Time to read: 8 minutes
In this week’s newsletter:
The Timbit Times
Kate Film Club, 3 of 52: “Morning Glory”
Book of the Week: “Arsène Lupin: Gentlemen cambrioleur”
French & Music Study
My Year of Ne’er-do-well-ism
This week was another rough week of gut symptoms, and I had to delay my medication “roadmap” somewhat. I call it my medication roadmap because at any given time, my doctors (yes more than one) and I have a queue of things lined up that we know we want to try or do next. Sometimes that schedule has to change due to flares like the one I’m currently in, or because we get new test results, or other reasons. It’s tough to live with such unpredictability and uncertainty, but I appreciate always having an organized plan, even if it will morph and shift several times before I actually get to each treatment or test or procedure on it.
Even though my baseline is still not fully recovered, my current flare seems to have somewhat stabilized. So this upcoming week I’ll be able to trial monolaurin, which my Lyme doctor wants me on before I trial a short course each of doxycycline and tetracycline. While I’m half-excited, half-apprehensive about the antibiotics, I’m mostly entirely excited for the monolaurin; I have a good feeling about it.
But yeah. This week was mostly me doing quite a bit worse than baseline, and fighting the continued blast of winter weather that was only supposed to last 3-4 days but has turned into a full week of such. The backyard was genuinely an ice rink for the majority of the week. We’re just starting to thaw out today.
The Timbit Times
I haven’t been able to move around very well this week, as the more I moved the worse some of my symptoms were getting. But I did at least manage to finally organize my clothing storage in the sleeping loft! These are all simple rope baskets from Target. I’ve been a fan of them for quite some time, but I’ve never bought and dispatched this many before! I would like to add some color to them, though—I might try doing something clever like tassels or chunky embroidery from my extensive yarn stash. In any case, it looks so much tidier up there instead of all of the piles of clothes haphazardly exposed in the shelving. (I forgot to take a before photo!, but trust me on this.) And it will be easier to find what I’m looking for, too, now that categories of things are separated into themed baskets.
Astute readers will notice a bottle of Bar Keeper’s Friend on my dresser. This is because I, in a panic the other day, worried I had found some mold on my dresser but instead an internet adventure introduced me to “black rust”—harmless, and easy to remove with Bar Keeper’s Friend. (My dresser is made from stained but unfinished wood. They usually install a white IKEA shelf there, but I asked the builders if they’d consider making one from scratch to match the ceiling. Very much worth the extra cost, I think!) Anyway, stain removal—black rust is just a stain—is another project for another week.
Kate Film Club, 3 of 52:
“Morning Glory” (1933)
This is Katharine Hepburn’s third movie, and her second starring role, which won her an Oscar! (She then would not win another Oscar, despite seven nominations in the interim, until 1967.) It was easy to see why she won the award for this role: in her first two movies, she definitely played characters closer to her own real life persona, but in this movie she…I wouldn’t say she was unrecognizable, but she definitely went out of her way to seem like a different person. Her voice was deliberately different, hand gestures, etc. It was fun to watch someone truly work a craft.
In this movie she plays a naive newcomer to New York who wants to become an actress, and struggles to land parts. Difficulties with housing and meals are implied, and there is an extended party scene in which she gets properly sloshed and begins to make a scene in a bad way, upset that she hasn’t yet landed any big parts, before turning it around and making a scene in a good way, by performing a couple of classic theater monologues before the crowd. She gets a big break near the end of the film…which is not exactly a spoiler because the big break itself isn’t really the point so much as her grappling with what the big break may mean for her. And that, I won’t tell you about. I’ll just say: the ending was a little chaotic and bizarre?, but it also made sense given what had been established about the character.
Rating: 3/5 – It was a decently fun time, although the ending felt very fast and dense whereas the rest of the movie felt a little slow at times. There was a particular love interest I was a bit sad to see go unexplored? The two monologues at the party were probably my favorite part.
Where to watch: Rentable on Apple and Amazon.
Quote: “I think artists should be free: free to love, free to dream, free to sin—if you can call it sin…”
Book of the Week:
“Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-cambrioleur”
Again I didn’t make quite as much progress as hoped this week due to health reasons. But!, I finished the 3rd (of 9) tales, and have read past page 100. I’ve never read past page 100 in a book in French before. So I’m declaring that a big victory for the week. I suspect I’ll be able to finish the book this upcoming week still, if I put my mind to it (and if my gut doesn’t take a turn for the worse again).
The more I see the relationship between Lupin and Ganimard grow in the book, the more I appreciate how Soufiane Guerrab plays the part of Inspector Guédira in the tv show. (Ganimard is a detective that Lupin is perennially outwitting, but they have a close and respectful-bordering-on-admiring relationship nonetheless.) In the tv show, I remember seeing Guédira’s face light up when Assane suggests that Guédira is the Ganimard to his Lupin, but I was a bit confused because all I knew was that Ganimard is the inspector in the books that keeps getting outwitted. Why would Guédira be excited to be Ganimard?, I wondered. But to see their relationship in the book, it makes sense. Also, as a queer person I know I have to be careful to too readily label fictional characters as “probably queer” but man does Lupin (the book character) love drama, flamboyance, and flourishes. In my head canon, Lupin is flamingly bi and I don’t think you’d be able to convince me otherwise.
I look forward to reporting on this book as a whole next time! And then as a preview: I’ve decided February’s theme will be “decision-making”. I’ve got Annie Duke’s “Thinking in Bets” lined up along with a few others, including a re-read of an old favorite of mine that I haven’t revisited since college. Since I’ll be reading in English again, I’ll be on a book-per-week cadence instead of book-per-month. Allons-y!
French & Music Study
My conversation class through Coucou continues to be good fun and good practice as always. As I think I’ve mentioned before, at the level I’m at, people are expected to take this conversation class over and over again (there’s only one higher level this company offers, which is effectively fluent). I’m one of the more advanced students in this particular session, and on Monday this week, there were only three of us there, and I could only stay for half an hour (due to a medical appointment). So the instructor said our activity for the first half hour was for the other two students to ask me questions about myself, ha!
One of the other students is a retired doctor and she had lots of questions about mast cell activation syndrome, especially once I emphasized that it’s probably vastly under-diagnosed, and is implicated in a nontrivial number of Long COVID cases. I actually do read about these medical things in French sometimes, since I hope to live abroad in France for a while someday, so it’ll be important for me to have a firm grasp of medical terms. (Even if I get better enough to be able to travel like that again, I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% cured and I’ll need to be able to explain my condition to doctors wherever I am.) At one point the teacher worried the questions were too invasive but I explained I was thrilled to have the chance to practice answering questions that might be very important for me to be able to answer in French someday! Combo win: practicing French and educating yet more people on le syndrome d’activation mastocytaire.
As for the music production class, my ability to keep up is already languishing somewhat, and I may have to drop out of it next week. We’ll see what this upcoming week brings, if I’m able to catch up.
My Year of Ne’er-do-well-ism
Well, I spent like the last three days fully lying down except for using the bathroom or getting meals. I think that checks the ne’er-do-well column for this week. Here’s hoping I can do something more delightfully subversive next week.
Kate Violette 