Esther has dark layered circles under her eyes (kind of like Thoreau here) and her face looks puffy lately. I think she’s seriously getting tired now, sleeps a good 12 hours a night and is sleepy and draggy during the day. I know I’m not supposed to blog about her (“how’d you like to be blogged about?!”). She had another scan today, and the images on the screen showed her thyroid “bed” lit up and also her bladder! That was kind of funny. You could see one big turn of her intestines kind of lit up too. I wanted to get a copy of the image, but they wouldn’t let me have one, and Esther did not want me to post it. I guess her urine is radioactive as all get out, and of course, the thyroid bed absorbed the radioactive iodine. The technician indicated there was still some active thyroid material (not necessarily cancerous, but needs to go), there, but that it was “dying”; later scans, a year from now, should show it gone. If I understand this correctly. Back to see the surgeon on Monday and Esther will start thyroid hormone. Thank God. She’s back to work today, dipping her radioactive fingers into the ice cream. She has to carry a special card for border crossings and airports, because she can set off the whatchacallits for up to six months!
I’m still having trouble reading, but I’m going to force myself to read all of Walden. I’m starting to enjoy it more, but my mind still spins over other things, mostly stupid things, like money and A. H. and Esther and whatever else my head wants to re-hash over and over. The old alcoholic head spinning stuff that can drive me crazy. I’ve been having teaching nightmares again too. As always, in the classroom and not ready, or running about a half hour late. I’m always late for class in my dreams. I’ve decided to keep reading, and when I catch my mind wandering off, force myself back to where it wandered off, then re-read sections during the day and underline. So he says “Books must be read as deliberately and deservedly as they were written. . . . ” (he must have been talking about his own) “. . . .yet this only is reading in the high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand up on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours. . . .”
I copied that line onto a lot of my syllabi.
Still, he spends an awful lot of time in the first two chapters or so criticizing the townfolk. and the farmers and laborers and merchants. And the news, railroads, and post office. And all those idiots who don’t take time to read on tiptoes.
I don’t know. . . it’s bugging me.
I do like some parts. About “news” and opinion, etc:
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge or feet down-ward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion (a deposit of sand and mud left by flowing rivers) which covers the globe, through Paris, London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poverty and philosophy and religion, till we come to the hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, have a point d’appui (a point of support) below freshet (a sudden rise in the level of a stream, or maybe just a sudden rise. . .) and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer (something that measures the level and current of the Nile River, I guess), but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.”
Yeah. That’d help! We need a Realometer!!
