Stuff and Moonshine

Spent the past weekend with a migraine that segued mid-Sunday into the first cold I’ve had in two years, which was an improvement over the migraine but still knocked me flat enough that I wasn’t able to come in to work until today. Shoutout to the co-worker who covered my desk Monday and Tuesday, not only for doing so but for leaving me a box of tissues.

Andrew found and downloaded a bunch of high-quality files of old movies, so yesterday (I think—my sense of time is still a bit muddled) we watched The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, which for various reasons is scarier to me than it was a few years ago. It’s still beautifully textured, especially in the copy we saw, and wryly funny in many places. My German is not yet advanced enough to follow conversations (particularly rapid 1930s-era ones) without the support of subtitles, but every so often my brain was able to pick out a word and then OHNE or BLEIB or GANZEN would flash behind my eyes.

Attempting to learn another language as an adult has highlighted a few things about just how I perceive words—I’ve known for a long time that when I read, I tend to hear the text; and that when someone’s speaking, I see the words somewhere in my head like title cards or a teleprompter. But I’m beginning to suspect that I actually need to have a handle on both the sound and the spelling, or I don’t get that little click of recognition, and I can’t parse the word at all—which rather makes me wonder how I would have fared in a pre-literate society. Perhaps imagery would’ve served the same purpose.

So, Andrew'd been suffering earaches for a week, and then yesterday morning he woke up with intense pain in the joint of his left big toe, so after a few hours of putting ice on it to no avail, we went to the emergency room, where they decided they didn't like the results of his blood tests and admitted him; he's now spending his second night, there, though he's in a semi-private room now and the anti-inflammatories are working, so it's likely to be easier on him than last night. They've been giving him fluids, too, so no doubt his kidneys (it's always the kidneys) will be ok when they re-check them.

Actually, we're both hoping this gets a psychiatrist to actually look at him; in the field of mental health it's the wheel that comes to Emergency in serious condition that gets the grease.

Anyway, things are generally fine, although I noticed this afternoon that even though it's not the dementia or the psych ward, some of the patients on his floor are a bit... confused. I was about to leave Andrew's room for a few minutes to get a coffee and found the door blocked by an old man with a walker who was not the other occupant of the room, and who shuffled in and stared at us (and the other occupant) silently, expressionless and unresponsive to our attempts to politely tell him that he was in the wrong room. He wasn't threatening, exactly, and eventually some nurses convinced him to go elsewhere, but having read reviews of It Follows, I was glad I haven't actually seen the movie yet.