I dreamt I was hiking with a friend by accident - a trail called Hike the Rails. We'd stopped at a tiny rest area to stretch our legs and while we were in the bathroom, someone stole our car. We waited for hours at the side of the rural road but no one else drove by so eventually we began walking a wide clearly marked trail that passed through the rest area and led deeper into the woods.
We walked till nightfall before I finally regained phone service and could map our location; we were on a cross country hiking trail that followed old railway beds. The closest marked highway was 50 miles away. We were unprepared but many people were walking the trails and we were able to cobble together a tent, sleeping bags, and a small amount of food.
The forest service came through to check for our permit and, as we hadn't planned this trip, we didn't have one. My sister appeared and paid the forest service agent to fake the paperwork. My sister insisted we not mention the theft; after he left I argued with her, frustrated that we hadn't asked for his help. But my sister said there was a larger conspiracy at work and the agency couldn't be trusted.
Abruptly I was in a friend's living room. She had a miniature pet tiger confined by an invisible fence in the corner. The tiger was nearly sentient and very well trained but everyone warned her it was still wild and would turn on her or her other pets without warning. She often sat on a couch nearby with her legs stretched into the
tiger's space, and allowed him to rest his tiger head on her ankles.
The other pets - two dogs and a cat - were constantly trying to get at the tiger behind the fence. Initially the barrier was an invisible noise fence that deterred animals as they neared the boundary. This kept the tiger confined but the other pets simply jumped through it, willing to endure the momentary discomfort in order to reach their target.
Next she put up an invisible electric fence that dispensed a pwoerful shock if you crossed the set lines. This worked on both the tiger and domestic cat but the dogs persisted.
I was constantly anxious that the tiger would eat one of the dogs or bite on my friends' feet. Once the tiger yawned, a slow back tilting of the head that revealed massive shiny white jaws. I panicked as its head came down, jaws wide, but at the last minute the tiger closed his mouth, licked my friend's feet once and settled back in to nap.
I walked out the door of her house, and into the parking lot where my car had disappeared. It was now a giant parking lot outside a mega box store and the police were questioning me. Apparently there had been a string of car thefts from this lot, that resulted in thousands of families stranded all across the country. This was why I'd encountered so many families while hiking. It had appeared literally like a migration.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Ex sex without the sex
I was working as a nanny and I had the night off, which was very unusual - in my dream life as in real life I worked many hours at my job. My science experiments do need a lot of babysitting so maybe the distinction between child care and biology research isn't as sharp as one might think.
It was the end of my shift and I was getting set to board the elevator that served as the door to the penthouse - my employer's lifestyle was opulent, to say the least. The door opened and my last long term boyfriend stepped out, pushing a rack of mens' suits. He had just flown in on business from Toronto, and wanted to know if I was free for dinner.
I have not dated men in any serious way since meeting my first girlfriend 15 years ago, so our relationship was literally in different decade. In my dream I was still married but separated from my wife.
We went back to my place to change. I shared a renovated very open floor plan 70s-era two bedroom apartment with my sister, who was in the living room virtual-snowboarding on the X Box when we arrived. We chatted with her while I scoured the hall closet for an outfit. My ex came up behind me, spooning me upright. I leaned into him. Sighed.
I remembered suddenly that we had another roommate. "When is mom due home from work?" I asked my sister. She told me 430. I checked my phone: 438. Not enough time.
I woke up. Looked in urban dictionary for "c-blocked by your dream mom". Found nothing. There *was* an interesting thread trying to decide on a female equivalent for b-balled. No one had proposed the term I heard from a friend in grad school: t-walled. Hilarious.
When I stopped dating men I was 27. I knew virtually nothing about women as erotic partners, aside from the years I had spent in my own body.
As an aside, I find the common* straight male assumption that women have a "home field advantage" in lesbian interactions just a little annoying. It's not that I can't see the value of knowing the terrain; but these same straight men never mention their own hypothetical home field advantage as a plus should they ever suddenly wake up gay one morning.
(*this statement is not based on a blinded, controlled scientific study but on hundreds of datapoints collected from dozens of straight men in too-many-to-count conversations between the ages of 19 and 40.... but if I had ever bothered to track the numbers, I would bet it is at least statistically significant.)
The dream felt curiously healing. I stood for a few minutes in front of the mirror and realized that today I don't hate my body.
It's 824 am. Sunday. Time to go babysit the science experiments. In the afternoon I'll be dancing with one of my favourite leads. His partner is a great lead too. I think I'll wear something nice. Something I might wear to dinner, if I was trying to seduce my ex.
It was the end of my shift and I was getting set to board the elevator that served as the door to the penthouse - my employer's lifestyle was opulent, to say the least. The door opened and my last long term boyfriend stepped out, pushing a rack of mens' suits. He had just flown in on business from Toronto, and wanted to know if I was free for dinner.
I have not dated men in any serious way since meeting my first girlfriend 15 years ago, so our relationship was literally in different decade. In my dream I was still married but separated from my wife.
We went back to my place to change. I shared a renovated very open floor plan 70s-era two bedroom apartment with my sister, who was in the living room virtual-snowboarding on the X Box when we arrived. We chatted with her while I scoured the hall closet for an outfit. My ex came up behind me, spooning me upright. I leaned into him. Sighed.
I remembered suddenly that we had another roommate. "When is mom due home from work?" I asked my sister. She told me 430. I checked my phone: 438. Not enough time.
I woke up. Looked in urban dictionary for "c-blocked by your dream mom". Found nothing. There *was* an interesting thread trying to decide on a female equivalent for b-balled. No one had proposed the term I heard from a friend in grad school: t-walled. Hilarious.
When I stopped dating men I was 27. I knew virtually nothing about women as erotic partners, aside from the years I had spent in my own body.
As an aside, I find the common* straight male assumption that women have a "home field advantage" in lesbian interactions just a little annoying. It's not that I can't see the value of knowing the terrain; but these same straight men never mention their own hypothetical home field advantage as a plus should they ever suddenly wake up gay one morning.
(*this statement is not based on a blinded, controlled scientific study but on hundreds of datapoints collected from dozens of straight men in too-many-to-count conversations between the ages of 19 and 40.... but if I had ever bothered to track the numbers, I would bet it is at least statistically significant.)
The dream felt curiously healing. I stood for a few minutes in front of the mirror and realized that today I don't hate my body.
It's 824 am. Sunday. Time to go babysit the science experiments. In the afternoon I'll be dancing with one of my favourite leads. His partner is a great lead too. I think I'll wear something nice. Something I might wear to dinner, if I was trying to seduce my ex.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Apocalypse the series
I dreamt the apocalypse was coming and no one would believe me. I kept seeing it happening like a prophetic near-future overlay, fading from present to future and back; it felt completely imminent.
I dreamt I was working at a big pharma corporation and had a secret meeting with two of my co-workers - minions like me - and three children of the company's top executives. We talked about money and privelege. I began disgusted with the existence of the 1% but they debated gamely, all had integrity and came across not like Paris Hiltons but as educated, smart and simply fiscally lucky and I felt somewhat better at the end at least about these particular kids having been born into such economic advantage.
I told them the change was coming fast and it might not matter so much then anyway. We talked in theory about whether it would be better to be in the city on the streets, in buildings or out in the country when it happened. It was universally decided that inside of an office building there are not enough places to hide from killer robots, alien invaders, zombies, or homicidal humans.
The dream changed and now I was a very wealthy young woman. I discovered a file suggesting that my mother had been part of a cloning project, and began to doubt the identity of my father. I searched records, recruiting the help of a few trusted friends. I confronted my mother, determined to understand and expose the conspiracy, but she denied everything and I felt doubly betrayed.
The grounds of my house were like a tropical paradise with faux built pools, waterfalls and gardens; everything was controlled down to the perfect climate and groomed vegetation. You could walk barefoot anywhere and never step on a weed. You could wear a bikini day and night and never be cold. If luxury had an actual lap, I was living in it.
I snuck out and watched some of the events unfold from the vantage point of the sunroof, a transparent better-than-glass barrier that roofed the entire property.
My mother was joined by a psychiatrist and at first it seemed this woman was going to be her ally and possibly inadvertantly mine; they talked about my cloning conspiracy theories and the psychiatrist did not just dismiss them out of hand.
Then a close friend of my mother's returned from a routine doctor's visit with amnesia and a fresh surgical scar over what would be her left ovaries. My mother started to consider that I might be right. The psychiatrist gave my mother something to calm her nerves. My mother fell asleep, the friend disappeared, and I realized the head shrinker was just a plant to keep my mother quiet and controlled.
The company was breeding humans to a purpose, though the end game was still unclear to me. I walked into a shoe store to order a pair of boots. I had decided to permanently separate myself from my old life. I talked with the shoemaker and decided that if the breeding led to a better race of humans that were more in line with my own philosophy it might not be so bad.
I woke instantly, heart racing, 540am, sat up, and my first clear thought was that I was wasting my life, I took a wrong turn, and now it was too late.
I dreamt I was working at a big pharma corporation and had a secret meeting with two of my co-workers - minions like me - and three children of the company's top executives. We talked about money and privelege. I began disgusted with the existence of the 1% but they debated gamely, all had integrity and came across not like Paris Hiltons but as educated, smart and simply fiscally lucky and I felt somewhat better at the end at least about these particular kids having been born into such economic advantage.
I told them the change was coming fast and it might not matter so much then anyway. We talked in theory about whether it would be better to be in the city on the streets, in buildings or out in the country when it happened. It was universally decided that inside of an office building there are not enough places to hide from killer robots, alien invaders, zombies, or homicidal humans.
The dream changed and now I was a very wealthy young woman. I discovered a file suggesting that my mother had been part of a cloning project, and began to doubt the identity of my father. I searched records, recruiting the help of a few trusted friends. I confronted my mother, determined to understand and expose the conspiracy, but she denied everything and I felt doubly betrayed.
The grounds of my house were like a tropical paradise with faux built pools, waterfalls and gardens; everything was controlled down to the perfect climate and groomed vegetation. You could walk barefoot anywhere and never step on a weed. You could wear a bikini day and night and never be cold. If luxury had an actual lap, I was living in it.
I snuck out and watched some of the events unfold from the vantage point of the sunroof, a transparent better-than-glass barrier that roofed the entire property.
My mother was joined by a psychiatrist and at first it seemed this woman was going to be her ally and possibly inadvertantly mine; they talked about my cloning conspiracy theories and the psychiatrist did not just dismiss them out of hand.
Then a close friend of my mother's returned from a routine doctor's visit with amnesia and a fresh surgical scar over what would be her left ovaries. My mother started to consider that I might be right. The psychiatrist gave my mother something to calm her nerves. My mother fell asleep, the friend disappeared, and I realized the head shrinker was just a plant to keep my mother quiet and controlled.
The company was breeding humans to a purpose, though the end game was still unclear to me. I walked into a shoe store to order a pair of boots. I had decided to permanently separate myself from my old life. I talked with the shoemaker and decided that if the breeding led to a better race of humans that were more in line with my own philosophy it might not be so bad.
I woke instantly, heart racing, 540am, sat up, and my first clear thought was that I was wasting my life, I took a wrong turn, and now it was too late.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
The art of happiness - dream remix
How do we derive meaning?
I woke up with this question, at the tail end of a dream series that could have doubled as a graduate seminar in philosophy or spiritual studies.
My dreams were not unusual - there was an anxiety dream about trying to find a bathroom in the middle of a cactus garden; there was a dream about being on a train tour with writers and politicians and making a plan to seduce the aloof, sensual female author in my sleeping car; I became friends with the woman who showed me a secret entrance to the hotel pool while I was scouting for an escape from our prisoner of war compound.
But all night, my dream experiences were analyzed through the lens of meaning. I was hyper aware of when and why in each dream my engagement and happiness were high and when they were low.
How do we derive meaning? My dreams said:
From our social network - by being part of friendships or partnerships or families
From our experience - participating in adventure or documenting and organize the events of our lives or immersion in art/writing/food/sex
From our contribution - doing meaningful career or hobby or volunteer work or raising families or creating art
The one I missed and thought of on waking - faith
Death, divorce, loss of a job, loss of faith are life events considered extraordinarily stressful. What do they have in common? From my dream perspective, it's all about identity, purpose and connection. When we lose someone we love to death, divorce or some other breakup we lose the meaningfulness of having our relationship to them. If we are disowned or excommunicated, we lose the identity and connection to community. Lose a job, we lose our answer to What do you do? and a concrete daily task list. If we become too sick to work or participate in activities we lose engagement and satisfaction. Loss of faith sends us into a limbo where it is no longer clear how to view and organize the world into meaning; it may challenge the very notion that life has any purpose at all.
My own happiness, sense of purpose, engagement, satisfaction, depends on connections, identity, activities. If I lose a job or a person or an ability, the other things in my life are supportive. But if I lose many things at once, or one thing that is supremely important, it can be hard to keep waking up to the world. It loses its color, satisfaction is replaced by despair and eventually engagement by universal disinterest.
How do we derive meaning?
When I am low, I can't answer this question. I don't see a purpose to being. My little human life is so short in comparison to the lifetime of the universe, my existence unlikely to matter or be recorded, and I am so often caught up in the minutiae of survival and the prison of my own ego that I don't put my energy into the things I'm really good at, that are truly satisfying, or that I believe matter.
Depression is both a medical and spiritual condition. It is certainly physiological. It can be rescued pharmaceutically. It can be brought on by sensory overload, by overwhelming demands, by loss, by trauma, or illness. But it is fundamentally about being able to participate in life in a way that is experienced as meaningful.
I woke up with this question, at the tail end of a dream series that could have doubled as a graduate seminar in philosophy or spiritual studies.
My dreams were not unusual - there was an anxiety dream about trying to find a bathroom in the middle of a cactus garden; there was a dream about being on a train tour with writers and politicians and making a plan to seduce the aloof, sensual female author in my sleeping car; I became friends with the woman who showed me a secret entrance to the hotel pool while I was scouting for an escape from our prisoner of war compound.
But all night, my dream experiences were analyzed through the lens of meaning. I was hyper aware of when and why in each dream my engagement and happiness were high and when they were low.
How do we derive meaning? My dreams said:
From our social network - by being part of friendships or partnerships or families
From our experience - participating in adventure or documenting and organize the events of our lives or immersion in art/writing/food/sex
From our contribution - doing meaningful career or hobby or volunteer work or raising families or creating art
The one I missed and thought of on waking - faith
Death, divorce, loss of a job, loss of faith are life events considered extraordinarily stressful. What do they have in common? From my dream perspective, it's all about identity, purpose and connection. When we lose someone we love to death, divorce or some other breakup we lose the meaningfulness of having our relationship to them. If we are disowned or excommunicated, we lose the identity and connection to community. Lose a job, we lose our answer to What do you do? and a concrete daily task list. If we become too sick to work or participate in activities we lose engagement and satisfaction. Loss of faith sends us into a limbo where it is no longer clear how to view and organize the world into meaning; it may challenge the very notion that life has any purpose at all.
My own happiness, sense of purpose, engagement, satisfaction, depends on connections, identity, activities. If I lose a job or a person or an ability, the other things in my life are supportive. But if I lose many things at once, or one thing that is supremely important, it can be hard to keep waking up to the world. It loses its color, satisfaction is replaced by despair and eventually engagement by universal disinterest.
How do we derive meaning?
When I am low, I can't answer this question. I don't see a purpose to being. My little human life is so short in comparison to the lifetime of the universe, my existence unlikely to matter or be recorded, and I am so often caught up in the minutiae of survival and the prison of my own ego that I don't put my energy into the things I'm really good at, that are truly satisfying, or that I believe matter.
Depression is both a medical and spiritual condition. It is certainly physiological. It can be rescued pharmaceutically. It can be brought on by sensory overload, by overwhelming demands, by loss, by trauma, or illness. But it is fundamentally about being able to participate in life in a way that is experienced as meaningful.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Write something
My favourite authors write like angels; my writing seems more like Pan. Coyote. A mythical trickster shapeshifter. Unreliable, neither on your side nor against you.
In the 565am dark I woke with this question: what is writing for me?
It's been years (maybe 20?) since I wrote on a regular basis. I feel it beginning to dry up, like my fertility, something juicy and vital that I'm not using, so it's ebbing away.
Writing is a lens - distorting, magnifying, resolving. Bringing focus to my experience. I can shoot the landscape. Wide-angled, I get mountain ranges; close-ups, grains of sand, shards of veiny rock, one rust-eaten leaf.
It organizes my time, makes bullet points of lists, notes in meetings, tracks experiments
then unravels into daydreaming, fantasy, impossible physics and far-fetched desire.
Writing is a sickness, a lucid fever dream. It wakes me dry-mouthed and hungover in the predawn and teases me with turns of phrases lovely or disturbing, smoke signals hanging bright in the gloom, threatening to disappear whether I move toward waking or retreat into sleep.
Writing is a decision, an act of will, to leave the roiling cobwebbed dark, turn on a light, and chase the vapor trail thoughts into words.
In the 565am dark I woke with this question: what is writing for me?
It's been years (maybe 20?) since I wrote on a regular basis. I feel it beginning to dry up, like my fertility, something juicy and vital that I'm not using, so it's ebbing away.
Writing is a lens - distorting, magnifying, resolving. Bringing focus to my experience. I can shoot the landscape. Wide-angled, I get mountain ranges; close-ups, grains of sand, shards of veiny rock, one rust-eaten leaf.
It organizes my time, makes bullet points of lists, notes in meetings, tracks experiments
then unravels into daydreaming, fantasy, impossible physics and far-fetched desire.
Writing is a sickness, a lucid fever dream. It wakes me dry-mouthed and hungover in the predawn and teases me with turns of phrases lovely or disturbing, smoke signals hanging bright in the gloom, threatening to disappear whether I move toward waking or retreat into sleep.
Writing is a decision, an act of will, to leave the roiling cobwebbed dark, turn on a light, and chase the vapor trail thoughts into words.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Being J Lo
I was J Lo in my dream last night. As I was leaving the stage, a man staggered up to me and tried to say something in my ear. He was tackled but struggled hard and managed to get away. One of my bodyguards received a minor cut from a switchblade. The would-be attacker ran out the main doors, all of us in hot pursuit. From the top of the stairs, we watched him escape into the sewer system.
Police cars skidded up, men in bullet proof vests piled out. Badges, walkies, and dogs were in plentiful supply; a full scale manhunt was assembled. Suddenly I realized I had to pee and there was no time to go back to my dressing room. A sign led downstairs to the rest room. There was a long after-the-show line. Apart from the occasional double take fading to uncertainty no one recognized me. I finally got to use the end stall. It had no door, but was guarded by Kiko, a muscular Puerto Rican dressed in white satin vest and leather pants.
"I'll make sure no one takes any cell phone pictures, Ms. Lopez," he assured me.
To get to the toilet you had to climb a flight of stairs. As I sat on the literal throne, panties around my ankles, the wall on the far side dissolved. Members of a royal dress ball milled into the room, chatting discretely, and sipping champagne from the delicate flutes held in gloved white hands. Three people sat at the bottom of my stairs as I deployed the last square of toilet paper.
For some reason I had taken off my stockings. While I leaned against the toilet for balance to put them on, a white-haired woman in a russet satin ball gown and small half crown took a seat, as if the toilet were a convenient chair.
The woman introduced herself as Edith, the duchess of somewhere-or-other vaguely german-sounding, and related a soft-spoken anecdote about her ex-husband that included historical references to Vatican edicts on marriage from the 1600s-1900s. She spoke in perfect precise syllables - the Queen's english. And she had questions for me - not about my singing career but about my relationships.
"How does one survive a terrible divorce?" "Is it possible to ever trust again after discovering your loved one with the maid?" "What do you do to cope with loneliness?" I was keenly aware of the Puerto Rican traces lingering in my answers.
I took her hand and kissed it before taking my leave, an awkward moment as I realized I had yet to wash my own hands; she didn't appear to notice or care. At the bottom of the stairs a young royal apprehended me and demanded to know why I was impersonating a celebrity. He refused to believe who I was, and left abruptly, after delivering a promise that he would return with the police.
I made my way through the banquet tables, feeling completely out of my element. I tripped on a chair leg and almost bumped into the real J Lo. She was a few inches taller, and thinner but wore a nearly identical outfit; I allowed a moment of pride - surely hers had taken hours to construct whereas mine had been hastily assembled during the 90-minute show - including time to pose and dress figurine dolls of her backup dancers - all from the vantage point of the lighting technician's balcony.
I flushed and stammered, "I love your work so much." She gave an uncomfortable smile and turned away, just as a police officer took my arm.
To get to the interrogation room we had to pass a long corridor where my father, a rabbi, was giving a reading from the Torah. His back was to me, so he didn't see me being dragged past, hand-cuffed and in tears.
The lead detective demanded to know the details of the conspiracy between me and the escaped man. I honestly said I didn't know; I just liked to make costumes and act out doll scenes of various artists' shows that passed through the concert venue. Clearly he felt I knew more than I was telling. He slammed the table. I woke up.
Police cars skidded up, men in bullet proof vests piled out. Badges, walkies, and dogs were in plentiful supply; a full scale manhunt was assembled. Suddenly I realized I had to pee and there was no time to go back to my dressing room. A sign led downstairs to the rest room. There was a long after-the-show line. Apart from the occasional double take fading to uncertainty no one recognized me. I finally got to use the end stall. It had no door, but was guarded by Kiko, a muscular Puerto Rican dressed in white satin vest and leather pants.
"I'll make sure no one takes any cell phone pictures, Ms. Lopez," he assured me.
To get to the toilet you had to climb a flight of stairs. As I sat on the literal throne, panties around my ankles, the wall on the far side dissolved. Members of a royal dress ball milled into the room, chatting discretely, and sipping champagne from the delicate flutes held in gloved white hands. Three people sat at the bottom of my stairs as I deployed the last square of toilet paper.
For some reason I had taken off my stockings. While I leaned against the toilet for balance to put them on, a white-haired woman in a russet satin ball gown and small half crown took a seat, as if the toilet were a convenient chair.
The woman introduced herself as Edith, the duchess of somewhere-or-other vaguely german-sounding, and related a soft-spoken anecdote about her ex-husband that included historical references to Vatican edicts on marriage from the 1600s-1900s. She spoke in perfect precise syllables - the Queen's english. And she had questions for me - not about my singing career but about my relationships.
"How does one survive a terrible divorce?" "Is it possible to ever trust again after discovering your loved one with the maid?" "What do you do to cope with loneliness?" I was keenly aware of the Puerto Rican traces lingering in my answers.
I took her hand and kissed it before taking my leave, an awkward moment as I realized I had yet to wash my own hands; she didn't appear to notice or care. At the bottom of the stairs a young royal apprehended me and demanded to know why I was impersonating a celebrity. He refused to believe who I was, and left abruptly, after delivering a promise that he would return with the police.
I made my way through the banquet tables, feeling completely out of my element. I tripped on a chair leg and almost bumped into the real J Lo. She was a few inches taller, and thinner but wore a nearly identical outfit; I allowed a moment of pride - surely hers had taken hours to construct whereas mine had been hastily assembled during the 90-minute show - including time to pose and dress figurine dolls of her backup dancers - all from the vantage point of the lighting technician's balcony.
I flushed and stammered, "I love your work so much." She gave an uncomfortable smile and turned away, just as a police officer took my arm.
To get to the interrogation room we had to pass a long corridor where my father, a rabbi, was giving a reading from the Torah. His back was to me, so he didn't see me being dragged past, hand-cuffed and in tears.
The lead detective demanded to know the details of the conspiracy between me and the escaped man. I honestly said I didn't know; I just liked to make costumes and act out doll scenes of various artists' shows that passed through the concert venue. Clearly he felt I knew more than I was telling. He slammed the table. I woke up.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Prison camp for women
I spent the vast majority of my dream locked in a prison camp for "disobedient women". The buildings were made of rough unfinished wooden boards. There was no heat, electricity or running water. Time passed strangely; it might have been days or years.
It was unclear who was holding us or why. I had brief, secret affairs with two of the other inmates. It was frantic and intensely erotic as we believed that discovery would result in some terrible, unknowable retribution.
We made endless attempts to escape, each thwarted and derided as unoriginal, the prison guards' scolding accompanied by a soul-crushing litany of the number of times that exact strategy had been unsuccessfully deployed by a former inmate.
Finally, two of us managed to escape through holes we'd made in the outer chicken-wire fence, only to observe an extraction team descend on the camp minutes later and arrest our captors. The world we were released into was bleaker than we remembered, our victory over imprisonment entirely anti-climactic.
Later I was working in my lab. My printer broke down so I went down the hall to ask another lab group if they had any suggestions for how to fix it. A woman on the couch in the break room said I could use her lab printer instead.
On my way back to my lab, I was stopped by the head of a different lab, our direct neighbour.
She was flushed, her words clipped. "You have your fingers in everything, don't you? You walk around this department using up whatever you like even if it doesn't belong to you."
I stood there stunned, unable to think of an appropriate reply.
She moved closer, put her hand on the center of my chest, and pushed me back several times for emphasis. "This. Has got. To stop."
When I got home, my roommate had let her new Burmese kitten out on the balcony. Rather than play or explore, the kitten sat on the railing of the balcony staring at us with palpable disdain.
A dark shape in my peripheral vision. I looked up and saw my upstairs neighbour's pet, a human-sized flying demon, perched on the balcony above us. Suddenly it leaped into the air, and began a dive headed straight toward us. I barely had time to scoop the kitten out of harms' way. The demon's claws grazed my knuckles, a hot sulfuric wind burned my eyes. It emitted a frustrated shriek and slow-flap-flapped its enormous leathery wings to climb back up to its own balcony.
I woke with dry mouth and a headache. I need to drink more water.
It was unclear who was holding us or why. I had brief, secret affairs with two of the other inmates. It was frantic and intensely erotic as we believed that discovery would result in some terrible, unknowable retribution.
We made endless attempts to escape, each thwarted and derided as unoriginal, the prison guards' scolding accompanied by a soul-crushing litany of the number of times that exact strategy had been unsuccessfully deployed by a former inmate.
Finally, two of us managed to escape through holes we'd made in the outer chicken-wire fence, only to observe an extraction team descend on the camp minutes later and arrest our captors. The world we were released into was bleaker than we remembered, our victory over imprisonment entirely anti-climactic.
Later I was working in my lab. My printer broke down so I went down the hall to ask another lab group if they had any suggestions for how to fix it. A woman on the couch in the break room said I could use her lab printer instead.
On my way back to my lab, I was stopped by the head of a different lab, our direct neighbour.
She was flushed, her words clipped. "You have your fingers in everything, don't you? You walk around this department using up whatever you like even if it doesn't belong to you."
I stood there stunned, unable to think of an appropriate reply.
She moved closer, put her hand on the center of my chest, and pushed me back several times for emphasis. "This. Has got. To stop."
When I got home, my roommate had let her new Burmese kitten out on the balcony. Rather than play or explore, the kitten sat on the railing of the balcony staring at us with palpable disdain.
A dark shape in my peripheral vision. I looked up and saw my upstairs neighbour's pet, a human-sized flying demon, perched on the balcony above us. Suddenly it leaped into the air, and began a dive headed straight toward us. I barely had time to scoop the kitten out of harms' way. The demon's claws grazed my knuckles, a hot sulfuric wind burned my eyes. It emitted a frustrated shriek and slow-flap-flapped its enormous leathery wings to climb back up to its own balcony.
I woke with dry mouth and a headache. I need to drink more water.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Eggs, bacon and DUI
I went to see Ira Glass and Dan Savage in a DJ-off at the Showbox last night. Dan was chill in jeans, t-shirt. Ira wore a Beetles-era suit and danced around like a five year old on steroids, utterly winning the crowd over with his energy and innocence. He pulled the mainly female audience onstage to dance, tango'd with Dan Savage, conducted the mosh pit and crowd surfed. Twice.
I may not have been 100% sober on the drive home which, as I'm a child of the MADD era, always engenders guilt, even if I'd have most definitely passed the sobriety test.
In my dream, I drove a converted city party bus through the snowy streets of Philadelphia. I had twelve fairly intoxicated and animated passengers. Going uphill through a residential neighborhood at about 60 mph, I hit two pedestrians. It took forever to stop the bus and then it rolled back to the bottom of the hill where the cops were waiting. I opened the doors. An officer motioned me outside and handed me a plastic tube I assumed was a breathalyzer.
"I have never taken one of these," I said. "What do I do?"
The officer told me to bite the top and leave my saliva on the strip. It was a DNA test.
"May I ask how things are going up the road?"
"Not good," the officer responded.
My eyes welled up with tears and my voice was unsteady, "Are they...?"
"Both alive," he said, "one is conscious, just bruised, but the other is on his way to hospital in critical condition."
A crowd had gathered; it fanned out from where I and the police were standing at the door to the bus. I've never had so much evidence that large numbers of humans actually live in suburbia. It was like an impromptu bus stop at rush hour, with me as the first passenger, forever about to get on; behind me collected the rubber-neckers, playing weary commuters, sweating patiently in suits and briefcases.
I only had two drinks last night, over four hours, but I completely forgot to drink water. I'm going to go cook up a greasy breakfast and engage in some gratitude. First and foremost, that I've yet to run anybody over with my car.
I may not have been 100% sober on the drive home which, as I'm a child of the MADD era, always engenders guilt, even if I'd have most definitely passed the sobriety test.
In my dream, I drove a converted city party bus through the snowy streets of Philadelphia. I had twelve fairly intoxicated and animated passengers. Going uphill through a residential neighborhood at about 60 mph, I hit two pedestrians. It took forever to stop the bus and then it rolled back to the bottom of the hill where the cops were waiting. I opened the doors. An officer motioned me outside and handed me a plastic tube I assumed was a breathalyzer.
"I have never taken one of these," I said. "What do I do?"
The officer told me to bite the top and leave my saliva on the strip. It was a DNA test.
"May I ask how things are going up the road?"
"Not good," the officer responded.
My eyes welled up with tears and my voice was unsteady, "Are they...?"
"Both alive," he said, "one is conscious, just bruised, but the other is on his way to hospital in critical condition."
A crowd had gathered; it fanned out from where I and the police were standing at the door to the bus. I've never had so much evidence that large numbers of humans actually live in suburbia. It was like an impromptu bus stop at rush hour, with me as the first passenger, forever about to get on; behind me collected the rubber-neckers, playing weary commuters, sweating patiently in suits and briefcases.
I only had two drinks last night, over four hours, but I completely forgot to drink water. I'm going to go cook up a greasy breakfast and engage in some gratitude. First and foremost, that I've yet to run anybody over with my car.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Who needs friends when you've got vampires
Yesterday as I was stepping onto the bus, someone called my name. I turned around and discovered two classmates from grad school who I have not seen in a decade; they were accessorized with children who, as they are under ten, I have not met at all. They now live in Maine, making chance encounters statistically unlikely. Sadly the father of one friend passed away recently; they are in town this week for the funeral.
That was the beginning of a day so hectic that I fell asleep at my desk from 7:31 to 7:39, still not finished the tasks on my list. Happily I got the second wind I needed to attend my favourite DJ's salsa dance and was invited to the after party at Fonda La Catrina, a delicious Mexican restaurant in Georgetown that last night hosted a fabulous local Cuban band. (The musicians are local; the music is Cuban).
I landed in my bed at around midnight and had nine glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep. All dream night long I ran into real and not-so-real people from my past.
***
I was in New York city visiting my real life best friend from high school. Her apartment was in a new maze of tunnels under the subway system - all the highrises had been built up as far as they could go so now the city was building down. The advantage to the underground apartments was that they were cheap and very convenient to subway stops; the disadvantage was the rats.
My friend took me into her parlor, a sloping dirt-packed tunnel decorated with a single naked bulb in the shape of a "W". The ceiling was so low that I couldn't stand and look her in the face but had to crouch and stare in her direction, while burning the letter "W" deeply into my retinas. I began to have difficulty breathing and she pulled me out into the main hall where the landlord happened to be standing. "Panic attack?" he asked, his tone matter-of-fact. My friend nodded. "Some people just can't handle the claustrophobia." He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, a gesture I decided to interpret as empathy rather than apathy.
I was a surveyor for a company that was building entire cities in undeveloped, supposedly unpopulated, areas all along the eastern seaboard. I left New York by train, then took a powerboat and finally a canoe to reach the back swamps of Virginia where I was raised*.
The plans I'd seen the night before at my project meeting would have a catastrophic impact on my family's traditional way of life, on their whole community. I arrived at dusk, and was eyed suspiciously by people peeking out from behind wooden shack doors. The only woman willing to make eye contact was from an extended family of deaf-mutes. She recognized me; I signed to ask where my family was now living and was directed to a trap door inside a barn.
When I reached the bottom of the ladder, my mother greeted me with a crushing hug, and began scolding me, "Where have you been? Why didn't you write us to say you were coming? You go off to school and then never return to visit..." then abruptly pulled back, her brow furrowed.
"People are coming to map and drain your swamps," I said, the words piling out in a rush. I felt suddenly nervous. "You need to call a town meeting."
She pulled me into the kitchen. "Why do you smell different?" She sniffed the air and pulled back again, her pupils hugely dilated. I tried to control my heartbeat, slow down the surge of adrenaline. "You smell human," she whispered.
My mouth had gone dry. "I work for Eastern Regency," I said, "and they are planning to build shopping malls and playgrounds on undeveloped land all over the eastern states." Behind my mother, ina huge living room lit by hundreds of candles milled about twenty of my extended family. A few cousins had trickled into the kitchen to listen. I recognized only one of them; I wondered where my father and brothers were.
My mother tried to shoo them out and simultaneously pin me in the corner of the kitchen. I outmanoevered her and walked out into the living room, raising my voice, "I came here to warn you - to warn all of you. A construction company is coming. They are planning to build right here, on this land. You will need to re-locate. You only have a few months before it isn't safe here for you anymore."
Few appeared to be listening to my words. Many were smelling the air. A groundswell of murmuring. I felt so stupid for not anticipating that I would have to address this first.
"I am one of you," I said. "I grew up here; this is my mother -" I pointed to where she stood, in the archway between the kitchen and this huge living room. "I went away for night school and three years ago... I woke up and I had become human."
The murmuring turned into a roar of sound. The circle of relatives closed around me. I saw fangs. Dark pools of eyes. In the cacaphony I distinctly heard one of them say, "How did this happen?" and another, "When do we eat her?"
"Listen to me," I yelled, as loud as I could. The crowd backed up just a little. "I came back to warn you. You are in great danger."
My mother was at my side now, using her broom to shove my relatives to the sides of the room. "We are calling a meeting. Go and get the elders. NOW." The crowd scattered, each going to fetch their parents, grandparents. I breathed a sigh of relief. My mother was senior. My family would not disobey her no matter how hungry they were.
She turned to me, her eyes black, fangs out. "I'm sorry," she said, but her half-smile, the flick of her tongue to her teeth, sent a chill up my spine. My heart sank. I knew she was not apologizing for the family but for what was about to happen. I would not get the chance to tell my story, as a honored guest. Of course not. As a child I remembered they only called meetings when strangers showed up. The agenda was how to divide up the body. Why hadn't I thought about this? Blinded by loyalty? Maybe becoming human had made me soft, forget my roots.
"Please mom," I said, my voice breaking. "I came here to help you. That has to count for something."
She shook her head. "You turned. I don't know how. But I can't change the ancient laws. You are not one of us anymore."
My body filled with a hot sense of injustice, so familiar from childhood, but mixed now with terror. My knees threatened to give in. I fought hard to push my feelings down. I took a breath. I had been at the top of my class in engineering. This was just another in a line of difficult hypothetical problems requiring a creative solution. "There are others with me," I bluffed.
I prayed that my family's ability to smell a lie would be compromised by surprise and bloodlust. It seemed to work. "Others?"
"Yes. They aren't far behind me but we got separated. I need to find them. Otherwise it will cause chaos. Fighting."
My mother nodded. My lie was flimsy, utterly illogical, but thankfully instinct was her strong suit and for once I had the upper hand. I knew how she thought, but she couldn't - never had - understood me. She was hungry and bound by convention, and the thought of some of our community getting more than their share - more than HER share - was unbearable.
Somehow I convinced her that she had to stay and ensure the meeting was organized properly while I rounded up my supposed colleagues. I slipped out of the main room, back through the kitchen, and climbed the stairs. My whole body shook with adrenaline. Outside it was full dark and crawling with vampires on their way to a meeting where they would decide who got which parts of my body. It was a long shot. I had no idea how to get out of this alive. I only knew I had to run.
*I did not grow up in Virginia and none of my relatives possess a drop of vampire blood.
That was the beginning of a day so hectic that I fell asleep at my desk from 7:31 to 7:39, still not finished the tasks on my list. Happily I got the second wind I needed to attend my favourite DJ's salsa dance and was invited to the after party at Fonda La Catrina, a delicious Mexican restaurant in Georgetown that last night hosted a fabulous local Cuban band. (The musicians are local; the music is Cuban).
I landed in my bed at around midnight and had nine glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep. All dream night long I ran into real and not-so-real people from my past.
***
I was in New York city visiting my real life best friend from high school. Her apartment was in a new maze of tunnels under the subway system - all the highrises had been built up as far as they could go so now the city was building down. The advantage to the underground apartments was that they were cheap and very convenient to subway stops; the disadvantage was the rats.
My friend took me into her parlor, a sloping dirt-packed tunnel decorated with a single naked bulb in the shape of a "W". The ceiling was so low that I couldn't stand and look her in the face but had to crouch and stare in her direction, while burning the letter "W" deeply into my retinas. I began to have difficulty breathing and she pulled me out into the main hall where the landlord happened to be standing. "Panic attack?" he asked, his tone matter-of-fact. My friend nodded. "Some people just can't handle the claustrophobia." He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, a gesture I decided to interpret as empathy rather than apathy.
I was a surveyor for a company that was building entire cities in undeveloped, supposedly unpopulated, areas all along the eastern seaboard. I left New York by train, then took a powerboat and finally a canoe to reach the back swamps of Virginia where I was raised*.
The plans I'd seen the night before at my project meeting would have a catastrophic impact on my family's traditional way of life, on their whole community. I arrived at dusk, and was eyed suspiciously by people peeking out from behind wooden shack doors. The only woman willing to make eye contact was from an extended family of deaf-mutes. She recognized me; I signed to ask where my family was now living and was directed to a trap door inside a barn.
When I reached the bottom of the ladder, my mother greeted me with a crushing hug, and began scolding me, "Where have you been? Why didn't you write us to say you were coming? You go off to school and then never return to visit..." then abruptly pulled back, her brow furrowed.
"People are coming to map and drain your swamps," I said, the words piling out in a rush. I felt suddenly nervous. "You need to call a town meeting."
She pulled me into the kitchen. "Why do you smell different?" She sniffed the air and pulled back again, her pupils hugely dilated. I tried to control my heartbeat, slow down the surge of adrenaline. "You smell human," she whispered.
My mouth had gone dry. "I work for Eastern Regency," I said, "and they are planning to build shopping malls and playgrounds on undeveloped land all over the eastern states." Behind my mother, ina huge living room lit by hundreds of candles milled about twenty of my extended family. A few cousins had trickled into the kitchen to listen. I recognized only one of them; I wondered where my father and brothers were.
My mother tried to shoo them out and simultaneously pin me in the corner of the kitchen. I outmanoevered her and walked out into the living room, raising my voice, "I came here to warn you - to warn all of you. A construction company is coming. They are planning to build right here, on this land. You will need to re-locate. You only have a few months before it isn't safe here for you anymore."
Few appeared to be listening to my words. Many were smelling the air. A groundswell of murmuring. I felt so stupid for not anticipating that I would have to address this first.
"I am one of you," I said. "I grew up here; this is my mother -" I pointed to where she stood, in the archway between the kitchen and this huge living room. "I went away for night school and three years ago... I woke up and I had become human."
The murmuring turned into a roar of sound. The circle of relatives closed around me. I saw fangs. Dark pools of eyes. In the cacaphony I distinctly heard one of them say, "How did this happen?" and another, "When do we eat her?"
"Listen to me," I yelled, as loud as I could. The crowd backed up just a little. "I came back to warn you. You are in great danger."
My mother was at my side now, using her broom to shove my relatives to the sides of the room. "We are calling a meeting. Go and get the elders. NOW." The crowd scattered, each going to fetch their parents, grandparents. I breathed a sigh of relief. My mother was senior. My family would not disobey her no matter how hungry they were.
She turned to me, her eyes black, fangs out. "I'm sorry," she said, but her half-smile, the flick of her tongue to her teeth, sent a chill up my spine. My heart sank. I knew she was not apologizing for the family but for what was about to happen. I would not get the chance to tell my story, as a honored guest. Of course not. As a child I remembered they only called meetings when strangers showed up. The agenda was how to divide up the body. Why hadn't I thought about this? Blinded by loyalty? Maybe becoming human had made me soft, forget my roots.
"Please mom," I said, my voice breaking. "I came here to help you. That has to count for something."
She shook her head. "You turned. I don't know how. But I can't change the ancient laws. You are not one of us anymore."
My body filled with a hot sense of injustice, so familiar from childhood, but mixed now with terror. My knees threatened to give in. I fought hard to push my feelings down. I took a breath. I had been at the top of my class in engineering. This was just another in a line of difficult hypothetical problems requiring a creative solution. "There are others with me," I bluffed.
I prayed that my family's ability to smell a lie would be compromised by surprise and bloodlust. It seemed to work. "Others?"
"Yes. They aren't far behind me but we got separated. I need to find them. Otherwise it will cause chaos. Fighting."
My mother nodded. My lie was flimsy, utterly illogical, but thankfully instinct was her strong suit and for once I had the upper hand. I knew how she thought, but she couldn't - never had - understood me. She was hungry and bound by convention, and the thought of some of our community getting more than their share - more than HER share - was unbearable.
Somehow I convinced her that she had to stay and ensure the meeting was organized properly while I rounded up my supposed colleagues. I slipped out of the main room, back through the kitchen, and climbed the stairs. My whole body shook with adrenaline. Outside it was full dark and crawling with vampires on their way to a meeting where they would decide who got which parts of my body. It was a long shot. I had no idea how to get out of this alive. I only knew I had to run.
*I did not grow up in Virginia and none of my relatives possess a drop of vampire blood.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Evil rainbow clouds
In my dream, my wife and I were walking through our suburb on a day far too sunny for Seattle. The lighting was perfect, the colors as vivid as a movie, post-edit. Lush lime green lawns. Robin's egg blue sky.
Clouds formed, discrete and pillowy, none blocking the sun. They weren't the usual white; inside the colors roiled, an artificial shimmering shifting to red or black, like the rainbow refractions from a gasoline spill. My wife said there was so much pollution that the clouds now were made almost entirely of rayon.
We strolled along the sidewalk, passing house after manicured house. One of my cats rubbed her head on my leg and I saw that my wife had brought both of them along. About three yards ahead a streaming puff of smoke scudded between the houses. In its wake, three people ran, screaming. A few seconds later, another smoke bomb. More running. More screaming. The sound was muted, as far away as television, an unlikely drama unfolding right in front of us. The peace shadow of front lawns was punctuated at every gap between houses by smoke and screaming. One cat cowered behind my leg, the other sought refuge in my wife's arms.
Eventually the sky turned yellow. The sidewalk ended at a sulfur refinery. Without suburban houses to shield us, the world was choked with smoke and chaotic with panicked people. We crouched a little to get into one of the giant concrete effluent pipes that exited the facility. It was fairly clean and dry. We walked along it for about fifty yards and emerged into a huge hangar. Dozers and cats parked like toys in the cavernous space.
I felt sad, witnessing the world ending. I wished we had left the cats at home; I worried they would get badly hurt. I wondered what to do, where to go now.
Clouds formed, discrete and pillowy, none blocking the sun. They weren't the usual white; inside the colors roiled, an artificial shimmering shifting to red or black, like the rainbow refractions from a gasoline spill. My wife said there was so much pollution that the clouds now were made almost entirely of rayon.
We strolled along the sidewalk, passing house after manicured house. One of my cats rubbed her head on my leg and I saw that my wife had brought both of them along. About three yards ahead a streaming puff of smoke scudded between the houses. In its wake, three people ran, screaming. A few seconds later, another smoke bomb. More running. More screaming. The sound was muted, as far away as television, an unlikely drama unfolding right in front of us. The peace shadow of front lawns was punctuated at every gap between houses by smoke and screaming. One cat cowered behind my leg, the other sought refuge in my wife's arms.
Eventually the sky turned yellow. The sidewalk ended at a sulfur refinery. Without suburban houses to shield us, the world was choked with smoke and chaotic with panicked people. We crouched a little to get into one of the giant concrete effluent pipes that exited the facility. It was fairly clean and dry. We walked along it for about fifty yards and emerged into a huge hangar. Dozers and cats parked like toys in the cavernous space.
I felt sad, witnessing the world ending. I wished we had left the cats at home; I worried they would get badly hurt. I wondered what to do, where to go now.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Fabulous and fiery, cut and colour
The first half of my dream was spent in search of a bathroom. After waking briefly to use a real bathroom, I found myself back in my hometown writing a poem. All I remember now is that I had constructed a beautiful metaphor comparing my city to a diamond.
My dream town and the actual city where I was raised have only the most superficial commonalities - the existence of a sewage system, roads, and electricity. The city of Edmonton harbors just shy of a million inhabitants; my dream hometown was a bona fide town, complete with quaint, columned town hall, a working ice cream parlor, and the kind of Main street which boasted the only traffic light for miles around.
"Charming" is a term that will never be leveled at the suburb I grew up in - an advancing cancer of row houses unchecked by the vast stretches of midwestern Canadian prairie available ever southward. And in the diamond metaphor, Millwoods aka South Edmonton would more likely be imagined as the eons of crushing pressure which, rather than transform coal into gems, was merely escaped as soon as one acquired a drivers license and/or admission to a far away school.
Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for the alternate universe in which my family relocated to some adorable hamlet in the southern Ontario landscape. I have never lived anywhere with fewer than 100,000 people (and that is already a little sparsely populated). I was once offered a job in small town Michigan, population 11,000, and had a full-blown panic attack on the freeway driving home from the airport after my interview. All that closeness, the limits of social and geographical terrain. I felt I couldn't breathe.
Life has a way of making you eat your words, so it's always possible I'll spend my golden years in a place where everyone knows your name. For right now I'm dreaming of an assisted living facility in the middle of some elephantine city where the bus can take you downtown.
My dream town and the actual city where I was raised have only the most superficial commonalities - the existence of a sewage system, roads, and electricity. The city of Edmonton harbors just shy of a million inhabitants; my dream hometown was a bona fide town, complete with quaint, columned town hall, a working ice cream parlor, and the kind of Main street which boasted the only traffic light for miles around.
"Charming" is a term that will never be leveled at the suburb I grew up in - an advancing cancer of row houses unchecked by the vast stretches of midwestern Canadian prairie available ever southward. And in the diamond metaphor, Millwoods aka South Edmonton would more likely be imagined as the eons of crushing pressure which, rather than transform coal into gems, was merely escaped as soon as one acquired a drivers license and/or admission to a far away school.
Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for the alternate universe in which my family relocated to some adorable hamlet in the southern Ontario landscape. I have never lived anywhere with fewer than 100,000 people (and that is already a little sparsely populated). I was once offered a job in small town Michigan, population 11,000, and had a full-blown panic attack on the freeway driving home from the airport after my interview. All that closeness, the limits of social and geographical terrain. I felt I couldn't breathe.
Life has a way of making you eat your words, so it's always possible I'll spend my golden years in a place where everyone knows your name. For right now I'm dreaming of an assisted living facility in the middle of some elephantine city where the bus can take you downtown.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The Archbishop is a sandwhich
My dream took me to a small town in southern Washington to visit family. The little cafe I chose to get breakfast had rows of peanut butter and jelly jars in the pastry case to the right of the cashier, accompanied by a hand-lettered sign listing eight exotic-sounding breads. The deli case on the left had more promising options including the "Archbishop", a poached egg and bacon on an english muffin.
The cashier who rang me up joined me at a table to make my Archbishop. She narrated the ingredients and procedure tour guide style in an unending stream that I could only half-hear, randomly employing italian for simple english words. A firm clear gelatin puck she referred to as indivisi (for "uncut", she explained) was placed on the plate. She unwrapped a lettuce leaf to reveal the fancy version of Egg McMuffin and laid that on top. Next to that, at an angle, she placed a deep fried chicken leg inside a hoagie roll, and then wrapped the entire construction inside a tortilla.
Perhaps I should not go to bed hungry.
The cashier who rang me up joined me at a table to make my Archbishop. She narrated the ingredients and procedure tour guide style in an unending stream that I could only half-hear, randomly employing italian for simple english words. A firm clear gelatin puck she referred to as indivisi (for "uncut", she explained) was placed on the plate. She unwrapped a lettuce leaf to reveal the fancy version of Egg McMuffin and laid that on top. Next to that, at an angle, she placed a deep fried chicken leg inside a hoagie roll, and then wrapped the entire construction inside a tortilla.
Perhaps I should not go to bed hungry.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The Fallen Buddha
Marilyn Monroe, Caroline Kennedy and Richard Nixon's daughter were on my dream TV last night, discussing the powerful men their lives had touched. The show ended with an unusual take on the history of world religions.
I was flipping through an album of startling black and white stills. I paused on an image of Marilyn, Caroline and Richard Nixon's daughter on the couch of a TV set. "That show was censored; the public never got to see it", says the historian who has shown me this recently declassified album from the Library of Congress archives.
Marilyn, in a long brocade and satin sheath of shiny white gold sits with her feet up on a chaise lounge; Caroline Kennedy is resting on her back, head against the other side of the lounge, her pelvis on Marilyn's lap, her legs at an angle, framing Marilyn on either side. They are in mid-sentence, smiling at each other. Nixon's daughter seated ramrod straight, acts as a cushion to Caroline's head; she is looking directly into the camera, expressionless.
Behind this tableau begins to play black and white film of three scenes juxtaposed: Kennedy's funeral after the assassination, a protest against the Vietnam war, and a line of cars driving Nixon to the courthouse; each procession of cars/people is headed by a slowly undulating American flag. The joint caption at the bottom in white script: "A shameful day in history." The historical montage is replaced by a color film showing a parade of white face-painted clown monsters and women in suit dresses with pastel wigs; the new caption, in black script: "Maitross, the oldest religion."
The camera pans to the front of a large throne room, focusing on a dais. There are nine shelves in a pyramid, the lower tiers occupied by recognizable deities from China, Thailand, India, South America and Scandinavia. Four remain unclaimed, including the single spot at the very top. Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed run in together, late and out of breath. Jesus and Mohammed begin jostling for position. An argument ensues over who should get which of the remaining ledges and a few of the established gods join in. "We leave that one open for Her, you know that," this from the god from Peru, as a flurry of arms jockey for a handhold to pull themselves to the top of the pyramid.
In the scuffle, Buddha is knocked onto the floor, which opens beneath him. He plummets through a long dark hatch out of sight, re-emerging alone on the blistering surface of a red sand and black rock desert. His wanders for some time, his luminous skin becoming charred and burnt; he is disoriented and in pain. Somehow he finds the opening to the hatch and strongarms himself into it. An eternity later, he pulls himself, exhausted and disfigured, back onto the floor of the godroom. It is deserted, dusty, the lights shut.
I woke to typical Seattle mist, my cats scratching at my bedroom door for their breakfast.
I was flipping through an album of startling black and white stills. I paused on an image of Marilyn, Caroline and Richard Nixon's daughter on the couch of a TV set. "That show was censored; the public never got to see it", says the historian who has shown me this recently declassified album from the Library of Congress archives.
Marilyn, in a long brocade and satin sheath of shiny white gold sits with her feet up on a chaise lounge; Caroline Kennedy is resting on her back, head against the other side of the lounge, her pelvis on Marilyn's lap, her legs at an angle, framing Marilyn on either side. They are in mid-sentence, smiling at each other. Nixon's daughter seated ramrod straight, acts as a cushion to Caroline's head; she is looking directly into the camera, expressionless.
Behind this tableau begins to play black and white film of three scenes juxtaposed: Kennedy's funeral after the assassination, a protest against the Vietnam war, and a line of cars driving Nixon to the courthouse; each procession of cars/people is headed by a slowly undulating American flag. The joint caption at the bottom in white script: "A shameful day in history." The historical montage is replaced by a color film showing a parade of white face-painted clown monsters and women in suit dresses with pastel wigs; the new caption, in black script: "Maitross, the oldest religion."
The camera pans to the front of a large throne room, focusing on a dais. There are nine shelves in a pyramid, the lower tiers occupied by recognizable deities from China, Thailand, India, South America and Scandinavia. Four remain unclaimed, including the single spot at the very top. Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed run in together, late and out of breath. Jesus and Mohammed begin jostling for position. An argument ensues over who should get which of the remaining ledges and a few of the established gods join in. "We leave that one open for Her, you know that," this from the god from Peru, as a flurry of arms jockey for a handhold to pull themselves to the top of the pyramid.
In the scuffle, Buddha is knocked onto the floor, which opens beneath him. He plummets through a long dark hatch out of sight, re-emerging alone on the blistering surface of a red sand and black rock desert. His wanders for some time, his luminous skin becoming charred and burnt; he is disoriented and in pain. Somehow he finds the opening to the hatch and strongarms himself into it. An eternity later, he pulls himself, exhausted and disfigured, back onto the floor of the godroom. It is deserted, dusty, the lights shut.
I woke to typical Seattle mist, my cats scratching at my bedroom door for their breakfast.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
First World Problems
I woke from a dream in which I was the eldest son of a wealthy family. Our life was incredibly priveleged, full of material and social advantages. My sister Sally and I had just summered at the cottage with our spouses and children, and right at the end of the season, something incredibly minor and (literally) forgettable had happened that had everyone in an outraged tizzy. The phrase on my lips when my eyes opened was: "Of course, Sally and I were beside ourselves."
This was such a funny echo of yesterday, when I spent the morning grouchy and irritable over little nothings - careless comments, small inconveniences - forgetting till nearly 2pm to appreciate the many good things in my life. Gratitude is a value that some cultures and religions try to instill as a moral value. But it's also much simpler; it opens the doorway to happiness with Right Now. It's a powerful gift you can give yourself. And since I was raised with protestant ethics like duty, and can't totally shake it, I will say that it probably does behoove me to be more aware of the privelege and bounty in my life now.
This was such a funny echo of yesterday, when I spent the morning grouchy and irritable over little nothings - careless comments, small inconveniences - forgetting till nearly 2pm to appreciate the many good things in my life. Gratitude is a value that some cultures and religions try to instill as a moral value. But it's also much simpler; it opens the doorway to happiness with Right Now. It's a powerful gift you can give yourself. And since I was raised with protestant ethics like duty, and can't totally shake it, I will say that it probably does behoove me to be more aware of the privelege and bounty in my life now.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Social butterfly hand in hand with autism
My social dream calendar was packed last night, which turns out to be the case in real life too.
Tonight I've got two different dances to attend - the queer social at Century and the monthly "Third Friday" salsa dance put on by one of my favourite salsa leads. Saturday, after I work for the usual 8h long teaching day, I'm heading to a destination birthday party. Sunday is lunch with a friend.
In last night's dream I was finalizing plans for a potluck with my granny aerobics group when my sister showed up unexpectedly from out of town - with ten friends in a big car caravan - in order to party at my house. I was thrilled to have her but unsure how to organize and attend both events. Finally I realized the first group, which consisted of mostly older women, would wrap up around 9, around the time my sister and her friends would probably just be getting started.
I drove to the store to get some supplies and just before the supermarket parking lot, saw a car come to a sudden screeching halt inches away from driving into the median ditch on the freeway. It was a small navy blue compact and the front tire had gone flat. I stopped to help and discovered the driver was my friend Phil* from grad school, who now runs a lab in upstate New York.
Phil's wife Bea got out and literally handed me their son, also Phil. Which is to say she took Phil Jr.'s hand, a boy of about 15, gangly, eyes downcast, and put it in mine. "Would you mind watching him while we take care of this?" she asked.
Phil's son was autistic, but relatively high-functioning and verbal. He needed his hand held 24h a day. He rambled facts and observations off to me as we walked hand in hand to my car. Let his hand go, Bea had warned me, and he'd become more and more anxious, till he was screaming and crying.
Phil had never told me about his son's condition and I wondered if it was because he had a hard time dealing with the situation. I pondered what seemed to me to be the sudden rise in autism - going through all the causes I knew had been proposed. I thought about my handful of friends whose autistic children were nonverbal and how difficult that made things.
Phil Jr would never be independent, not if he needed physical contact every moment of the day - though perhaps at some point he could transition to a companion animal. But he had a set of basic skills and he could talk. That was no small something.
Phil returned and it was instantly clear he deeply loved and enjoyed his son. Also it was clear that Phil had become entirely gay. The vibe practically rose from him like a heat wave. I glanced at his wife, wondering if she knew, or if it just seemed beside the point with a special needs child.
*not his real name.
So in the real world, I know as many people with autistic children as I know people who've had breast cancer. Does this seem like a large number to you? It does to me.
I'm not suggesting cancer and autism are similar in a superficial way - one is a progressive life-threatening disease; the other a developmental condition. The comparison holds for another reason. Cancer is ultimately genetic and it runs in families, but not in a straightforward Mendelian way. It skips generations; it doesn't affect everyone with identifiable "cancer genes".
For years cancer eluded sophisticated treatment or biological explanation because it turns out that several cellular systems have to fail one after another before cells become cancerous. Much of the research was like that old story about the blind men stroking the elephant.
So each progression towards cancer, we now know, shares broad similarities. And still many challenges remain since each cancer is the result of a rapid, independent series of evolution events and so is best treated on a case by case basis.
Likewise there does not seem to be one easy answer that explains the autistic spectrum. My money is on some combination of side effects from the processes of first world industry. Some pollutant, hormone disruptor, factory-made chemical, waste product. Something in the environment or our lifestyle or both is boosting the disruption of a genetically complex system whose dysregulation drives autism.
I think there will turn out to be autism genes, not one or two but many, from select classes of molecules that perform similar functions and converge on the same process. Cancer genes are in one of five or six classes, but each class has several members, so that the suite of genetic defects in a given breast cancer is not necessarily identical to another similarly-behaving tumor from another individual - or even a second tumor in that person's own body.
I also think that, like cancer, autism will prove difficult to treat or predict even once we have a biological mechanism. Cancer retreats and recurs. Anyone with a severely autistic child is familiar with the disconcerting, sometimes heartbreaking, ebb and flow of skill acquisition.
In my dream we sat at a table under a huge umbrella at an outdoor fast food hamburger place - me, Bea, Phil, and their 15 year old son. It was a bright day, no clouds, a little breezy. Phil held his son's hand, and Phil Jr. talked about everything under the sun.
With no pause in his stream of chatter, Phil Jr said, "Wet. I'm wet." Bea immediately rose and took her son to the bathroom to be changed. I hugged Phil and said how nice to see him and his family. I left to go home and finish party planning.
Tonight I've got two different dances to attend - the queer social at Century and the monthly "Third Friday" salsa dance put on by one of my favourite salsa leads. Saturday, after I work for the usual 8h long teaching day, I'm heading to a destination birthday party. Sunday is lunch with a friend.
In last night's dream I was finalizing plans for a potluck with my granny aerobics group when my sister showed up unexpectedly from out of town - with ten friends in a big car caravan - in order to party at my house. I was thrilled to have her but unsure how to organize and attend both events. Finally I realized the first group, which consisted of mostly older women, would wrap up around 9, around the time my sister and her friends would probably just be getting started.
I drove to the store to get some supplies and just before the supermarket parking lot, saw a car come to a sudden screeching halt inches away from driving into the median ditch on the freeway. It was a small navy blue compact and the front tire had gone flat. I stopped to help and discovered the driver was my friend Phil* from grad school, who now runs a lab in upstate New York.
Phil's wife Bea got out and literally handed me their son, also Phil. Which is to say she took Phil Jr.'s hand, a boy of about 15, gangly, eyes downcast, and put it in mine. "Would you mind watching him while we take care of this?" she asked.
Phil's son was autistic, but relatively high-functioning and verbal. He needed his hand held 24h a day. He rambled facts and observations off to me as we walked hand in hand to my car. Let his hand go, Bea had warned me, and he'd become more and more anxious, till he was screaming and crying.
Phil had never told me about his son's condition and I wondered if it was because he had a hard time dealing with the situation. I pondered what seemed to me to be the sudden rise in autism - going through all the causes I knew had been proposed. I thought about my handful of friends whose autistic children were nonverbal and how difficult that made things.
Phil Jr would never be independent, not if he needed physical contact every moment of the day - though perhaps at some point he could transition to a companion animal. But he had a set of basic skills and he could talk. That was no small something.
Phil returned and it was instantly clear he deeply loved and enjoyed his son. Also it was clear that Phil had become entirely gay. The vibe practically rose from him like a heat wave. I glanced at his wife, wondering if she knew, or if it just seemed beside the point with a special needs child.
*not his real name.
So in the real world, I know as many people with autistic children as I know people who've had breast cancer. Does this seem like a large number to you? It does to me.
I'm not suggesting cancer and autism are similar in a superficial way - one is a progressive life-threatening disease; the other a developmental condition. The comparison holds for another reason. Cancer is ultimately genetic and it runs in families, but not in a straightforward Mendelian way. It skips generations; it doesn't affect everyone with identifiable "cancer genes".
For years cancer eluded sophisticated treatment or biological explanation because it turns out that several cellular systems have to fail one after another before cells become cancerous. Much of the research was like that old story about the blind men stroking the elephant.
So each progression towards cancer, we now know, shares broad similarities. And still many challenges remain since each cancer is the result of a rapid, independent series of evolution events and so is best treated on a case by case basis.
Likewise there does not seem to be one easy answer that explains the autistic spectrum. My money is on some combination of side effects from the processes of first world industry. Some pollutant, hormone disruptor, factory-made chemical, waste product. Something in the environment or our lifestyle or both is boosting the disruption of a genetically complex system whose dysregulation drives autism.
I think there will turn out to be autism genes, not one or two but many, from select classes of molecules that perform similar functions and converge on the same process. Cancer genes are in one of five or six classes, but each class has several members, so that the suite of genetic defects in a given breast cancer is not necessarily identical to another similarly-behaving tumor from another individual - or even a second tumor in that person's own body.
I also think that, like cancer, autism will prove difficult to treat or predict even once we have a biological mechanism. Cancer retreats and recurs. Anyone with a severely autistic child is familiar with the disconcerting, sometimes heartbreaking, ebb and flow of skill acquisition.
In my dream we sat at a table under a huge umbrella at an outdoor fast food hamburger place - me, Bea, Phil, and their 15 year old son. It was a bright day, no clouds, a little breezy. Phil held his son's hand, and Phil Jr. talked about everything under the sun.
With no pause in his stream of chatter, Phil Jr said, "Wet. I'm wet." Bea immediately rose and took her son to the bathroom to be changed. I hugged Phil and said how nice to see him and his family. I left to go home and finish party planning.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The department of transportation
My dream world last night was very busy with intrigue, lapses in narrative flow, and blatant disregard for the rules of physics. But what I remember best about last night's kaleidoscope of vignettes was that I took every possible form of transportation, including something that hasn't been invented yet.
There were planes, trains, and automobiles as well as a cross-country journey on foot, at the onset of the apocalypse. My final dream was of sightseeing in Manhattan with my family. We exited a taxi, took an elevator to the 11th floor of a historical building on Columbia U campus, and boarded what I had assumed would be a train, for a quick five-block journey. Instead, after 11 people were packed into the small cabin, we were instructed to put on our seatbelts and our hovercopter rose into the air.
We watched the varied New York landscape whiz by as we descended and rose, always keeping fifteen feet off the ground. The copter followed a crow's trajectory and rather than avoid the constant obstacle highrises, simply skimmed up and over them. It was a roller coaster subway ride I'll never forget.
Finally we landed on another roof and disembarked. My sister and I tipped the driver and then set off on the most urgent task of that moment: locating the restroom.
There were planes, trains, and automobiles as well as a cross-country journey on foot, at the onset of the apocalypse. My final dream was of sightseeing in Manhattan with my family. We exited a taxi, took an elevator to the 11th floor of a historical building on Columbia U campus, and boarded what I had assumed would be a train, for a quick five-block journey. Instead, after 11 people were packed into the small cabin, we were instructed to put on our seatbelts and our hovercopter rose into the air.
We watched the varied New York landscape whiz by as we descended and rose, always keeping fifteen feet off the ground. The copter followed a crow's trajectory and rather than avoid the constant obstacle highrises, simply skimmed up and over them. It was a roller coaster subway ride I'll never forget.
Finally we landed on another roof and disembarked. My sister and I tipped the driver and then set off on the most urgent task of that moment: locating the restroom.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Look where you're going
The thought I woke up with was: we should be studying the healthiest people, not the sickest.
This is a sleepy oversimplification of what I really believe. Obviously we shouldn't stop researching disease or creating models of cellular dysfunction. But there is also value in studying a process that is working optimally. You may learn a lot about car engines by studying the contents of junk yards and trying to resurrect or improve them; but, it would be really valuable to have a Ferrari and a Prius purring in the front lot, so you know what to aim for.
In my field of basic biological sciences, it is far easier to pinpoint "dead" as a relevant experimental output. But the goal of what we learn from the dysfunctional data points in basic sciences is to reconstruct how-this-works - when it's working - and see if that informs how-it-works in all animals including us. Recent advances in imaging and data mining have allowed us to look deep inside even those cells and processes that are humming along perfectly and see what is really going on.
I imagine in medicine it is easier to justify pumping money into interventions that will improve lifespan or healthspan, or open a new market for prescription drugs, when the starting point is "really sick", rather than "doing OK, not great". There is a field of preventative medicine and though I'm told that funding is tight, I personally know little about it. So this will largely be a half-awake ramble outside my expertise.
When I was learning to drive, the most lasting, practical lesson was not "10 and 2" or even FINALLY grasping how to parallel park. It was "look where you're going". I took a crash avoidance course and in a crisis, the instinct is to stare, deer in headlights style, at whatever you are hoping not to hit - the oncoming vehicle in the wrong lane, the guardrail you ventured too close to, the dog that is running in front of your car - is very powerful. And disastrous.
The bromide that applies here is "look where you are going"; the related human rule of physics: you go where you look. The course taught drivers to use the seconds before a possible collision to scan the environment for escape routes, rather than the obstacle. Drive past the scene of an accident and your wheels drift in the direction of the crash you are staring at. Round a corner to find a huge rock in your lane and you just might avoid it if you can keep your head, check the other lanes for an opening and swerve out of the way.
Coincidentally, I was in a tunnel yesterday, driving my lab to a Vancouver conference, when a truck three cars ahead began losing engine parts; the jumbo sized muffler landed right in the middle of my lane as we were going about 40 miles an hour. I couldn't go right (tunnel wall) or left (cars in adjacent lane) or come to a dead stop without getting rear-ended, so I went over. The sidewall of the front right tire on my car and the car directly ahead of us that also had to make this decision were both torn out. We shared a bonding moment after exiting the tunnel on our rims, changing tires on the side of the road.
This is not directly related to my thesis; on a further tangent I have to say my tires always go flat at the least convenient and most dangerous places.
Despite our roadside adventure, we made it to the Vancouver Regional Worm meeting on beautiful UBC campus, and I even got a chance to obtain a delicious sushi assortment from Jun Sushi near Blanca and Broadway - a mom and pop that was one of THREE sushi options within walking distance of Big O Tires. Their mango and dynamite rolls will both make you cry with happiness.
Yes, Vancouver IS awash in good, cheap sushi. Sushi for four? $33 including tax. I share here a picture of the feast about three minutes into our feeding frenzy. There's nothing like a near death experience to make you appreciate wild caught salmon sashimi.
My favourite talk of the conference, besides of course the killer jobs done by my own colleagues and an excellent keynote address from a very established female PI, was from a woman using C elegans as a model for ALS. So I'm not a hater, yo. For reals. This kind of research is fascinating and valuable; the presenter had some very exciting results to share and it was truly a showcase for what model systems can tell us about being human, which is nice since I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to this kind of basic science research.
I also watched a TEDx talk recently about Dr. Wahls', a physician who cured her own severe MS with a daily diet of:
3 cups leafy greens like kale
3 cups sulfur vegetables like brussel sprouts
3 cups bright colors like roots and berries
grass-fed animal protein and organ meats like liver
MS is a debilitating progressive disease and the most modern pharmaceutic and technological interventions at BEST buy a minor reduction in decline or minimal increase in comfort. Like ALS, there is no medically sanctioned cure. Typical lifespan after an ALS diagnosis is less than four years. The picture of MS is of patients in wheelchairs.
I'm fairly healthy and I've always been fit and active, but at 40 I've finally reached a point where if I don't watch what I eat very carefully I gain - oh let's say theoretically - 30 pounds in two years. I wake up stiff and sore, and if I don't stretch and manage injury properly I find I can't go running, hiking, dancing, or even walking without pain.
My friend in toxicology believes environmental chemical pollutants and poor diet are at the heart of much of modern first-world disease. There is a small but growing medical community that is getting behind this idea. I've been inspired to try this MS diet and see what happens to my inflammation and weight.
What I woke up thinking was that we should be focusing on those people who are extra healthy - populations where cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's are at a global low - and figure out what they are doing right. Of course this is not a new idea; people have tried to correlate red wine drinking in France, olive oil use in Greece, fish and rice consumption in Japan, with health benefits. I am eager to see the large studies on hunter gatherers asking whether a lifelong diet of nuts, berries and wild caught game, environmentally imposed diet restriction cycles, and a physically active lifestyle is associated with decreases in heart disease or senility.
I'm not a luddite and I don't think that technology is evil per se, though there can be no doubt that first-world-technology-driven pollution is a giant problem with devastating environmental effects.
I just think we should be looking where we want to go at least as much as we stare at what scares us. Figuring out how the healthiest bodies work, not to downgrade the care and treatment of people suffering from chronic illness, but to raise the bar. There is value in finding the drug that will keep someone alive an extra six months. I want that to be six months worth living.
This is a sleepy oversimplification of what I really believe. Obviously we shouldn't stop researching disease or creating models of cellular dysfunction. But there is also value in studying a process that is working optimally. You may learn a lot about car engines by studying the contents of junk yards and trying to resurrect or improve them; but, it would be really valuable to have a Ferrari and a Prius purring in the front lot, so you know what to aim for.
In my field of basic biological sciences, it is far easier to pinpoint "dead" as a relevant experimental output. But the goal of what we learn from the dysfunctional data points in basic sciences is to reconstruct how-this-works - when it's working - and see if that informs how-it-works in all animals including us. Recent advances in imaging and data mining have allowed us to look deep inside even those cells and processes that are humming along perfectly and see what is really going on.
I imagine in medicine it is easier to justify pumping money into interventions that will improve lifespan or healthspan, or open a new market for prescription drugs, when the starting point is "really sick", rather than "doing OK, not great". There is a field of preventative medicine and though I'm told that funding is tight, I personally know little about it. So this will largely be a half-awake ramble outside my expertise.
When I was learning to drive, the most lasting, practical lesson was not "10 and 2" or even FINALLY grasping how to parallel park. It was "look where you're going". I took a crash avoidance course and in a crisis, the instinct is to stare, deer in headlights style, at whatever you are hoping not to hit - the oncoming vehicle in the wrong lane, the guardrail you ventured too close to, the dog that is running in front of your car - is very powerful. And disastrous.
The bromide that applies here is "look where you are going"; the related human rule of physics: you go where you look. The course taught drivers to use the seconds before a possible collision to scan the environment for escape routes, rather than the obstacle. Drive past the scene of an accident and your wheels drift in the direction of the crash you are staring at. Round a corner to find a huge rock in your lane and you just might avoid it if you can keep your head, check the other lanes for an opening and swerve out of the way.
Coincidentally, I was in a tunnel yesterday, driving my lab to a Vancouver conference, when a truck three cars ahead began losing engine parts; the jumbo sized muffler landed right in the middle of my lane as we were going about 40 miles an hour. I couldn't go right (tunnel wall) or left (cars in adjacent lane) or come to a dead stop without getting rear-ended, so I went over. The sidewall of the front right tire on my car and the car directly ahead of us that also had to make this decision were both torn out. We shared a bonding moment after exiting the tunnel on our rims, changing tires on the side of the road.
This is not directly related to my thesis; on a further tangent I have to say my tires always go flat at the least convenient and most dangerous places.
Despite our roadside adventure, we made it to the Vancouver Regional Worm meeting on beautiful UBC campus, and I even got a chance to obtain a delicious sushi assortment from Jun Sushi near Blanca and Broadway - a mom and pop that was one of THREE sushi options within walking distance of Big O Tires. Their mango and dynamite rolls will both make you cry with happiness.Yes, Vancouver IS awash in good, cheap sushi. Sushi for four? $33 including tax. I share here a picture of the feast about three minutes into our feeding frenzy. There's nothing like a near death experience to make you appreciate wild caught salmon sashimi.
My favourite talk of the conference, besides of course the killer jobs done by my own colleagues and an excellent keynote address from a very established female PI, was from a woman using C elegans as a model for ALS. So I'm not a hater, yo. For reals. This kind of research is fascinating and valuable; the presenter had some very exciting results to share and it was truly a showcase for what model systems can tell us about being human, which is nice since I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to this kind of basic science research.
I also watched a TEDx talk recently about Dr. Wahls', a physician who cured her own severe MS with a daily diet of:
3 cups leafy greens like kale
3 cups sulfur vegetables like brussel sprouts
3 cups bright colors like roots and berries
grass-fed animal protein and organ meats like liver
MS is a debilitating progressive disease and the most modern pharmaceutic and technological interventions at BEST buy a minor reduction in decline or minimal increase in comfort. Like ALS, there is no medically sanctioned cure. Typical lifespan after an ALS diagnosis is less than four years. The picture of MS is of patients in wheelchairs.
I'm fairly healthy and I've always been fit and active, but at 40 I've finally reached a point where if I don't watch what I eat very carefully I gain - oh let's say theoretically - 30 pounds in two years. I wake up stiff and sore, and if I don't stretch and manage injury properly I find I can't go running, hiking, dancing, or even walking without pain.
My friend in toxicology believes environmental chemical pollutants and poor diet are at the heart of much of modern first-world disease. There is a small but growing medical community that is getting behind this idea. I've been inspired to try this MS diet and see what happens to my inflammation and weight.
What I woke up thinking was that we should be focusing on those people who are extra healthy - populations where cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's are at a global low - and figure out what they are doing right. Of course this is not a new idea; people have tried to correlate red wine drinking in France, olive oil use in Greece, fish and rice consumption in Japan, with health benefits. I am eager to see the large studies on hunter gatherers asking whether a lifelong diet of nuts, berries and wild caught game, environmentally imposed diet restriction cycles, and a physically active lifestyle is associated with decreases in heart disease or senility.
I'm not a luddite and I don't think that technology is evil per se, though there can be no doubt that first-world-technology-driven pollution is a giant problem with devastating environmental effects.
I just think we should be looking where we want to go at least as much as we stare at what scares us. Figuring out how the healthiest bodies work, not to downgrade the care and treatment of people suffering from chronic illness, but to raise the bar. There is value in finding the drug that will keep someone alive an extra six months. I want that to be six months worth living.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Vampire strategy
I dream a lot about vampires lately because I've been watching Vampire Diaries before bed. It's basically a paranormal soap opera set in high school. Last night, when I should have been having epiphanies about my project, because I should be reading scientific papers before bed, I realized that the evil mastermind in VD is trying to isolate everyone, break alliances, so opponents are weaker and can be dispatched one by one.
This is my biggest fear - being alone. My second is having no worthwhile accomplishments before I die. There is a buddhist saying that translates kind of like this: when unsure what to do, ask yourself "what is the most important thing?" It turned out the most important thing right now was to write down this thought. The second most important thing, given that it is Very Early in the AM, might be to have a quick nap before work.
This is my biggest fear - being alone. My second is having no worthwhile accomplishments before I die. There is a buddhist saying that translates kind of like this: when unsure what to do, ask yourself "what is the most important thing?" It turned out the most important thing right now was to write down this thought. The second most important thing, given that it is Very Early in the AM, might be to have a quick nap before work.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Don't talk about the whale in the bathtub
I dreamt that I lived with my family on a lot that had two houses, joined at the front door by a carpeted tunnel. I had two sisters and a brother, all ginger-haired like my geologist father. I was the oldest, blonde like my mom.
Two days before, my father had picked me up for spring break from my New Hampshire dorm so we could road trip together back to California, in a van. This is the only thing in my dream that has a parallel in the real world. For most of my childhood, my family owned a blue Dodge van. We drove it for twenty years, until it literally disintegrated; at the end, you could see the road through the floorboards and the only gear that worked was "reverse". The dream van was still in good shape, comfortable for driving thousands of miles across the country.
As we pulled into the driveway at home, my siblings ran out to greet us. Mom was still at work. My younger sister complained that south wing was too hot. My father and I touched the wall of the south house next to the front door and compared it to the temperature in the north. South house was definitely hotter to the touch. In south kitchen, we discovered some old electrical wiring sparking near the stove. There was a very small fire, some flames but mostly smoke, spreading very slowly. We ran through the house and found a small blue whale outside my bedroom door. Together we lugged it into the upstairs bathtub to keep it hydrated.
My father decided that the house was worth more to us in insurance money so he drove off with my two sisters, leaving me and my brother on the front lawn to watch the house burn down.
As he drove away we became younger and younger until I was 9, my brother Sean 8. We circled the house. In the backyard I found our cage full of gerbils and pulled them further back from the house that was now putting out an oven temperature heat even though no flames were yet visible from the outside. Over and over again, Sean asked me what we were doing. Waiting for daddy I said, and with each iteration it seemed less true.
A cop car pulled up to the curb. "What are you two doing out here?" the officer asked.
"Our house is on fire," I blurted out, immediately regretting it. I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to say anything. I began blathering, making excuses for why we hadn't called the authorities yet.
The officer called the fire department. Instantly, with no waiting or fire trucks, the fire subsided. "Next time," the officer scolded me, "you just have to dial 9-1-1."
My father got home. All of us went inside. I was 19 again. At dinner in the north wing, my father was quiet as I related what had happened when the police officer showed up. "You should have kept your mouth shut," he said, finally. "We were almost free."
"Well NEXT time the house is on fire, and you decide to go for a drive, you should leave me with specific instructions for exactly how to lie to the authorities." I stormed out of the room, angry tears leaking from my eyes.
I walked through south house, appreciating the neutral decor. Everything seemed so neat and cozy. I couldn't understand why my father had wanted it all to burn, or why he'd left the house without trying to save even one momento. I felt a growing sense of gratitude that not a single scorch mark was visible; there wasn't even the smell of smoke in the air.
I passed the bathroom door and heard a strange stretched-out moan. My stomach sank; how could I have forgotten? Opening the door, I saw the whale in the bathtub had dried out on one side and was heaving as if unable to get air. I ran water over it with the shower head and asked, in english, if it wanted something to eat. I was pretty sure I remembered seeing a can of crab meat in north fridge. The whale nodded, one sad eye pleading with me for help.
I ran down the stairs and through the tunnel to north wing, my mind racing. If I called a museum or aquarium we'd certainly get trouble from agencies that protect sea mammals. I didn't think anyone would buy that we'd just "found" a blue whale in our house, even though it was true.
I rifled frantically through the fridge, feeling despair when I came up empty-handed. I couldn't even feed this animal. What was I going to do do? I didn't think the whale would fit in my car. I'd need a truck. It would have to be the middle of the night to avoid attracting too much attention. And I'd need help; I couldn't lift the whale by myself. Did I even know anyone strong who would keep that kind of secret for me?
I woke up, heart pounding, still strategizing how to save the whale without going to jail.
Two days before, my father had picked me up for spring break from my New Hampshire dorm so we could road trip together back to California, in a van. This is the only thing in my dream that has a parallel in the real world. For most of my childhood, my family owned a blue Dodge van. We drove it for twenty years, until it literally disintegrated; at the end, you could see the road through the floorboards and the only gear that worked was "reverse". The dream van was still in good shape, comfortable for driving thousands of miles across the country.
As we pulled into the driveway at home, my siblings ran out to greet us. Mom was still at work. My younger sister complained that south wing was too hot. My father and I touched the wall of the south house next to the front door and compared it to the temperature in the north. South house was definitely hotter to the touch. In south kitchen, we discovered some old electrical wiring sparking near the stove. There was a very small fire, some flames but mostly smoke, spreading very slowly. We ran through the house and found a small blue whale outside my bedroom door. Together we lugged it into the upstairs bathtub to keep it hydrated.
My father decided that the house was worth more to us in insurance money so he drove off with my two sisters, leaving me and my brother on the front lawn to watch the house burn down.
As he drove away we became younger and younger until I was 9, my brother Sean 8. We circled the house. In the backyard I found our cage full of gerbils and pulled them further back from the house that was now putting out an oven temperature heat even though no flames were yet visible from the outside. Over and over again, Sean asked me what we were doing. Waiting for daddy I said, and with each iteration it seemed less true.
A cop car pulled up to the curb. "What are you two doing out here?" the officer asked.
"Our house is on fire," I blurted out, immediately regretting it. I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to say anything. I began blathering, making excuses for why we hadn't called the authorities yet.
The officer called the fire department. Instantly, with no waiting or fire trucks, the fire subsided. "Next time," the officer scolded me, "you just have to dial 9-1-1."
My father got home. All of us went inside. I was 19 again. At dinner in the north wing, my father was quiet as I related what had happened when the police officer showed up. "You should have kept your mouth shut," he said, finally. "We were almost free."
"Well NEXT time the house is on fire, and you decide to go for a drive, you should leave me with specific instructions for exactly how to lie to the authorities." I stormed out of the room, angry tears leaking from my eyes.
I walked through south house, appreciating the neutral decor. Everything seemed so neat and cozy. I couldn't understand why my father had wanted it all to burn, or why he'd left the house without trying to save even one momento. I felt a growing sense of gratitude that not a single scorch mark was visible; there wasn't even the smell of smoke in the air.
I passed the bathroom door and heard a strange stretched-out moan. My stomach sank; how could I have forgotten? Opening the door, I saw the whale in the bathtub had dried out on one side and was heaving as if unable to get air. I ran water over it with the shower head and asked, in english, if it wanted something to eat. I was pretty sure I remembered seeing a can of crab meat in north fridge. The whale nodded, one sad eye pleading with me for help.
I ran down the stairs and through the tunnel to north wing, my mind racing. If I called a museum or aquarium we'd certainly get trouble from agencies that protect sea mammals. I didn't think anyone would buy that we'd just "found" a blue whale in our house, even though it was true.
I rifled frantically through the fridge, feeling despair when I came up empty-handed. I couldn't even feed this animal. What was I going to do do? I didn't think the whale would fit in my car. I'd need a truck. It would have to be the middle of the night to avoid attracting too much attention. And I'd need help; I couldn't lift the whale by myself. Did I even know anyone strong who would keep that kind of secret for me?
I woke up, heart pounding, still strategizing how to save the whale without going to jail.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Stupid human tricks
I have been having a wee bit of trouble sleeping lately. So when, the night before last, I got a full unbroken seven, I resolved to be more disciplined, early to bed early to rise, no more late night snacks or caffeine or skipping my morning trip to the gym.
Instead last night I discovered "Dollhouse" and stayed up till 3am.
I'm dumb.
It's a pretty good show, though.
Instead last night I discovered "Dollhouse" and stayed up till 3am.
I'm dumb.
It's a pretty good show, though.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Cleopatra dances the salsa
I had such a busy night in dreamland that I feel like I just was at a triple feature.
I was in a group of my friends, mostly couples, touring around the country in a little VW bus. It was a loose meandering agenda, ending nightly wherever we landed - motels on the freeway, cabins in the wilderness, with the occasional break to go into the nearest city to party like aging rock stars.
Most of my friends were straight but there was one other lesbian in the group. On day four our bus passed through the small town where her girlfriend lived. Before leaving to visit her girl she gave us directions to a dance hall where she had started taking lessons. We all got drunk, dressed up and set off for the hall.
On the way there the bus got a flat. One of the husbands hotwired a couple of motorcycles so that he and I could ferry people back to the hotel. It turned out most people were lukewarm about dancing so in the end I went a straight girlfriend, whose husband stayed behind with everyone else to watch a game on TV.
I met the salsa instructor and instantly hated her. She was a heavily made up 60-something woman with died orange hair. I asked if we could join the lesson - as it was the second week of beginner class and my friend hadn't danced in a while I wasn't sure. Some instructors won't accept drop-ins after week one. She looked at my friend and said "Oh. No problem. I can teach you everything you need to know right here." She grabbed my friend by both hands and began raising and lowering her in the stairwell. I saw that my friend was moving her shoulders too much and losing her frame but the instructor said nothing about it except, "Great. You're ready."
As we followed her down a hall, she became a stocky, energetic gay man in his 30s. He offered some rapid-fire dance-and-relationship advice. Right before we reached a door he turned to me and said, "You have very masculine energy. I'm gay but I'm flexible." Then he kissed my cheek and resumed her previous form.
She ushered us into a small, overly decorated waiting room lined with people, all over the age of 50, dressed as for an egyptian-themed ball. They wore silver masks or heavy white and black makeup, black or purple velvet robes and a great deal of metal jewelry and accessories. My friend was the most elaborately costumed of them all. I felt a momentary self-consciousness in my short salsa dress and red dance shoes.
One by one, the different instructors came into the room and called out for their dance students. People left to take waltz with a pot-bellied jovial man in a powder blue suit. A 20something guy with spiky black hair and a pin-stripe suit vest Pied Pipered out an entire troupe of 7-and-8-year-old brownies who had apparently been hiding in the waiting room foliage. They were dressed in uniform, badges and all, and emerged, holding hands in an unbroken line, like perfect brown paper dolls.
The salsa instructor had not reappeared, nor her queer male alter ego. The egyptians were getting restless, fanning and fanning themselves in the close air of the room. But nobody left. We just stayed, and kept on waiting.
I was in a group of my friends, mostly couples, touring around the country in a little VW bus. It was a loose meandering agenda, ending nightly wherever we landed - motels on the freeway, cabins in the wilderness, with the occasional break to go into the nearest city to party like aging rock stars.
Most of my friends were straight but there was one other lesbian in the group. On day four our bus passed through the small town where her girlfriend lived. Before leaving to visit her girl she gave us directions to a dance hall where she had started taking lessons. We all got drunk, dressed up and set off for the hall.
On the way there the bus got a flat. One of the husbands hotwired a couple of motorcycles so that he and I could ferry people back to the hotel. It turned out most people were lukewarm about dancing so in the end I went a straight girlfriend, whose husband stayed behind with everyone else to watch a game on TV.
I met the salsa instructor and instantly hated her. She was a heavily made up 60-something woman with died orange hair. I asked if we could join the lesson - as it was the second week of beginner class and my friend hadn't danced in a while I wasn't sure. Some instructors won't accept drop-ins after week one. She looked at my friend and said "Oh. No problem. I can teach you everything you need to know right here." She grabbed my friend by both hands and began raising and lowering her in the stairwell. I saw that my friend was moving her shoulders too much and losing her frame but the instructor said nothing about it except, "Great. You're ready."
As we followed her down a hall, she became a stocky, energetic gay man in his 30s. He offered some rapid-fire dance-and-relationship advice. Right before we reached a door he turned to me and said, "You have very masculine energy. I'm gay but I'm flexible." Then he kissed my cheek and resumed her previous form.
She ushered us into a small, overly decorated waiting room lined with people, all over the age of 50, dressed as for an egyptian-themed ball. They wore silver masks or heavy white and black makeup, black or purple velvet robes and a great deal of metal jewelry and accessories. My friend was the most elaborately costumed of them all. I felt a momentary self-consciousness in my short salsa dress and red dance shoes.
One by one, the different instructors came into the room and called out for their dance students. People left to take waltz with a pot-bellied jovial man in a powder blue suit. A 20something guy with spiky black hair and a pin-stripe suit vest Pied Pipered out an entire troupe of 7-and-8-year-old brownies who had apparently been hiding in the waiting room foliage. They were dressed in uniform, badges and all, and emerged, holding hands in an unbroken line, like perfect brown paper dolls.
The salsa instructor had not reappeared, nor her queer male alter ego. The egyptians were getting restless, fanning and fanning themselves in the close air of the room. But nobody left. We just stayed, and kept on waiting.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Military porn star
I had a really long dream with an involved plot. And now all I can remember is that I was at a family reunion and ended up as the ad hoc mentor to my cousin who had been in the military a long time. She was queer but having gone from her fundamentalist family straight into the service, was only just coming out, now, at 43.
For the reunion we were all housed in a rustic Kansas farmhouse. The toilets didn't work so in the middle of the night you had to choose between peeing on the floor outside of your room or going outside. Either option was acceptable but women were encouraged to choose the indoor option for safety reasons. Every morning it was my chore to get up and clean puddles off the old wood floor.
My cousin and I shared a double bed. In the corner was a rocking chair in which, every night, a different porn star sat, still as a post, dressed in military fatigues. Neither of us knew the purpose of these women. I thought they might be a gift, to ease my cousin into the new queer chapter in her life. She thought they were a final warning from the military to look but don't touch. Her point during the ongoing argument about whether or not we could touch them was that there was far more evidence to support a military-industrial anti-lesbian conspiracy than the existence of a benevolent elder queer in our family. She routinely won this argument, so we would just get into bed and watch them, during the long minutes before sleep.
The women in the corner were beautiful and slutty and intimidating all at once. I tried to ask them questions but they wouldn't answer. Instead they just stared back, unblinking, enigmatic, and still as statues.
For the reunion we were all housed in a rustic Kansas farmhouse. The toilets didn't work so in the middle of the night you had to choose between peeing on the floor outside of your room or going outside. Either option was acceptable but women were encouraged to choose the indoor option for safety reasons. Every morning it was my chore to get up and clean puddles off the old wood floor.
My cousin and I shared a double bed. In the corner was a rocking chair in which, every night, a different porn star sat, still as a post, dressed in military fatigues. Neither of us knew the purpose of these women. I thought they might be a gift, to ease my cousin into the new queer chapter in her life. She thought they were a final warning from the military to look but don't touch. Her point during the ongoing argument about whether or not we could touch them was that there was far more evidence to support a military-industrial anti-lesbian conspiracy than the existence of a benevolent elder queer in our family. She routinely won this argument, so we would just get into bed and watch them, during the long minutes before sleep.
The women in the corner were beautiful and slutty and intimidating all at once. I tried to ask them questions but they wouldn't answer. Instead they just stared back, unblinking, enigmatic, and still as statues.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
I'm not a Buddhist but
I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist. I'm not an Anything-ist really, least of all that. I wouldn't be comfortable calling myself a Buddhist unless I'd spent a lot more time learning about it and walking the path. But of all the spiritual practises I've encountered, Buddhism is the one that I find most helpful in difficult times.
I've read a little bit, I know a few of the famous Buddhists by name, and unlike Presbyterianism, in which I was immersed for many years, several Buddhist teachings have had immediate concrete value in my life. As more than a few scholars have pointed out, many of the world's major religions have overlapping values. Indeed, I think many of the principles I've found helpful in Buddhism have equivalents in Christianity. But I never really connected with them until I heard them expressed from a Buddhist perspective.
In my admittedly very limited experience, Buddhism is more accessible and grounded in everyday experience than other paths. I also think it has aged well, maybe because there is less rigid dogma to try to lug into each new century. It's quite possible that with further exposure and study I could find the orthodox Buddhists who take ancient texts literally in contexts that no longer make sense or the practitioners who abuse their families or wage war in the name of a spiritual idea. I just haven't observed that yet.
This doesn't have all that much to do with dreaming, but in my defense I have been doing my level best to achieve REM for some hours now. I've been tossing and turning since 3am and as it is now 530, I thought I might stop struggling and embrace my current reality. This seems like a great time to share a Buddhist idea that has, quite literally, gotten me through the night.
One of the most helpful things I've learned from Buddhism is how to be grateful. Many religions have this as a core tenet in some form so I don't have a snappy explanation for why I like the Buddhist version better. I tried for many years to practise Christian gratitude - I prayed and said Grace and counted my blessings, and I intellectually understood the value in these rituals. But at least for me, the whole endeavor was pretty loaded with "should"s that generated a distracting and oppressive sense of duty, and since my efforts did not achieve any significant sense of peace I was also saddled with a constant sense of guilt that I must not be doing it sincerely enough.
Buddhism does not ask you to combat bitterness, despair or anger with gratitude because you "should", because religious leader so-and-so said to, or because you are going to Hell and the Grand Being will turn His back on you forever if you don't. The message from Buddhism about gratitude is that it WORKS. It says here is a tool, accessible to anyone who wants suffering in their personal life and the world around them to be less.
I do want to proffer the semantic caveat that this idea is not generally labeled "gratitude" in Buddhist parlance. The Buddhist idea I'm referring to has many names and teachers but since these teachings translated as Gratitude to me for reasons I will explain later on, I call it Buddhist gratitude.
Buddhist gratitude is about accepting the current situation without making excuses for it. It's about welcoming all of the potential good in any moment, however uncomfortable. It does not require you to make any promises, barter your future good behaviour for some immediate peace, turn a blind eye to injustice or ignore pain.
If I am in distress, this kind of gratitude calms my craving mind that is wishing things were different than they are and is feeling simultaneously entitled and unworthy. It allows me to recognize the things in my life that are already sustaining and could be helpful in the current situation. It also helps me to acknowledge and troubleshoot the things that are not working well, without getting all bent out of shape that these challenges exist in the first place.
Buddhist gratitude allows me to welcome the present moment and encourages me to view the situation with ruthless honesty, knowing that by doing so I am most likely inviting yet more challenges into my life. It is not a Pollyanna form of denial, nor is it an attempt to guilt myself into happiness by comparing my circumstances to the less fortunate. The intention is not to cover up or outweigh the bad things in life by focusing on the good. It is about removing the labels "good" and "bad" from experience altogether, and just calling it "now".
Some might call this acceptance but I don't - because it does not bring me to a place of either apathy or peace. It is a more active thing, though more natural and gentler than any of the efforts I made to Thank God as a Christian, which I found contrived and forced. The other reason I don't call it acceptance is that I don't associate it with maintaining the status quo. Sometimes gratitude has allowed me to react to discomfort or pain by deliberately going into an experience that I know will be even "worse" - only to discover that it is a place I always wanted to be. The magic of Buddhist gratitude in my life is that it alchemically transforms the scariest, hardest, most challenging parts of lived experience into joy.
My second caveat in this post is a spiritual one. Once the Buddhist gratitude idea sank in and I began to use it, I recognized it - I think it's embedded in many religious traditions and I have close friends who talk about their relationship to God (or Jesus Christ if they are born again) ((or Higher Power if they are in AA)) as the doorway through which they can access this tool, whatever you want to call it. I have heard it described as a sense of being deeply cared about by a powerful being, who will accept them unconditionally and has set them on a special and important road, upon which they have constant access to a loving travel companion.
Armed with this knowledge, regardless of the specific origin of their faith, I have seen these people face hardships with grace, courage and strength, offering help and comfort to other people along the way. I think that's wonderful, I really do, with no satire or sarcasm in sight. It makes me glad. It just does not work for me. I don't consider this a failing of mine or of the Christian religion in which I was raised. And I also don't lose any sleep trying to understand why that's so. I find it entirely unsurprising and also immensely comforting that me and someone else can reach what appears to be the exact same place through two different routes.
It would make dogmatics of every major world religion roll over in their respective unmade graves but I think this empirically supports something I've long thought, which is that the world is better off if there are lots of religions in it - the more the merrier, a kind of spiritual diversity at least as important to human health as ecological diversity. I think we should all have access to unlimited spiritual education. Find the path that resonates and follow it. It's tough to embrace this if you think there really is only one true path and I'm sorry - that is where fundamentalists and I will forever disagree - if they don't kill me first for being a heretic.
Now THAT was a little joke; if there's one thing I can't stand it's a spiritual practise with no sense of humor... No, I don't feel threatened for realsies; I consider myself lucky to live in a place where it is not an obstacle to life or liberty if you don't subscribe to the geographically dominant religion. I deliberately left out happiness as I have observed many people shunned by their fundamentalist relatives for various reasons that make no sense to me and which leave deep grooves of grief on both sides of that fence. To me this seems unnecessary and frankly tragic.
I have also been at ground zero where the impact of some gianormous Christian fundamentalist organization on things that are very important to me was being felt in a deeply personal way. So yes, there are aspects of the big, organized religions I have been exposed to that are a personal turnoff, I do have opinions about what aspects of those traditions might be obstacles to human happiness in general, and I have grave concerns about fundamentalists of any stripe. I don't know enough about Buddhism to determine whether that kind of judgement is frowned upon but my guess would be there is some very practical reason that being more compassionate and less offended by what I perceive to be other people's crazy, even abusive, antics is just good sense, and would make me more effective at reducing my own suffering and the suffering of other beings.
So I'm not a Buddhist, at least not yet. But I am very grateful that it's out there, in the world, and we're getting to know each other.
I've read a little bit, I know a few of the famous Buddhists by name, and unlike Presbyterianism, in which I was immersed for many years, several Buddhist teachings have had immediate concrete value in my life. As more than a few scholars have pointed out, many of the world's major religions have overlapping values. Indeed, I think many of the principles I've found helpful in Buddhism have equivalents in Christianity. But I never really connected with them until I heard them expressed from a Buddhist perspective.
In my admittedly very limited experience, Buddhism is more accessible and grounded in everyday experience than other paths. I also think it has aged well, maybe because there is less rigid dogma to try to lug into each new century. It's quite possible that with further exposure and study I could find the orthodox Buddhists who take ancient texts literally in contexts that no longer make sense or the practitioners who abuse their families or wage war in the name of a spiritual idea. I just haven't observed that yet.
This doesn't have all that much to do with dreaming, but in my defense I have been doing my level best to achieve REM for some hours now. I've been tossing and turning since 3am and as it is now 530, I thought I might stop struggling and embrace my current reality. This seems like a great time to share a Buddhist idea that has, quite literally, gotten me through the night.
One of the most helpful things I've learned from Buddhism is how to be grateful. Many religions have this as a core tenet in some form so I don't have a snappy explanation for why I like the Buddhist version better. I tried for many years to practise Christian gratitude - I prayed and said Grace and counted my blessings, and I intellectually understood the value in these rituals. But at least for me, the whole endeavor was pretty loaded with "should"s that generated a distracting and oppressive sense of duty, and since my efforts did not achieve any significant sense of peace I was also saddled with a constant sense of guilt that I must not be doing it sincerely enough.
Buddhism does not ask you to combat bitterness, despair or anger with gratitude because you "should", because religious leader so-and-so said to, or because you are going to Hell and the Grand Being will turn His back on you forever if you don't. The message from Buddhism about gratitude is that it WORKS. It says here is a tool, accessible to anyone who wants suffering in their personal life and the world around them to be less.
I do want to proffer the semantic caveat that this idea is not generally labeled "gratitude" in Buddhist parlance. The Buddhist idea I'm referring to has many names and teachers but since these teachings translated as Gratitude to me for reasons I will explain later on, I call it Buddhist gratitude.
Buddhist gratitude is about accepting the current situation without making excuses for it. It's about welcoming all of the potential good in any moment, however uncomfortable. It does not require you to make any promises, barter your future good behaviour for some immediate peace, turn a blind eye to injustice or ignore pain.
If I am in distress, this kind of gratitude calms my craving mind that is wishing things were different than they are and is feeling simultaneously entitled and unworthy. It allows me to recognize the things in my life that are already sustaining and could be helpful in the current situation. It also helps me to acknowledge and troubleshoot the things that are not working well, without getting all bent out of shape that these challenges exist in the first place.
Buddhist gratitude allows me to welcome the present moment and encourages me to view the situation with ruthless honesty, knowing that by doing so I am most likely inviting yet more challenges into my life. It is not a Pollyanna form of denial, nor is it an attempt to guilt myself into happiness by comparing my circumstances to the less fortunate. The intention is not to cover up or outweigh the bad things in life by focusing on the good. It is about removing the labels "good" and "bad" from experience altogether, and just calling it "now".
Some might call this acceptance but I don't - because it does not bring me to a place of either apathy or peace. It is a more active thing, though more natural and gentler than any of the efforts I made to Thank God as a Christian, which I found contrived and forced. The other reason I don't call it acceptance is that I don't associate it with maintaining the status quo. Sometimes gratitude has allowed me to react to discomfort or pain by deliberately going into an experience that I know will be even "worse" - only to discover that it is a place I always wanted to be. The magic of Buddhist gratitude in my life is that it alchemically transforms the scariest, hardest, most challenging parts of lived experience into joy.
My second caveat in this post is a spiritual one. Once the Buddhist gratitude idea sank in and I began to use it, I recognized it - I think it's embedded in many religious traditions and I have close friends who talk about their relationship to God (or Jesus Christ if they are born again) ((or Higher Power if they are in AA)) as the doorway through which they can access this tool, whatever you want to call it. I have heard it described as a sense of being deeply cared about by a powerful being, who will accept them unconditionally and has set them on a special and important road, upon which they have constant access to a loving travel companion.
Armed with this knowledge, regardless of the specific origin of their faith, I have seen these people face hardships with grace, courage and strength, offering help and comfort to other people along the way. I think that's wonderful, I really do, with no satire or sarcasm in sight. It makes me glad. It just does not work for me. I don't consider this a failing of mine or of the Christian religion in which I was raised. And I also don't lose any sleep trying to understand why that's so. I find it entirely unsurprising and also immensely comforting that me and someone else can reach what appears to be the exact same place through two different routes.
It would make dogmatics of every major world religion roll over in their respective unmade graves but I think this empirically supports something I've long thought, which is that the world is better off if there are lots of religions in it - the more the merrier, a kind of spiritual diversity at least as important to human health as ecological diversity. I think we should all have access to unlimited spiritual education. Find the path that resonates and follow it. It's tough to embrace this if you think there really is only one true path and I'm sorry - that is where fundamentalists and I will forever disagree - if they don't kill me first for being a heretic.
Now THAT was a little joke; if there's one thing I can't stand it's a spiritual practise with no sense of humor... No, I don't feel threatened for realsies; I consider myself lucky to live in a place where it is not an obstacle to life or liberty if you don't subscribe to the geographically dominant religion. I deliberately left out happiness as I have observed many people shunned by their fundamentalist relatives for various reasons that make no sense to me and which leave deep grooves of grief on both sides of that fence. To me this seems unnecessary and frankly tragic.
I have also been at ground zero where the impact of some gianormous Christian fundamentalist organization on things that are very important to me was being felt in a deeply personal way. So yes, there are aspects of the big, organized religions I have been exposed to that are a personal turnoff, I do have opinions about what aspects of those traditions might be obstacles to human happiness in general, and I have grave concerns about fundamentalists of any stripe. I don't know enough about Buddhism to determine whether that kind of judgement is frowned upon but my guess would be there is some very practical reason that being more compassionate and less offended by what I perceive to be other people's crazy, even abusive, antics is just good sense, and would make me more effective at reducing my own suffering and the suffering of other beings.
So I'm not a Buddhist, at least not yet. But I am very grateful that it's out there, in the world, and we're getting to know each other.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Putting the fun back in...
Some years ago I took a memoir writing class. It was nothing short of life-changing. I wrote a lot of pieces, the best of which achieved the lofty exposure of being read before my ENTIRE writing class of 11 people - and my sister, who came to the reading for much-appreciated moral support.
In that class (and since) I learned two things.
First, that there is nothing more satisfying than taking the facts and distilling from them the emotional truth, or at the very least an entertaining distortion; my true calling may have been editing reality TV. (A corollary: the more loaded and haunting the facts, the more cathartic to purge them in a fierce literary construction.)
Second, that it is very tricky to write about real people and events without getting in trouble for writing about real people and events. So for instance some people would advise against calling your family dysfunctional; at least in a public forum.
Since I hail from Canada, the chances of my parents going all Billy Ray to my Miley are slim to none. Even if it was not the case that We are a relatively non-litigous society, They have too much dignity and reserve for that.
On the other hand, I harbor a great deal of Protestant guilt. This is much much worse than Catholic guilt because in my childhood religion there isn't much of an emphasis on forgiveness. It's not that it's frowned upon or anything. It's just not really on the agenda. I've dated enough Catholic boys to know that confession is one of the major headlines from the Vatican Press. There is no equivalent sacrament available to Presbyterians; instead forgiveness is on the second to last page, sandwiched between the classifieds and the porn advertisements.
I chalk this up to the fact that we drink grape juice instead of communion wine. There may be nothing worse than an unflinchingly sober interpretation of scripture. Particularly when absorbed from the hard bleacher in a cold, fluorescently lit gymnasium echoingly too big for its diminutive, fiscally restrained, community congregation.
But I digress.
I have collected a number of female mentors over the years. Written down that sounds a lot more stalker serial killer than the reality. I hope. Anyway, my Nia instructor and occasional ad hoc life coach is one of the most loving, positive people I know. She is also the only person who has been able to pull off this adage without sounding either trite or annoyingly didactic: "unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." From her it sounds... well... just true.
This is not about forgiveness, so much as it illustrates her point of view which I have found helpful on occasion. As for instance, today, it helped me frame what I want to say in a way that will not get me sued either legally or emotionally.
I was at work, having a less than stellar day - mostly because I'm PMSing, having an unusually prolonged existential crisis AND it's Day 537,562 without sun in The Rainy City (now that can't possibly be TRUE can it? This must be memoir!)
My temporary gloom had nothing to do with being at work; I am lately in the habit of thinking that going to my job is a privelege rather than a chore. Not long ago a former boss did the equivalent of crash and burn my little work family by driving our financial bus into a brick wall, and terminating my position about three years ahead of schedule. In this uncertain economy where many gifted friends are unemployed, I was very grateful last month to land a new job, and even happier to discover that my colleagues all quite sane.
On this day of unwonted out-of-sorts-ness I was standing three feet from my new boss, whom I am daily, shamelessly, trying to impress, when I very nearly destroyed a multi-thousand dollar piece of equipment.
This is what happened: I accidentally spun a fragile glass tube at thousands of rpms so that seconds after I pressed "start" and the machine began whirling up to its target speed, there was a horrible noise. Immediately I hit "stop" and lifting the lid, observed that the tube had literally disintegrated into thousands of tiny glass pebbles. Lest you forget the proximity of my boss, I could have reached out and touched her. I had visions of my paycheck being garnished for the next six months to pay for the damage, or worse yet, being fired for incompetence.
I casually scooped out the rubble, wiped down the interior, vacuumed up residue, and carried on an uneventful conversation, all with the smell of burning rotor in the air.
To give credit where credit is due, I must give a shout out to my family: thanks for the decades of experience that have taught me how to appear completely calm and collected in a situation that is, in fact, totally fucked up.
In that class (and since) I learned two things.
First, that there is nothing more satisfying than taking the facts and distilling from them the emotional truth, or at the very least an entertaining distortion; my true calling may have been editing reality TV. (A corollary: the more loaded and haunting the facts, the more cathartic to purge them in a fierce literary construction.)
Second, that it is very tricky to write about real people and events without getting in trouble for writing about real people and events. So for instance some people would advise against calling your family dysfunctional; at least in a public forum.
Since I hail from Canada, the chances of my parents going all Billy Ray to my Miley are slim to none. Even if it was not the case that We are a relatively non-litigous society, They have too much dignity and reserve for that.
On the other hand, I harbor a great deal of Protestant guilt. This is much much worse than Catholic guilt because in my childhood religion there isn't much of an emphasis on forgiveness. It's not that it's frowned upon or anything. It's just not really on the agenda. I've dated enough Catholic boys to know that confession is one of the major headlines from the Vatican Press. There is no equivalent sacrament available to Presbyterians; instead forgiveness is on the second to last page, sandwiched between the classifieds and the porn advertisements.
I chalk this up to the fact that we drink grape juice instead of communion wine. There may be nothing worse than an unflinchingly sober interpretation of scripture. Particularly when absorbed from the hard bleacher in a cold, fluorescently lit gymnasium echoingly too big for its diminutive, fiscally restrained, community congregation.
But I digress.
I have collected a number of female mentors over the years. Written down that sounds a lot more stalker serial killer than the reality. I hope. Anyway, my Nia instructor and occasional ad hoc life coach is one of the most loving, positive people I know. She is also the only person who has been able to pull off this adage without sounding either trite or annoyingly didactic: "unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." From her it sounds... well... just true.
This is not about forgiveness, so much as it illustrates her point of view which I have found helpful on occasion. As for instance, today, it helped me frame what I want to say in a way that will not get me sued either legally or emotionally.
I was at work, having a less than stellar day - mostly because I'm PMSing, having an unusually prolonged existential crisis AND it's Day 537,562 without sun in The Rainy City (now that can't possibly be TRUE can it? This must be memoir!)
My temporary gloom had nothing to do with being at work; I am lately in the habit of thinking that going to my job is a privelege rather than a chore. Not long ago a former boss did the equivalent of crash and burn my little work family by driving our financial bus into a brick wall, and terminating my position about three years ahead of schedule. In this uncertain economy where many gifted friends are unemployed, I was very grateful last month to land a new job, and even happier to discover that my colleagues all quite sane.
On this day of unwonted out-of-sorts-ness I was standing three feet from my new boss, whom I am daily, shamelessly, trying to impress, when I very nearly destroyed a multi-thousand dollar piece of equipment.
This is what happened: I accidentally spun a fragile glass tube at thousands of rpms so that seconds after I pressed "start" and the machine began whirling up to its target speed, there was a horrible noise. Immediately I hit "stop" and lifting the lid, observed that the tube had literally disintegrated into thousands of tiny glass pebbles. Lest you forget the proximity of my boss, I could have reached out and touched her. I had visions of my paycheck being garnished for the next six months to pay for the damage, or worse yet, being fired for incompetence.
I casually scooped out the rubble, wiped down the interior, vacuumed up residue, and carried on an uneventful conversation, all with the smell of burning rotor in the air.
To give credit where credit is due, I must give a shout out to my family: thanks for the decades of experience that have taught me how to appear completely calm and collected in a situation that is, in fact, totally fucked up.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Movie plots
I was asleep in a motel room recently and I woke from such a perfect new movie plot. It was unusual, but not too far-fetched. There were plot twists and crises. It had a mildly science fiction feel, but near future, so accessible for non-geek audiences. I sat up and wrote down what now appears to be a poetic but rather hallucinogenic dream sequence that is entirely unusable as a screenplay.
Still, I had such a strong sense of purpose, such a passionate certainty that my little dream was about to morph into an award-winning film that rather than put the nail in that coffin, I e-filed it where I put all my writing ideas that have potential legs. Since almost every one of these ideas comes to me immediately post-REM, this file is metaphorically bulging with bright hopes yet to be doused by the cold water of 9am.
I have no such illusions about last night's dream, though it was powerful and the emotions pull on me still. I was knee-deep in water talking to a long lost high school friend when the sun went down and a storm came up. He was on a fishing boat and one huge wave separated us. I frantically swam backwards to catch up and by sheer force of will, landed us both on a nearby beach.
Ten yards ahead in the sand was an authentic thai restaurant. My friend was local. We began walking up the dirt path to the lean-to and I noticed that my swimsuit was dripping so I stepped to one side and began wringing it out. Looking down I saw that I was watering their local garden with my swim wear. Looking up, I saw my friend, nearly at the hut entrance, observing my behaviour with obvious horror.
He walked back to me and began steering me away from the building by the elbow. "What are you doing?" I asked. When he wouldn't answer I pulled away and said, "Look. I know I'm an embarassing gringo here. But that's who I am. I assure you there's no place you can take me where you will be safe from my cultural slips and blundering faux pas. I'm hungry. We eat here. We eat now." I tugged his arm and reluctantly he followed me back to the shack on the beach, where I ordered, smiling as much as I could and trying not to step on/lean against or brush past anything that might be fragile or precarious.
The meal was delicious.
Still, I had such a strong sense of purpose, such a passionate certainty that my little dream was about to morph into an award-winning film that rather than put the nail in that coffin, I e-filed it where I put all my writing ideas that have potential legs. Since almost every one of these ideas comes to me immediately post-REM, this file is metaphorically bulging with bright hopes yet to be doused by the cold water of 9am.
I have no such illusions about last night's dream, though it was powerful and the emotions pull on me still. I was knee-deep in water talking to a long lost high school friend when the sun went down and a storm came up. He was on a fishing boat and one huge wave separated us. I frantically swam backwards to catch up and by sheer force of will, landed us both on a nearby beach.
Ten yards ahead in the sand was an authentic thai restaurant. My friend was local. We began walking up the dirt path to the lean-to and I noticed that my swimsuit was dripping so I stepped to one side and began wringing it out. Looking down I saw that I was watering their local garden with my swim wear. Looking up, I saw my friend, nearly at the hut entrance, observing my behaviour with obvious horror.
He walked back to me and began steering me away from the building by the elbow. "What are you doing?" I asked. When he wouldn't answer I pulled away and said, "Look. I know I'm an embarassing gringo here. But that's who I am. I assure you there's no place you can take me where you will be safe from my cultural slips and blundering faux pas. I'm hungry. We eat here. We eat now." I tugged his arm and reluctantly he followed me back to the shack on the beach, where I ordered, smiling as much as I could and trying not to step on/lean against or brush past anything that might be fragile or precarious.
The meal was delicious.
Friday, March 2, 2012
You'll poke your eye out! (with a pineapple)
Last night was short on sleep or dreams. But something noteworthy did happen today - I poked myself in the eye with a pineapple, which is certainly a personal first.
The day did not have a particularly auspicious beginning. I woke into a rather conventional existential panic: omg i'm not living up to my potential and i'm forty and what is the meaning of life the planet's going to shit and shouldn't i be doing something important or useful instead i'm boring and tired all the time and my iq points are dropping right and left maybe i'm supposed to have kids after all but it's too late and i used to be good at writing but now i don't know if i'm good at anything i'm always afraid my boss will decide i suck at my job and i'll become unemployablee and destitute unable to support even my cats and so die alone ETCETERA)
So I took a breath, gave myself a tough love pep talk and decided the weight of the world's problems and my neuroses could wait for another thirty minutes, since it was 6am and I had not managed to fall asleep till 1am.
The morning got busy with teaching duties, lab experiments, a meeting. At 1136am I was puzzling over data when I suddenly remembered a lunchtime team fitness event I was signed up for. But it was in less than an hour, on another campus, and I had not brought any sweat-friendly clothes.
I ran the six blocks to the carpark, hopped on the freeway, thanking several minor deities that off peak traffic in Seattle is not bad at all. It took only 25 minutes to get from lab door to home. I grabbed tights, hoodie, tennis shoes, and another frantic freeway interlude later, made it to the Pineapple Express start site with three minutes to spare.
My team of four donned leis and lugged pineapples through four stations dotted across campus, where we faux-swam, climbed stairs, lunged, crunched, and hopped around all in the name of fitness. And on the very last rep of the very last exercise at the very last station, I bent over and poked myself in the eye with the leafy hairdo of my own pineapple.
It hurts to poke yourself in the eye with sharp foliage. Naturally I wondered if I had made myself blind, scratched my cornea, given myself an infection with some menacing pineapple bacteria, or was about to discover that - notwithstanding the fact that I eat pineapple mutliple times a week at the workplace salad bar without incident - I have a previously undetected and very severe allergy to pineapple leaves.
Since I don't trust eyewash stations, I got back in my car and took my reddening eye to Bartell drugs. Three rinses with Bausch & Lomb Eye Relief and it still hurt but not as much and I managed to talk myself down from imminent blindness and imagined corneal surgeries. Instead, I went back to work, pausing only for late lunch (pho) and much later a snack (soda machine).
And work is where you will find me still, looking at worms under the microscope, furrowing my brow over cloning diagrams, and a little bit dreading the pop quiz I have to write for my students' 8am lab tomorrow. But I have a bottle of saline and a bottle of Gatorade, which is enormous wealth by some standards. So I should be content.
The day did not have a particularly auspicious beginning. I woke into a rather conventional existential panic: omg i'm not living up to my potential and i'm forty and what is the meaning of life the planet's going to shit and shouldn't i be doing something important or useful instead i'm boring and tired all the time and my iq points are dropping right and left maybe i'm supposed to have kids after all but it's too late and i used to be good at writing but now i don't know if i'm good at anything i'm always afraid my boss will decide i suck at my job and i'll become unemployablee and destitute unable to support even my cats and so die alone ETCETERA)
So I took a breath, gave myself a tough love pep talk and decided the weight of the world's problems and my neuroses could wait for another thirty minutes, since it was 6am and I had not managed to fall asleep till 1am.
The morning got busy with teaching duties, lab experiments, a meeting. At 1136am I was puzzling over data when I suddenly remembered a lunchtime team fitness event I was signed up for. But it was in less than an hour, on another campus, and I had not brought any sweat-friendly clothes.
I ran the six blocks to the carpark, hopped on the freeway, thanking several minor deities that off peak traffic in Seattle is not bad at all. It took only 25 minutes to get from lab door to home. I grabbed tights, hoodie, tennis shoes, and another frantic freeway interlude later, made it to the Pineapple Express start site with three minutes to spare.
My team of four donned leis and lugged pineapples through four stations dotted across campus, where we faux-swam, climbed stairs, lunged, crunched, and hopped around all in the name of fitness. And on the very last rep of the very last exercise at the very last station, I bent over and poked myself in the eye with the leafy hairdo of my own pineapple.
It hurts to poke yourself in the eye with sharp foliage. Naturally I wondered if I had made myself blind, scratched my cornea, given myself an infection with some menacing pineapple bacteria, or was about to discover that - notwithstanding the fact that I eat pineapple mutliple times a week at the workplace salad bar without incident - I have a previously undetected and very severe allergy to pineapple leaves.
Since I don't trust eyewash stations, I got back in my car and took my reddening eye to Bartell drugs. Three rinses with Bausch & Lomb Eye Relief and it still hurt but not as much and I managed to talk myself down from imminent blindness and imagined corneal surgeries. Instead, I went back to work, pausing only for late lunch (pho) and much later a snack (soda machine).
And work is where you will find me still, looking at worms under the microscope, furrowing my brow over cloning diagrams, and a little bit dreading the pop quiz I have to write for my students' 8am lab tomorrow. But I have a bottle of saline and a bottle of Gatorade, which is enormous wealth by some standards. So I should be content.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The Jews are boring
That was the phrase that woke me at 6:22 AM.
Actually, to provide some mitigating context, I woke up with a filmography of Katherine Heigl parading across my semi-conscious mind; the last item before the appearance of this world undissolved was "The Big Lebowski". It turns out my semi-consciousness is neither reliable nor a big reader of the IMDB. In 1998, it was Julianne Moore who played the beautiful female lead in yet another hilarious, "quirky", and lucrative Hollywood blockbuster. Katherine Heigl was probably not even old enough to drink at that time.
Anyway, it seems more important to address my semi-conscious mind's potential as a racist than its poor fact-checking abilities, so let us move on. As I woke, the realization that Katherine Heigl was young and pretty and starring in a lot of movies - albeit it now turns out, NOT The Big Lebowski - struck my just aroused mind as infuriating. I have nothing against lovely young starlets, but the formulaic nature of Hollywood films, its sexism, ageism, heterocentrism, and copy-cat-ism, all seemed, at the nubile hour of 6:22 AM to represent the very essence of the decay of Western civilization.
After another moment, I realized it's more like the bedrock of capitalism. Sex sells. Young women are considered sexier in America. It's true that older actresses have lately been cast in more than just supporting roles ("As Good As It Gets" ironippropiately comes to mind), coincident with the terms MILF and Cougar. However, as a nation, Hollywood is a far cry from, say, the BBC, or the French, for casting interesting-looking people of all ages in non-cookie-cutter roles.
(Incidentally, if anyone can define the age range of these terms referring to the sexual desirability of older women, please share your knowledge with the rest of us... I can't figure out where a 40 year old female scientist would fall on this spectrum and the lack of an appropriate label is very disconcerting.)
Where do the Jews come in? I'm terribly embarrassed to say that once, many MANY years ago - possibly in 1998 - I overhead someone use a phrase along the lines of "the Jewish autocracy" when referring to the movers and shakers in the California movie industry. It had something to do with the "ethnic" names attached to some of the prominent studios and influential movie executives. It's not my fault I overhead this label, but I have to take responsibility for the concept lodging itself deep enough in my neural circuits that it could be coughed out of the synaptic recesses of my mind some twenty years later.
So while "The Big Lebowski" was being revealed as utterly lacking Katherine Heigl, I mourned for the Julianne Moores of this world, whose prospects for leading roles inversely correlate with their experience, and then for a film industry where a movie about a bowling alley bum is considered avant garde and finally, for the American public whose brains wither as we speak, in multiplexes across this great land.
Why can't we have genuinely creative movies? Character actors? Non-predictable plots? The Jews, my mind said, frustrated and ill-advisedly, are BORING.
In the non-light of 6:52 AM (it's January in Seattle... even if it is dawn, I would have no idea, thanks to the 364/24/7 cloud cover that shields us all from overdosing on vitamin D or those of us with Celtic ancestry from losing that silvery shade of white that can be seen from space), my second thought was: "what a bizarrely racist statement" - so naturally I compounded the evil by blogging about it.
I amend my waking thoughts for political correctness and accuracy: the conservative, wealthy, largely white men who run Hollywood... are BORING.
PS Katherine Heigl was 20 in 1998 - not old enough to drink. Take THAT anal fact-checkers of people who dream up stupid shit. Also that makes her 32. Not a 20-something starlet. So good on you, Katherine Heigl, and all that makeup that allows the lens to believe you are still a dewy 20-something. Poor Julianne Moore has to rely on botox.
PPS Hollywood insider malcontents speak up here: http://fadeinonline.com/articles/minority-report/
Actually, to provide some mitigating context, I woke up with a filmography of Katherine Heigl parading across my semi-conscious mind; the last item before the appearance of this world undissolved was "The Big Lebowski". It turns out my semi-consciousness is neither reliable nor a big reader of the IMDB. In 1998, it was Julianne Moore who played the beautiful female lead in yet another hilarious, "quirky", and lucrative Hollywood blockbuster. Katherine Heigl was probably not even old enough to drink at that time.
Anyway, it seems more important to address my semi-conscious mind's potential as a racist than its poor fact-checking abilities, so let us move on. As I woke, the realization that Katherine Heigl was young and pretty and starring in a lot of movies - albeit it now turns out, NOT The Big Lebowski - struck my just aroused mind as infuriating. I have nothing against lovely young starlets, but the formulaic nature of Hollywood films, its sexism, ageism, heterocentrism, and copy-cat-ism, all seemed, at the nubile hour of 6:22 AM to represent the very essence of the decay of Western civilization.
After another moment, I realized it's more like the bedrock of capitalism. Sex sells. Young women are considered sexier in America. It's true that older actresses have lately been cast in more than just supporting roles ("As Good As It Gets" ironippropiately comes to mind), coincident with the terms MILF and Cougar. However, as a nation, Hollywood is a far cry from, say, the BBC, or the French, for casting interesting-looking people of all ages in non-cookie-cutter roles.
(Incidentally, if anyone can define the age range of these terms referring to the sexual desirability of older women, please share your knowledge with the rest of us... I can't figure out where a 40 year old female scientist would fall on this spectrum and the lack of an appropriate label is very disconcerting.)
Where do the Jews come in? I'm terribly embarrassed to say that once, many MANY years ago - possibly in 1998 - I overhead someone use a phrase along the lines of "the Jewish autocracy" when referring to the movers and shakers in the California movie industry. It had something to do with the "ethnic" names attached to some of the prominent studios and influential movie executives. It's not my fault I overhead this label, but I have to take responsibility for the concept lodging itself deep enough in my neural circuits that it could be coughed out of the synaptic recesses of my mind some twenty years later.
So while "The Big Lebowski" was being revealed as utterly lacking Katherine Heigl, I mourned for the Julianne Moores of this world, whose prospects for leading roles inversely correlate with their experience, and then for a film industry where a movie about a bowling alley bum is considered avant garde and finally, for the American public whose brains wither as we speak, in multiplexes across this great land.
Why can't we have genuinely creative movies? Character actors? Non-predictable plots? The Jews, my mind said, frustrated and ill-advisedly, are BORING.
In the non-light of 6:52 AM (it's January in Seattle... even if it is dawn, I would have no idea, thanks to the 364/24/7 cloud cover that shields us all from overdosing on vitamin D or those of us with Celtic ancestry from losing that silvery shade of white that can be seen from space), my second thought was: "what a bizarrely racist statement" - so naturally I compounded the evil by blogging about it.
I amend my waking thoughts for political correctness and accuracy: the conservative, wealthy, largely white men who run Hollywood... are BORING.
PS Katherine Heigl was 20 in 1998 - not old enough to drink. Take THAT anal fact-checkers of people who dream up stupid shit. Also that makes her 32. Not a 20-something starlet. So good on you, Katherine Heigl, and all that makeup that allows the lens to believe you are still a dewy 20-something. Poor Julianne Moore has to rely on botox.
PPS Hollywood insider malcontents speak up here: http://fadeinonline.com/articles/minority-report/
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