Kate Violette

Time to read: 10 minutes.

In this week’s newsletter:
The Timbit Times
Kate Film Club, 16 of 52: “The Philadelphia Story”
Kate Film Club, 17 of 52: “Woman of the Year”
French Study
We Can Have Nice Things

If I continue to miss weeks, I’m going to start calling this the “Fortnight in Review” (or even “Month in Review”, gulp). But I’ll give it a few more weeks to see if I can get back on track before I do that, ha.

It’s been a busy past three weeks. Overall status?, kinda the same since my prior dispatch, but I had a terrible crash last week. The precipitating factors were likely a combination of forgetting my evening pills one night (which has never happened before), then the next day—despite feeling off—spending several hours putting the finishing touches on my own updated treatment roadmap proposal and making a fucking slide show for it, as if I’m going to straight-A-student my way out of Lyme disease. The slide show was as much for me to keep it all straight in my head as much as for my doctor, but I think he appreciated it as well. He was open to my lobbying that we should probably do another round of antifungal treatment before anything else, and I’ll start that next week once he’s back from a short vacation.

Close readers may be wondering what happened to the “nutritional protocol”that I was talking about in prior newsletters that my main doctor and I were going to put me on prior to starting actual Lyme (and Bartonella) treatment. It was taking several weeks for him to figure out the intricate protocol dosing for my particular case, and I got antsy and decided that wasn’t the right very next thing to focus on anyway. I do think it makes sense to return to in the next few months, but there are other more important things I think we should back up and re-focus on first. (Such as the antifungal/anti-yeast treatment, which I was responding well to before another provider pulled me off of it—probably prematurely—back in November.)

Anyhow, I’ve got two Katharine Hepburn movie reviews for you!, a major 2024 goal update!, and a drink recipe as promised last time. C’est parti!

The Timbit Times

Alas, sometimes the Timbit news is a bit of a bummer. I’ve already decided to end the garden experiment, since my friend wasn’t keeping the garden watered often enough for seed germination, and I neither wanted to create tension with my friend by asking for more attentiveness to watering my part of the garden, nor be continually personally tempted to overextend myself to just water it myself. I wish I had known my friend’s proactive offer of watering wouldn’t be quite what was needed before I spent a very large energy investment in getting my mini garden plot planted, but that’s how it goes. I was devastated at first, but in an illness like ME/CFS, you are constantly grieving losses, so—into the grief bucket this one goes along with so many other things. I poured my soul into getting that little bit of ground planted, paid for it for two days, and I have nothing to show for it. But that really is just par for the course with this illness sometimes, and you gotta keep moving and looking ahead.

Kate Film Club, 16 of 52:

“The Philadelphia Story” (1940)

This movie lived up to the hype! It was just as great as everyone said it is. Usually I don’t like mistaken-identity comedies but this one just happened to hit the right note for me, and I loved it. I especially appreciated at the beginning of the movie how the women were the ones to more quickly see through various levels of subterfuge and omission than the men, that earned more than one chuckle from me. Looking back over my notes, I think I’ve generally been a fan of Hepburn’s movies with director George Cukor, and I think I’ve still got a few more yet to go, which I’m now looking forward to even more.

How to summarize “The Philadelphia Story”? At first it seems like a guy trying to get revenge on his ex-wife by sneaking a couple of reporters in to cover her high society wedding for what appears to be a sort of tabloid—but there’s more to that subplot than that first impression. You could probably say the movie is really about Hepburn’s character having a massive personal reckoning in fast, slapdash motion? Or maybe the whole thing is just a high hijinks romantic comedy. Either way, it’s a fun ride, I highly recommend it, and I will for sure be watching it again in the future.

Rating: 4.5/5 – Some real laugh out loud moments, and great chemistry among the cast as a whole.
Where to watch: Streaming on Apple or Amazon.
Quote: “Hello, friends and enemies.”

Kate Film Club, 17 of 52:
“Woman of the Year” (1942)

This is the first movie (with Katharine Hepburn in it, anyway) that really mentions World War II, which was interesting to me. There was a joke in “Holiday” (1938), but that’s it otherwise. This is also the first Hepburn movie with Spencer Tracy in it, and hot damn—is it just me or it is obvious on the screen that he was head over heels in love with her from probably the moment they met? I’ve never seen him in anything else (other than “Desk Set”, which I watched last December but will watch again as part of my 2024 goal to watch every Katharine Hepburn movie!) so perhaps he’s just a good actor, but I don’t think that’s what it was. I know the aura around their off-screen romance is supposedly a big deal, but I didn’t really understand it until I saw this film. Just wow. I felt the urge to tell him something akin to “sir you have something stuck in your teeth” except it would have been more like “sir your eyes are shouting to the whole world that this woman who is not your wife is oops, your earth-shattering and eternal soulmate”. Hepburn on the other hand, managed to keep it together and seem pretty normal. (But I already know that won’t quite be the case by the time we get to “Desk Set”.)

So anyway, the movie. “Woman of the Year” is about a successful journalist lady who reports on Very Important Things, and a fellow guy journalist who reports on sports. A bit of a classic opposites attract tale, with elements of “but can women really have it all??” thrown in. At first I was a little worried the movie was trying to say women can’t have it all, that the moral of the story was aiming for something regressive, but I actually think that wasn’t the case. I think this movie was just trying to be a rom-com. And on that front, it was perfectly adequate.

Rating: 3/5 – A pleasant time. It’s not essential viewing, but it had its moments.
Where to watch: Streaming on Apple and Amazon.
Quote: “Fadiman says she’s the number two dame in the country right next to Mrs. Roosevelt.” “So they’re giving them numbers now, like public enemies.”

French Study

I PASSED THE DELF B1!! I teared up when I got the email, I am beside myself with joy. If you recall, I had actually arrived a few minutes late to the test (thanks, ME/CFS) and missed a few of the oral comprehension exercises, which I was bummed about because those would have been easy win points for me. So the pressure was on to do well in my oral production appointment the next day. And evidently I did even better than I dared hope on that section, and I PASSED THE EXAM!

To put this in context: the B1 level DELF is the level of French language proficiency you must demonstrate to apply for various visas and long-term residency in France. I’m not planning on applying for such anytime soon, but it is a goal of mine, if my health were to ever improve enough to allow it. So it feels blissful and powerful for me to have at least unlocked this requirement along that path. To be appealing to French employers, however, you typically want to demonstrate B2 level skills. I’ve already been taking B2 level classes for several months, and you can bet that I’ve now slated passing the B2 DELF as a 2025 goal! I’m almost tearing up again writing this out. I’m just so happy.

When you pass the DELF, you get an official diploma from the French Ministry of Education. That usually takes 2-3 months to arrive. You can bet I’m going to frame that baby when it gets here.

We Can Have Nice Things

I’m changing this section, since “My Year of Ne’er-do-well-ism” kinda has no relationship to the reality of my existence whatsoever, as much I would like it to. My time is not my own; I am constantly advocating for my own medical care among several providers, managing prescriptions, making sure records get sent this place or that, coordinating homecare staff—I almost never, ever, have time to just relax. It was foolish of me to think I could wish into existence leisure time that is, in a very real spacetime sense, out of reach for me given how much rests on my sick shoulders.

What I can do is try to find little enjoyable things that keep my spirits afloat despite these unrelenting demands. So, as promised, a short recipe for a delicious tea cocktail that’s been sort of covering for the absence of wine in my life. (For over 3 years and counting now. For illness reasons, no one congratulate me!, this is not by choice; I would absolutely go back to a healthy relationship with alcohol the moment my body let me.)

My recipe for a sort of “mulled wine” substitute! You will likely have to do a little work procuring the exact ingredients:

• Detox Scandinave tea from Palais des Thés
• My go-to juice mix I keep in the fridge, which is roughly: 2 parts unsweetened cranberry juice, 2 parts aloe juice (inner fillet), 1 part tart cherry juice — tart cherry juice has anti-inflammatory benefits so be sure to get that type of cherry juice specifically!
• Stevia drops to sweeten (or your sweetener of choice/need)

Simply brew the tea—double strength!—for a good 10+ minutes, and if it’s not still hot after adding the juice, pop it in the microwave. (No time to be prudish about microwaving tea when you have ME/CFS.) You could also add some spice or a cinnamon stick if you really wanted to go for the mulled wine vibe! (Personally I can’t have most spices so that option is lost for me at the moment, but it sounds lovely.)

If you try it, let me know what you think!

(Small edit after this post was sent to subscribers: I removed a metaphorical usage of “spoiler alert” in the movie review where I am discussing Hepburn and Tracy’s romance. This was to avoid anyone thinking I was using “spoiler alert” in a literal sense and was about to reveal a critical movie plot point—which I make a point to avoid in my reviews!)