Joan's Journal

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Back From The Cape
Spent the weekend with my brother, his wife and their little boy in a vacation cottage in Wellfleet. It's on the Atlantic side, about the equivalent of a city block from Cape Cod National Seashore: dramatic dunes, lovely clean beaches, unswimmable water. Rob tells me that it isn't always this cold, that sometimes when the wind blows from the sea it can bring in the warm surface water. In any weather there is still the surf, which is beyond my aquatic skills, learned long ago in small kettle-hole lakes of the sort that would probably be called ponds here. So I didn't even try to swim, just waded in to my waist and let the waves smack me and the undertow try to pull me off my feet. The sea is powerful and dangerous, even here where it's being all scenic.

I duly coated my legs with zinc oxide cream but thought my arms were brown enough. Wrong. I came home with boiled-lobster arms. I've greased them well and they're just about faded but now they're starting to itch, so they may peel after all. Sunburn is tiring. For days after a real burn one needs too much sleep.

Speaking of which, later, folks.

Maybe open room
The housemate who was sure she was leaving is now not so sure. The possibility has been raised that instead of her moving out, her boyfriend may want to move in here. He is also unemployed but has some savings which he would give me to bring her rent situation up to date. This has not yet been discussed with the household.

Meanwhile, a friend of theirs, moving away rather suddenly, has gifted me with his bed, a queen sized mattress, box spring and frame. My old mattress just happens to be dying, so this is timely. Only difficulties will be logistical.

Open room
One of the housemates who has been away just came home and announced that she is moving out. Basically she is unemployed and is going to move in with her boyfriend. So the Nourishing Traditions House is looking for housemates again.

Gardening update
I spent the morning pulling up Borg. (For you non-gardeners, that's bittersweet vine, named by a Star Trek fan because of the way it can cover an ornamental bush and smother it to death while using its victim's woody structure to support itself so that you end up with something the same size and shape as the old bush but with bittersweet foliage.) This particular vine seemed to have been cut back before but only to the ground. I yanked out as much of the root system as time permitted. I'll still need to maintain vigilance; no plant that normally has leaves can survive having its leaves snipped off every time they show above ground, which I don't mind spending the summer and fall doing. I'm a Taurus. I can be patient. This afternoon I'll be planting a morning glory vine where the Borg was, where it can climb up the drainpipe.

Still waiting for attention: basil, parsley, cilantro and mint on the porch in the tiny pots they came from the store in.

Aching body, inspired soul
I love to dance but I need structure and commitment to make me dance often enough that it constitutes an exercise program. I used to take classes, but these days I've let myself go so badly that I really can't keep up with a group anymore. Besides, my neck isn't really well yet. I need an individually designed program. Monday night in my Landmark class I recognized that I was still adhering to an old and no longer applicable limit: I'm a grown-up now and I can have the private lessons my parents couldn't afford when I was a girl. So yesterday I had my first lesson with Antony de Vecchi, a big name in the local dance community, that is, the part of it that calls what they do "the dance" instead of "dancing." He worked me hard. My body felt its limits. It also felt the first tiny glimmer of the return of my gift for the dance, a possibility I had not even considered. This will be hard. It will also be entirely worth it.

More ursinity
Yesterday morning the trash can put out last night by Craig was over on its side, empty, with the lid lying next to it. The bag of trash was on the lawn twenty feet away with holes torn in it and some stuff scattered on the grass. So much for my idea that raccoons were getting into it. Dragging the bag that far was the work of something at least golden retriever sized. Then as I was putting the mess into a new bag I noticed the broken pomegranate molasses bottle. It was nearly full when it went into the trash and now it was licked clean. Canines don't go for sweets. By process of elimination, we have a bear problem. Anybody got any suggestions?

Solstice Weekend
On Saturday I went to the public Midsummer at Cauldron Farm. Wore a yellow dress and a big yellow sun hat. Made yellow food (root vegies) in the solar oven. Was moved by the ritual and I think without really deciding to I have committed myself to working on my social courage for the next six months.

On Sunday I went on to Salem for the memorial service for an old friend. Now, when I travel to someplace expecting to dress up when I get there, I like the crinkle gauze look because it doesn't look any worse after a day or five in a suitcase. So I carried my black crinkle gauze peasant blouse and tiered skirt into the restroom at the visitors' center and changed into them and from the time I hit the street after that, strangers kept asking me for directions. It took me a few moments to figure out why. Downtown Salem is full of witch-themed tourist traps. A woman with long grey hair wearing archaic black clothes would naturally be assumed to work in one. I looked more like a witch while dressed to attend a non-denominational event than I had the previous day at an actual Sabbat.

Galloping summer
Within two weeks of taking the Landmark Forum, I find that my life is rapidly coming to look the way it did when I was part of that community in the mid-Eighties: booked solid, especially on weekends. ( Feel free to skip this; I'm posting it as much to get it clear in my own head as for any informative purpose. )

West Coast trip
One thing I've wanted to do since I was a teenager is cross the Rockies near the US-Canada border. ( Read more... )

Conclusion to housemate drama
By the time I saw the housemate I was mad at, it was afternoon and I was no longer furious. And he was really abject about his mistake. So I didn't ask him to leave. And in the few days since then, he's made a lot of effort to be more considerate. I'm beginning to get that he's not being passive-aggressive when he neglects the basic housemate stuff. He's being what he is, a well-meaning but poorly socialized 23-year-old with ADD. He needs reminding about stuff, but he's trainable.

Next week is the signing of the new lease. He won't be on it unless he comes into sudden money and pays up, but I won't be kicking him out tomorrow, either.

Something's gotta give
I came downstairs this morning and found the heat on low under an empty but very dirty frying pan. Not the first time. But this time the butter was on the stove next to said burner and it had melted completely out of its package. If it had flowed into the burner well of the same burner that was on, we might have had a fire. Happily it ended up in a different burner well. Still, the housemate most prone to the midnight snacks is also the one who hasn't yet paid May or June rent or utilities or anything.

Throwing someone out always sucks, but after this I don't think he's a careful enough person to live in a house with a gas stove.

Explanation of something I'd wondered about
I've wondered for a while now what the Bush Administration is up to with the Guantanamo detainees. If they wanted to extract information from these people, "coercively" or otherwise, the job would have been done by now. Why were these people being held year after year? Now, Scott Horton, a blogger for The Atlantic Monthly, alleges that the Administration was saving them for an opportune moment.

...the chief prosecutor presented in detail plans by Bush Administration officials to arranged rigged show trials running parallel to the 2008 presidential elections, with the express aim of influencing the elections for the benefit of the Republican Party.

I wish Horton had put in more references or even more specifics. He doesn't even give the chief prosecutor's name. I don't find the allegation incredible but that doesn't mean I believe it. If you want to see Horton's article, it's at http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/hbc-90003070.

Brainwashed into getting out of my own way
At the beginning of 1983, I was in trouble. I'd missed the deadline on my master's thesis and was on the verge of being thrown out of Boston University without my degree. My adviser had given me one more semester. Now, I knew I couldn't do it. That graduation ceremony might as well be held on the Moon for all the likelihood that I, as I was then, would ever get up to the front of it to be handed a diploma with my name on it. Something about the prospect of writing a thesis brought all my crippling neuroses to the surface. I had motivation to do everything, it seemed, except sit down at the keyboard and expand my pile of notes into an actual thesis. So there was no way. But on the other hand, I couldn't not do it, either. I had a massive investment of time, effort and money in this program. I didn't have it in me to just shrug off that investment, anymore than I had it in me to actually finish the frigging thesis. Couldn't do it, couldn't not do it. I was wedged, blue-screened, immobilized. I needed some mental dynamite for my mental blocks. In this frame of mind, I called up a former work colleague who had once told me about this program he had done which had as its purpose "getting people off it" and putting them in a space to make their lives work. With some trepidation I signed up for the controversial est Training, "a weekend to transform your life," rumored to be a cult, rumored to be a brainwashing program, rumored to drive people over the edge. To me this only sounded like evidence for its effectiveness. ( Read more... )

Irritated with Derrick Jensen
I'm about halfway through the first volume of Endgame by Derrick Jensen and I think that's about all the further I'm going to read in it.( Read more... )

Spreadin' the word
ganked from

uberspooky via

ngakmafaery:

The office of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is polling reaction to the California Supreme Court decision overturning the ban on gay marriage. Most of the response they are getting is in OPPOSITION to the court action.

To vote in support of the Supreme Court's decision on same sex marriage:

call 916-445-2841
press 1 (for English) or 2 (for Spanish)
press 5 (for hot issue topics)
press 1 (same sex marriage)
press 1 (for support)

After you've done this, please send it on to all supporters you know. You can keep calling and voting: Your support at this point is important!

(Personal note: I just tried this and got a busy signal - and it's 6:20 a.m. in California. I'll try again later.)

How my weekend went.
Saturday morning I went garage sale shopping and got (among other things) a non-smelly structurally sound (but very ugly) sofa for free (although I did give the guys that drove it to my house $10 and a beer). The sofa is still sitting in the hallway because we have yet to work out exactly where it's going to go.

Saturday afternoon, I got a call that a friend had been taken to the hospital with a life-threatening allergic reaction to Sudafed. (In some states there are more limits on buying Sudafed than on buying a gun. This is why.) Having been treated, se was now stranded at Holyoke Medical Center, which has no weekend public transit service, so se needed a ride. I drove hir to hir place, then hung out for a while. In the course of hanging out I asked if I could borrow the sewing machine to make a slipcover for the new couch. Hir response was "We have an extra that we never use. It needs servicing, but after that it will probably work fine. You can have it."

Saturday evening was the bear sighting.

Sunday morning I went for a walk with one of my housemates. It turned out to be a longer walk than expected because part of our route involved trails in the nature preserve and the one we originally intended to take was blocked in its middle by a great heap of beaver-felled trees. There was a beaver dam there, too, the biggest one I've ever seen. The difference in water levels on the two sides of the dam must have been six feet. So we had to retrace our steps some and returned much later and more tired than we expected. And more bitten; it was buggy.

Sunday afternoon I tried to dehydrate soaked cashews in the solar oven. It didn't work. The oven holds the moisture in. Also baked bread in the regular oven.

This morning I walked in the nature preserve again, taking a slightly different route. Still beautiful, still buggy, and there's a lot of poison ivy along the sides of the trail.

This afternoon I made two things at once in the solar oven: carob chips and gingerroot tea. The tea came out very good. The carob chip mix (coconut oil, carob powder, unrefined sugar and vanilla extract) overcooked and came out kind of ugly (lumpy and it partially separated during the cooling process) but tasty neveretheless. I also made my most perverse sushi yet: fresh salsa sushi. Also made some not-quite-so-perverse sushi with canned anchovies and chopped violet leaves that I picked myself.

This evening Craig hobbled home from Rites of Spring, girlfriend in tow, both severely sleep deprived. They liked the sushi and the ginger tea. I promised I would drive said girlfriend to the bus station to catch the first bus for Boston which leaves at 7 a.m., so I'm headed for bed.

'Night, all.

Quotation with commentary
"It is not real work unless you'd rather be doing something else."

That's from J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan.

By his standards I have done very little work in my life. I have spent years on various payrolls, earning my living, being productive and getting mainly good-to-excellent evaluations. But wishing I were doing something else? Only rarely, when I worked so late that I wished I was asleep. Actually, since I hate commuting, one might say that I have done more work (in Barrie's sense) going to and from the office than I have when actually in it. And when going to the office, what I mainly wished is that I was already there.

May you all have such careers.

Wild wild life
Sitting at home with a friend just before dusk yesterday, glanced out the window and saw three black bears, an adult and two cubs, strolling across the lawn. They were coming from the direction of the wildlife preserve. As I ran from window to window observing their progress, they ambled out back, past the compost bin and off the property, thence perhaps to frighten and fascinate the neighbors in the next block.

I called Animal Control. Now, when I was growing up, a wild bear in a residential neighborhood would have been considered an emergency. These days, however, it seems to be no big deal. The woman who answered the phone assured me that they knew the bears were there and didn't expect them to become dangerous so long as people and dogs left them alone. She requested that I warn any neighbors I saw to stay away from them.

I can understand why the warning was necessary. Black bears really do look like toys, especially the cubs, which were small enough to walk under the adult with no more than a brushing of ears against belly. For some perspective, I'm going to quote Vine Delora:

About six years ago we had a rash of tourists in Rapid City, South Dakota being bitten by rattlesnakes at state campgrounds. It seems that they did not regard the snake as dangerous. Each year we have several incidents in western parks involving visitors frolicking or picnicking with local bears much to their discomfort when they discover that the bears are in fact hungry and aggressive. Rangers in Wind Cave National Monument have to be especially alert to prevent tourists from wandering into the buffalo herd to take pictures. People seem to be of the opinion that the animals that are humanized on television should immediately strike up a personal relationship with them when encountered in the wild. Thus, the belief that Yellowstone bears are a western version of Gentle Ben is creating a hazardous situation for wildlife because they are the ones killed when a tourist is injured or frightened.

Modern people do not know what wilderness is, they are pretty oblivious to the fact that wild animals are still around and trying to survive in increasingly reduced habitats, and they appear to see the world as a special zoo created for their entertainment. Some kind of reality therapy is in order. While we treat the natural world as our plaything, it really does have an existence and values in and of itself. The natural world is not a yuppie zoo obedient to our wishes and fantasies. We have to give this world and its natural inhabitants some respect.

~ from "Outside the Yuppie Zoo", first printed in The Whole Earth Review, Winter 1998.

Finally, I'll add a link to the poem that shared the page with Deloria's article in the original issue: http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/95/article/51/destruction

More about my neck
I read up on this Prednisone stuff. Doctor who prescribed it told me it was a kind of extra-strength anti-inflamatory. Pub Med says it's actually a steroid with some scary side effects, especially for people who already have adrenal and blood sugar issues. Of the reasons it's commonly prescribed, the one the doctor mentioned to me was arthritis. Now, I can see my mom taking the risks this stuff presents because for her arthritis is a serious problem. Myself, I'm not so sure.

Then I asked Craig what alternatives are out there. He pulled out a book called Beyond Aspirin. One of the two co-authors was a professor of his and also is a founder and owner of a local (Vermont) supplement company called New Chapter Organics. So I started thumbing through it and there on pages 125 and 126 was a story about how one of the authors had a pinched nerve much worse than mine, completely disabling his left arm, hand and shoulder, and how he cured himself in a few months with herbal extracts. (When you own a supplement company, I guess you can have them extract whatever you want.) I'm going to use his formula instead of the Prednisone for three weeks and see how it does me.

Back in Northampton
I had been thinking that my neck was getting better and that therefore I really didn't need to see that spine specialist I was scheduled to see this morning. Then over the past few days I began to realize that this was not the case. Instead, over the course of the couple of months since I healed enough to stop needing the pain meds, I had gradually been doing less an less physical activity. The less I moved around, the less I got into positions that hurt. Then at Mom's I did a few things like change the burned-out lightbulbs in the ceiling lights, which she can't reach anymore. Even worse, on my ride back (a fellow Northampton resident coming back from visiting family, contacted through Craigslist) I fell asleep sitting up in the car for an hour or so. These perfectly ordinary activities were enough to bring back a level of pain and numbness I thought I was done with, at least as far as this particular injury is concerned.

So I went and saw this specialist. He looked at my neck, looked at my X-rays, had me do some movements, and wrote me a prescription for a steroid called prednisone. He said a normal course is 11 days and may fix the problem once and for all. If it doesn't, then he'll order an MRI.

I haven't filled the script. Want to research this stuff first.