Time to read: 10 minutes
In this week’s newsletter:
The Timbit Times
Kate Film Club, 11 of 52: “A Woman Rebels”
Kate Film Club, 12 of 52: “Quality Street”
Book of the Week: in-progress
French Study
My Year of Ne’er-do-well-ism
I’ve been doing slightly better in the past week or so, which meant I was able to take the DELF this past week! (More on that below.) Conserving my energy for the exam, just in case I was well enough to take it, is why I missed last week’s newsletter. As for my weekly newsletter goal, I at least seem to be doing a decent job of only missing one newsletter per month so far in 2024. I’m pleased with that! Since I missed last week, I’ve got another double header Katharine Hepburn movie review for you this week, so buckle in.
I attribute the doing slightly better to having stepped the monolaurin back down to a tolerable dose, and having started zinc. Zinc is first supplement I’m adding in per what I’ve been calling this “nutritional protocol” my doctor suggested I do before trialing antibiotics for Lyme. I had also been lurking on this treatment protocol for a little while (the researchers have an open Discord server) before my doctor brought it up, and I had independently become interested in it. Here is a link to the full protocol and background science for those who want to follow along.
For those who just want the gist: the idea is that for sneaky chronic infection reasons, people can develop worsening nutritional deficiencies over time. (Not just deficiencies of things you already knew were essential nutrients like zinc, but also things like vanadium, say.) This then creates a cascade of broken metabolic cycles and then worsening deficiencies, which in turn zaps power from your immune system, which then can’t fight infections as effectively, and round we go. As you might imagine, once you have a bunch of cycles broken, all dependent on each other, you have to be thoughtful about how you’re ‘turning things back on’, so to speak. You also have to go after the infections that caused problems in the first place. There are three stages to the protocol, and my understanding is that in each, you’re going to feel worse before you feel better, which I’m not looking forward to.
But the science all seems pretty sound, and I’m eager to get started more fully. I need to finish going through the protocol document to get my specific doses of things calculated first, and then get everything ordered. For the most part, you want to start everything in Stage 1 all at once, but I’ll be adding P5P (which I’ve been on before and tolerated well) and a specific probiotic first, while waiting for my full mix of supplements.
Whew. Ok, on to the fun stuff.
The Timbit Times
We had a lovely fake spring weekend! (Before we went right back to more rain.) My friends did yard work and I left the door open to socialize—not just with humans but also pets! My friend’s indoor/outdoor cat popped in a couple times to explore, while their dog rested her face on my entryway asking me to come play. (Lack of appropriate research into illnesses like chronic Lyme don’t just hurt the people with the illness—they leave doggos lonely, too! How I wish I had been well enough to hop off the couch and play fetch!)
It took my friends and I a while to figure out how to arrange my patio furniture around what will soon be a fire pit they’ve wanted to install. (It looks nice now but seriously we tried like three other variations before settling on this one. The table will go behind the couch once the fire pit arrives.) I think this is going to be an adorable backyard that’s great to hang out in this summer! I look forward to having a covid-safer way to socialize with people, so close to my couch, so I don’t have to go very far.
Kate Film Club, 11 of 52:
“A Woman Rebels” (1936)
I enjoyed this movie, much more so than expected to given that this is during what many critics consider a slump in Katharine Hepburn’s career. To be fair, the movie did lose money at the box office, a significant amount. But I have no idea why! It was a great film, with lots of drama, and with some of the best comedic moments of any of her movies that I’ve watched so far. (There’s not a ton of comic relief, but the few moments there are, are quite funny.)
The story focuses on a woman who has a baby out of wedlock, but due to unforeseen circumstances is able to raise the baby as if it’s her niece, thereby circumventing any sort of social ostracization. (The movie takes place in Victorian England.) She’s courted by a handsome and kind diplomat but she refuses his marriage proposal because she’s worried the truth might eventually come out about her niece/daughter and it would jeopardize his career. She fights to find a job to support herself and her child in an era when it was frowned upon for women to even live alone, never mind hold a job.
The movie was a good ride, and I enjoyed it even though grappling with the weight of how few rights women had even just a bit over a century ago was rather heavy at times. (Who’s to say we aren’t still in the dark ages when it comes to gender equality? Women only earned the right to have credit cards in their own name a few short years before I was born. That’s still viscerally close!) The second half of the movie kept me on edge because I wasn’t sure if it was going to have a happy ending, or if it was intended to be a tragedy. I won’t spoil it for you—you’ll have to watch it to find out!
Rating: 4/5 – My only complaint is some of these early movies based on novels feel like they drag a little sometimes.
Where to watch: I had to get this one on DVD. Check your local library!
Quote: “Even though I’m a woman, I have brains. I intend to use them.”
Kate Film Club, 12 of 52:
“Quality Street” (1937)
This movie was a sort of run-of-the-mill comedy of errors. If you’re someone that likes that sort of comical Shakespearean vibe, you’ll probably like this too. It’s a bit less my cup of tea, as I felt some of the plot elements stretched the bounds of believability, but there were some funny moments to be sure: I particularly laughed out loud at the croquet scene, and another scene near the end where a side character—who has not quite been keeping up with the whole subterfuge—is repeatedly, mercilessly, further confused.
The story starts when a young doctor in town, who previously Katharine Hepburn’s character expected to propose marriage, decides to sign up for military service instead. Ten years later he returns a successful captain (or some title), while she’s become a school teacher and old maid. (An old maid at 30, egads.) Due to a thoughtless remark of his upon their reunion—which she builds up to mean more than he really meant it to mean—she decides to play an elaborate long con to get back at him by pretending to be her own niece. There are nosy neighbors the double identity must be kept from and other hijinks. I’ll have to leave it there so I don’t spoil the ending for anyone who wants to watch it!
Rating: 3/5 – It was ok! I do think this is a genre of film/theater that you either like or you don’t. The guy lead was pretty hunky though so there is at least that eye candy.
Where to watch: Streaming on Apple and Amazon.
Quote: I neglected to write any quotes in my notebook!, I suppose I wasn’t particularly struck by any. The movie was just kinda marshmallow fluff.
Book of the Week: still in-progress!
Still working through “Arsène Lupin: gentleman cambrioleur”, but I’m on the very last story! About 20 pages to go! And then I’ll have finished the first of my seven goals for 2024: reading a whole book in French. (And at which point I suppose I should write a little blurb about all of the 2024 goals.) With every page I read, it’s the farthest I’ve ever read before in a book in French, and I feel a little like Sam Gamgee setting foot out of The Shire. It also feels like I’m running the last mile of a marathon and already celebrating my soon-to-be accomplishment.
French Study
Exciting news on this front this week: I took the DELF! I woke up on Tuesday and felt just well enough to try taking it. There’s no guarantee I’ll be feeling any better in June, so I decided I should strike while the iron is hot. Unfortunately, I was a few minutes late for the group portion of the test, so I missed a couple of the listening exercises. (With my illness, it takes forever for me to get ready to go anywhere, and the route between where I live and the testing center very easily gets clogged with traffic.) I was able to make decent guesses for the exercises I had missed just based on the multiple choices, but it still meant I had to do better-than-anticipated in my speaking interview the following day. However, I did even better in the speaking interview than I dared hope!, so we’ll see if that’s enough to pull my total score above the pass/fail cut-off.
It will be several weeks before I find out if I passed, so now, I wait. Even if I didn’t pass and I have to take it again in June, I’ve lowered the energy it would cost me to take it again, since now I know where to go, to prepare for peculiar traffic in this part of town, etc.
My Year of Ne’er-do-well-ism
I’d been doing a lot of heavy lifting in therapy recently, so I decided to take a week off from it. A “therapy vacation”. It was just as well, since leaving the house three days in a row (Monday for a medical appt, then Tuesday for the first part of the DELF and Wednesday for the speaking part) is rather over-doing it for me. I was stuck on the couch for the better part of the second half of the week, and it was nice and good to not have another mental challenge while recovering.
My therapist is great and I’m already looking forward to my next appointment, but wanted to share this in case there are any other folks out there with energy-limiting illnesses who are also therapy devotees: it’s ok, and can even be beneficial, to take a week off sometimes.
Kate Violette 