soup: what it is about is the fact that yesterday as I entered my 36th (or so) hour of lying here waiting for my immune system to prevail, the angle of my Vellux window and the phase of the moon and my view from my pillow were perfectly aligned so that I could see the latter through the former as it rose around five o’clock. Which is something I would not have seen had I not been bedridden. It didn’t make all of this gross suffering feel worthwhile, not quite. But quite a bit less bad.

Get vaccinated to help your friends.

jayparkinsonmd:

Equal rights for all races, genders, and sexual orientation. Do not litter. Don’t drink and drive. Give money to charity. Etc, etc, etc.

Why do these things? Because it’s the right thing to do as a society. The vast majority of us do these things because we care about other people. We want to help others. We don’t litter because it makes the world ugly. We don’t drink and drive because we could kill ourselves and others. We eat local and buy Priuses because it helps the environment.

There is a strong history of branding an individual problem in order to change our behavior to benefit society. The Don’t Mess With Texas campaign is credited with reducing litter on Texas highways 72% between 1986 and 1990. Smoking in public has been markedly reduced because it harms other people. Just watch Mad Men to see how society has changed. We now look at the world in a more connected way. We behave differently because, through marketing, we now know that the way we behave makes a difference in the world.

Vaccines work because of herd immunity. In diseases passed from person-to-person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune. The higher the proportion of individuals who are immune, the lower the likelihood that a susceptible person will come into contact with an infected individual.

Not getting vaccinated is therefore a social problem, like driving drunk, littering, equal rights, and smoking around children. For every person who does not get vaccinated, more people in our society are at risk of serious illness or death.

In 1904, there was a Supreme Court case called Jacobson vs. Massachusetts. Massachusetts at the time had a law mandating smallpox vaccination. Jacobson didn’t want to be vaccinated. He sued. The court ruled against Jacobson:

“in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individuals in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations as the safety of the general public may demand.”

They ruled it was in the public’s interest for the state to enforce the law. It was a top down, creepy implication that in order for the public to be protected, we should all be required to risk death as a complication of a vaccine. While I don’t agree with this top-down approach, we’re smarter today. And vaccines are much, much safer today than injecting powdered smallpox scabs. They ruled properly, but mandates aren’t the answer.

Making vaccination a social cause is the answer. Doing things for others makes us feel really good. Getting vaccinated not only protects me, but it protects the herd of awesome people around me, so none of my friends or strangers die a preventable death.