幸虧提前去了書店，因爲event在樓下，我得慢慢地下樓，找到座位，坐下來。
離開之後就去圖書館找他，他說他剛剛在圖書乾坐定。他自己又吃了一份印度餐。羊肉，所以很飽了。我還是吃了一份冰激凌，彌補一下上次來普林太長隊伍沒有吃上的遺憾。
其實是為了買apple watch才去的costco，路上說還有兩個，跑到那裏被告知是out of stock，結果我不死心，并不完全相信機器的正確率，還是找了一個工作人員去核實，果然，核實之後說是還有兩個，就讓他幫忙打印了出來，結果其他的東西也七七八八地買了一些，又開始買肉了。還買了兩個水杯。有漂亮的水杯在，是不是喝水能更加輕快一點。正好周五去化療的時候可以用上了。
A Macaque Mourns
I read this article a few years ago about grief that I’ve never been able to forget. A haunting story about a female Tonkean macaque named Evalyne, who lives in a little colony of macaques in an Italian animal sanctuary.Here’s what happened: Evalyne was 4 years old, pregnant for the first time. She gave birth and did all the normal caretaking — grooming, touching, licking, etc. On day 5, however, the baby died, no one knows why. The morning after the death, Evalyne skipped eating. Instead, over the next two days, she repeatedly stared at her reflection in a plastic enclosure door and screamed, something she had never done before.Starting on the second day, she did something kind of weird. She began putting her finger and tongue into the dead baby’s mouth, which is a common move to elicit a sucking reflex in a live baby. From there, Evalyne basically started caring for the dead baby exactly as she would have if the baby was alive — carrying it around, grooming it, licking its face (despite the noticeable smell). By Day 8, the baby — which had been desiccating the whole time — was now basically mummified. Even as hair and skin fell off and the skull detached, Evalyne kept toting it around and caring for it.By the third week, Evalyne started carrying the infant’s body around less like a baby and more like an object, in one hand or one foot. At one point on the 18th day, she broke contact with the body for the first time, leaving it on the ground, but still monitoring it. Another juvenile female macaque approached it, sniffed it, and then picked it up and started some “rough and tumble play” with Evalyne while holding it.On the nineteenth day, something REALLY unusual happened. Evalyne started gnawing on the dried flesh, and eating bits of it. By the 22nd day, the body had disintegrated and there were bits of it all over the enclosure. Evalyne always had one piece in her hand or mouth, but then would lay it on the ground and then later come back to it. By the 25th day, Evalyne was seen holding a leg bone for the last time; and after that, the body was nowhere to be seen in the enclosure, most of the body parts had either been eaten or just eroded into nothing.This sort of thing (technically called “filial cannibalism”) had been seen in rare instances in other primate species, but usually not in the absence of nutritional or social stressors, and never in Tonkean macaques, which are by the way, exclusively vegetarian. It’s actually such a weird thing that the primatologists kind of dance around trying to make sense of it in the paper — “it is more difficult to understand the mother’s prolonged interest in remains that became increasingly less recognizable.” And “Nothing is known about the psychological mechanisms underlying this behavior.”This story is obviously grotesque but I find the weirdly precise description of such UTTERLY NAKED GRIEF both captivating and cathartic. Also the paper doesn’t say what happened afterwards — whether Evalyne is now back to normal or if she was permanently damaged by this ordeal — but the timeline it does lay out feels like a material metaphor for her grief, how it changed, grew more diffuse, more abstract, and slowly, less socially alienating. Grief can make you feel so lonely, but not only are we not alone in it as individuals, we are not even alone in it as a species. I take some comfort from that.
今天看完一本書，作者自己原來是醫生，後來得了MS，坐在輪椅上，後來她自己琢磨飲食，通過飲食來改變了她的病情，最終不僅是站起來，而且還參加非常强烈的體育鍛煉，比如説騎行。
想著在家也做不了啥事情，還不如去把頭髮整理一下，打電話問海雲，沒有想到她已經在May的理髮的地方了。於是準備好她的午餐，陪她吃完後，就去了店裏。碰到了也沒有怎麽聊天，座位有點分開了。時間也是花得長。但是離開的時候，想去看看圖書館的那棵樹。每年都要去看一眼。那條路上已經秋色很可觀了。
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