Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🎄 🎄 when I began this posting, it was penultimate November, and this year also Black Friday, when the anticipation of Christmas becomes a constant, unremitting dinging, accompanied by exhortations to SHOP NOW; I held to my long-standing practice of not leaving the house on Black Friday for any purpose other than retrieving my mail from the mailboxes in the condo parking lot

Meanwhile:

(#1)

A tale of the jim-jams, the most acute form of the jams (joint and muscle afflictions), a story that began on Friday 11/22 with the jams, reached utter jim-jam misery on Monday 11/25, and then slowly moderated since then; but also a tale of plans gone utterly awry (lyrics above from “Walk on the wild guardsman side”)

As I posted Thursday, in “Today’s truly terrible pun”, about

the last week in my life, parts of which were spectacularly awful, but through most of which I coped admirably and in good spirits, I don’t know why or how [:] This simultaneously disastrous and miraculous week ended with my delicious Thanksgiving dinner, of Korean soy and black vinegar chicken on japchae, a last-minute replacement for the long-planned Mexican homestyle pozole, which had to be shelved when the cook was incapacitated

And that day was spent pleasantly without any direct contact with anyone else (not even with a word exchanged with a delivery person or a neighbor), a successful test day for living comfortably in isolation, which I’m learning to treat as the base state of my life, with actual face-to-face contact with others as the occasional special treat. Meanwhile, I have a rich life, full of colleagues and friends, with conversations and exchanges of news about our lives, managed entirely on-line. In fact, yesterday was a very busy, sociable day for me.

I had resisting adapting to this way of life, but I was in the right frame of mind — see reference above to my miraculous good spirits —  to just let it happen for a day. It wasn’t that I worked at getting through, or even merely tolerated, this mode of life, but that I ceased to see it as a loss, and just gave up caring about it. Only at the end of the day did I realize that I’d sailed happily through a day of isolation without giving it a thought. (And without putting on pants, even my customary gym shorts, and in my bare feet, as is my at-home custom. I spent the day in my underwear, but that underwear was fresh and clean — to satisfy myself and no one else.)

Now to abandon myself fully to this Zen state. I was a teenager when I discovered that I could take enormously restful naps of either 20 or 60 minutes’ duration by entering a meditative trance state; I had no idea what it was called, or how this skill worked, but I stumbled on it, and further altered states of consciousness, that have soothed and enriched my life for 70 years. And now, this ability to just let go of things. What a lovely thing.

But now, as we professors say, to the details.

Lexical matters. The central topic of this posting is a set of bodily afflictions affecting the joints and muscles of my extremities (legs, feet, arms, and hands) and hips, for which I coined the alphabetic abbreviation the jams, for joint and muscle afflictions. This term came with an echo in an existing English noun jam, which is negative in its reference but has nothing to do with medical conditions:

noun jam-1: … 2 informal an awkward situation or predicament: I’m in a jam. (NOAD)

Then, the jams, though painful, have an acute, excruciating, form (soon to appear in my story), for which I sought a memorable term. Well, English has a existing showy noun jim-jams that looked like a good choice, since again it’s negative in its reference (though again it’s not medical):

pl. noun jim-jams-1:  informal a fit of depression or nervousness: prerace jim-jams. ORIGIN mid 16th century (originally denoting a small article or knick-knack): fanciful reduplication. The current sense dates from the late 19th century. (NOAD)

(There’s also a British slang noun jim-jams-2 ‘pajamas’, irrelevant to this posting.)

The onset of the jams. From my 11/22 posting “Discordant moments”:

The affliction. I’ve been reluctant to post about this, because it will seem like yet more of my endless pissing and moaning about the afflictions of my aged body. But it’s consumed a lot of my day, by making almost everything I do tremendously painful and time-consuming. I can sit comfortably in two of the chairs in my house, but standing up, sitting down, and walking are painful, and bending down for any purpose is excruciating (I pick things up off the floor using a grabber device).

It’s intense pain in the joints and muscles of my legs, especially my right leg [and hip]. Plus lesser pain in my fingers (which are swollen) and arms — like my everyday pain there, but a bit worse.

… it’s a mystery. Especially in light of … the signs of health and happiness.

That is, joint and muscle pain coexisted with a wide range of indicators of good health, plus an exceptionally good frame of mind. Life was, basically, Arnold-wonderful (yes, I’m largely housebound and incapable of doing many things, but all that’s normal awful, to which I’m accustomed), except for those pesky jams.

I continued to post things on 11/23 and 11/24, but my queue of postings in preparation grew alarmingly (and continues to do so, while so much of my time is taken up with coping with life). And then ..

The first side story. Sunday 11/24. Intended to do shapenote singing at home, watching the Zoom of the Palo Alto singing in the afternoon, but I’d lost my speaking voice — this is just one of those things that happens to me — and so had no singing voice; and then I waded into a posting about pianist Peter Buka (my 11/24 posting “Sweatless in the poolside sun”) that took most of the day (and led to many hours of work on a follow-up, still in preparation).

Ordered up some food for dinner and awaited an Amazon delivery of some household supplies I was about to run out of. Grubhub delivered, Amazon did not. Night was drawing on. The Amazon tracking said that the package had been delivered, handed to the householder. That was flat false, but by then it was time for me to go to bed.

Monday 11/25. E-mail from Amazon:

Your package is ready at
Amazon Counter at Whole Foods Market
Pick up codes are valid for 60 minutes. Click here when you’re at the location and ready to pick up your package.
Generate pickup code

This side story is about to intersect with the main story line, which starts out being about the jim-jams.

The onset of the jim-jams. Monday 11/25. My morning report to Elizabeth Zwicky (I send reports every morning and evening, to let her know I’m still alive):

Slept 7:30 to 3:10 in lots of pain, excruciating when I got up. Walking and using hands very difficult, so all movements very very slow and careful. Finally got breakfast. Hoping things improve enough for me to take a shower.

Well, no, a shower — difficult in normal times — turned out to be utterly impossible. And my morning blood pressure, which had been satisfactorily low for some days, shot up.

Why were things suddenly so bad? Because the barometric pressure plummeted during the night, to a terrible long low in the morning. Which makes my joints sing with pain in normal times, but I was already in the jams, so now the pain of standing up, sitting down, or walking was excruciating — walking was a painful shuffling, lifting my feet as little as possible —  and my hands kept cramping up as well, so I couldn’t do sustained typing at the computer. The jim-jams.

What I could do is sit quietly in my desk chair, letting the tv wash over me. I managed to shuffle my walker slowly to the kitchen to get a minimal breakfast and lunch. And then attempted to get my mail, at the mailboxes in the parking lot in back of my condo. I shuffled my walker out to the back gate to the parking lot and stood there, unable to imagine how I was going to get any further, beginning to weep with pain, when I realized it was, omigod, raining.

And then my neighbor April came down the back stairs from her upstairs condo unit, umbrella in hand, saw me standing there in misery, and asked what she could do. I told her that getting my mail would be life-saving, she took my mailbox key from me, snapped her umbrella open, and went off in the pouring rain to retrieve the day’s mail for me. A torrent of thanks for April.

After which I very slowly shuffled backwards through the gate and to my back door, and from there back to my desk chair. Where I contemplated that e-mail from Amazon; I had to find someone to retrieve the package from Whole Foods, because I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do it. But, not to worry; my caregiver León would be coming by the next day and he could do it.

And now …

The second side story. When I woke on Tuesday 11/26, the jim-jams had receded to the jams and I could function in the world again, and León was coming, so he could fix the things that needed fixing and also proceed on preparing my (US) Thanksgiving meal, pozole the way his Mexican mother made it; I’ll digress on Thanksgiving pozole / posole in a moment, but first a crisis.

In my morning e-mail on Tuesday, from the aging-care agency (sent the night before, but after I had gone to bed):

Due to recent exposure to individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19, Leon will unfortunately be unable to see you this week. He has had close contact with clients and caregivers who have been affected.

While Leon is currently asymptomatic, we are taking necessary precautions to ensure everyone’s safety.

Well, I was sufficiently recovered to take this blow with equanimity and handle it all myself (and did a load of laundry as well, and got the day’s mail myself, and took the recycling out to its bin and the trash out to its bin): I arranged for Elizabeth to pick up the package (that afternoon); got a grocery delivery of food to carry me through the week; for my Thanksgiving dinner, ordered Korean soy and black vinegar chicken and japchae from Vons (see note below), and stashed it in the refrigerator for Thursday 11/28. At noon I experienced a sudden inexplicable moment of sheer pleasure and well-being and was able to do two little postings (“Slip into a plush penguin” and “Woś in blue”).

And that’s what happened the day I got the jim-jams.

Background: Thanksgiving hominy-and-meat soup / stew. From my 8/14/24 posting “Los pozoles como el sexo”:

Yesterday’s adventure in all things posole (in my characteristically American English spelling) / pozole (in the usual Mexican Spanish spelling — in either case, pronounced with an [s]), with my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter L). L and I were putting away the (extensive) leftovers from the lunch he had just cooked for us, when I remarked that I had a huge bowl of superb pozole left over from my last restaurant-food order (from El Grullense Grill in Redwood City), and L was stunned.

First, that I had even heard of pozole — Mexican hominy and meat (classically, pork) soup, traditionally red with chiles, fragrant with spices, a bit sharp with citrus juice, and crunchy with cabbage —  which he had thought of as utterly Mexican, homey comfort food that the rest of the world didn’t know about (the way Vietnamese pho was before it became fashionable). Then, still more amazing, that it was one of my favorite foods, and had been for decades (like, five decades, from when Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who died in 1985) and I made it ourselves in Columbus OH, ’cause where in central Ohio in the 1970s would you find pozole?).

Then, to bolster these fantastical claims, I referred him to two pozole postings on this blog: the first from 2011, describing a considerable previous history with pozole;

(#1) from the 2011 posting

the second, from 2017, with a recipe for an eccentric, deeply non-traditional (but very tasty) variant, based on chicken (plus tomatillos and huge amounts of cilantro):

(#2) from the 2017 posting

At which, this exchange:

L: But it’s chicken

A: If you can do it with chicken, you can do it with pork

L [laughs out loud]: We say, el pozole como el sexo, entre más puerco mejor (‘pozole is like sex, the more pork the better’)

A [laughs out loud, asks for the joke written down]

Wonderful: a food joke, about pozole, and a dirty joke, about penises. Happy happy joy joy.

Background: the Korean holiday meal. From my 12/26/23 posting “Randy elves, coming in Latin, and a Korean feast”, with a section on Vons:

Festoonus [12/22] and Festoonus Eve [12/21] are both occasions for elaborate light shows, decorating your bodies, sharing exotic food, dancing, and making public and communal art and music.

… This year my Festoonus focus was on exotic food (my life is entirely solitary, and I will never be able to dance again, but food, I can do food). The plan developed in steps.

Step 1. I had a craving for roasted chicken.  I had discovered a few years back that the rotisserie chickens available from so many groceries are pretty decent, especially if you can get just the dark meat pieces (thighs and drumsticks), which are both tastier and moister. I knew that such things were available from Safeway, where Instacart does my grocery shopping. Then I discovered at Thanksgiving that you had to get the order in at just the right time of day: too early, and the machines were not yet producing fully cooked chickens; too late, and they’d all been sold, and Instacart would replace them with fried chicken pieces, which I can eat but would never choose to buy. (This happened at Thanksgiving, so my Thanksgiving chicken was not the chicken I was looking forward to.)

Step 2. I went to Grubhub, my source for restaurant food, to look for roasted chickens at restaurants they deliver from. Vons Chicken outlets (offering both roasted and fried chicken) popped up early in the search, and then it turned out that they offered plain roasted chicken but also a bunch of more exotic styles of roasted chicken — because they’re, whoop whoop, Korean.

From the Vons Chicken “About” page:

Our history: Since the opening of the first store in April 2007 in South Korea, we operate franchises all over the World. In the overseas market, we are [a] roast and fried chicken brand with 70 stores in the United States, Guam, China. Vietnam, Guatemala, and Cambodia.

Bingo: exotic food for Festoonus! From a Vons restaurant not very far away.

… Vons roasted chickens; I was immediately attracted to … soy sauce and black vinegar chicken

Served on a bed of japchae, a savory dish of stir-fried glass noodles and vegetables.

It was absolutely delicious for the Christmas season last year and for Thanksgiving this year. (Of course, the delivery portions are meant for two people, so I had this excellent meal on Thanksgiving and then again on the day after.)

 

This entry was posted on December 2, 2024 at 3:17 am and is filed under Holidays, Jokes, Language and food, Language and medicine, Lexical semantics, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.