It’s Hump Day, and my big activity for the day is turning in my old University ID card to get the new PCC(E) ID card, and visiting the local Social Security Office to give them my birth certificate. I grow old. . . .I grow old. . . . I shall put on extra clothes against the cold. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus has mustered the courage to reprove Hili for nomming his food:
Hili: I like our sharing bed and board.
Cyrus: I do too, but stay out of my bowl, please.
In Polish:
Hili: Lubię tę naszą wspólnotę łoża.
Cyrus: Ja też, ale nie wtykaj nosa do mojej miski, proszę.
“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?”
As a Canadian, I’m curious about the need for the visit to the Social Security office. Does everyone do that, or are there special circumstances? Everyone I’ve known here who’s received Canada Pension or Old-Age Pension has simply gotten some paperwork in the mail that they fill out and send back unless there are special circumstances (amounts adjusted by divorce, time working outside Canada, etc) and then a meeting (or two) may be involved. At first glance everyone bringing in their birth certificate would seem to be inefficient, which is why I’m curious. Thanks.
I could send it in, but then they’d have to mail it back, and I’m worried about that. But the local office is only four blocks away, and I could use a nice walk today.
Hili and Cyrus are spooning. That is adorable.
Fantastic picture; a scoot over and “invading” Hill; a delightful & patient Cyrus!
Jerry you repeated “I grow old…” twice. I was wondering what those … (three dots) represent in view of your getting old:
nostalgia (your past); purpose or fulfillment (your present); anxiety (your future); or perhaps all three?
Or is it just the fact that as you get older you need to make adjustment related to the weather, the bureaucracy, and the “old” sōma.
It’s a quote from The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/love-song-j-alfred-prufrock
Funny note: C.S. Lewis didn’t appreciate Eliot’s poem at all, especially this bit:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
and wrote a parody of it:
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
I can forgive Lewis his bad theology for that verse. 🙂
That makes Lewis imagining magical things all the more baffling. But he found another big nit to pick.
The part of the bureaucracy that is always a puzzle – do they want the original birth certificate or will a certified copy do. Not a good idea to put the original in the mail if you can help it. Donald Trump will have you born in Kenya and ICE will be knocking at the door.
Time is the only roughly fair dimension, even if we don’t feel the same about it.
While we can’t all occupy the same space, we can occupy the same cosmological clock times (as measured by the cosmic microwave background reference frame).
And we all grow older at the same rate, give or take a few nanoseconds depending on the local gravity field and your amount of travel.
I tend to be 8 years younger biologically than chronologically, as the former is measured with walk speed et cetera … biology isn’t as fair as physics. On average of course, now that they can measure individual organs biological age. But still: what age should I mention?
I honestly have no clue where my birth certificate is. I think my parents might have it.
I don’t really care. I’m alive, so I must have been born….
b&