Author: Isy

I think I'm getting better.

Inspiration and vacation

Isy / / nature, perspective, what works

I must remember to inhale. It’s too normal to go about with my whole core clenched. It’s very tiring, and I’m generally tired enough, thank you.

Here’s an interesting thought… If I feel chronically un-rested, it’s tempting to think that the solution is to rest, at some point, for long enough to recuperate completely. Nice thought, eh?

Doesn’t work. For one thing, I need to Do Something to keep the lymph flowing & neurotransmitters cycling, so absolute rest is beyond me. For another … Well, pursuing yet another extreme state probably misses the point.

So I come to the idea — by a very long route — that resting and recuperation are supposed to be as much a part of daily life as eating and breathing and sleeping. (Strange thought.)

It takes a certain amount of determination and persistence. It’s much easier, given my situation and habits, to churn on something that frustrates me or to brace for the next unexpected blow.

I’m practicing. Yesterday, I took a more scenic route home; don’t think it took much longer, but I got quite a bit of sun on my hair … And I remembered how to inhale.

I got only a couple hours’ sleep the prior night and worked hard that day, but at 5:04 pm I felt more rested than I can remember.

Today, I still feel that much better. Inhaling is still something I need to remember to do, but the part about digging the moment I’m in is already easier. Stretching is spa-time. A moment in the sun is a break. A beautiful glimpse of sparkling sea is a mini-vacation.

So something worked.

Balancing act: homeostasis and words I live by

Isy / / critical thinking, nature, perspective, tasty words, what works

A balance has two ends: when one goes up, the other goes down. As a metaphor for living, it lacks dimension.

Homeostasis is better. It has no end, but it does count every factor. With a balance, it’s possible to find a point where everything holds perfectly still – until the wind changes. With homeostasis, there is no still-point, because even the thing that pushes the wind is part of it. It’s always shifting.

Homeostasis is a puzzle to which there is no lasting solution, only a series of adjustments. There’s always something new to learn, something different happening.

I find that intriguing.

After living on the water, in the forest, by the desert, and in cities of all sizes, it also makes perfect sense to me. No change sets off only one corresponding change. All real things are clusters of changes, and in the end we can either adjust or be adjusted – and only one of those alternatives accounts for our own wishes.

Living, like homeostasis, is not about flattening the ocean. It’s about riding the waves.

Chalk boored: cortisol and dentition

Isy / / CRPS knock-on effects, perspective

My teeth were crumbling. I thought that was churlish of them, especially since I was moving at the time and had quite enough going on.

My naturopath has gotten them back to something more toothlike and durable, but the thing about tooth chips — like stretch marks — is that there’s no undoing them.

Another blow to my vanity, or what’s left of it.

I’m told this churlish chalkification was due to the effects of the cortisol my body now has again — and responds far too strenuously to. This makes sense at a basic level, since mineralization is one of the things cortisol affects. I haven’t looked into the specific science but, since I can chew without fearing for my molars now, I’ll accept the explanation and keep going.

I’m glad my teeth are stronger. I can probably live without using them for pulling needles and trimming cuticles, but I was stumped for ways to chew my food without them. As it is, I suspect beef jerky and rock cakes are entirely in my past.

Think I’ll have an apple for breakfast. Wonderful thought. It really is the simple things that make life sweet.

Hope

Isy / / perspective, spirituality

At 12:11 this morning, a soft sea-wind went through me. My insides relaxed.

2010 was tough all over. We know that. Mortality sucks, life is hard, and all the rest.

But something has changed in here. Even though this date is, technically, just an arbitrary accident of history, it’s a good one. A happy accident.

I don’t know if this year will be any better than the last one, but I like this gentler sense of life I’ve woken up with. It leaves more room for hope.

Now there’s a New Year resolution I hadn’t even imagined: keep this inward gentleness. Leave more room for hope.

Yeah. I like that.

No choice but integrity

Isy / / humor, opinion, perspective, realpolitik

I’m a walking, talking, babbling, ceaseless argument for the fact that sexuality is not a choice. Integrity is — though that’s not my point here.

As a sometime lesbian and appalled heterosexual, I’m well aware that the combination of qualities I adore are hopelessly rare in either sex:

Men are disgusting… Women are unbearable… And sadly, as friend Lori remarked, “There is no third sex… And goats are too chatty.”

But that’s not the point either, though there’s plenty of material there — and some of it’s even original. This is about nonconsensual sexuality: the understanding that most of us don’t choose our orientation.

To what do I attribute my own unforeseen, profound internal shift?

Brain damage. Obviously.

The answers that sound less flippant are somewhat less convincing to me. However, CRPS’s extensive disruption of the endocrine system (that is, system of hormone-secreting organs) is already amply demonstrated. I think that’s it.

When I was more lesbian, and other people were being silly about that, I used to ask, “Why would I ‘choose’ to be something that has led several companies not to hire me, my own government to refuse to let me marry despite my being such a good citizen, and at least one individual to try to kill me in cold blood?”

Now, nobody gets silly about my orientation, but I ask myself the complementary questions. They are a lot more trivial, but also much more intransigent: “Why would I ‘choose’ to be relentlessly attracted to a sex as ill-mannered as chimps, as emotionally corrupt as usurers, and as stable as malaria?”

But hey, nobody’s tried to kill me for being straight; same-sex marriage is heading towards legality; and I’m unhireable for reasons that have nothing to do with my orientation. If I were less lonely and more selfless, I would take these changes as major victories. (As it is, it’s more like a no-score win.)

But, at New Year’s, I’ll toast those victories nonetheless, in the names of all my spiritual kindred who can be a bit safer, a bit freer, a bit better recognized for being good people, good spouses, and good citizens.

Hope to hear your voices, and see your glasses, raised with mine! Who knows, I might even run into my own better half in 2011. Whatever that person turns out to be.

Julian Assange and Swedish herrings (red)

Isy / / brainiac, critical thinking, realpolitik

The Interpol-ation of Julian Assange, the most widely-known of the Wikileaks founders, is a thoroughgoing exercise in logical fallacies and predatory smoke-screening.

First, the fallacies…

Straw man: The sex was consensual, though it may have gotten out of hand in one case. Charges weren’t brought until the two girlfriends found out about each other. They backed and forthed about whether they wanted to press charges or not. (Whether large men in dark suits paid them furtive visits is open to debate.)

Selective memory: Sweden has a shamefully high rate of unexamined, unpursued, unprosecuted cases of true rape — that is, forced sex, nonconsensual sex, sex with minors. Why pursue this sexual “irregularity” over condom use and infidelity?

Entrapment: Why give him direct permission to leave the country, at his explicit request, then send the Rottweilers after him?

These charges are not designed to bring someone down. They’re designed to tie him up. How else were they going to keep tabs on someone who can afford to dress like that without having a fixed address?

The real harm was not done by Assange. That imputes too much leverage to a self-infatuated ho with mad hash skillz.

The U.S. was hoist by its own sloppy petard. The State Department and the Military decided to share records, without sharing precautions. Let’s look at that, shall we?

The U.S. State Department, whose core purpose is the pursuit and use of social and political information, has an educational requirement involving alphabet soup behind your name; a staggering array of tests; and a final examination for *entry-level positions* that takes days to complete. The computers are subject to high levels of security, including an inability to even accept removable media.

The U.S. Military has three things it wants to know: What’s your name? Got a pulse? All your parts attached? And some people scrape by on the third try.

The military develops some of the fiercest computer security in the world, but guess what? Removable media! Oh, and all that State Department data … accessible by anybody with technical skills. Guess what the Army and Air Force specifically teach? Technical skills, maybe?

Well done.

So here’s the setup:

Tons, masses, heaps of socio-political data …
– collected on the basis of strict secrecy
– sometimes at terrible personal risk
– on people and issues who remain viable and valuable;

Gets passed by the State Dept. …
– from graduate-prepared, carefully-selected, highly-socialized personnel
– in an environment with lojack and hijack protections in place
– with no meaningful guarantees of its continued protection;

To the U.S. Military,
– an organization with minimal entry requirements
– and a post-adolescent social environment
– staffed by technically competent personnel.

Doesn’t that seem kind of silly to you? I realize most of us are not masters-prepared, much less possessed of a law degree, but pure common sense would make that unthinkable. Wouldn’t it?

Now, as for the leaky boy …

While being accused of being gay is a common put-down these days, in the U.S. Military this accusation could lead to someone losing his job, his housing situation, his social network, and his entire career path. Feel powerless, much?

They’re isolating, freezing, and tormenting an idiot kid over the staggering, monumental idiocy of the Military implementation of secrecy AND the State Department’s lack of due diligence.

They’re hunting down and marginalizing a tired, aging hack who misjudged the value of his own charms, over his willingness to advertise that kind of collective stupidity.

There were a whole lot of much brighter, much better-educated, far better-informed people who fucked up on a simply staggering scale before Assange or that kid ever got into this.

Where are the courts martial? Where are the heads that should be rolling out the state dept. doors and down the steps — bouncing on the way?

The real damage, sadly, is to the wider world. The US has lost credibitlity and leverage on the world stage to a degree unmatched by anything since the initial invasion of Iraq. That, folks, is the real tragedy: we have demonstrated that we are poisonous even to our most important friends.

How many more will die for _this_ mistake, eh?

B. C. E. takes on new meaning

Isy / / critical thinking, humor, loved ones, perspective, realpolitik, tasty words

Les was a chef before he was born. He helped with a BAADS Thanksgiving some years ago as a gesture of kindness, and found that — as he remarked to a friend helping out yesterday — “boy, these disabled people sure can cook!”

I laughed out loud, losing several points for coolness — but I regained them later with my Drunken Sweet Potatoes.

A weighty label like “disabled” sweeps everything before it. Literally, everything… before it. Most of us had full lives before we got a crippling illness or injury; we all have full lives now, even when much of that fullness has to do with how much harder simple things are.

But everything we did, or were, _before_ or _besides_ being [whatever] is still with us. Abled-bodied people rarely seem to think of that themselves: the term “disabled” makes our able-ness seem surprising.

Back in the late 1980’s, the socially-preferred term was moving from “disabled” to “handicapped”. This explanation from a kindly woman explained why: “It’s not correct to say I’m dis-abled, because I’m _able_ to do many different things. But I have to deal with added burdens to get the same things done that a normal person does, so I’m _handicapped_.”

Horses carry extra weight in a race, golfers get extra points on their score, and racers get penalties added to their times to handicap them. Though life isn’t a sport I entered with any thought of competition (and that’s where the analogy falls down), it’s true that I do carry a burden which makes it harder to complete the same tasks that anyone does.

But I can still cook one heck of a pan of Drunken Sweet Potatoes. Not everyone is, ahem, able to do that.

I’m definitely handicapped. I’m not sure I’m disabled. I can still write, and often remain coherent through a whole paragraph. That’s an ability!

B. C. E. — in my case, that means Before Crippling Event — I could play the flute pretty well, too. I can’t even hold the darn thing for more than a few seconds, now; the handicap there is too great to overcome.

Sadly, it’s still true that — whatever we call it — this is a nasty, harsh reality which everyone handles poorly sooner or later; the terms will continue to revolve as we try to keep from getting too stuck in our collective thinking.

As the next decade turns, I expect the terminology to change again. And then again a decade after that. And again and again, as people age and grow and try to loosen up their thinking. Rock on, I say! — We could all use a little more change.

Extreme Moderation: an Olympic challenge

Isy / / humor, perspective, tasty words, what works

I got on the wrong train today. Got off 15 minutes later – was already 15 minutes late, so now it’s pushing an hour.

Ok, so the pain is up lately, not much sleep for a week, lot going on, etc. etc. The fact is, that’s how my life is: pain, survival, and figuring out how to handle normal issues under abnormal circumstances — this is just life.

I’m paying a lot of attention lately to navigating & negotiating these realities without succumbing to the inherent drama. One can have enough of drama, however seductive & compelling it is.

The fact that pain, survival and abnormal circumstances make the most thrilling narratives doesn’t make this an easy task. But who needs easy? It’s boring.

Y’know, I never thought of it that way before….

Here’s a new sport: Extreme Moderation — staying on top of my own responses and managing intelligently when my body plonks or my brain goes AWOL. What an interesting challenge for a recovering adrenaline junkie.

I’ve often said that, when you’re skirting Paradox, you’re close to naked Truth. So I think I’m onto something.

File-sharing ~= sex, fecal transplants, and bacterial cognition

Isy / / brainiac, humor, nature, science, studies

This is the richest, most fascinating article I’ve read about life, the biosphere and everything:

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/bacteria-r-us-23628/

Now that’s a writer with ADD, putting all that into one contiguous piece — but also she’s got one hell of a gift, to make it so coherent and approachable. I want to be like Valerie when I grow up!

I’m completely blown away. I’m going to go for a bus ride so I can explain to the air how thrilling bacteria are. After all, I have to take the bus ride anyway, so I might as well scare people off.

I am in paroxysms of bio-geek delight!

On weighing the evidence

Isy / / critical thinking, loved ones, perspective, sheeple

My friend J’s husband called her from work today with the immortal words, “I’ve met someone else.” If he had been able to pick a worse time in life to tell her — say, when she was hooked up to chemotherapy or had just been knocked over and broken her spine — I suspect he would have. (I’d like to think I’m joking.)

I recently had another opportunity of my own to mull over the impact of emotional deceit and betrayal, but after the initial surprise I found those reflections boring.

Instead, I turned to thinking about getting so attached to my hopes and errors that it becomes almost impossible to look at the evidence and admit I was wrong. I _was_ misled, but also, for a year, I remained more attached to my erroneous assumptions than to the weight of the evidence.

So I’m reminded of the importance of being ready to notice, and own up, when I’m likely to be wrong. What someone tells you isn’t evidence, but what they do — or fail to do — certainly is. Sooner or later, you have to go with the evidence.

J and her husband had years of shared struggles, victories, and all the usual pushme-pullyou dramas and traumas that go with two different people sharing their lives.

There were times when, on the basis of the evidence, I told her she should leave. Maybe she should have, for the sake of her own soul. But she didn’t, and her husband would almost always call when we were talking, because whether they were getting along or not, he’d still call her every hour throughout the day and then ring off with a real, “I love you.”

So what do you do when the evidence itself is so confused?

Very few people wind up in solid marriages. Both my brothers did, so I sometimes think that I should, too. But I’m beginning to believe, down to my soul, that nobody will have my back that devotedly — and maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t come first to anyone, nor put anyone first, myself. Becoming that attached to something that’s so very rare in reality does seem to hinder one’s ability to see the evidence, and destroys the ability to admit that one is wrong.

I have congenital trouble with admitting that my perceptions are wrong in the first place. Perhaps I should just work on that.