Thinking Too Much Today

So today is Thursday, it's early in the morning.  My husband has long since left to walk over to the ophthalmologist- twelve minutes away--I am lining up the books for my introductory lecture on Homer's poem Odyssey, which I have lectured on for forty odd years, written books and articles about, and yet I really do forget the plot details.  Pathetic, but there you have it.  We've lived here in Sarasota six or seven years, and if you want to know what's really pathetic we've never made a friend close enough to share the detail that he is having a cataract operation and I am in such pain that I am dosed up on Prednesone or whatever it's called for my first day of class.  Our home is our castle and we have pulled up the drawbridge.  Actually we have a close friend but as luck would have it she just got out of hospital (I know that's the Brit way but I like it) and we haven't mentioned our situation but which we only got onto anyway.  A friend put us on to a British television light hearted crime series called Agatha Raisin.  The lead character is a good looking woman who moves from London to a small village in the Cotswolds and it's all about her trying to fit in whilst constantly solving murders by chance.  She fails again and again to establish a boyfriend relationship but my take on her is that she is utterly selfish, mindless, poorly educated, and maybe a nice figure and all that, but, no way is she going to get a man.  I find the programme (Brit again!) tedious because she is so aggressive and one note.  How can a woman watch this program and not weep for shame for the female sex?  And then I wonder are we like her?  Is Sarasota a Cotswold village in a demented ugly American way?  Okay, stop these self destructive ruminations.  Get into a hot shower and then shave clumsily of course with pain in your wrist doing mischief.  Today's pills haven't kicked in.  Ah, yes. you can recite in the shower, not sing: Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon, hos mala planxthe and so on an so forth.  Everybody taking a course in the Odyssey should learn the first line in Greek, for God's sake!