No men.

I heard about a young lady, a daughter of a friend of a friend, who graduated high school this year with a plan to practice living away at college. She and her pals got jobs in a beachfront town and rented a house; they would work and pay their own way and be responsible like grown-ups should be. 

But they made one fatal and entirely, completely, 100% avoidable mistake. They allowed some guys to rent with them. 

I'm kidding about the picture--this is from a show about hoarding--but not about the boys. One of the things that made this young lady quit her job and come home in July was that the boys were absolute pigs and refused to do a thing around the house. They just left their crap everywhere and never scrubbed a dish. If I know my gender, they probably left a lot of beer cans everywhere as well. And this was all foreseeable for anyone who has ever been 18 years old. 

I don't mean to blame the victim. Of course these slobs should have pulled their weight in the beach house. But it is to be expected that boys won't, certainly not in their first away-from-home digs. I have to guess that these boys and girls were not romantically entangled, or the girls could have used their wiles to get the boys to behave like they should. Not that the women should have to, of course; I'm just saying it would have worked. 

Unsupervised men are pigs. Not all, no. Just by and large. Especially when they first get out from under Mom's thumb. Hell, if these boys were actually paying their share of rent on time I'd be surprised. 

I remember visiting a friend at college in my own university days; he lived in a house with other undergrads, each worse than the next, subsisting on cheap beer and frozen potpies. While I was there two housemates got in a play-fight in the kitchen and body-slammed the table, which did it no good at all. These things don't generally happen in women's houses. 

Another friend I visited lived in a similar arrangement; a few doors down his girlfriend lived in a house with some women. It was like staying with Oscar and visiting Felix.

My point is, people will say that in these enlightened times we need not worry about mixing young men and women in co-ed housing, but I say: Be wise, women. For your own sanity, if nothing else, don't share a roof with these uncivilized heathens until they get some civilizing. The summer you save may be your own.

And now, another moment with Igor.

 This has been another moment with Igor.

Undoer of knots.

Today is the Assumption of Mary in the Catholic Church, the day that commemorates Mary being assumed bodily into heaven, and normally a Day of Obligation in the church -- at least in places in the United States that have a lot of Catholics, like New York. However, when it falls on a Saturday or on a Monday, as this year, the obligation is abrogated. It's still recommended that we go to church, as Father pointed out yesterday.

One of Mary's less-known titles is Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. This is one that gets people's attention, maybe fishermen the most. It's an odd title, and of course there's a story to go with it. 

According to the Holy Rosary site, 

To show us the mission granted to the Virgin Mary by Her Son, artist Johann Melchior Georg Schmittdner painted Mary Undoer of Knots with great grace. Since 1700, His painting has been venerated in the Church of St. Peter in Perlack, Augsburg, Germany. It was originally inspired by a meditation of Saint Irenaeus (Bishop of Lyon and martyred in 202) based on the parallel made by Saint Paul between Adam and Christ. Saint Irenaeus, in turn, made a comparison between Eve and Mary, saying: “Eve, by her disobedience, tied the knot of disgrace for the human race; whereas Mary, by her obedience, undid it”.

The devotion to Mary is to untie the knots that hold us down, chain us to sin, threaten our families, make us confused and feel hopeless. I know a couple of women who, while not super-Catholic, are devoted to Mary as Undoer of Knots, and say they have found great peace through her.  

Sometimes you see a dedication to Mary under this title, as in this stained glass, but it's not typical. 

While Mary's concern is to undo spiritual knots (not cut or slash, but remove with care), I can imagine that fishermen, sailors, and Boy Scouts might have recourse to her, sure. I have a rosary that often seems to get knotted up in its little box, but sure enough the knot comes right out with a little tug. 

Getting ready for Monday.

My wife keeps one or two scratch-off lottery tickets in her workspace, the kind that pay off money in installments for life to the jackpot winner. She's not a gambler at heart; what she is is someone who finds creative ways to blow off steam. When she gets frustrated or tired at work, she has a ticket handy as an escape hatch, either to look at it and dream of retirement or to scratch it off and hope for the big dough. Just having it there gives her a smile. 

As a friend of mine learned in statistics class, it's worth buying one lottery ticket but no more, because the difference between 0 in 1,000,000 and 1 in 1,000,000 is infinite, but not between 1 and 2 in 1,000,000.

It's a way to deal with Mondays. 

Another, older friend once told me that he called the attack of nerves on Sunday night Ed Sullivanitis, because when he was a kid his parents never missed The Ed Sullivan Show, which ruled Sunday nights through the fifties and sixties. When the show was on, he knew his weekend was dead and it was back to school in the morning.

Yet another friend tells me that the closing theme of Car 54, Where Are You? can still make him break into a cold sweat sixty years later, because when that show was going off it was nine o'clock on Sunday night in his house, and that meant bedtime and school on Monday.

The hatred of Mondays is not only deep, but starts early, and is pervasive. 

I don't mind Mondays as much since I work from home now. I spent decades schlepping into Manhattan from places outside Manhattan, and that alone was enough to make me dread the start of the week. The Census Bureau says that the average time to commute into work in the United States is 27.6 minutes; from the time I got my first job in publishing to the time I started work at home, my one-way commute was between one and two hours. I got a lot of reading done in those days, but it made for early mornings. Not to mention delayed trains, broken-down ferries, heavy traffic, and everything bad about subways.

These days my weekends are so busy that I almost prefer the workweek. All I have to worry about is work. Plus, I often have to work on weekends anyway, which is forced in among the other weekend commitments. So since I'm working anyway, it might as well be Monday. 

Bring it on! We fear no Ed Sullivan in this house! Well, I don't, and my wife has her lottery ticket. 

Ban all the things!

I got a little taste of what it would be like to be Rip Van Winkle, Buck Rogers, or some other person who wakes up to find things have changed in strange and unexpected ways. 

It happened at a group down at the church, which had been meeting again in person following the Chinese Death Virus Lockdowns. The meetings had resumed for some time, but someone (not me) said, "Hey, instead of everyone bringing his own coffee, why don't we make coffee again like we used to?" It was decided to do a trial balloon by getting a Box o' Joe from Dunkin' (nee Dunkin' Donuts) and some bagels. 

I had nothing to do with any of this except that I had a big wholesale-club carton of Styrofoam coffee cups at home, a remnant of the pre-COVID era, so I figured I'd bring some to the meeting in case we needed some extras. 

That's how I found out I was a strange visitor from the past.

"You must have had these hidden in your basement or something," a friend of mine said.

"Well... yeah, why?"

"Because they're illegal now."

Yes, although New York State has been busy chasing its grotesque governors around, inviting illegal aliens to move in, and watching its wealthy people and businesses flee, it still had time to ban Styrofoam last year. They slipped it in last year when we were all celebrating Christmas, and now I know why I can't find the really good 16-oz. Dart travel cups anymore. Like the plastic bag ban of a few years earlier, this is another way to make life less convenient, less hygienic, more expensive, and more annoying, all in the name of the environment. And now we're using paper and cardboard, which means cutting down more trees. 

I'm a rebel and I'll never
ever be any good

You can't recycle Styrofoam, it's true, but guess what? All our other legally mandated recycling goes in the landfill as well, because nobody wants our garbage. 

But if you've been a reader of this blog, you knew that. 

As an experiment I put some Styrofoam cups in my Amazon basket, because of course you can buy polystyrene cups on Amazon, and got no red flags saying they cannot ship to New York. I'm going to try to smuggle in some of those Dart cups. I think this could be the next great smuggling opportunity in this state, after cigarettes and plastic bags. 

I'll also keep an eye out for the next big ban. The more they make illegal, the more we all become criminals anyway. 

Heath-22.

I went to the doctor's office yesterday to discuss the results of my MRI. My appointment was at 11, and true to form, I had to nap for an hour after getting up so I could make the trip because the drug I take to prevent neuropathic pain from spinal stenosis makes me drowsy. 

It's a forty-minute drive from here, but the guy is one gnarly pain specialist and very good.

As it turned out, I didn't see him, but another doctor in the office. Neither of them look at all like this guy.

So, the test results: Severe stenosis. Nothing had changed in almost three years. I don't know why it would, but it was worth a look. Soooo.... what now?

As I discussed it with the doctor, we seemed to be going round and round in circles, and I didn't know why. I couldn't seem to get us past the idea that my pain was currently manageable but my life was not. She mentioned that there were other options up to and including surgery, but if my pain was manageable then we needn't do them at this time. So, I left. The whole appointment took ten minutes. 

I realized as I went home that I am caught in a classic catch-22 here. Because my pain is manageable on the drug (duloxetine), the doctor is not inclined (and no doubt my insurance company is very disinclined) to make any changes. If I go off the drug, my pain may become unmanageable, and then we may have to opt for something else. I do not want unmanageable pain; the memory of being helpless in agony on the floor will stay with me for life. But if I do not get off the drug, there's no way to know if my pain is unmanageable now. So we must stick with the drug that is making my life unmanageable. 

I came home, did some work, had some lunch, and slept for two hours. 

Now I don't know what to do. This is all a little depressing. Ironically, duloxetine is supposed to be an antidepressant that just happens to help with nerve pain, but it has done nothing for depressed mood for me. Maybe because being sleepy so much of the time is discouraging. 

Oh, well. At least when I can function, I can function, if you know what I mean. And if you do, please explain it to me.

Game of throne.

New toilet for the master bathroom arrived yesterday. If you heard something, that was the parade I threw in its honor. We're flushed with joy.

As is typical for the homeowner, what started as a small issue turned into a pricey fix that took weeks to resolve. There were a lot of ifs along the way that would have prevented this from getting out of hand and thus out of pocket:

🚽 If I had installed this toilet properly two decades ago, it might not have started to leak.

🚽 If I had bothered to change the gasket when I was changing out the screws that held the tank to the bowl, that might have stopped the leak for real. 

🚽 If I had just bought a cheap can at Home Depot instead of asking my wife which throne she desired, I might have been able to bring it home myself and not have to pay delivery. 

🚽 If she had picked something that wasn't big and heavy and had super-flush technology (we'll get to that), we would have saved a hundred bucks. 

🚽 If I had not exposed myself as an incompetent plumber, I could have installed it myself. 

🚽 If she had not noticed the damp spot on the ceiling below the toilet, all this could have been ignored until we moved or died. 

But, if ifs were horses, beggars would ride. 

It's all resolved now, however. The new throne has arrived and was installed by two very polite young chaps. The new one is elongated and chair-height, which is nice, and has Kohler's Revolution 360 super-flushing technology. The queen of England in her Windsor-era WC could only wish for a throne this delightful. 

I'd like to go up and play with the new installation some more, but I've already flushed it a few times. I would hate to be called a four-flusher.