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11 reasons to love your body

1. The Brain
My favorite body part is the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasure dome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag. The neocortex has ridges, valleys, and folds because the brain kept remodeling itself though space was tight. We take for granted the ridiculous-sounding-yet-undeniable fact that each person carries around atop her body a complete universe in which billions of sensations, thoughts, and desires stream. They mix privately, silently, while agitating on many levels, some of which we’re not aware of, thank heavens. If we needed to remember how to work the bellows of the lungs or the writhing python of digestion, we’d be swamped by formed and forming memories, and there’d be no time left for buying cute socks. My brain likes cute socks. But it also likes kisses. And asparagus. And watching boat-tailed grackles. And biking. And drinking Japanese green tea in a rose garden. There’s the nub of it—the brain is personality’s whereabouts. It’s also a stern warden and, at times, a self-tormentor. It’s where catchy tunes snag and cravings keep tugging. A hand-me-down miracle is that we are living things made of nonliving parts. Our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations. It’s also an impersonal landscape where minute bolts of lightning prowl and strike. A hall of mirrors, it can contemplate existentialism, the delicate hooves of a goat, and its own birth and death in a matter of seconds. It’s blunt as a skunk and a real gossip hound, but also voluptuous, clever, playful, and forgiving. For all those reasons, and because it’s shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, it’s my favorite companion.
—Diane Ackerman
Click here for the others.

Bullet list of late night ramblings

•I’m organizing a master plan to develop my career.
•A friend who is helping me says I’ll be a future Koch sister, only not so crazy conservative (my words, not his).
•However, I don’t know the likeliness of that with the way I drink my money at Starbucks.
•I swear they must have some sort of addictive ingredient they add to their concoctions.
•I love my new business cards. They arrived yesterday. I’ve been handing them out to everyone…even those who know all about me and my business. I like the cards that much.
•I received a call yesterday regarding more work opportunities, which made my entire week.
•I’ll be tweaking my website soon to better reflect the services I’m offering.
•I’m working on a certificate in web authoring/digital communications, and over the summer I start a web design course.
•I’m hoping it will allow me to make my site a little flashier, a little more sophisticated.
•Right now it’s all scroll all the time.
•I’d like to add rotating pictures on the home page, so it’s not always the same image.
•I have to edit down some of the photos on the site.
•I have classes to teach over the summer, which is nice.
•In the fall I’m taking a video editing course. That will help a lot. I’m going to practice over the summer.
•There is an app design course, too. Will probably take that at some point.
•That’s my update for now.
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on texting and friendships

I think about my friends often. I’ve lived in several places and have friends who still live in these places, or friends who have moved to new places, and though I may not call them each week, I think about them often. We send emails, text messages, and occasionally chat on the phone. However, I’m not a fan of talking on the telephone, and I think this is for a few reasons. First, I don’t want to interrupt someone’s day with an unexpected phone call because they may be reading, or on the toilet, or meditating. Second, I’m very comfortable with long silent pauses in conversation, except when they happen over the phone. On the phone, I feel obligated to fill up any dead space that starts building. If we were together at a diner talking to each other and we both fell quiet—no problem. Silence is golden, I say. But on the phone, silence is awkward. Third, I use only a cellphone and the connection is not always clear, or it gets dropped, and I end up talking into silence until the phone starts ringing in my hand. This happens with me and my mom, who is the only person I talk to on the phone on a regular basis and for long periods of time. Even with my husband, if we are apart, we keep our calls to each other very short. If we talk for five minutes on the phone, that is a very long conversation.

I’m a big fan of texting. With texting, you can send a message to friend and not worry about whether it’s interfering with something they are doing; they can answer at their leisure. You can schedule a time to talk on the phone by sending a text and saying, Hey, can we talk tonight? I find it to be a simple way to reach out.

This brings me to an experience I had last week that reminded me of why I’m thankful for texting, but also reminded me of why it’s good to talk to friends directly, too. For the past month or so, I’ve been emailing with a very dear friend of mine about some health issues she was trying to straighten out. Nothing major, but she had test results that the doctor could not explain. We shared experiences with each other, and I gave her some suggestions. I knew she was going to get some more tests done. Fast forward to last week, when I got a text from her that said, in essence, “Hey, remember that situation we thought was nothing. Well, it’s something and I’m going to the hospital now.” Her text included the specifics, and it was the kind of health related news that made me feel as if ice water has been shot through my veins when I read it. What struck me as interesting was that she wrote, “Sorry to tell you this through a text.” I was just glad she thought to tell me at all! I mean, she’s in the process of dealing with this news and making arrangements to get to the hospital, and calling her parents. Text messaging seems like the most obvious way to keep a friend informed who can’t exactly rush to be by her side. If I were in the area, perhaps it would make more sense to call me, but this was a way of keeping me posted, while also maneuvering through the chaos of what was happening to her in the moment. We texted for the next few days as her parents arrived, and she found out more information. When she told me in a text that she was going home, I texted her and told her we should talk soon. She called later that day. And this is what reminded me how good it can be to hear someone’s voice.

During all the text messaging, I felt dreadful. My heart was heavy; I felt impotent to help; I felt sad that I wasn’t closer. It was imagining the worse, feeling bad, googling medical information without knowing a lot of details. I was envisioning tears, fears, anger. But when I talked with her, it was just her, dealing with things the way she always deals with things—she’s strong. That’s not to say she doesn’t have those feelings mentioned above. But before hearing her voice, they were pervasive in my imagination. After hearing her voice, I realized that it’s not that way all the time. She told me everything that had happened, and I responded to one piece of information in a way that made her laugh and laugh (which made me laugh). It lifted my heart to hear her laughing. That’s the important stuff you miss with texting.

Funny stuff

Whenever I think I’ve read the best Onion story ever, they outdo themselves again! This story had me laughing out loud today.

For Love of the Dog

I always start my morning by reading email, visiting the Daily  Beast (via links they email me), and then swinging over to the New York Times to check out the headlines. This morning I scrolled through a fun slideshow called “Readers’ Photos: A Family’s Best Friend?” Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, and I was impressed by the quality of the pictures! Some were really outstanding. It was fun to read the little stories that accompanied the pictures and how the animals had changed their owners’ lives. But then one submission really put a damper on my day. It was next to an unusual looking dog, very striking, and the story next to the picture said this:

I am not a dog person. But with three boys and a country house, I deemed it important that my children experience a deep connection with a being who wasn’t human. So, we ordered our hypoallergenic Spanish water dog, Muki, last spring and guess what, she is a “Velcro” dog, desperate for my attention and jealous of my husband. It’s stressful having a dog I don’t want alienate my husband and only slightly tolerate the boys. I sometimes feel the urge to let the coyotes lurking in our backyard lure her away, but I know I have created this new dynamic and must deal with it rationally. She is getting better, but we wish she were more lablike in her behavior. What to do?
— Aspen Real Life, Snowmass, Colo.

WTF? I almost feel like this is some sort of joke, some tool taking on the tone of a snobby Aspenite who can’t stand her new hypoallergenic Spanish water dog (a breed many of us were probably unaware of). First of all, I’m sure she paid top-dollar for this dog from some breeder without doing any research on what this breed was like—she probably put emphasis on hypoallergenic, without thinking about personality. Second, to say she occasionally feels the urge to let the coyotes have their way with this dog is particularly disgusting. I’m not saying she can’t express regret over purchasing the dog and it not working out for her family, but that’s not quite the same as saying she wished the dog would be brutally mauled and killed while the owner’s back is turned. I find that pretty gross, and it makes me feel sorry for the poor dog because it’s stuck in a household with this flake. I mean, it’s not rocket science to find a new home for the dog—there are rescues and humane societies that could help. I just hope her written words are more severe than her actions, and that she secretly adores the dog (though I’m not holding my breath).

Deactivation

So, I finally deactivated my Facebook account. This means little in terms of actually getting rid of my profile; if I want to log in again, all I have to do is type in my email and password and everything will still be intact. (Unlike MySpace, where once I deleted my profile, it was gone, gone, gone. After I deleted the profile, I remembered a message I had on the site that I would have copied into a word document if I had thought to go through my messages—the downside of my itchy delete-button finger.)

I’ve been toying with the idea of removing myself from Facebook for a few months. I think it’s a pretty cool site, and it’s great for getting back in touch with people, or keeping in touch with people, but I found myself spending too much time on the site—clicking links, reading updates, commenting on links and updates, thinking of things to update my status with, or sharing every interesting story that I read in the New York Times. I looked forward to sharing pictures, sharing funny situations, or weird observances—I call this Facebook Brain. So much of daily life was viewed in terms of how I could share it on Facebook: things my husband said, things I saw, places I went, plans I made. These are things I normally would share with certain people during conversations, but suddenly I shared them with over 300 people a day—at least 50 of those people I haven’t spoken to since high school, but suddenly we’re “friends” again. And I noticed others telling me when they checked in to restaurants, stores, doctors’ offices, schools, and when they were buying healthy foods at the health food store, or eating a taco at Taco Bell. And I observed another friend who took photos of himself during any leisurely outing and posted them minute by minute on his page—his shoes, his face straight on, his face from above, his partner, the scenery. It was as if every outing the friend took had to be documented and posted to FB in order to show he was Living Life.

Now god knows I am not above taking photos of myself. Sometimes you’re the only person around to take the picture! And I love posting pictures, especially of my pets, and seeing pictures other people post. But, for me, I finally decided it was too vicarious, and self-indulgent (more so than other forms of social media). I didn’t want to view life through the lens of Facebook, and how excited my friends would be when they learned about this plan or that, or how quickly I could get to a computer to upload a picture. I didn’t want to keep spending more time than necessary reading comment threads, and finding out who was doing what when, and who had visited whom. It was taking too much time from daily experience. Already I spend too much time on the internet when I should be out and about, checking out the world.  Facebook proved to me that I truly could wile away hours of my life online, accomplishing nothing and creating nothing, and that is not acceptable to me.

My only exceptions are the work-related Facebook pages I manage. I created an alias Facebook account so I could still manage them. One is my own for my website; one is for Paul Strand (which I seldom update…I should probably turn it over to someone else. It has over 1400 fans, so one of them would probably be more proactive than I); and one is for the university I work for. That was one of the factors keeping me on Facebook longer than I planned; I’m an administrator for my employer’s facebook page, and I have to update it for work. That would be hard to do with no account, so my alias account remedies that problem.

Anyhow, it’s nice to know Facebook is there, and this is certainly not meant as a diatribe against it because I think it’s great. However, I know it’s time for me to focus my energies elsewhere. And I’m still working on my digital footprint with this here blog, and my Twitter account. These two outlets do not consume my time in the same way Facebook did, which is why I’m keeping them. I’m also writing letters in good ol’ pen and ink and mailing them through the postal service in an effort to be truly retro (but mostly because I like writing and receiving letters). So, you may be getting a letter from me in the mail one of these days. And there’s always email; I still love email.

Long time, no type

Time flies these days. All is well in SOS-land, generally speaking. Still writing, photographing, & editing for the alumni magazine. The edition that was just printed is by far my favorite. Every section looked just like I envisioned, and I’ve received numerous compliments on the changes I’ve made, which is great. It helps to work with a designer who is flexible and willing to implement my vision. It also helps that I have a visual communications background, so the designer and I can speak the same language when planning the magazine layout.

I’m still teaching and enjoying it more than I would have imagined. This semester I’m teaching only one class that meets once a week for four hours in the evening. They are a fun bunch, and we have a good time talking about writing and essays. I’m also taking my first computer class toward a web-authoring certificate. It’s quite nice to sit in a room surrounded by 27-inch iMacs. It makes me covet a new mac.

I’ve been meeting with some friends every weekend to discuss politics over chai tea lattes. To be honest, it’s me and RD that do most of the talking, but his wife (and my good friend) comes along, too. She’s not so interested in politics, though, but she hangs out with us. Sometimes there are 2 or 3 other people who join us, but RD and I are there on a regular basis. We come from two differing political ideologies, so we spend several hours going back and forth on various topics. I’ve never been able to have such enjoyable conversations about politics with someone who comes from a different political perspective. We’ve decided that we agree on 98% of issues, but our disagreements begin when discussing how to address those issues. It’s fun and it pushes me to keep up with the day’s political news.

When I need a break from reading/writing/editing/photographing, I watch an episode of Weeds. I am quite hooked on the show, and find myself pondering the larger, philosophical implications of the storyline. In the four seasons I’ve watched, the storyline has moved from this notion of a young widow (Nancy) living in an expensive California subdivision, and trying to maintain her and her family’s quality of life by becoming the local pot dealer to the rich folks, to her having a baby by a leading Mexican politician who is also the backer of the Mexican mafia. Of course, many other things have happened to get her from there to here, but the one thing I keep returning to is how Nancy described pot dealing to her son as a “victimless crime.” However, there is a trail of blood leading right to her door because of the decisions she has made, and the people she became involved with. She keeps trying to limit her role in the drug endeavor to marijuana dealing only. However, once she starts working with gangsters who pay her to carry marijuana across the border, she suddenly finds herself also having to deal with gun smuggling, heroin smuggling, human trafficking…really dark stuff. The storyline makes me think about the decisions we make, and how we indirectly affect others. She tries to think she’s not hurting anyone with her participation in selling/smuggling marijuana on behalf of various charismatic thugs, but that means she has to turn a blind eye to everything else the thugs do. Eventually, she makes a decision to turn against some of them, which sets off its own chain reaction leading to the torture and deaths of other characters. I initially thought I liked the main character when I first started watching the show. As the storyline has progressed, I’ve decided she’s completely reckless, delusional, and self-involved (although I think she would describe herself this way). So, as you can see, I’ve been giving this character some thought. It’s a fascinating show to watch. Netflix has it on demand.

On a completely different note, my dear friend M’s dog died on Friday. He was a Great Dane and incredibly cool. He was 11, which is very old for giant breeds, and he had a good life with M, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I went on a walk with them a few weeks ago and took my camera with me. I took this picture of him in the snow. I’ve already made a print of it for her.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2010. That’s about 3 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 35 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 267 posts. There were 22 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 9th with 26 views. The most popular post that day was What I’m Doing.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, iwouldhavebeenalocksmith.blogspot.com, en.wordpress.com, incertus.blogspot.com, and anniekwrites.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for opposite of equanimity, the american gothic, puzzle box plan, fred kahler, and fred kahler art.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

What I’m Doing February 2010

2

Ignoring the poop May 2010

3

For Love of the Dog (Project 52, Week 4) January 2010
2 comments

4

The opposite of equanimity August 2009
8 comments

5

Radiohead is coming! February 2008
1 comment