Organ Recitals

I. You can... Name Your Own Gulf on Mapquest (via Orange Crate Art--thanks, Michael!).

II. Going Swimmingly

Hey, We're in Pisces! My sign.
No wonder I feel better.  I always feel better around my birthday--the light returns!

And, if we're lucky...
Health returns.
My knee is slightly better, after weeks of not improving. (I could roll over in bed last night!)
Energy returns.
After printing for the first time in months, I want to keep rolling. 

This prediction for Pisces is timely:

"Have you been struggling to summon the motivation to start anew in some area of your life?
I predict that in the coming weeks, you will find all the motivation you need."

I was grumbling to Maura that I need more linoleum blocks and inks, and I will have to order some online, and I always prefer to browse in person. But the one remaining art store requires a bus + walking several blocks.
"I'll take you!" she said.

So--yay!

Other people have offered rides or otherwise been kind--several have brought me groceries (without me asking)--sister even brought me flowers.
It's helped a lot––with mood as much as food.


 ^ Among donated greeting cards.
Sympathy helps.

Weirdly, though, Volunteer Abby from work has been distinctly unsympathetic.
We've become friends in the past year, but I started to notice she was NOT offering any help. She's usually keen to do things for people.

Then, she and I went out with a third thrift-store worker for happy hour, and Abby recited a list of all the times she's been injured (sometimes badly), clearly implying,
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself."

That's it, I thought. She has had to struggle through hard times (very hard times!) alone, without help--and she's become the sort of person who resents other people when they're "needy".

In fact, while sometimes I've been down about my knee, at work I've been as cheerful as ever.  I'm happy to be at work, and I know it shows.

I see this injury as another Trial Run for getting old.
Message: Strengthen your glutes!
Also: stock up on canned goods and books.
Practice patience.

Having someone else tell you to shut up and buck up is not helpful. It's judgment, not support.
I don't trust Volunteer Abby now.

What helps most is what always helps, at least for people like me:
a friendly ear.

"Tell me more" is the best offer.

Maybe it can be boring to listen to people talk about their health, but our bodies are where we live/who we are--it's a big deal.

I took J-shek out for his birthday yesterday--he turned 74.  We laughed about how talking about our health is part of our conversational repertoire now, and we even enjoy it--the mutual support.
He said an elderly friend calls such conversations Organ Recitals.

But then we got on to talking about his writing--he has started on the second novel in his world-building trilogy.

III. #BeHereTomorrow

I talked about researching more about suicide.
I've followed up on one of the survivors mentioned in the New Yorker article "Jumpers"--Kevin Hines.

His work since has been getting and staying healthy (he's bi-polar, with childhood trauma), and working for suicide prevention--#BeHereTomorrow––including getting a net installed under the GG bridge.

Interesting article in the San Francisco Standard.
The suicide deterrent barriers are not what I thought:

"Certainly, they are not the springy mesh used to protect high-wire aerialists. " 

"Rather, they’re marine-grade stainless-steel wire rope, akin to a horizontal fence four millimeters thick, positioned 20 feet below the roadbed and extending 20 feet out.
Anyone who jumps into this net is likely to be injured."
_______________

Here's a crazy detail I hadn't known:
A SEA LION saved Hines's life.

As soon as Hines jumped he thought, "What have I done? I don't want to die!"

When he hit the water though, his spine shattered, and he was drowning. A swimming animal came up beneath his.
He thought it was a shark--"great, I'm drowning and a shark is going to bite off my legs".
But observers later said it was a sea lion.
The sea lion circled under him and kept him afloat until the Coast Guard arrived.

There are a lot of different attitudes and approaches to suicide prevention--or to suffering.
Hines's is very pro-active, very strong and positive, very loving.
I like that--I love this guy--but a little of that energy goes a long way with me.

I am more drawn to the slowness and sadness of the caretaker Will in the movie Nine Days.

Everyone's different. The message that applies to us all is,

Everyone Matters.

Yes. Whether we like each other or not! 🙄

I matter.

YOU matter.

We matter, we and our organs. 

RePrints/ "Fuck Your Fear." Or, try again later.

I printed up a snowstorm...

I. Advice from a Flamenco Teacher

My friend Dee is a school counselor at a tough high school --lots of her kids live below the poverty line, come from undocumented immigrant families, have a hard time making it to graduation.
She'd put my print "NO TENGAS MIEDO/Don't Be Afraid" on her office door.

I'd carved it the night after DT won the presidential election,   inspired by advice from a Spanish flamenco teacher,
but I thought it was too simplistic or preachy, and I'd only printed a few.
I’d forgotten I’d given Dee one—she must've and seen it at my place, because I didn't hand them out.

But ALSO... AS A PISCES, I always want to add to Gung-Ho Marines advice…

It's OK to sit in the corner and read a book; 
It's okay to feel afraid with a teddy bear!!!
But... in your interactions with other people (and your self),
be cognizant that in whatever you do or feel or say, 
you have POWER.

The other day Dee texted me a photo of her office door covered in signs and posters, and said,
"Guess which sign gets the most comments?"

"Don't be Afraid"! and people sometimes ask her where they can get one too. 

Did I have extras?

 I didn't, and her inquiry spurred me to print again.
(I'd stopped after failing to create a print for the Swedish museum last fall.  Like a knee injury--I'd over-stressed some interior structure of mine, and it had seized up! Frustrating.)

Another friend had asked me for "Dept. of Do Your Damn Work", and that'd be good for Ben at the gym too--a version of "ISYMFS" ("it's still your mother-fucking set").
I also printed some Get Well cards--once you have them on hand, they're easy to use up--at least this winter they are.
________________

II. Advice from an Improv Teacher

Maybe I should have printed this slogan:
Fuck Your Fear.

Hm. No, that sounds like, "I want you and your fear to fuck off."
Maybe, FUCK FEAR?
Hm. Ambiguous...?

Fuck the Fear? 

Anyway, "Fuck Your Fear" is Advice for Improv from Mick Napier's book Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:

"Make strong choices.

Fuck your fear.

We want to see your power, not your fear. Nobody has time for your fear. ...
Take the powerful choices [you make] and utilize them in the show.

If... [you are] coming from a huge space of insecurity in the first place...that's the problem right there, not the idea or character or anything.
The more you approach a director or other actors in this needy manner, the more you will alienate yourself from the director's power and your own.

If you find yourself in a show and you are afraid, then fake it. ...

The best thing you could say to me in notes [on rehearsals] is,
"I'll make another choice and we'll see if it works."
______________________

That last bit reminds me of what I like about reincarnation, the insertion of this phrase after everything:
"I'll try again and see how it goes".

Anyway, I was feeling down about my knee--I go to the PT in a week, and it's not significantly better after 5 weeks--
and I thought I'd better adopt an approach for the long haul.

I like this:

FUCK YOUR FEAR.
Or, try again later.

Maybe I will print that...

Here we go!

Toffee Tin

My new Favorite Thing Ever, a donation I unboxed yesterday
and immediately claimed for myself:
Riley Brothers Toffee tin, Halifax, England (1950s?)

"Brothers Fred & John Herbert Riley launched Riley's Toffee Rolls in 1907, using a recipe from their mother."

This tin could illustrate the cover of Barbara Pym's novel Excellent Women (1952).
Food rationing in the UK didn't end entirely after WWII until 1954. Confectionery (sweets and chocolate) came off in February 1953.
I can imagine this 10-oz. (small!) tin of individually wrapped toffees would be a special gift--from the rector's sister, perhaps–– and on Sundays the book's heroine, Mildred Lathbury, would have allowed herself one toffee.
__________

Another extraordinary donation, from around the same time--this Kommando 2000 car by Schuco, Made in US-zone Germany.
Circa 1945–1949.
I showed it to Big Boss, explaining that the US occupied Germany after WWII...  He's generally interested to learn things.
"My history lesson for the day," he said.

Ebay is always declaring things to be rare, but this really is an unusual item. I priced it $49.

The Powers That Be decided we should put out Easter this week--two months before the holiday--hence my amused but annoyed look, below...
It's true, though, that I don't have anything else to fill the shelves where Valentines were. And spring equinox is only a month away.
I made a sign of upcoming Spring Holidays.
(Must add Ramadan--it happens to fall in spring this year.)

Anyway--never too early for Peeps!
(I was glad to find lacey table runners to line the ugly shelves.)

 

There was absolutely nothing unusual in the boxes of Easter unpacked so far. 

We've got lots more boxes though.
I will keep an eye out for a tumbrel. Last year we didn't have one, and Penny Cooper couldn't perform her annual reenactment of Sydney Carton's martyrdom: "It is a far, far better thing I do..." 

The days are getting longer---almost 11 hours of daylight now!--but today it's so cold, the city's public schools are closed. They don't do that until the wind-chill is –35º F, (right around where Fahrenheit & Celsius catch up to each other).
It's my day off anyway, or I'd have taken it off.

Safety precautions must be taken!
bink's dog Astro wrapped his fleece blanket around his head last night:

My friend Kate wrapped up her orphan, Ivy, to keep her warm and  healthy. Lots of gunk going around: Kate is recovering from pneumonia, and Sister has been coughing for two weeks too.

I love when I get reports from Girlettes in the Field.

MT's girlette, Margaret Helen Conway, is dressed for spring in an outfit MT sewed by hand. Flirting with freckles--and eyebrows--she looks a little like Peppermint Patty...

Stay warm, everyone! Or cool, depending on where in the world you are.

Cleaning your room is not a moral issue.

Beethoven didn't make his bed.
In fact, he was filthy. He left filled chamber pots under his piano, wore overripe clothes... and, have you seen his hair?

Cleanliness is not next to godliness.

Beethoven is next to godliness.

I've been wanting to say clearly (having recently quoted Jordan Peterson's "make your bed") that I believe that taking agency, claiming our self-sovereignty are good things---
but what we do with our agency is our choice.

By definition:
Sovereignty means self-determination.
You do not take orders (unless you determine them to be helpful). Not from influencers ("arrange your designer ice-cubes in plexiglass trays!"); not from Jordan Peterson; not from your dead grandmother's voice in your head.
(I can still hear my mother's mother, and she definitely judged a person's character by the state of their bed––and in her eyes, mine was rumpled).

Now I'm off Meta, I'm not watching hundreds of 1-minute videos, I'm watching several18-minute TED Talks. I like sinking into a subject instead of skittering along the surface. (Not that that's not fun--like a shiny dragonfly!)

I watched a good TED talk yesterday--
"How to Do Laundry When You're Depressed". 
The speaker, KC Davis, emphasizes that
Care tasks are morally neutral.

Yes!
(She has a website too: strugglecare.com.)

A year ago, when I was learning about autism for my job at the high school, I came across a lot of helpful life hacks--neurodivergent people offering practical approaches to managing tasks.
(And of course you don't gave to be depressed or neurodivergent or laid up with a bad knee to experience overwhelm,
and to benefit from these approaches.)

Find work-arounds.
Can't wash dishes?
Use paper plates.
Can't handle the many steps of brushing your teeth?
You can buy toothbrushes with toothpaste already on them.

KC even talks about environmentalism:
It is better you stay alive than you take out your recycling. Buy the paper plates.
(And sadly, we individual households don't make much difference anyway.)

She doesn't say this, but if you're staying in bed all day, your carbon footprint is already pretty low. (lol, but true.)

One of my favorite hacks I read last year, personally, was:
you never have to fold your laundry.
If it's too much, or even if you just don't want to?
So what?
Don't.

That didn't change my behavior--it changed how I felt about my behavior.
Like so many of us (most of us?), I felt shame about not folding my laundry. But really, it doesn't bother me if it's sitting in the kitchen chair where guests sit. . . until guests come over.
(What's the harm, Grandmother? It's clean. Go away.)

KC Davis says the main issue is not good vs. bad, it's
WHAT WORKS?
What is most functional for you?

Determine that, and find ways to make it happen for you. It will take some work, but it will serve you, not some fictional judge.

I'd say this applies to most everything--including morality.
I mean, some things we determine are morally Good. But still, how we do or be them--what a functional approach to them is--is up to us.

There are some great teachers out there,
but if we accept their teaching, we still have to determine how to apply it. I just read that Thich Nhat Hanh changed the name of his teaching from Engaged Buddhism to Applied Buddhism. It's something you do. (Doing includes--starts with--breathing.)
If we accept it, what does 'love your neighbor' look like, applied?

NOTE: Suicide

Recently I've been watching more talks about suicide.
Every so often I sidle up to the topic. Have I developed a tolerance?
Recently, a little bit, ever since making that video about my mother taking her life, and then getting mad at her--and then being happy that if reincarnation were real, I would see her again.

I had watched this TED Talk years ago, and it's till my favorite--and judging by the comments, many other people's too:
Sami Moukaddem's
"On living with depression and suicidal feelings".

Of course I love him---he starts the talk holding onto a giant stuffed giraffe (is it a giraffe?).

It seems to me, the best talks and teachers are people who have survived suicide--not someone else's, but their own.

The least helpful may be the well-meaning people who have no clue and say things like, "Talk to your friends and family! Ask for help from someone you trust."

Their comment sections are full of replies like,
"I told my wife I wanted to die, and she told me to pull it together."
"No one loves me."
"The NHS put me on a two-year wait list."

Another longstanding favorite of mine is the New Yorker article "Jumpers" from 2003, about people who jump off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

There's a way to access articles without subscriptions--but I think you can see one free article. (Then you have to sign out and in again--a pain.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/13/jumpers

A Paywall Workaround

Oh!!! Here! I googled how, and found https://12ft.io

You type a url in their "clean website" box, and it give you the article or site without ads or anything.

"All we do is disable the javascript of the site. This obviously doesn't work for all websites, but it works for a surprisingly large proportion of them. "

It doesn't provide a shareable live link--but I put in the Jumpers url, and there was the article.
______________________

We don't know what people who succeed feel, but the article reports,

Survivors often regret their decision mid-air.

Ken Baldwin hurdled over the railing, afraid that if [he] stood on the chord he might lose his courage.
“I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

But I always imagined my mother felt relief, honestly.
She shot herself, so she died too fast for regrets;
but first, she had shot one bullet into the wall. (The police found it.)

I take a weird comfort that she had had time to realize the gun worked––she would have felt and heard its power––and she had an opportunity, a moment to decide "not to jump", as it were.
But she did.

For her to have stopped then--and I know she had stopped herself many times before--so very many things would have had to be different for so, so long...
I can't even imagine.

We can help each other, but we cannot force someone into being saved.
I am not the savior.
And if someone I love takes their life, at that point I say, well...

We can try again in our next incarnation.

Is that true?

Who cares?
It's a story-line that I like a lot––a workaround of crippling moral judgement or dead-end despair.
The paper plate for "I cannot wash the dishes."

Rest.
And try again on another day. Or, another life.

"Nine Days"

In the movie Nine Days (2021), five newly minted personalities (souls?) show up at a house on a salt flat, an in-between/neither life nor death station, to be interviewed and observed by a caretaker.
At the end of nine days, he will select one of them to be born into life. 

“You will not remember any of this,
but you will still be you.” 

Nine Days is like a response to one of my Story Ideas:
Explore what a process for selecting who gets incarnated on Earth would look like. Use more images than words.

Also, without being preachy:
 Life. Why bother?
Suicide. Depression. What helps?

At the end of the movie, Nine Days, I thought, 
Did I make this movie?  It's the most Pisces movie I've ever seen.*

Japanese-Brazilian director and writer Edson Oda's uncle committed suicide when he was fifty, and Edson was ten--that was part of his motivation.
For me, he got it right.

It's a film for people who are already likely to like it. You can judge by the trailer, below.  If this attracts you, you'll probably love it. If not, I think it would leave you unmoved.

 

With Winston Duke as the caretaker, Benedict Wong as his assistant, and, as the candidates, Bill Skarsgard, Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, and David Rysdahl.
_____________________

* Pisces, in this sense (I don't remember where I got this quote):

"Pisces witness to the difficult task of straddling the divide between the human and the divine. More than any other sign, perhaps, Pisces experiences normal human life as limited, for it excludes so much that can make life more complete. 

“Yet, even Pisceans have to live as human beings in a world full of limitations. 
Coming to terms with the necessity to live in a world separate from Paradise can be an immense problem. 

“Some may attempt to live as if exclusion from Paradise had never happened, and live life in a constant daydream, very ineffective in the world as it is. Others, however, may learn to live life in the human arena in such a way as to infuse it with divine meaning."
__________________

I can mention that Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” comes into it. 

This scene (link below) is a spoiler, but even if you’re not interested in the whole movie, you might love this rendition by Winston Duke (Will, the caretaker);

https://youtu.be/pR2i24iJTX4

The lines from Whitman reminded me of a Capt Kirk pin-up vid I made a dozen years ago...

Whitman's  hymn to the male body in "I Sing the Body Electric" could've been written with Kirk in mind ("O Captain, my Captain!"). All lines here are from the poem, though not in the original order.

Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" seems tailor made…

“The Weaver of Grass” blog archive

 https://web.archive.org/web/20240913055517/http://weaverofgrass.blogspot.com

A kind commenter told me that after the death of blogger Pat, her son archived her blog, The Weaver of Grass, at the above live link.*

I thought of Pat when I was reading Home Fires, about the rural Women’s Institute in World War II Britain. Hers was very much their “put a smile on a your face” philosophy that my Auntie Vi practiced too. 

The word that is repeated over and over again in the book about the WI is “cheerful”.

That has its limitations (and it’s a limitation of the book that it buys that that surface cheer was the whole story), but in hard times when one has limited options, it can be extremely helpful. 

I’ve been dialing it up to deal with the limited mobility and pain of having an injured knee. 

I was walking five blocks home from the bus the other day, and it was a cold cold beautifully bright day after a snowfall, and my knee hurt, so I thought,

 I’ll just try walking very, very slowly – – like the mindfulness practice that Thich Nhat Hanh recommends. 

It took me almost half an hour, but it didn’t hurt! and I was able to enter into the pleasure of being outside. 

I’ve missed being able to walk around the lake—but I can savor a walk to the bus. 

It’s good to SLOW DOWN! And breathe…

* I note the archive has some limitations too—comments aren’t saved, links aren’t active, and you need to navigate backwards through the blog’s sidebar archive (“older posts” arrows don’t work).

Be a Citizen Archivist!

Speaking of how the Internet connects us to useful work,
Sister has been transcribing handwritten docs from the 1830s --(applications for veteran's benefits, in this case)--for the US National Archives--the government agency that preserves "the sweep of the past".

 https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist

From Nat'l Archive General Info:

"In a democracy, records belong to the people, and for more than eight decades, NARA has preserved and provided access to the records of the United States of America.

The National Archives was established in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt, but its major holdings date back to 1775.

They capture the sweep of the past:
slave ship manifests and the Emancipation Proclamation; captured German records and the Japanese surrender documents from World War II;
journals of polar expeditions and photographs of Dust Bowl farmers;
Indian treaties making transitory promises...

And a comic book from the Atomic Energy Commission publicizing the development of nuclear energy, 1948:

 

And Richard M. Nixon's letter resigning as President of the United States, August 9, 1974:

Love & Competency

Happy Valentine's Day!

I don't think about romance much, but after I went to see the doctor––so competent! so smart, kind, and funny too––I thought,
I wouldn't mind someone to watch over me . . . like Dr. McCoy watches over Capt. Kirk.

Fanvid by Marz, 2014: “Kirk and His Doctor: Someone to Watch Over. Me” (Ella Fitzgerald )

I italicized "competent"--not what I would have chosen as romantic when I was young, but mygod, the longer I live, the more attractive--even romantic--competence is.

Competent just means to have the "necessary ability, skill, or knowledge to do something successfully".
Successfully--not even exceptionally.
Does that sound kinda mediocre?

But when the "something" you're talking about is Life...
Well, to be competent IN LIFE is exceptional!

Like, say, a person who can...
change a bike tire, change a diaper,
recognize & express emotion, make a salad,
write a condolence card, write a grocery list, write to their senators,
parallel park (this excludes me), hold your hand,
read a book out loud, use a dictionary,
invent lyrics for old songs, get a joke,
floss their teeth, return library books,
make tea when you're sick,
play, pay bills, . . . and LEARN NEW THINGS.

And also, they like you, and are able let you know it.

That's a lot!

Do you have some to add?

____________

Making a list reminds me--last night, having given up on Frankie the plucky Vietnam nurse in The Women, I picked up Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

I always list Carried as one of my favorite books, but I've only read it once, about thirty years ago. The title story is basically what it says: a list of the things foot soldiers in Vietnam carried. Not all of them physical.
The writing is beyond competent.
I felt restored, reading it.

And speaking of soldiers...
I don't think this article was meant to be funny, but I laughed out loud, though it's shocking ––(but sort of endearing)–– how INcompetent America's youth are:
The military can't find enough prospective recruits who can pass their physical and mental tests:

"Half the Battle: Why can't the U.S. Military fill its depleted ranks?", New Yorker, 2/3/25

The army started a training course in 2022, Future Soldiers, for would-be-recruits who are close, but need pre–boot camp boot camp to close the gap--lose 30 lbs, learn to read English, do 5 push-ups...

Not funny overall, no, but I did wonder at some of the author's choice of examples. Were they simply unavoidably ludicrous? Like the Navy shipyard president who can't hire enough workers because, "We're competing with Chick-fil-A for workers".

Really though, it's outrageous and tragic that the children (recruits can be 17 to 40 y.o.) are so fat and out of shape they can't do one push up--not one!
They reflect the same problems that ENRAGED me so much I stopped eating sugar:

"A lot of people who arrive have never eaten healthy foods, or exercised regularly, in their lives––that's just the reality of the American we're dealing with," Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Pfeiffer, who helps oversee the program, told me.(About forty per cent of U.S. adults are obese.)

"I ate chips and played Call of Duty all day long," one young woman said. She went to a recruiter at 17 years old and 305 lbs. The recruiter told her to come back when she'd lost 100. "He didn't think he'd see me again," but she did it and then entered Future Soldiers to lose the last 30 lbs.
(Entry restrictions have loosened.)

Reading the article, I pictured Abbott & Costello in the army. The poor darlings... Who is taking care of them?!

Another disturbing- to- ludicrous reflection of where and who we are is the exception to military weight restrictions: hackers. 

The rapid automation of warfare ...will require highly trained specialists. So will the demands of "offensive cyber war"--that is, hacking enemies.
"No dumb kids in those jobs," Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me.
"We need Python coders... Fat kids welcome!"   ____________

Yes. Well. Weird world, eh?

Weird world to grow up in!

Marz was talking to me about how much she's liking her science classes, even though--or partly because--they are very hard, and bow she is wanting to become a grown up, someone knowledgeable and skilled and "of use".

("knowledgeable"--what weird spelling--I had to look it up!)

I think of the young people in the article above who want to put down the chips and the controller, get off the couch, and join the military.

The article's author quotes Trump's ban on trans people in the military referring to "the humility and selflessness required of a service member"--adding that "these qualities seem scarce in Trump's Washington, but they're easier to find among the young recruits I talked to."
Not that the recruits want to "serve their country" in the old-fasioned (naive) way--they want to improve their lives.
A noble goal!

It's harder to be useful when you're old in a society that excludes old people, though the internet is a huge boon. (Blogger seems to be mostly 60 + .)

Besides us aging bloggers, my role model these days is the handful of old women who volunteer at the thrift store. They're 73 years old (me, in ten years) to 88 y.o., and many volunteer other places too. One of them who helped start the thrift store 35+ years ago also volunteers at the food shelf I go to, though she suffers from long term vertigo. (I had vertigo for three months--it was horrible.)

Personally I'm a fan of an invisible kind of usefulness: blogging, of course. Pat at Weaver of Grass inspires me—she blogged up until a few weeks before she died of cancer. 

(Sadly her son  closed her blog—for invited readers only—which is a shame because she wrote posts you might want to reread.

Wait, a kind commenter let me know Pat’s son archived Weaver of Grass, here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240913055517/http://weaverofgrass.blogspot.com

WRITING A NOVEL. (Lol. But really.)

Practicing prayer.
You can call prayer something else, like the interior cultivation of equanimity, or Being Peace, or meditation or visualization...

 Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh says,

"In prayer, the electric current is love, mindfulness and right concentration.

If there is a change in the individual consciousness, then a change in the collective consciousness will also take place. When there is a change in the collective consciousness,
then the situation of the individual can change;
the situation of our loved one who is the object of our prayer can change. . . .

From this powerhouse we call mind, we can change the world.
We change it by means of a real energy that we ourselves have created. "

Off I go to work--to be useful... BUT SLOWLY.
That's the biggest lesson of my hurt knee:
Slow down!!!

Thanks for blogging, ❤️  ya'll!

PS. Talk about useful—now I’m at one of the newly designed bus stops—with overhead heaters you can activate! (It’s 14 degrees out.)

Hot n Humid

Kristin Hannah’s new novel The Women is a bizarre mix of  A Field Guide to Dressing War Wounds and a Harlequin Nurse-n-Doctor Romance: 

“She looked up from debriding the soldier’s sucking chest wound—he was just a boy!— to meet the surgeon’s smoldering eyes… And yet, she knew that under the sterile medical gloves sensitively holding a Kelly clamp, a wedding ring graced his manly hands .”

—not an actual quote, but close!

[UPDATED with actual quote at the end, so you know I wasn’t exaggerating ]

The author has done her research – – and is a little too eager to pile it on. Did you remember Tab diet cola was stylized T small-a capital-B? 

“Back in her hooch, she relished an ice-cold TaB.” Did anyone actually spell it that way?

Still, it’s an acceptable distraction it is, stuck home with a bum knee and below-zero temps. 

First, an old friend from the art college library, RMcG,  is in town and I’m going out for coffee, but the rest of the day it’s me and “Frankie”, naive plucky daughter of the country club set, as she holds the hands of dying young African American soldiers, ponders the US’s role in SE Asia,  and leans her tired head on the blood-stained scrubs of the disturbingly handsome Dr What’s-His-Name in a steamy (“steamy”, get it?) MASH unit in Vietnam.

Quote UPDATE

Okay, here’s what I mean— 

Nurse (Frankie McGrath) goes into a tailspin about her feelings for Doctor (Jamie) after a shift that ends with them bonding over the body of a dead soldier.

[click to embiggen, ya know]

Then they leave the operating theater and stand talking in the rain…

Oh, the problems of a nurse in Vietnam! “Is this horror, or is it love?”

How’s a girl to know???

Doctor’s Orders

 “Try treating a Bear’s knee and see if that helps you,” my doctor said yesterday when I told her I do Bear Repair. 

(We’d already established that she loves the thrift store—a couple miles from the clinic—and used to own a complete Playmobil 🏕 camping set herself.)

Turns out four (4!) dolls and bears needed treatment. I sent the doc this picture.

Such good advice! It is helping already. 

Seeing the doctor helped overall, even though there isn’t anything she could do directly– – basically the diagnosis is, 

YOUR KNEE IS HURT…

though the good news is, I  haven’t torn anything, one of the interior bits of the knee is hurt – – probably the ligament (she showed me a diagram—I love when doctors are fully informative like that) – –and that takes a while to heal. But I was comforted just knowing that, and I am going to get PT, which is what I wanted, although the first appointment isn’t for two weeks.

The doctor also suggested that I consider not crawling around on my almost-64-y.o. slightly arthritic knees on the concrete floor at work, which I think was the precipitating event. 

Maybe that sounds obvious, but it was kinda eye-opening to me – –the idea that I should change my behavior with age, not only to focus on getting stronger but to take more care to protect my vulnerable self.