She changes everything she touches

Moving to LJ, I think

2005-11-08T00:29:00.000-05:00

I'm not without some ambivalence about it, but I seem to be preparing to move to LiveJournal instead of blogger. I still really like blogger. But I want to be able to write friends-only stuff sometimes and I want tags. So let's see how this goes, shall we?

If you want to be on my friends list on the new LJ and I missed you, send me an email or leave a comment. If you have me in your LJ friends list under my old username, could you switch/add "syncretistfool"?

Sorry for some administrative hassle. Hopefully the result will be more interesting /more frequent content. We shall see.

Another silly quiz

2005-10-31T20:54:00.000-05:00

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	7.8
Mind:	7.8
Body:	6.1
Spirit:	8.8
Friends/Family:	5.9
Love:	9.1
Finance:	7.8
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

babies babies EVERYWHERE!!!

2005-10-26T22:41:00.000-04:00

We have officially arrived at that stage of our lives in which our friends are having kids, a LOT. To wit, in the past 2 months:

Hannah Kelso Dunn, 8/22/05

Mose Vigoda Millburn, 9/22/05

Peter Terran Labana Drake, 10/19/05

Guinevere Evelyn Menyuk, 10/24/05

Ingrid Laurel Johnson, 10/26/05

Congratulations to lots of delighted and exhausted parents and siblings!
Welcome to new small people!

(Whoever's next, can you try and hold out until 11/23? I think 3 Scorpios this year are plenty.)

A million thank you's

2005-09-17T01:44:00.000-04:00

We are working on thank you cards for the wedding and honeymoon. It's a big job. We're nowhere near done. But it's amazing how much we have to be grateful for, and you just can't complain about that.

A couple of you heard me say this: the wedding was a seriously humbling experience for me. I spent months doing everything within my power to make sure all the details would be taken care of, and then we got there the day before and saw all the things we HADN'T managed to take care of, and it was terrifying. Suddenly it's not humanly possible to be in control anymore, and whatever is going to happen, will happen. It's a great big "trust fall" exercise. I remember feeling very exposed -- everyone's about to show up and see the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I just have to let go and let them see.

And then it just came together. People started jumping in and dealing with all those loose ends for us, frequently without our even knowing it. The folks we had asked to help did amazing jobs and a whole lot of folks we hadn't asked did too. By breakfast time on the day of the ceremony, I was able to just pay attention to being a bride and let all the other stuff happen without me. When I was sitting alone, ready, waiting for Twink to come tell me it's time for the procession, I cried, able to just sit there and be overwhelmed with how happy I was. And a huge part of that was gratitude that this wonderful crowd of friends and family had pulled together and given us the gift of this day.

It was a hell of a gift. It was a great big fabulous party and it will always be one of the best days of my life. Looking at the pictures makes me all giddy all over again. (And yes, photos will be online soon...)

When I was in the receiving line after the ceremony, hugging everyone, I remember feeling kind of silly that the only words I seemed to be able to come up with were "Thank you." If you thought to wonder whether other people got more words out of me than you did -- probably not. It's not that there weren't lots of other things to be said. But I was so full of "Thank you" I just couldn't think of anything else.

NEVER check your luggage.

2005-09-16T13:18:00.000-04:00

Jesus Christ.

8/26 My big backpacking pack with all my clothing in it was lost by Northwest Airlines on the way home from Vancouver. So was M's bag. We filed a report at the airport.

8/29 M's bag was returned.

8/29 through 9/6 M and I called daily to Northwest's baggage office at the Albany Airport, where we had been told to call, to follow up about my bag. The automatic "check status" phone line and website unhelpfully reported that my bag had arrived in Albany and I would be contacted to arrange delivery. We got an answering machine every time, left messages with no response.

9/7 I finally found an 800 number for national Northwest "luggage irregularities." I was told that the case for both bags was closed when M's bag was found, and a message would be sent back to Albany to reopen the case. I called Albany, miraculously finally spoke to a human, and played a couple rounds of "The national office told you WE would re-open it? But they're the ones who have to do that!" Eventually I was told the woman in Albany would call me back the next day.

9/8 nada

9/9 I called Albany back. Case had not been re-opened yet. They managed to do it, and told me to call back in a few days now that they were looking for the bag, to find out if they had any luck.

9/13 I called Albany back. No luck. I asked if they would send me a claim form, which one is supposed to do after the bag is missing 5 days. (It's not available online or anything, they have to give you one.) I was told I had to wait until the case had been *reopened* for 5 business days. I called the national 800 number back to ask if they knew anything about my bag that Albany didn't know. They didn't, but at least they emailed me a claim form.

9/14 and 9/15 I spent several hours filling out their claim form with exhaustive inventory of the bag and supporting documentation. 9/15 at lunchtime I faxed it all back as I was directed to do.

9/16 I called back to the 800 number at lunchtime to confirm that they had received my fax. THEY COULD NOT DO THAT BECAUSE THE PILE OF INCOMING CLAIMS IS TOO BIG for them to be arsed to look through. I was told to call back on Wednesday to find out if it came through yet. I decided to push and ask for a manager, wanting someone to take responsibility for making sure this gets followed up on. The manager had no such power. I asked that someone call *me* back when the claim is entered. She said she would put that request on my record in the computer, but she couldn't promise it would happen. That's the best she could do. I had some words to say about how this system is not working. But I couldn't bring myself to really rip her a new one, because she sounded so miserable. Poor woman is taking shit for this company all day long.

Oh, and I hear NWA declared bankruptcy this week.

Anyone want to place a bet on whether I get anything back from them?

Yes, they were doing it on purpose.

2005-09-13T00:29:00.000-04:00

I'm mostly avoiding wallowing in Katrina news, but damn.

Just read a first-person account by a couple EMT's who were in New Orleans for a conference when Katrina hit. I hope everyone and his brother reads this.

> As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across
> the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began
> firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in
> various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us
> inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in
> conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander
> and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were
> no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
>
> We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as
> there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the
> West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no
> Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and
> black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not
> getting out of New Orleans.

The good news (because I need some right about now) is that this account is also full of everyday people getting together and taking care of each other, despite the "relief" operation's best efforts.

Go read the full article.

Marty on Zipporah

2005-09-01T15:20:00.000-04:00

Marty McConnell and her blog are well worth checking out. If you're in NYC on a Monday night, go visit Bar 13, even if you don't think you like poetry that much. This scene is definitely best experienced live.

This most recent poem on the blog is really striking to me. Mir, you should put "Miriam Cast Out" online so I can link to it here. I am now aware of 2 poems imagining Moses through the eyes of women in his life. It's a pretty different view than most of what we get, to say the least.

The writing exercise this came from, apparently:
"write a poem of instruction or command, telling someone specific how to forget you."

Sunburn from hell.

2005-09-01T12:08:00.000-04:00

First off: The wedding and the honeymoon were both absolutely wonderful. We got back Friday. I will have more to say about that stuff, and hopefully photos online before long. In general life is very very good.

But what I really need to talk about right now is the tremendously disturbing thing that is happening to my shins.

Last Thursday, our last day in British Columbia, we went out kayaking on the edge of Howe Sound and the Squamish River estuary. It was the first time any of us had been in a kayak, and we were all surprised by how much we enjoyed it. Because we were beginners, the rental place gave us "sit on top" kayaks, because they're nearly impossible to capsize and if you do, you're not stuck inside anything. This all worked out wonderfully, except that my fishbelly-pale legs were out on the water, exposed to the sun for 3.5 hours. And no, I was not wearing sunblock.

The best I can say in my own defense on this point is that I'd had ridiculously good luck the entire rest of the trip. I didn't wear sunblock the whole time, was outside quite a bit, should have gotten mild burns several times by my usual experience, but didn't. So I was developing some kind of delusion about how the sun must not burn as much when you're this far north. And I had been wearing long pants over a bathing suit, and the weather got warmer than I expected, and I took the pants off, and we didn't have the sunblock with us, and I decided not to care. One of those decisions you don't even really think about. Except I think from now on I'll think about it.

My shins are really not OK. I have serious second-degree burns on the entirety of both shins. I had never imagined that such a thing could happen. I am not going to talk about what they look like. Blisters are involved, and bandages. It hurts, and not like a sunburn. Standing up and walking hurt a lot. My ankles are swollen. The doctor gave me Silvadene and Vicodin, and a note saying I should keep my feet up at work. I have stayed home from work 2.5 days this week so far. M & R are fetching things for me and doing all the work at home while I sit in a recliner with my feet up. This is NOT what I was planning to do when I got back from vacation!!

So, yeah, I feel pretty dumb.
And crispy.
Ow.

Belly Tales

2005-08-06T09:04:00.000-04:00

Hooray! My friend the student midwife has a blog about midwifery, which she has been keeping for a while but just started telling people about. It rocks!!

In particular, I love this post about another way to look at baby showers.

Congratulations, guys.

2005-07-31T08:50:00.000-04:00

I was privileged to be there yesterday when two friends, M & D, tied the knot. They chose not to get married, for a variety of reasons, even though they legally could have. But they got their family and friends together and had a ceremony on a mountaintop to celebrate their relationship, and it was completely their own, and very cool. No officiant, lots of participation from family and friends. And yes, they really did tie a knot.

I was especially glad that they chose to speak openly in their ceremony about how their relationship has been affected by D's experience with breast cancer. She was diagnosed at 26, with no family history, no risk factors, no reason to believe this would ever happen to her. She has been in remission for 5 1/2 years and is doing very well, but she has been face to face with mortality in a way relatively few people our age have been.

As it happens, one of her big supports through this process was a man who was also going through a life-threatening illness that started at a young age -- he was diagnosed with HIV at 21 years old, 26 years ago I think. He got up with D in the ceremony and talked a little about how it changes you, to live for a while as if you don't have much time, and then realize you might have more time after all, and start to make long term plans again...

I was grateful that they did this on several levels. It gave me a new understanding and respect for what D has experienced (it was before I knew her), for the bond between my friends, and for what this celebration means to them. And also, talking about cancer and HIV on equal footing this way was just one more small but real step towards breaking down the stigma around HIV and AIDS. Everyone present yesterday got a chance to see this man through D's eyes: a fellow survivor, a source of strength, and a much-loved friend. Not an unknown person with a scary disease that people assume you usually get by doing something you weren't supposed to do. It was only one small part of the day, just a couple minutes. But this is the kind of thing that can change the way people think.

Good day with good people. May they have many good years together.

What a singing there will be when I get home

2005-07-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

That's the title of Helen Schneyer's last recording, which will come out next month. I just found out yesterday that she died on July 16. Her obit in the Washington Post gives a basic bio; the Mudcat thread tells much more, through all the tributes of her friends.

She was one of those people whose presence is just huge, and love-inspiring. She always wore all white, with long white hair, and a metric ton of silver and turquoise jewelry. And I haven't met anyone who heard her sing who hadn't been moved to tears by it.

Mostly what I know of Helen, I know through her huge influence on my Mom. The songs Mom most loves to sing are the ones she learned from Helen. When she sings those songs she sings them with every cell in her body, which is the way Helen sang. For that alone I am tremendously grateful.

As Garrison Keillor put it, when Helen sang on Prairie Home Companion, "A lot of agnostics, atheists and people of no particular religions sang about the hope of heaven for the redeemed. It was quite amazing for her to perform." It's probably largely her fault that I love singing a certain number of spirituals and Baptist hymns. It's hard to explain, but it's beautiful.

I wish I had more chance to know her.
Rest easy, Helen.

Yum.

2005-07-23T10:18:00.000-04:00

Breakfast this morning: yogurt with fresh local blueberries and black raspberries. Life doesn't get much better than that. Happy summer. I love my CSA.

A change of plans

2005-07-19T17:02:00.000-04:00

Some of you have been hearing from us for a while that when we start trying for a baby, we have been planning that I would be the first one to get pregnant, and Miriam would have her turn at carrying a baby a couple years later. This past weekend we decided to switch. Which is kind of a big change.

The basic reasoning behind the change is job-related. If I got pregnant anytime soon, I would have to go back to work pretty quickly for us to make ends meet. Miriam, on the other hand, has the power to make money from home as a freelance writer. It has been her plan for a while, that she would use that to be able to stay home with a baby after she has one. She's feeling ready to do it sooner, and if I wait til Robin is done with grad school, there's a pretty good chance that I can have a turn to stay home with a baby too. Which would be really nice.

But of course there is more to a decision like this than just that. We had a bunch of reasons for me to go first. That stupid doctor who got me worrying I might have trouble getting pregnant, and my anxiety to resolve that question, probably played a bigger role in it than they deserved. And Mir had wanted to stay at her job longer and develop her skills there more thoroughly before making her next career move. And especially when we thought my mom had Alzheimer's, we wanted her and her grandbaby to get the most possible chance to know each other, as soon as possible. And Mir kind of wanted to go second, for her own reasons... And I really wanted to go first. A lot.

I have been on preparation-for-baby mode for pretty much all of this year. I went off the Pill in December and started taking my temperature every morning and charting my cycles to find out if I was ovulating. I have been taking vitamins, and taking strange measures to block out light from my bedroom at night because that's supposed to promote healthy cycles. I have been exercising for several reasons, but not least because I wanted to be in shape for a pregnancy. I have been going out of my way to spend time with the babies of friends. You could say I've had a lot of energy to redirect -- we were pretty much all three ready to get going on the having kids by last Fall, and we've been assuming since then that I would be going first. But we decided we wanted to get the wedding part done before we started trying. So this stuff was what I was doing instead. :-)

Mir and Robin never would have thought to question that I should go first, I think, because it had become so solidly the plan. And to be honest, if they had brought it up, I probably would have flipped. I had so much of my brain wrapped up in getting ready to be pregnant, if I felt like they were trying to take that away from me it would have been bad news. But as it happened... Mir gave herself a vacation for her birthday. She had a long weekend at home first, and then a week away by herself on a writing retreat. She was relaxed, and happy. And I found myself thinking that I would absolutely love to be able to give her the chance to be like that more of the time, sooner than we have been planning on. And I realized that might be in our power to do, if she had the first baby. I talked with Robin about it while she was away on her retreat, and once I figured out I would be OK with the switch if we all decided that made the most sense, I brought it up with Mir when she got home. And then we took a while to think it through... and it really seems to make a lot more sense this way. And it's actually OK with me, which I might not have been able to imagine a couple months ago.

More than that. I feel GOOD about it. Mir keeps being surprised, I think, that I seem as happy as I am with this. I definitely did have to go through some feelings of loss about it, and that may not be over yet. But I think without being aware of it I had gotten pretty self-centered about the whole baby business. I was thinking about my fertility and me being pregnant and me having a baby. And of course my family being there too... but in retrospect it feels like it was too much just about me. In contrast, I'm now looking at a plan where I get to go through the whole process with Miriam and be the best support for her that I know how to be, and she will get to spend some time focusing on home instead of work, and it's about US, together. So much better.

And as a side benefit, the next time I go off the Pill, I think I will just stop taking pills and see what happens. Not so much with the charts and the anxious preparation. I think that might very well turn out to be more fun.

No no no no no.

2005-07-15T23:14:00.000-04:00

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was, when my friend in midwife school told me that student doctors and student midwives in the US are no longer taught how to deliver vaginal breech births. It is assumed from the start that a diagnosed breech should be delivered by caesarian. And if you have an undiagnosed breech, they'll rush you to an emergency caesarian if they have time, and if they don't -- you may well be in a dangerous situation, because there may not be anyone around who knows how to handle this. Even though someone who has been taught the appropriate skills could handle it just fine.

Since she won't get it in school, my friend is planning to travel somewhere else where she can learn how to do it -- but even if she gets enough practice to feel confident, she probably won't be able to get malpractice insurance without promising she'll require a caesarian for breeches. There are no words for how wrong that is.

Lots of research to do about the midwives and doctors in this area. I have heard there are a lot of good resources out there, and separately I've heard that things are a mess. Except for the whole travelling to Tennessee bit, The Farm is sounding better all the time.

Friends with interesting things to say

2005-07-15T22:14:00.000-04:00

Quinn on sex, love, kids, and oxytocin: more lab notes on the necessarily subjective research topic of how hormones affect our thinking, desires, identity...

Kif on cachexia: what happens when you're not eating and it's NOT because you're obsessed with losing weight. You're right, Kif, I've known other folks who have this but I never had a separate word for it, and it's a very good thing to have a separate word for.

Ada on BOUNCING! That looks like so much fun. Do they let big kids go on that ride?

Random computer generated thingy #853

2005-07-05T19:20:00.000-04:00

Found on A's LJ, which I would link to if it weren't all locked and stuff. Finally got back in touch with A. Hooray for that.
Meanwhile I am still not dead. Today I made a decision about a caterer and bought a strapless bra; tomorrow my mother and I are going for a dress fitting. I think I must be getting married soon.

I am The Empress

The Empress can refer to any aspect of Motherhood. She can be an individual mother, but as a major arcana card, she also goes beyond the specifics of mothering to its essence - the creation of life and its sustenance through loving care and attention. The Empress can also represent lavish abundance of all kinds. She offers a cornucopia of delights, especially those of the senses - food, pleasure and beauty. She can suggest material reward, but only with the understanding that riches go with a generous and open spirit. The Empress asks you to embrace the principle of life and enjoy its bountiful goodness.

For a full description of your card and other goodies, please visit LearnTarot.com

What tarot card are you? Enter your birthdate.

Crash

2005-05-18T18:28:00.000-04:00

Saw the movie Crash last night.  Went to sleep with it in my head, woke up before my alarm still going over it, had to drag my head out of it when I got to work.  It is not an easy movie to watch, but it's beautifully done.

I was pretty skeptical when I heard this was a movie "about racism."  Tough to make that sound anything but pedantic.  But this movie is not pedantic, or simple in any way.  And while it's not a feel-good movie with a happy ending, it does not come out to be a tragedy either.  Some of the story threads within it are tragic.  The stakes are high enough that pretty much everything that doesn't turn out to be a tragedy feels like a miraculous escape.  But, well, that's not entirely unlike life.

It brought me near tears.  Not tears of sadness, really.  Once, I nearly cried with relief.  But mostly what I was feeling was just recognition. 

Go see it.

In which I am a geek about reproductive health

2005-05-15T13:45:00.000-04:00

So I've been learning about Fertility Awareness. It's a way women can tell if/when they ovulate, when in your cycle you might be fertile, when you're definitely not, etc. You take your temperature first thing in the morning every day, and watch the changes in your cervical fluid (not as gross or difficult as one might initially think) and keep a chart of that stuff. People use it for birth control, or when they're trying to get pregnant, or to help diagnose and monitor various problems with hormonal cycles and the reproductive system.

I got interested in this because a couple years ago a doctor told me I might have trouble getting pregnant. This doctor was not one I particularly liked or respected, so I have not been worrying overmuch about what he said. But I'm aware of it. And if there were anything I could do to increase the chances that I won't have a problem, I would want to do that. So on good advice from a friend, I got off the Pill well in advance of when I might start trying to get pregnant, and I'm using the charting to get a sense of what's going on with my cycles.

Of course, one of the things I found out is that it's not at all unusual for it to take MONTHS to get back to normal after you come off the Pill. So I don't have a lot of interpretation from my data yet, because everything could just be residual effects of the Pill that will even themselves out. But it's empowering already, because I can come up with better questions to ask my new (way better!) doctor, and I don't feel like the whole thing is just out of my hands.

And the particularly cool thing is that if you do find out something's not working right, there are things you can do about it. Apparently sleeping in complete darkness can cause people to start ovulating when they haven't been, regularize their cycles, etc. And there are diet changes and nutritional supplements and other stuff that can be helpful... and you can TELL whether whatever you try is making a difference or not because you can see it on your charts.

Right now I'm working on figuring out how to make my bedroom totally dark -- we get a lot of light from the street and the firehouse next door. Anybody have any experience/advice with this?

Still here.

2005-05-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

Yeesh, it's been a month? My brain has been very full and time is flying. I'm doing OK though, didn't disappear into a depressed funk or anything. Just busy.

Strange news this week: the doctor now says he does not think Mom has Alzheimer's, or any degenerative neurological disease. The trick is that he doesn't have any clue what the problem actually is. No dispute that something's not working right, but what is it?

On one hand this is a relief, because we don't have to look at what's happening to all those folks who do have Alzheimer's and prepare ourselves to go through THAT. But on the other hand, her support group and all the connections she's made with people in Alzheimer's services are suddenly not there for her in the same way, and she's still having all the same problems she was before. And we just don't know WHAT to prepare ourselves for at all.

Next step, talk to some different doctors. And we just keep going one day at a time.

2005-04-03T23:18:00.000-04:00

Someone made a map of who slept with who at a high school. Very interesting. And not exactly what they expected to find. Some bits from the article:

"The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners... But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain."

Which has implications for STD prevention:

In adult populations, in which there are cores of sexually active people who are the main conduits of disease, you can focus education and other efforts to this select group.

Hmm, that sounds familiar... Oh, I know -- that's the only kind of HIV prevention education the CDC will approve funding for! The kind that's targeted to a small core of high-risk individuals.

But in the case of adolescents, “there aren’t any hubs to target, so you have to focus on broad-based interventions,” Moody said. “You can’t just focus on a small group.”

Oh, and this is somebody's random art project, that I think is pretty cool.

Not getting depressed, again

2005-03-31T23:19:00.000-05:00

The bloody Internet keeps eating my brain. For the past couple evenings I have opened up my computer with the intention to post things here, but I think, well, I'll just browse a little first and see what's going on, and then the next thing I know I'm out of time or I can't remember what I was going to say. Has anybody figured out some way to prevent having your brain eaten like this when you browse? I've tried lots of garlic and cayenne, but they don't seem to help.

Yesterday and today have perhaps been the beginning of spring-like weather around here. It has been 50-ish with warm sunshine, and a nice breeze that doesn't make you chilly as long as you've got a jacket on. But strangely, I'm reacting to this in a very mixed way. I'm glad that it's not quite so cold. But driving along the Hudson River on my way to work this morning, everything was looking naked without its snow cover, and all mushy, and I didn't feel ready for it. Imagining things getting greener was worse. It's not time for that yet, in my head. I don't need it to look January-white, but the early-March dirty half-melted snow all over everything was just about right.

This is as unusual for me as it is for most people. Usually I am overjoyed at every sign of spring. That itself may be part of what's getting to me: if it's spring, I should be excited, but I'm too stressed to be excited, and I don't want spring to leave me behind, so it should wait. If it were warmer, that should be relaxing, but I can't relax, so I'd prefer that the weather stay cool. I would feel all exposed in spring clothes -- I want to hide inside my boots and layers and leather jacket. Spring is for spring cleaning and starting gardens and spending time outdoors and getting back to 99 different projects with the house and yard, and I don't feel ready for any of that.

I know enough by now to know, these reactions are signals I need to keep an eye on. I could get depressed right about now. I've been feeling it particularly since they told us about the increase in caseloads at work last week. I have been working really hard to get on top of the work I've been doing, and I've been getting somewhere. I was just getting to the point where things might have just gone smoothly for a while, and I might have been able to relax a little at work. But now it's just going to keep getting harder, for the forseeable future. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. And everything outside of work feels overwhelming too. I was juggling everything and feeling good about it... but as of this most recent spike in the stress level, it seems that at least part of my brain has decided it is no longer obliged to maintain a positive attitude about anything at all.

I hate being depressed. I have had enough of it to last a lifetime. It feels ironic that what I need to do is to kick myself into even higher gear, to make sure that the exercise and the eating right and the getting enough sleep all make it into the schedule on top of everything else (because of course those things are the first to go). But I will do it, and whatever else I need to do to stay out of the hole. I'm still at the point now where I have a choice about whether I keep going down or not. I have learned from experience that taking care of myself at this point can break the spiral, so that's what I need to do.

This all looks so overwrought and teenagerish when I step back from it. This is not what it's like to be in my head all the time, mostly I'm just doing what I'm doing. But even when it's subtle, depression is not something I want to mess with. So I am resisting the urge to change my mind and not publish this. Even though I probably can "just deal with it" in my own head this time, I would rather live in a world where people feel able to talk about mental health more.

Today on my lunch break I took a walk outside. There is a highway that separates downtown Albany from the Hudson, but there's a footbridge that goes over the highway to a park on the near bank of the river. I went over the bridge, and stood for a while looking at the water, thinking about how I didn't want spring yet, but the sun was on my back. After a while, I started to think how maybe I could imagine, if the sun were a little warmer, and there were soft green grass here, I might lie down on the grass and rest. OK, I guess I could be ready for that.

An appropriate Saturday

2005-03-26T17:10:00.000-05:00

1. Slept late.

2. It's gorgeous out.

3. We just got new pots and pans. They do not have non-stick coatings. The old pots and pans with the scratched-up coming-off-in-the-food non-stick coatings are going in the garbage now.

4. We have got the ingredients on hand to attempt to make this cheesecake for the first time. M & R had it at a party recently and said it was AWESOME.

5. A cutie is coming to visit us tonight, so her folks can get an undisturbed night's sleep for once. (And so we get to play with her!)

Also, strangely enough, tomorrow is Easter already. I'm having trouble caring about coloring eggs, and I don't even want chocolate. Dad is coming over and making a ham, and that's fine. Beyond that, I think I'll go outside and enjoy the sun and find some crocuses somewhere, and ignore the rest.

bits & pieces

2005-03-24T23:18:00.000-05:00

Lots happening this week. The Powers That Be decided that the program I work for needs to increase caseloads, fast -- within 90 days I will have 20 or 21 cases instead of the 12 I currently have. Mind you, "cases" are families, not individuals... Yikes. This is gonna be interesting.

Found a cool thing: Seed Wiki will host a wiki for you if, like me, you are geeky enough to know what to do with one but not geeky enough to know how to host your own. At our house we're considering going over to using a wiki to keep track of household business. Because we are starting to think in hypertext. Uh oh.

Best for last: yesterday was TEN YEARS that M and I have been together. We celebrated by going out for gourmet locally-grown food and then listening to the out of range album by ani difranco, which was the soundtrack for that evening 10 years ago. Very good fun. And wow -- I'm not used to having had things in my life that long. We have been through a lot. I am so lucky.

We need an army of guerrilla sex-ed teachers

2005-03-22T20:47:00.000-05:00

It seems that virginity pledges are not working out the way their proponents had hoped. According to a recently published study, "pledgers" have the same rate of STDs as their non-pledging peers, they are less likely to use protection when they have sex, they are less likely to go to the doctor and get treated for the infections they do get, and they are very likely to replace vaginal intercourse with other kinds of sex that are also risky. For example: male "pledgers" are 4 times more likely than their non-pledging peers to be having anal sex. Which is fine, I hope they have a great time, but I sure as hell hope they're using those condoms nobody has taught them how to use!

This is all a very funny joke on the uptight Christians until I remember how much funding the US federal government is putting into this kind of program, and how much they're NOT funding actual sex education. How many kids are going to get HIV while "saving their virginity for marriage" before we get the idea that kids need real information?

Meanwhile, I have a co-worker who teaches teenage girls in jails about how to not get HIV. And she tells me that said teenage girls have some pretty interesting ideas about how bodies work. Recently the girls in her class told her that (as everyone knows, they said) "booty sex will give you more junk in the trunk in 4 days and a wake-up." Translation: if you have anal sex, you will have bigger, sexier butt-cheeks by the morning of the fifth day afterward. They had trouble believing her when she told them it wasn't so.

Big kids learn from little kids

2005-03-20T22:25:00.000-05:00

I was web-browsing pretty much at random when the phrase "teaching children emotional literacy" caught my eye. I'm working with some kids who are having significant trouble with this. So now I'm wondering again whether the blue states could just join Canada, because once again they have got the cool stuff.

Roots of Empathy is a program that reduces bullying in schools and helps kids learn to understand emotions by bringing babies and their parents into classrooms and asking the kids to figure out what the baby is experiencing and what it needs. Remind me, again, why our school system has kids spending time always and only with kids exactly their own age?

Checking out del.icio.us

2005-03-20T11:39:00.000-05:00

I have been distracted, these past couple of days, by del.icio.us. I've been seeing references to it and finally decided to check it out. You geeks out there who have already been there and done that can skip this -- but for the rest of us this is worth talking about. It's dead simple, really, but way more powerful than it looks at first.

What it's useful for:
- Place to keep your bookmarks on the web, so you can get to them from any computer.
- Sorting your bookmarks in whatever way you want, by giving them tag-words you make up. Each link can have as many different tags as you want, and you can filter for one tag or a combination of tags. Your account page has a list of tag-links along the side so you can get at things easily.
- Finding out what other people are bookmarking. You can see everyone's bookmarks with a particular tag, or see who else links to the same site you do and then see what else they link to. If you find someone who frequently bookmarks stuff that's interesting to you (generally or under a particular tag), you can subscribe to their links and automatically find out what they're looking at.

I'm trying not to spend all my time mucking about with this, so del.icio.us/becca doesn't have a ton of stuff on it yet. But I will definitely be using this. Friends, if you're there too, let me know where I can find your page?

Fluorescent lights

2005-03-15T17:54:00.000-05:00

Ever since environmentalists have started promoting how energy-efficient their compact fluorescent light bulbs are, I have been wishing fervently that they would all go to hell. I am one of those people (apparently 1/3 of the human population) who is sensitive to the flicker of fluorescent lights. I don't have it as bad as some -- I don't get migraines from it -- but I'm uncomfortable. My anxiety level is higher, my concentration is not as good, and I feel like it will be physically impossible for me to relax until that light is off or I leave the room.

The particularly challenging bit is that my household is pretty hard-core in trying to do all the stuff we can to reduce our environmental impact, make things energy efficient, etc. For the most part I am fully on board with this. But when we get around to light bulbs, we have trouble. They want to replace as many light bulbs as possible with compact fluorescents. I have been saying, basically, over my dead body.

Because I want peace in my household, I have been doing research. I figured maybe I'd find a solution to my problem, maybe I'd find scientific data to back up my "hell no." Either would be better than nothing. What I've got so far seems to be a little of both. It's also longish and probably boring, unless you have reason to obsess about this like I do. Proceed at your own risk.

There seems to be agreement out there that the older fluorescents -- the ones that hum, visibly flicker, and give dead, cold light -- are not good for people. There are studies showing significantly improved performance in school children in classrooms with full-spectrum light versus cool white fluorescent, and parallel studies for workplaces. On a hopeful note, these studies seem to agree that mixing fluorescent light with natural sunlight or incandescent (non-flickering) light can ameliorate some of the unpleasantness, or even block out the flicker effect.

Everybody including the people selling fluorescent lights will admit to these problems, because they want to tell you that their new improved CF (compact fluorescent) bulb is better than that. I can't count the number of kinds of them we have ordered by mail, just to try, just in case. None of them has yet been better than barely tolerable for me.

There seem to be several different variables to play with when making new improved CF bulbs. "Color temperature" is the color of the light that is emitted. The color rendering index (CRI) of a lamp rates its ability to render an object's true color when compared to sunlight, on a scale of 0 (bad) to 100 (good). Full spectrum fluorescents can apparently reduce a lot of the ill effects caused by "cool white" fluorescents -- but the full spectrum bulbs we've tried still haven't been pleasant to be around.

I also found out today about another different variable: the difference between magnetic and electronic ballast. This determines how fast the flicker is. Older fluorescents have magnetic ballast and flicker at about 60 cycles per second. Electronic ballast makes the flicker a lot faster, so it's supposedly way too fast for a human to perceive at all. Gaiam (trying to sell their light bulbs) says this completely addresses the problems usually caused by fluorescent light. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (not trying to sell anything) says that switching to electronic ballast has reduced the number of complaints by 50%. Gaiam also lost some points with me because when I looked at specific bulbs on their site, there was no way to tell if they use electronic ballast or not, or how the bulb rated for color temperature or rendering, even though they had just told me I should be looking for those things. Does anyone know how you can tell, looking at a bulb, which kind of ballast it has?

This information may be moderately helpful to me. I can probably deal with mixing some CF with some incandescent bulbs, in rooms where more than one bulb is usually on. And this one bulb (the "warm glow" one) that M just bought that doesn't seem to be so bad -- maybe that's the difference that the ballast makes? I want to figure out how to confirm that. I still don't want to go out and buy a ton of them, because I'm afraid my not minding it might not last. But it's something to mess around with, anyway.

Meanwhile, I found some other interesting stuff along the way:

This guy is concerned that LED displays (like this here laptop monitor I'm using) may have similar health effects to fluorescent light. Boy am I lucky I haven't had a problem with that so far.

Fluorescents, like sunlight, suppress the production of the hormone melatonin. Usually we make it at night while we sleep. Too much melatonin can cause depression, such as in Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is why people use bright fluorescents to treat SAD. On the other hand, melatonin also suppresses the growth of cancer cells, especially estrogen-sensitive ones. So women who work night shift under fluorescent lights have less melatonin and a higher risk of breast cancer.

Connection between agoraphobia and fluorescent light sensitivity?
"Women who suffer from agoraphobia (a fear of open or public places) developed a faster heart rate and abnormal visual effects when exposed to fluorescent lighting. The non- agoraphobic women exposed to fluorescent light reported more miscellaneous symptoms while under the fluorescent lights." (Psychological Medicine 20(3)591-596, August 1990)

"You are the man."

2005-03-13T12:39:00.000-05:00

Those were the first words out of the guy's mouth when he was introduced to Robin this morning. He's the adult son of the woman who was meeting with us, at the place we're getting married this summer. He had apparently heard about the man and two women who were all marrying each other, and decided on the spot that that guy is his hero. He was much more straightforward about it than most. We got a very good laugh out of it.

Dream last night

2005-03-13T09:09:00.000-05:00

[Background: My mom started asking her doctors what was up with her brain a couple years ago, because she was noticing having a lot more trouble than she used to have with keeping track of things. At first they were telling her that she had a couple silent strokes. The most recent neurologist says the strokes probably didn't cause the problems, and he wrote down the diagnosis of "Mild Cognitive Impairment, possible early Alzheimer's Disease." You never know for sure whether it's Alzheimer's, until it progresses to a point where it's clearly recognizable, or else you're looking back from some far future point and realizing it never did progress. In the meantime you basically have to prepare as if it were happening.]

I am at an Alzheimers Conference for Caregivers but the setting is really more like the Dance Flurry, big and spread out over lots of different buildings in a downtown not unlike Saratoga Springs. Mom and Dad are both around somewhere but I'm wandering on my own right now. There is a movie that is being shown at the conference, it's spoken very highly of as a way to better understand what the internal experience of Alzheimers is like over time. It's also supposed to be very depressing and I'm not sure I can handle it. I end up in a conversation with a bartender, whose bar is sort of a concession booth in a hotel lobby that's one of the sites for the conference. She's got mostly booze but she's telling me about this new medicine that she also has, that's supposed to let you experience something very sad without actually getting sad. It's a shot of bright-colored liquid. (I think there were red and green ones, don't know the difference. What she offers me is red.) Mostly what's in there besides the drug is aspartame, which I usually won't go near. She cautions me that the common side effect people have with this is forgetfulness, over a couple days after you take it. But I decide to try it. Kinda feel like I need it.
A little bit later I'm sitting in a lobby area trying to decide if I'm up for seeing this movie. I'm not, really, with or without the funky drug. It's not making me feel less sad, I just feel flaky and out of it and I want to go home. Mom appears and she is all energized and going to all the workshops and taking notes on everything and she's very urgent that I should make sure not to miss this and that and this, and especially that movie. It's very important to her that I see the movie. She's not picking up on the fact that I'm not doing very well. I say yes, I'll see the movie, because I'm not sure what else to say. She bustles off to the next thing. I feel like crap and decide to go home.
I get out to my car and find 5 white men wearing suits and ties in the process of getting into my car and getting ready to drive off. I approach the passenger side and I'm trying to get their attention, knocking on the glass and it takes them a while to notice me, but when I say excuse me, this is my car, one of them says oh sorry, that prius over there must be mine, and they go away. I'm in a hurry and get right into the car and start driving, and realize that I'm still on the passenger side and I can't reach the brake pedal. (Apparently the need to reach the gas pedal doesn't apply in this dream.) OK, this isn't that bad, I can mostly sort of control the car... I'm driving in a downtown area... I see my Dad on the other side of the street, standing outside smoking, and I want to tell him what's going on. I turn across to pull over in front of him -- crap, no brake -- and steer into the curb to stop the car, which works because I'm not going that fast. I start telling Dad (who is apparently untroubled by my strange arrival) about what's been happening, and the dream ends.

Work rollercoaster

2005-03-11T17:21:00.000-05:00

Taking a minute to breathe, before I get back to my workday... I am sad
and disappointed. I got my hopes up, big time, for one of the women I
work with. She is addicted, badly, to crack. She is also really smart
and a really wonderful person when she's not in addict mode. She had to
give up custody of her 2 little kids last year because of the drugs, and
that hurts her all the time and she really wants to get them back. She's
also doing terrible things to her own health. But she hasn't been ready
to stop using. This Monday she told me it was time, she was ready, she
wanted to go for treatment. She brought it up herself. I worked my butt
off this week to make it happen. We got her a bed at a good place. I
went to her house today to let her know. She said no.

I shouldn't be surprised, at all. It happens this way at least as often
as someone actually makes it to rehab. And it doesn't mean she's never
going to go. But it is hard to take. Her health is bad enough, if she
keeps on the way she's going she might not live long enough to have
another moment of clarity. And I really do care about her.

A few months ago, Emma and Karin invited me to go to a panel with them,
which was the last class and graduation party for their certification
course to be foster parents. One of the things I learned there was that
foster parents choose to get attached to a child, knowing that they will
give them up and grieve for them, because it is exactly that attachment
that the child needs in order to continue healthy development. I can't
remember how she said it, but I remember one of the foster moms on the
panel saying something like, our willingness to open ourselves up to grief
is the gift that we give them, so that they can have a real mutual
attachment with us and feel loved and safe. That stuck with me.

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I think there's a parallel there with
my work situation. The relationship we have with folks is nothing like
parental. But we help people with what they want help with, without
telling them what to do, and we don't ever get mad and go away because
they didn't do what we wanted. And the fact that we do actually care is
maybe the only reason that we ever do any good. So I want to keep caring, even though it takes me on a rollercoaster sometimes.

Some stuff I found

2005-03-10T18:17:00.000-05:00

from metafilter:

interactive human body -- very cool way to learn anatomy.

japanese psychiatric art -- as in art used to sell psychotropic drugs. weird.

For Kif, re: theory into practice

2005-03-09T21:00:00.000-05:00

In her comment, Kif said:

> If it's just where you live, and that can't change, then you deal,
> and fear is only something you realize once you're "out"...

Yup. If you just don't have the power to make yourself safer, you get on with your life the best you can and don't spend a lot of time being afraid. If it happens, it happens. Nothing I can do about it. And any one individual has pretty seriously limited ability to do anything about crime.

But let's play what-if for a minute. Imagine that those arseholes banging on your door at 4am went on to get arrested that night, for disorderly conduct or drug possession or something. Imagine that someone saw them at your door, so the police know they were bugging you. And for the bit that's probably most unrealistic at this point, imagine that Montreal had Community Accountability Boards set up when it happened.

How would you feel if a CAB member contacted you, and asked you to come to the meeting where it would be decided what those guys would have to do, to repair whatever harm they did? To tell them, in as much or as little detail as you wanted to discuss, exactly how they affected you?

Just makin' stuff up here... maybe that 4am was 5 hours before an interview for a job you really really wanted, and you were all shaken up and underslept, and you blew the interview. Maybe one of your kids woke up and got scared when they came to the door, and had nightmares after that. Maybe other folks started knocking on your door because they saw these guys doing it and thought you were selling. Maybe this was the last straw on top of a bunch of little things in the neighborhood making you feel mad and unsafe, and you started to feel really powerless because you didn't have the money to move, and you started to get depressed about it. Or WHATEVER the actual effects were for you and your family.

You would have the chance to tell those guys, in a safe setting where they are obliged to listen and understand and recognize what this event meant to you. And you would be asked, what would these guys have to do, to regain good standing in YOUR eyes as members of your community? So you would feel fine about them being your next-door neighbors? And your answer to that (in combination with the input of the other affected people present) would be what they would have to do, or else go back to court.

Would you want to do that if you were asked? Some people take to the idea immediately, and a lot of others want nothing to do with it.

The fact that probably none of us have ever been asked, though, points up what I think is a pretty big gap in the way Western traditional criminal justice works. We pretty much punish the offenders and ignore the victims. If you're the victim of something "serious" it can be really socially isolating, because nobody quite knows what to say to you... and if whatever it was wasn't that "serious" we're pretty much expected to suck it up, maybe complain about it a bit but basically just deal. Most of the time, the people affected by a crime never get offered any support to work through what the experience meant for them, or heal from it. So by ourselves we do what we can, and chalk up the rest to "the way the world is."

My hope is that on the level of towns and cities and states and provinces, we're starting to do a little better at this, with these restorative justice practices, and we can get a whole lot better at it. But in the meantime, this work is mostly just being done in bits and pieces. It's even something you can do with kids. The simplest version is just to ask them:

-- What happened?
-- Who was affected?
-- How were they affected?
-- What are you willing to do to make it right?

For your next research project

2005-03-09T17:41:00.000-05:00

I've known about Wikipedia for a while now. Haven't used it much -- I guess I'm not quite sure how much to trust the accuracy of the Internet's collaborative mind. But I've heard it's pretty on-target, and that very much appeals to my inner anarchist. Anybody out there have any experience with how reliable it is?

On the other hand, today is the first time I heard about Uncyclopedia, the free encyclopedia full of "misinformation and utter lies." You can just go there at any time of day or night and contribute to this great public work by making shit up about any topic you like. They just reserve the right to delete it if it isn't funny.

From theory to practice

2005-03-05T18:30:00.000-05:00

Very exciting day. One of the Things I Think Should Be Done Differently in the world (you know, that miles-long list of mostly impossibly big things) is actually happening, and they're looking for people to help, and it's something I can actually do, and I'm going to do it.

The idea is that when people commit crimes -- especially, but not exclusively, with young offenders and with crimes where no one is seriously hurt -- instead of the usual jail/fines/probation sentencing, you can actually work with the offender to have them make reparations to the people affected by what they did, and address the underlying problems that led to what went wrong. Many of the people trying to convince the criminal justice systems of the world to try this call it Restorative Justice. There's a good bit of research to show that it works. Here is a great big list of where you can read about it if you are so inspired.

So I'm going to be on a Community Accountability Board! Albany County is going to expand them from one current board in one neighborhood, to a bunch of different boards in various neighborhoods and outlying towns. I went to an all-day training today. It's a bit scary, it's a big responsibility. But I will be working alongside some folks I know and very much respect, who have been doing this for a while. And I think, I hope, I can learn to be good at it.

There's a ton I could say about the training itself. For now, just one exercise, which I invite you to try at home. One of the tricks about how this process works is that the offender has to really believe that the board members are for real. You can't stay aloof and lecture them about how their behavior affects "the community" in the abstract, you have to give them reason to believe that it matters for your own life. Which it does, but the connections are not always easy to see. So the trainer asked the folks who have already been on the board to list off what kinds of crimes they dealt with: drug possession & sales, physical assaults, property damage, theft, loitering, loud parties, sex trade, etc. And then we were each asked (in pairs) to articulate, for each crime: how does the fact that this happened in your neighborhood affect YOU?

Today it was full daylight at 6:30am

2005-03-04T12:36:00.000-05:00

And that means that even though there's still a ton of snow on the ground and it's been biting cold out, spring is coming. Today standing in the sun I can actually feel some heat from it. I haven't been minding this winter that much, but this week I've been thinking a lot more about spring.

A curious thing I was noticing, talking to Mom (who hates winter with a passion and has been counting the days til the equinox for some time now) -- spending time with pagans these past few years really has changed my sense of when the seasons change.

Basic summary, much distilled from Alexei's version, is: The 4 holidays that mark the change of seasons in (at least some) Celtic tradition are Samhain (aka Halloween, and the New Year on this calendar, 10/31 to 11/1), Imbolc (St.Brigid's Day, 2/1), Beltaine (5/1), and Lunasa (8/1). The summer half of the year starts at Beltaine and ends at Samhain; winter is Samhain to Beltaine. The second half of each, Imbolc to Beltaine and Lunasa to Samhain, are winter-becoming-summer and summer-becoming-winter, respectively.

This meant not very much to me for the first year or more I was observing these holidays, but this calendar has taken hold in my brain and makes sense now. Winter starts at the beginning of November. Summer starts at the beginning of May. And yes, spring in February. Given, not exactly the definition of spring most people are working with. But a shift has taken place. People have had their rest and hidden in their caves long enough and are starting to make plans and work on new projects. The light is coming back.

My day at work: condoms

2005-03-02T21:52:00.000-05:00

One of the cool things about my job is that sometimes I get to read about sex on the Internet, all completely in the line of duty re: HIV prevention. Today's find: learning to enjoy using condoms. Everyone and his brother will tell you that you should use them, and most folks seem to assume that you're never going to like it that much but you just have to deal. Here's somebody who knows, telling you how it can be fun. Thanks to the sex workers for putting it out there.

Speaking of the sex workers, there need to be more places like this in the world.

Also, from Robin: how to hack your brain. Or figure out more about how it works, anyway. This book will be on my wishlist shortly.

Trying something new

2005-03-01T20:20:00.000-05:00

OK, so I've been convinced to try this web log thing, because some good and far-away friends have them and it seems like a good way to keep in touch. And maybe I will journal more. But if I start doing this instead of interacting with people in person I must be stopped. I'm just the sort of introvert who would do that.