Category Archives: words

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Dream travel

I time travel in dreams.

Two dreams last night. In one I am in a hospital and trying to finish up and go home, but there are two babies. I check and one is my daughter. I check the other and it is a boy. He has a label saying “Call police.” The story is that he is sent from a smaller hospital for some testing that I am not sure about and that the mother was supposed to pick him up. She has been discharged but has not picked him up. I feed him and my daughter, feeling anxious. Where are the nurses? Why is my daughter here? I will take her home, but I have to make provision for the boy first. I feel sorry for him, abandoned. Both babies are clean and alert and swaddled, but the nurses are not around. I wake up.

In the second dream, I am still married to my first husband/but it’s a more recent gentleman friend at the same time. We are in southeast asia. I want to go home but for some reason we have stuff, including skis. My daughter is in her 20s in this dream. We take the skis to a house. Right before we reach it, there are police nearby, having a shootout with someone. Gangsters. This worries me and my daughter/friend. My husband/the guy meet us there and he boasts that a rich friend lets him use the room in the house. “I can have it for a whole month.” I am unimpressed and don’t care. I want to go home. My daughter/or it’s a woman friend and I go back. I think that my husband/guy is getting the car, but I hear his voice. He is singing in a karaoke bar. It is a very trashy glittery place and he loves it. I do not like the lounge style of singing and I decide to get the car myself and with my daughter/friend, get out of there. I hear my husband/guy making excuses and calling after us, but I am leaving. He lies to me and he excludes me, he wants to be the center of attention with his rich friends and when he sings, he’s afraid I would take attention away from him.

My daughter/friend and I retrace towards the building where the skis are. We have to walk on the edge of a massive fountain, with a cliff on one side. We are in a city. I think that we are retracing but then we come out into an open area. There is a police car parked there. I know we are visible, with a full moon reflecting off the fountain pool, so I wave with no concern. Just tourists here. I study the edge of the fountain to see if we could go in the water and climb to the next section, but it is not safe. I can’t tell how deep it is nor how fast the current. We will have to backtrack. The city is beautiful, with a giant lion building on the skyline and buildings with the Thai curved rooftops stacked up. It is gorgeous. Suddenly the other person is my friend and I worry: where is my daughter, where is the baby? I wake up.

My daughter is in her twenties now, not a baby, but in the dream she was a baby and then later in her twenties. When I wake I think, who cares about the stupid skis? Get out of there and leave the stuff. The babies are most important.

The first dream has three people. The second has four, because I can see the policeman. All the people are aspects of myself. My husband who is my ex now/a recent gentleman friend and then a male southeast asian policeman, though the police car is one of the large blue SUV style ones that I see at home. All of these complicate elements. Both my children have been to Thailand but I have not. Dreams are definitely time travel for me.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: time travel.

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travel ravel

Monday’s travels were intense! I was happy not to unravel, but was bleary by evening.

I packed my tent from the inside out in the rain starting at about 5 am. I packed the sleeping bag and mat and then the tent and groundcloth. I packed the fly last, so that I did not pack too much Ohio rain with me!

I left the field at 7 am and drove through rain and roads that were not flooding quite to the airport. There I spent 30 minutes shaking wet tent parts and packing them in the suitcase. I went to my plane and flew to Chicago. In Chicago I retrieved the suitcase and went by Metro to the train station. I rode a train to the next destination and then was picked up in a van. I still am using the oxygen at night and with heavy lifting, and I masked for all the travel, but I made it! A year ago that would have been way too much for one day.

I saw a rainbow spreading out from the wing of the plane and caught part of it in the photograph. A good flight!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bleary.

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teen toys today

Um, you say, these don’t really look like toys.

I had friends visit last week. These are the thirteen year old’s toys: he enjoys fixing cell phones and computers and asked if we had any old game platforms. I talked to my son and the thirteen year old is taking the ones he wants. And what was he working on in the picture? Replacing the broken glass in my cell phone.

Now many of you are jealous and would like this teen to visit you. My cell phone has a lot of parts and many tiny screws. There was only one left over and the phone is working fine and the glass is unbroken! Wow! Toys of mine that were used in explorations and repairs included my vacuum and I provided the super glue.

I thanked him with a comic book subscription, since we share an enjoyment and appreciation of comic books.

One of the most useful toys I had growing up was a china doll. Useful you say? Yes. We sewed doll quilts and doll clothes and made our own furniture and hoped for the tiny books in the Cracker Jack boxes. How is this so helpful? Surgeons asked where I had learned my stitching techniques. It was quite delightful to reply, “Doll clothes.” It really did help. I made one old fashioned dress with miles of ruffle, all hemmed by hand. In the 1970s I was embroidering my jeans and adding studs and we dyed t-shirts with melted paraffin and crayons. My sister and I nearly burned down the kitchen once, but we did learn which techniques to use to stop wax fires.

I am not sure who made this dress for the doll. My grandmother Katy Burling sewed doll clothes for us and helped us make patterns and nine patch doll quilts. My other grandmother Evelyn Ottaway could knit the tiniest doll clothes on knitting needles: I still have some of those as well. A tiny stole knit out of a furry yarn and lined with brown satin. My mother was an artist and loved crafts as well but NOT sewing. Pottery yes, sewing no.

My daughter promptly illustrated her lack of the packrat gene by putting half the furniture and stuff away and having a spare and elegant doll house. She learned to sew but does not like it much to date.

What childhood toys and ideas contributed to your adult skills?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: toy.

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Parasympathy

In 2013, Catherine Hodes, director of the Safe Homes Project (a domestic-violence program), started a workshop called “Is it Conflict or Abuse?” An abusive dynamic, she argues, requires one person to have power over the other, whereas conflict involves two people struggling for power. The distinction can be confusing, and in some cases “both people feel like they’re being abused, because they’re not getting their needs met or they’re not getting their way.”

From the Atlantic Monthly article: That’s it, you’re dead to me. September 2022 p. 14.

I think this is a fascinating idea, in the article that questions the internet wisdom of getting rid of “toxic people” in one’s life. When we cut off someone we consider “toxic”, we aren’t peaceing them, are we? Peace me, peace you, how do we actively peace people instead of being afraid, on guard, at war. I think everyone is more afraid after the two years of Covid 19 pandemic and all of the deaths and the Long Haul Covid and war. Everyone has a shorter fuse, everyone is stressed.

Remember that stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight system. The body makes less thyroid and less sex hormones and makes more adrenaline and cortisol. Cortisol is a steroid and great for short term, but bad for long term. If we are continually stressed, cortisol messes up the immune system and we get auto-immune disorders, the body attacking its’ own cells. The adrenaline raises our heart rate and blood pressure, neither of which are good for the heart long term. When the thyroid hormone is on the low side, we feel tired. The adrenaline makes us feel wired and we have trouble sleeping. The cortisol makes us more likely to get sick and raises blood sugar too. The low sex hormones, well, women can stop menses and men start asking for viagra.

So we as a world, need to learn to downregulate the sympathetic nervous system and go back to parasympathetic. The relaxed one. The one where we have less adrenaline and less high cortisol and more thyroid and our gut works and sex works again. How do we get there?

Breathing is one way. Slow breathing: 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out. Work up to 20 minutes. One of my veterans said he was not used to feeling relaxed, it felt weird. Ok, it may feel weird, but maybe we need to practice it. He did. There is circular breathing too, 5 seconds in, 5 hold, 5 out, 5 hold. Zen meditation, facing a wall for 40 minutes, works too. We try not to follow the thoughts. The thoughts pop up anyhow, but not following them down the rabbit hole is interesting and challenging. Mindful mediation and Jon Kabat Zinn’s books and tapes work as well. It takes practice. Practice peace, practice relaxing. Doesn’t that sound like a lovely practice?

Stupid cat videos work for me too. Laughter works. What makes you laugh? I like the silly animal videos, the moose playing with the wind chimes, three baby bears rescued (with care) from a dumpster, with the truck driving off to avoid momma bear. Rocking, knitting, sewing, fishing, walking the beach, cuddling a baby, dancing, listening to music, playing music. Which works for you? Silly movies. I don’t like horror movies, and I love cartoons and animation. Engage the child at heart for the parasympathetic nervous system.

In high school my daughter said that most fights were stupid. “One person says something without thinking. The other person goes off and gets upset. She stops talking to person one, who has no idea what is going on, and they often talk to their friends. So there is this big fight over some dumb comment.”

I don’t think it ends with high school, sadly enough. And before we label someone “toxic”, maybe we need to wander off and breathe, or watch a silly cat video. Whatever works for you that doesn’t hurt others.

We need more parasympathy in the world. Yep, I just made that word up. Relax and if you can’t or won’t, consider practicing.

Peace you and please peace me.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/23266-parasympathetic-nervous-system-psns

https://healthnews.com/family-health/healthy-living/how-to-activate-the-parasympathetic-nervous-system/

August 19, 2022

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On pants and pronouns

My pronouns are now per and pers. And that’s what I am going to call you and you and you over there too. Because I don’t care what is in your pants unless I have personal interest (rare and unlikely) or unless I am working as a physician. Per and pers are short for person. Generic. Nongendered because I don’t care. I suppose we could use Pee and Pees for People, which would amuse small children and immature adults (which includes me).

As a physician I need to know if someone is XX, XY, XO, XYY, or any of the other variations because it affects health. I need to know if the XX is of childbearing age or before that or after that. I need to know if the testes are undescended or have been removed because of prostate cancer. But otherwise I don’t need to know and I don’t care what is in your pants.

Get over gender. Everyone can wear kilts or carhartts or makeup or glitter or boots or toe cleavage sandals (ok, the five inch heels are really bad for your feet) and I don’t care. The first time I met my future husband was in a contra dance line where the people coming up the line were upset or rattled. I wondered why and there he was, wearing his mother’s wrap around lavender flowered skirt and dancing the “male” part. Now the parts are often called “lead” and “follow” because the callers don’t care what is in the dancer’s pants either.

When I saw my future husband in a wrap around lavender skirt, it was not love at first sight. What I thought was, “Well, that is not your routine Beltway Bandit. Bet he’s not an attorney.” This was Washington, DC in 1985 or 6 and the place was crawling with attorneys. I was correct. He is not an attorney. I thought, well, at least he’d be interesting to talk to and I found the consternation in the contra dance line amusing.

I did not talk to him that night. The next time I ran into him was at a square dance at the Washington Cathedral Nunnery. (You now may be wondering if this is true. It is.) He was wearing pants. After the square ended, I said, “You look different from a week ago.” He laughed. “The woman I am here with hates it when I wear skirts,” and he promptly invited me out. Ok.

Marge Piercy published Woman on the Edge of Time back in 1976. The pronouns in one of the two futures were per and pers. I am fine with that and I am not fine with having every single person pick their own pronouns. If we are going to pick our own pronouns, I am going to be “Mother Superior”, because I think it is stupid. Make it generic and non-gendered and I have no issue with generic. I don’t care what is in people’s pants or shirts or whatever, nor do I care what gender they are born nor their present identification nor their future plans. Except, as I said, if I am romantically interested or if I am working as a physician.

And since I love words and wordplay, my reply to the next query about my pronouns will be in a very sexy voice. “My pronouns are puuuurrrr and puuurrrrrs.”

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crack

even stone can crack
under great pressure
under great heat
under great force
under water

water?

yes, water
water wearing the surface
water rolling the rocks against each other
water wearing the cliffs and the trees fall down

even stone can crack
under great pressure
under great heat
under great force
under water

___________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: crack.

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on the line

The photograph is why I didn’t bring the laundry in the other morning. This buck and a young friend were in my back yard.

Here are the laundry lines.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: laundry. I may have to stay buck naked as long as that buck is out there.

That brings up this song: