The folks at Fox "News" were pleased as can be, gloating their faces off at the news that Occupy Boston was forced to evacuate their tents from Dewey Square. The restraining order against the city was lifted after their lawyers got to work on it. The protesters, unfazed, are talking about setting up camp elsewhere in Boston. I attended a rally last weekend in Copley Square--there was a march beginning at Dewey and ending at Copley which unfortunately drew only about 50 people. The whole crowd was probably under 200 people. The speakers were using mike check and some ineffectual bullhorns, and I couldn't help noticing that the anti-Assad demonstration at the far corner of the square had a very loud P.A. system and no police presence to speak of. I counted seven police motorcycles parked alongside the Copley Plaza Hotel. There were at least two dozen cops surrounding the Occupy demonstration. (I spoke to someone who told me that these police are all getting overtime pay--our tax dollars! And meanwhile, crime is rampant in other parts of the city.) No one at this demonstration so much as pushed or shoved.
I observed the police state in action as I stood near the Socialist Workers' table of literature. I had just given a woman some money as a donation in exchange for their very well written, intelligent newspaper. Suddenly not one but three cops were in her face, asking if they had a permit to display their literature. They said no. One cop replied, "You can't distribute literature here without a permit." The woman I was speaking to said (politely) "It's a public sidewalk. It is legal." She cited a court ruling. The cop sneered back at her: "I'm not going to discuss constitutional law with you. If you don't pack it up, you are all going in the wagon." Translation: The only law that matters is the law that I make right here and now because I carry a gun. They had no choice but to pack up their stuff. I saw a young man carrying a sign that read "The Boston police are protecting and serving the shit out of us." Later, the woman at the Socialist Workers' table gave a speech in which she described the incident I had witnessed. There were reporters from local news stations all over the place filming trivia. Not one of them filmed either the incident itself or the woman's speech.
America, the land of free speech (NOT!)
America, the land of freedom of assembly in a public place (NOT!)
Still think it can't happen here? It has.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Occupy!
The occupation of U.S. cities must continue until we break the backs of the banks.
It's amusing that FOX news and their ilk are saying that the protesters don't have a clear message, when to anyone but an idiot it's clear as day: wealth needs to be redistributed from the 1% haves to the 99% have nots. The mass unemployment of the 99% is a direct result of the 1% sitting on its ill-gotten gains. The banks are even adding insult to injury by adding fees for use of a debit card. That's right, folks: pay for the privilege of withdrawing your own money from the bank! What took them so long to think of this? It wasn't enough, apparently, to steal people's money obtained with sub-prime mortgages and invest it in guaranteed-to-lose operations. No, they have to pick our pockets at every opportunity.
They have no shame. They have no decency, no human kindness, no morals, and no soul.
Hell exists: it is here on earth and the banks and corporations are the devil.
It's amusing that FOX news and their ilk are saying that the protesters don't have a clear message, when to anyone but an idiot it's clear as day: wealth needs to be redistributed from the 1% haves to the 99% have nots. The mass unemployment of the 99% is a direct result of the 1% sitting on its ill-gotten gains. The banks are even adding insult to injury by adding fees for use of a debit card. That's right, folks: pay for the privilege of withdrawing your own money from the bank! What took them so long to think of this? It wasn't enough, apparently, to steal people's money obtained with sub-prime mortgages and invest it in guaranteed-to-lose operations. No, they have to pick our pockets at every opportunity.
They have no shame. They have no decency, no human kindness, no morals, and no soul.
Hell exists: it is here on earth and the banks and corporations are the devil.
More about Facebook
Since my last posts, I have been frustrated by certain people I know who don't have a FB page (and should--one is a musician and presumably could get gigs. Wait! Have I ever gotten a gig via FB?) Also, I was wrong about my former BF--he has now deemed it safe to have a FB page, with friends and all. Yes! I even friended him, after I swore i was not stalking him but was merely in search of "information" about him. (As were the sinister beings on The Prisoner("You won't get it!" snarls Patrick McGoohan, a.k.a, Number Six.) Actually, I didn't use the word "information." I just said I was curious about what he was doing after all these years. He responded that he was self-employed and broke. Maybe there are some things you just don't want to know from FB.
Scientific research will soon reveal that FB makes depressed people more depressed. I am firmly convinced of it. People on the Unclutterer Forum are in favor of a weekly information blackout or unplugging. You know, no cell phone, TV, internet (which includes FB, Twitter, and other forms of social networking.) Some people even ban DVDs, magazines, and newspapers. Is this going a bit too far? I don't know. The surfeit of information to which we are daily being exposed is not healthy.
TO BE CONTINUED
Scientific research will soon reveal that FB makes depressed people more depressed. I am firmly convinced of it. People on the Unclutterer Forum are in favor of a weekly information blackout or unplugging. You know, no cell phone, TV, internet (which includes FB, Twitter, and other forms of social networking.) Some people even ban DVDs, magazines, and newspapers. Is this going a bit too far? I don't know. The surfeit of information to which we are daily being exposed is not healthy.
TO BE CONTINUED
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Are you standing naked in front of a window?
In a cost/benefit analysis, my social networks have engendered very little return for the surrendering of my privacy. If my web presence were to suddenly disappear, my life would not be affected one iota. Even the fancy new website I paid $250 for last year isn't visited by anyone who could get me any gigs. Though for some reason hope springs eternal and I am not considering taking it down any time soon.
I am quite sure that my entire life is an open book online, if you know where to look.
I used to go around airily declaring that I have nothing to hide, and as far as I was concerned, my life was an open book and I didn't care who looked at it. Now that my life is irretrievably an open book, I don't want people examining it. But it's too late. And as a non-celebrity, I don't get the advantage of tons of money in exchange for relinquishing my right to privacy.
It seems that my former boyfriend, the antisocial and defiantly geeky Ken, is the smartest kid in the class: he has never had any detectable web presence because he knows how to cover his tracks. He can't be googled. You can't even find a random post on a message board for people who like to fix old Volvos. I always suspected he was a hacker, though I had no proof. If that's what it takes to hide your cyberfootprint, then we're all in trouble (except for geeky teenage boys and adult males who act like geeky teenage boys.) Ken broke up with me via email (the last refuge of a coward) in 1998. Since this resulted in my having a nervous breakdown of sorts during which I was not in my right mind for some time, I attempted to stay in touch with him and force him to apologize for his shoddy treatment of me. These were the heady days of flaming as a sport, and to my surprise he allowed himself to get drawn into an email debate with me in which he wrote absurd self-justifying screeds before finally declaring me a stalker and closing up shop. By this time it was 2000, the year I met Curtiss, my enduring SO of 11 years. Even Curtiss, a programmer with a lot of web savvy and a healthy dose of paranoia, has not managed to erase his footprint. He is more than half convinced that "they" are out to get him and will one day show up at our door to drag him to prison for his left political views. But he has a FB page!
That's just asking for trouble!
I'm not saying it couldn't happen here. After all, we live in a corporatocracy, and 90% of the U.S. citizenry is unaware of it and the implications of it. Corporate rule is just one short step away from fascism and the revoking of all civil and constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. The electoral system is a joke.
Our President has to answer to Wall Street, just as if he were an old-style Republican.
And the new-style Republicans are nutbags. Every single one of them. Scary, fascist nutbags with a lot of corporate money behind them. We the people have already allowed telecommunications companies to give up the records of our phone calls to the government. There wasn't even any outcry. And the final absurdity, the final nail in the coffin of American democracy is this: the online security default is no security protection; you have to create security controls yourself if you want any personal info protected. The default is lack of privacy. And we are all putting up with this as though it were the "new normal," a hateful phrase created by right-wing propagandists to describe the current unacceptable unemployment rate. Why are we accepting their "new normal?" It's the opposite of normal. It's a metastasizing cancer
threatening to kill off any vestiges of democracy we have left. Just look at how they are gleefully going about dismantling the New Deal after 75 years of success.
Do we have any place to run and hide?
I am quite sure that my entire life is an open book online, if you know where to look.
I used to go around airily declaring that I have nothing to hide, and as far as I was concerned, my life was an open book and I didn't care who looked at it. Now that my life is irretrievably an open book, I don't want people examining it. But it's too late. And as a non-celebrity, I don't get the advantage of tons of money in exchange for relinquishing my right to privacy.
It seems that my former boyfriend, the antisocial and defiantly geeky Ken, is the smartest kid in the class: he has never had any detectable web presence because he knows how to cover his tracks. He can't be googled. You can't even find a random post on a message board for people who like to fix old Volvos. I always suspected he was a hacker, though I had no proof. If that's what it takes to hide your cyberfootprint, then we're all in trouble (except for geeky teenage boys and adult males who act like geeky teenage boys.) Ken broke up with me via email (the last refuge of a coward) in 1998. Since this resulted in my having a nervous breakdown of sorts during which I was not in my right mind for some time, I attempted to stay in touch with him and force him to apologize for his shoddy treatment of me. These were the heady days of flaming as a sport, and to my surprise he allowed himself to get drawn into an email debate with me in which he wrote absurd self-justifying screeds before finally declaring me a stalker and closing up shop. By this time it was 2000, the year I met Curtiss, my enduring SO of 11 years. Even Curtiss, a programmer with a lot of web savvy and a healthy dose of paranoia, has not managed to erase his footprint. He is more than half convinced that "they" are out to get him and will one day show up at our door to drag him to prison for his left political views. But he has a FB page!
That's just asking for trouble!
I'm not saying it couldn't happen here. After all, we live in a corporatocracy, and 90% of the U.S. citizenry is unaware of it and the implications of it. Corporate rule is just one short step away from fascism and the revoking of all civil and constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. The electoral system is a joke.
Our President has to answer to Wall Street, just as if he were an old-style Republican.
And the new-style Republicans are nutbags. Every single one of them. Scary, fascist nutbags with a lot of corporate money behind them. We the people have already allowed telecommunications companies to give up the records of our phone calls to the government. There wasn't even any outcry. And the final absurdity, the final nail in the coffin of American democracy is this: the online security default is no security protection; you have to create security controls yourself if you want any personal info protected. The default is lack of privacy. And we are all putting up with this as though it were the "new normal," a hateful phrase created by right-wing propagandists to describe the current unacceptable unemployment rate. Why are we accepting their "new normal?" It's the opposite of normal. It's a metastasizing cancer
threatening to kill off any vestiges of democracy we have left. Just look at how they are gleefully going about dismantling the New Deal after 75 years of success.
Do we have any place to run and hide?
10 reasons to quit Facebook
1) Privacy issues. You really can't trust them.
2) It's a HUGE time waster.
3) I am not interested in 95% of the content.
4) Most of my friends are not really my friends.
5) Unlike MySpace, FB has not led to any gigs or CD sales.
6) I get annoyed by constant invites to other people's gigs. These people never come to my shows.
7) The constant bragging is repugnant.
8) Certain "friends" have me confused with someone who is actually interested in their pics with SO, cats, dogs, drumsets, peculiar tastes in music and literature.
9) At least an iPhone/iPad can be useful and TV entertaining (if you're going to waste time, you might as well be entertained.)
10) I have thus far resisted the urge to participate in Twitter or buy an iPhone or iPad. I CAN DO THIS.
However, it isn't clear whether it is even possible to quit FB. Some hard drive somewhere has an electronic dossier on you that can never be erased, or if it is, can easily be hacked into. And Google has even more on you than FB. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I
2) It's a HUGE time waster.
3) I am not interested in 95% of the content.
4) Most of my friends are not really my friends.
5) Unlike MySpace, FB has not led to any gigs or CD sales.
6) I get annoyed by constant invites to other people's gigs. These people never come to my shows.
7) The constant bragging is repugnant.
8) Certain "friends" have me confused with someone who is actually interested in their pics with SO, cats, dogs, drumsets, peculiar tastes in music and literature.
9) At least an iPhone/iPad can be useful and TV entertaining (if you're going to waste time, you might as well be entertained.)
10) I have thus far resisted the urge to participate in Twitter or buy an iPhone or iPad. I CAN DO THIS.
However, it isn't clear whether it is even possible to quit FB. Some hard drive somewhere has an electronic dossier on you that can never be erased, or if it is, can easily be hacked into. And Google has even more on you than FB. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Stress
It seems that recent studies of baboons and humans have shown that the higher you are in the hierarchy, the less sick you are, the assumption being that you experience less stress. Stress hormones contribute to or produce life-threatening diseases. They even cause us to develop the dreaded metabolic syndrome with its telltale belly fat.
I'm very low on the totem pole when it comes to my occupations, music and college teaching. I have very little control over these jobs, but at least I have a good boss at the college I teach at. The occupations themselves are not high-stress, except for the self-imposed stress of performance anxiety and the stress of being the leader of your own group. Being a leader means "the buck stops here" and you are responsible for publicity/promotion, program, and behavior of group members. I have relatively few gigs as a leader anymore compared to the halcyon days of the 80s, 90s, and mid-2000s. From 1985 to 2004 I led my own group at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. The almost 20 years of stress (combined with second-hand cigarette and cigar smoke for most of the time) is undoubtedly causing some kind of bad illness which is now dormant but will soon leap up to bite me in the ass. I can only hope that my breast cancer was the worst of it.
Problem is, stress becomes a habit. Even when nothing is expected of me and I don't have to produce on a deadline (as I have been doing for a year now in preparing my book for publication) I still feel free-floating anxiety. All summer I was sidelined by a detached retina. I had nothing to do. Nothing that had to be done. This did not prevent me from compulsively doing things as soon as I was allowed to get up from my prone position. I began a practice schedule. I walked almost every day because it was the only form of exercise allowed. As soon as I could drive, I began doing chores and errands which could have been delegated to my boyfriend. When it comes to stress, I am my own worst enemy. If it doesn't come looking for me, I create it.
I stressed for over a week over the following:
a) my brother's upcoming prostate surgery for cancer (good news: lymph nodes are clear)
b) my own post-menopausal "spotting" and bloating which the Internet sternly informs me is never normal and needs to be seen to immediately
c) the ongoing stress of living with an invalid who is your boyfriend whom you love and have to see in pain and on disability
d) my gig at the Acton Jazz Cafe last Friday (good news: was a rousing success. Would it still have been so if I had stressed less?)
Now I am low-level stressing about the spotting and bloating, because as usual I trot out my logic in an effort to show my cortisol that it can relax. The gynecologist who examined me last Thursday did not appear to be unduly alarmed and could not find anything abnormal in the pelvic exam. Since I have a history of polyps, she set me up for an ultrasound in the next few days, after which presumably we can rule out several things and have a discussion. It's not the end of the problem, because there will still be a biopsy, the results of which I must wait for. (Waiting for lab test results is quite possibly the most stress-inducing thing in existence.) I could not stop myself from trolling the Internet health sites in search of reassuring statistics. Unfortunately, all female conditions involving uterus/ovaries have the same symptoms, whether the condition is benign or malignant. It appears, however, that ovarian or endometrial cancer are the least likely culprits statistically. This only lowers my stress a little because when my breast was biopsied I was told reluctantly by both internist and radiologist that 85% of biopsies are normal. I was in the unlucky 15% who had ductal carcinoma in situ which is as close to curable as cancer gets (95%) with surgery followed by radiation followed by 5 years of tamoxifen. You could argue that because I beat the odds and won the cancer lottery 6 years ago that the odds of beating them again when they are already similarly low are not good. But better than winning the Massachusetts state lottery.
Tamoxifen is an anti-breast cancer drug which has been studied for many years--it has been around since the 80s. My oncologist correctly decided that the (albeit low) risk of my cancer returning at about 10% outweighed the risks of taking the drug itself. Blood clots are a risk but really only in sedentary women older than me. The risk of endometrial cancer is about 4%, meaning that 96% of women on the drug do not develop the disease. Dr. Tabesh, whom I love, didn't prescribe a newer and less tested drug because it was newer and less tested. She always patiently answered my anxious queries. It impresses me no end that with her busy practice (she is now chief of oncology where she practices) and as the mother of 3 she has the time to keep up with the latest research papers. She also doesn't seem to be stressed out. But then she is high-ranking in the job hierarchy.
During my bout with breast cancer I also took the genetic test for BRCA1 and 2, which are sneaky cancer genes that show up in a small percentage of women who are mostly of Ashkenazic Jewish descent, as I am. Thank an inbred gene pool for that! These genes make women prone to ovarian cancer AND breast cancer. Well, I don't have the genes. But I do have 2 risk factors for the reproductive organ cancers: I am getting older and I took tamoxifen.
I have succeeded in convincing myself that my spotting/bloating (which has mysteriously disappeared over the past week) is either a) more polyps, which are usually benign but need to be removed or b) nothing (technically, the aging uterus sheds cells from its lining which is thinning out, which is a normal process.)
If it is more polyps, another surgical procedure is in order--thankfully, an in-office one--the last thing I want to see is the inside of another hospital. As I recall, it was not a pleasant procedure: the gyn refers to it as "crampy," but I would characterize the pain to be well over 5 on a scale of 1-10, 10 being labor pain.
To quote from Fight Club: Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.
Though not the Mona Lisa by a long shot, the mirror and my boyfriend both tell me that I am a youthful, more attractive than average 58 year old. BF uses words like "beautiful," of course. I strive stressfully to exercise a lot even though I hate it (except for biking, hiking, and horseback riding) to stay on the Weight Watchers plan which enabled me to lose 30 lbs. I am not one of the 95% of Americans who do not eat enough fruits and vegetables; I easily get more than 5 a day. But cancer treacherously
laughs at fitness and healthy diet and gives Lance Armstrong a run for his money. Being at the top of his game and the sports hierarchy, he beats it, at least for now.
Cancer took the life of my clean-living, outdoors-loving mother at age 59. It cost my 48 year old boyfriend his stomach and his health. And it cost me about 1/3 of my right breast after 4 surgeries. It is a malevolent, sneaky, treacherous disease. Each time BF gets a CT scan--every few months--it has thus far shown no return of the cancer. But it has been known to return years later. So I share in his stress every time the test comes around. And using logic or reading about odds does very little to alleviate the stress.
Stress has been shown to actually kill brain cells, the only cells in the body which do not regenerate. This results in memory loss of the following type: I go into a room and forget what I went in there for. Or, as happened just now, I ask BF: What was the name of the bicyclist who won the Tour de France and got cancer? This after fruitlessly searching the recesses of my brain for a name that was just out of reach. My generation dreads Alzheimer's as people once dreaded the plague, and my friends are all convinced that they have the early-onset form of the disease. But maybe it's just stress. No--"just" is not a word that can be used with "stress" anymore. It's a killer.
I could write a lot more on this subject, but I am too stressed.
I'm very low on the totem pole when it comes to my occupations, music and college teaching. I have very little control over these jobs, but at least I have a good boss at the college I teach at. The occupations themselves are not high-stress, except for the self-imposed stress of performance anxiety and the stress of being the leader of your own group. Being a leader means "the buck stops here" and you are responsible for publicity/promotion, program, and behavior of group members. I have relatively few gigs as a leader anymore compared to the halcyon days of the 80s, 90s, and mid-2000s. From 1985 to 2004 I led my own group at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. The almost 20 years of stress (combined with second-hand cigarette and cigar smoke for most of the time) is undoubtedly causing some kind of bad illness which is now dormant but will soon leap up to bite me in the ass. I can only hope that my breast cancer was the worst of it.
Problem is, stress becomes a habit. Even when nothing is expected of me and I don't have to produce on a deadline (as I have been doing for a year now in preparing my book for publication) I still feel free-floating anxiety. All summer I was sidelined by a detached retina. I had nothing to do. Nothing that had to be done. This did not prevent me from compulsively doing things as soon as I was allowed to get up from my prone position. I began a practice schedule. I walked almost every day because it was the only form of exercise allowed. As soon as I could drive, I began doing chores and errands which could have been delegated to my boyfriend. When it comes to stress, I am my own worst enemy. If it doesn't come looking for me, I create it.
I stressed for over a week over the following:
a) my brother's upcoming prostate surgery for cancer (good news: lymph nodes are clear)
b) my own post-menopausal "spotting" and bloating which the Internet sternly informs me is never normal and needs to be seen to immediately
c) the ongoing stress of living with an invalid who is your boyfriend whom you love and have to see in pain and on disability
d) my gig at the Acton Jazz Cafe last Friday (good news: was a rousing success. Would it still have been so if I had stressed less?)
Now I am low-level stressing about the spotting and bloating, because as usual I trot out my logic in an effort to show my cortisol that it can relax. The gynecologist who examined me last Thursday did not appear to be unduly alarmed and could not find anything abnormal in the pelvic exam. Since I have a history of polyps, she set me up for an ultrasound in the next few days, after which presumably we can rule out several things and have a discussion. It's not the end of the problem, because there will still be a biopsy, the results of which I must wait for. (Waiting for lab test results is quite possibly the most stress-inducing thing in existence.) I could not stop myself from trolling the Internet health sites in search of reassuring statistics. Unfortunately, all female conditions involving uterus/ovaries have the same symptoms, whether the condition is benign or malignant. It appears, however, that ovarian or endometrial cancer are the least likely culprits statistically. This only lowers my stress a little because when my breast was biopsied I was told reluctantly by both internist and radiologist that 85% of biopsies are normal. I was in the unlucky 15% who had ductal carcinoma in situ which is as close to curable as cancer gets (95%) with surgery followed by radiation followed by 5 years of tamoxifen. You could argue that because I beat the odds and won the cancer lottery 6 years ago that the odds of beating them again when they are already similarly low are not good. But better than winning the Massachusetts state lottery.
Tamoxifen is an anti-breast cancer drug which has been studied for many years--it has been around since the 80s. My oncologist correctly decided that the (albeit low) risk of my cancer returning at about 10% outweighed the risks of taking the drug itself. Blood clots are a risk but really only in sedentary women older than me. The risk of endometrial cancer is about 4%, meaning that 96% of women on the drug do not develop the disease. Dr. Tabesh, whom I love, didn't prescribe a newer and less tested drug because it was newer and less tested. She always patiently answered my anxious queries. It impresses me no end that with her busy practice (she is now chief of oncology where she practices) and as the mother of 3 she has the time to keep up with the latest research papers. She also doesn't seem to be stressed out. But then she is high-ranking in the job hierarchy.
During my bout with breast cancer I also took the genetic test for BRCA1 and 2, which are sneaky cancer genes that show up in a small percentage of women who are mostly of Ashkenazic Jewish descent, as I am. Thank an inbred gene pool for that! These genes make women prone to ovarian cancer AND breast cancer. Well, I don't have the genes. But I do have 2 risk factors for the reproductive organ cancers: I am getting older and I took tamoxifen.
I have succeeded in convincing myself that my spotting/bloating (which has mysteriously disappeared over the past week) is either a) more polyps, which are usually benign but need to be removed or b) nothing (technically, the aging uterus sheds cells from its lining which is thinning out, which is a normal process.)
If it is more polyps, another surgical procedure is in order--thankfully, an in-office one--the last thing I want to see is the inside of another hospital. As I recall, it was not a pleasant procedure: the gyn refers to it as "crampy," but I would characterize the pain to be well over 5 on a scale of 1-10, 10 being labor pain.
To quote from Fight Club: Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.
Though not the Mona Lisa by a long shot, the mirror and my boyfriend both tell me that I am a youthful, more attractive than average 58 year old. BF uses words like "beautiful," of course. I strive stressfully to exercise a lot even though I hate it (except for biking, hiking, and horseback riding) to stay on the Weight Watchers plan which enabled me to lose 30 lbs. I am not one of the 95% of Americans who do not eat enough fruits and vegetables; I easily get more than 5 a day. But cancer treacherously
laughs at fitness and healthy diet and gives Lance Armstrong a run for his money. Being at the top of his game and the sports hierarchy, he beats it, at least for now.
Cancer took the life of my clean-living, outdoors-loving mother at age 59. It cost my 48 year old boyfriend his stomach and his health. And it cost me about 1/3 of my right breast after 4 surgeries. It is a malevolent, sneaky, treacherous disease. Each time BF gets a CT scan--every few months--it has thus far shown no return of the cancer. But it has been known to return years later. So I share in his stress every time the test comes around. And using logic or reading about odds does very little to alleviate the stress.
Stress has been shown to actually kill brain cells, the only cells in the body which do not regenerate. This results in memory loss of the following type: I go into a room and forget what I went in there for. Or, as happened just now, I ask BF: What was the name of the bicyclist who won the Tour de France and got cancer? This after fruitlessly searching the recesses of my brain for a name that was just out of reach. My generation dreads Alzheimer's as people once dreaded the plague, and my friends are all convinced that they have the early-onset form of the disease. But maybe it's just stress. No--"just" is not a word that can be used with "stress" anymore. It's a killer.
I could write a lot more on this subject, but I am too stressed.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
In search of lost time
My oldest friend's father (a close friend of my father's) died last week after being ill for some time and suffering from dementia. Over the past several years, most of my father's close friends have died. It has been an achingly sad experience for my father, of course, but also for me, because with each death, a childhood experience of mine seemed to die. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are even real. Unless the memory is a shared one (as with my brother) I have no way of knowing if things actually happened as I recall them, or if indeed they happened at all. With each death, I also cling hopelessly to those who are still living, like my aunt Joan and Uncle Buddy who are my role models for how a life ought to be lived. Or Irv and Phyllis, my father's oldest surviving friends, who at 90 and 91 are still hanging on to life, and not tenuously: they are active in a senior citizens" choir, and most importantly, they still have each other. I know that the day will come, sooner rather than later, when I will have to bid goodbye to my father and my relatives in their 80's and beyond. Nothing prepares us for death, it sneaks up on us unawares, leaving us full of regrets for not having seen the person just once more to say goodbye, because last time you saw them, you didn't know it WAS goodbye.
A year ago last winter, my beloved piano teacher, Charlie Banacos, became ill with a fast-moving and deadly cancer; he was dead in a matter of weeks. Even now after the passing of time, I am still inconsolable. He was the first musician/teacher to take me seriously, without sexism, and lead me down the path of playing jazz. Without him, I might not have become a musician at all. I was young when I studied with him, and like all of his young students at the time, I regarded him as a spiritual as well as a musical leader, even though he did not espouse any religion (at least not in lessons.)
He was a remarkable man by any standard, a prodigy who gave up performing to teach, who slept only 4 hours a night and practiced 14 hours a day. He made you work harder than you thought possible. He dispensed wisdom modestly. He always greeted you with a smile and a joke, and would end the lesson by shaking his fist and saying "Burn!" I can still see him in my mind's eye. I feel that his presence is still with me, inspiring me, to this day. Of course it's completely unscientific, and I could not explain how I know this, but I often speak to him, and I believe that he hears. I recently downloaded two photos of him from the internet, printed them and put them up in my piano room to inspire me to get back to practicing and to take advantage of the extra time I have now not teaching.
The times and places I remember have changed, just as in the Beatles song "In My Life."
The landscape of the college town I grew up near, where my father taught, is unrecognizable when I refer to the mental picture of what it looked like in say, 1969.
The Pizza House and Campus Restaurant are long gone, as are Waring's, the Hoot, the Disc, Phil's Record and Radio, Singer's bookstore, and the College Theater where I saw The Sound of Music, The Graduate, Dirty Harry, and Easy Rider. My high school had a facelift many years ago, and is now larger and more expansive than it was when I attended it. More often than not, when I am driving through Storrs on the main drag, it seems like a dreamscape to me. Did I really grow up here? Is there an accurate picture in my mind of what it used to be? Did I really cut class to read tarot cards in the basement Campus Restaurant, where the pizza was terrible and the air redolent of marijuana? Did I really write bad poetry for the high school literary mag pretentiously entitled VIRTU (with an accent over the "u")? I submitted some nice drawings, I think. Did I really roam the halls of school in a black hat and cape from the Portobello Road flea market in London? I seem to recall a crew-cutted gym teacher
snarling at me that this wasn't Halloween. Did we girls really have sadistic female gym teachers? And what is it about gym teachers anyway? I have nightmares to this day that I was not allowed to graduate from high school because I had not satisfied the gym requirement. In the dream, I failed to show up for gym all year long even though I knew what would happen to me. In reality, I dragged myself to the hated gymnasium, put on the awful bright red one-piece uniform with the bloomers that didn't look good on anyone, even the thin girls, and made a pretense of playing whatever game we had to play that week. I sprained my precious piano-playing fingers playing volleyball and basketball. I was always in the outfield in softball, so clumsy was I with my lack of eye-hand coordination. No one wanted me on their team. I came in almost last in the cross-country (1/4 mile run which seemed endless) Ah, the humiliation! That memory must be accurate. We never forget our humiliations--they appear to be larger than our triumphs.
I also suffered humiliation in math class and in Modern European History (which I alone of all my friends had to drop) but let us not dwell on this pain. I did not have anywhere near perfect grades, so it's a mystery that I got into Wellesley and Vassar and was waitlisted at Brown (the women's college was then called "Pembroke")
It wasn't good enough for me because Yale and Wesleyan turned me down but accepted two of my female classmates. Disappointment. And the resultant self-flagellation because of course it was ALL MY FAULT for not working harder, cutting class, doing drugs, etc.
I fancied myself a rebel but in reality my attempts at rebellion were feeble. My brother, two years younger, was much more daring, and rebelled to the extent that he almost flunked out of high school, something I would never have dared to attempt.
I was just a little too young to be part of the hippie and yippie movements, and I missed out on Woodstock because--are you ready for this? I was too cowardly to run away with my friends who were going, because my parents forbade me. A good little girl to the last. If I had known that Woodstock was going to be the biggest pop culture phenomenon in history, I might have gone at 15. When my friends all came home with bronchitis and pneumonia, my mother said triumphantly: "You see?" But I would have risked sickness if I had known. I had to be satisfied with the movie.
Lost time, lost time--one day, today will have spun as far into the past as 1969.
In 40 years, I will be 98 if I am still living. Then I will be trying to remember what is happening now, and wondering if it really happened. And there may be no one else left to ask.
A year ago last winter, my beloved piano teacher, Charlie Banacos, became ill with a fast-moving and deadly cancer; he was dead in a matter of weeks. Even now after the passing of time, I am still inconsolable. He was the first musician/teacher to take me seriously, without sexism, and lead me down the path of playing jazz. Without him, I might not have become a musician at all. I was young when I studied with him, and like all of his young students at the time, I regarded him as a spiritual as well as a musical leader, even though he did not espouse any religion (at least not in lessons.)
He was a remarkable man by any standard, a prodigy who gave up performing to teach, who slept only 4 hours a night and practiced 14 hours a day. He made you work harder than you thought possible. He dispensed wisdom modestly. He always greeted you with a smile and a joke, and would end the lesson by shaking his fist and saying "Burn!" I can still see him in my mind's eye. I feel that his presence is still with me, inspiring me, to this day. Of course it's completely unscientific, and I could not explain how I know this, but I often speak to him, and I believe that he hears. I recently downloaded two photos of him from the internet, printed them and put them up in my piano room to inspire me to get back to practicing and to take advantage of the extra time I have now not teaching.
The times and places I remember have changed, just as in the Beatles song "In My Life."
The landscape of the college town I grew up near, where my father taught, is unrecognizable when I refer to the mental picture of what it looked like in say, 1969.
The Pizza House and Campus Restaurant are long gone, as are Waring's, the Hoot, the Disc, Phil's Record and Radio, Singer's bookstore, and the College Theater where I saw The Sound of Music, The Graduate, Dirty Harry, and Easy Rider. My high school had a facelift many years ago, and is now larger and more expansive than it was when I attended it. More often than not, when I am driving through Storrs on the main drag, it seems like a dreamscape to me. Did I really grow up here? Is there an accurate picture in my mind of what it used to be? Did I really cut class to read tarot cards in the basement Campus Restaurant, where the pizza was terrible and the air redolent of marijuana? Did I really write bad poetry for the high school literary mag pretentiously entitled VIRTU (with an accent over the "u")? I submitted some nice drawings, I think. Did I really roam the halls of school in a black hat and cape from the Portobello Road flea market in London? I seem to recall a crew-cutted gym teacher
snarling at me that this wasn't Halloween. Did we girls really have sadistic female gym teachers? And what is it about gym teachers anyway? I have nightmares to this day that I was not allowed to graduate from high school because I had not satisfied the gym requirement. In the dream, I failed to show up for gym all year long even though I knew what would happen to me. In reality, I dragged myself to the hated gymnasium, put on the awful bright red one-piece uniform with the bloomers that didn't look good on anyone, even the thin girls, and made a pretense of playing whatever game we had to play that week. I sprained my precious piano-playing fingers playing volleyball and basketball. I was always in the outfield in softball, so clumsy was I with my lack of eye-hand coordination. No one wanted me on their team. I came in almost last in the cross-country (1/4 mile run which seemed endless) Ah, the humiliation! That memory must be accurate. We never forget our humiliations--they appear to be larger than our triumphs.
I also suffered humiliation in math class and in Modern European History (which I alone of all my friends had to drop) but let us not dwell on this pain. I did not have anywhere near perfect grades, so it's a mystery that I got into Wellesley and Vassar and was waitlisted at Brown (the women's college was then called "Pembroke")
It wasn't good enough for me because Yale and Wesleyan turned me down but accepted two of my female classmates. Disappointment. And the resultant self-flagellation because of course it was ALL MY FAULT for not working harder, cutting class, doing drugs, etc.
I fancied myself a rebel but in reality my attempts at rebellion were feeble. My brother, two years younger, was much more daring, and rebelled to the extent that he almost flunked out of high school, something I would never have dared to attempt.
I was just a little too young to be part of the hippie and yippie movements, and I missed out on Woodstock because--are you ready for this? I was too cowardly to run away with my friends who were going, because my parents forbade me. A good little girl to the last. If I had known that Woodstock was going to be the biggest pop culture phenomenon in history, I might have gone at 15. When my friends all came home with bronchitis and pneumonia, my mother said triumphantly: "You see?" But I would have risked sickness if I had known. I had to be satisfied with the movie.
Lost time, lost time--one day, today will have spun as far into the past as 1969.
In 40 years, I will be 98 if I am still living. Then I will be trying to remember what is happening now, and wondering if it really happened. And there may be no one else left to ask.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Psychopaths are running the country
I've been reading "Without Conscience," a book written in 1993 by psychologist Robert Hare, who created the Psychopathy Checklist to identify the 20% of prison inmates who are psychopaths. It's a well-written, intelligent book. The Checklist itself is not in the book; presumably that would make it too easy for psychopaths to manipulate whoever gave them the test.
It appears that many characteristics of psychopaths are desirable if one is to succeed in climbing the corporate ladder: egocentricity, grandiosity, ruthlessness, lack of empathy, good manipulative skills, lying and deceitfulness, and a generally predatory nature. Relatively few pp commit violent crimes; most of them are con men and petty criminals of various kinds. Some (like Bernie Madoff) successfully bilk hundreds of people out of their life savings, causing catastrophic suffering. From what I observe, a good number of American politicians and Wall Street banksters are definitely psychopaths.
More later, since I have to listen to Randi Rhodes' take on the current group of Republican psychopaths in Congress who are holding the debt ceiling legislation hostage.
Another characteristic: When you are caught commiting a crime, blame everyone else!
It appears that many characteristics of psychopaths are desirable if one is to succeed in climbing the corporate ladder: egocentricity, grandiosity, ruthlessness, lack of empathy, good manipulative skills, lying and deceitfulness, and a generally predatory nature. Relatively few pp commit violent crimes; most of them are con men and petty criminals of various kinds. Some (like Bernie Madoff) successfully bilk hundreds of people out of their life savings, causing catastrophic suffering. From what I observe, a good number of American politicians and Wall Street banksters are definitely psychopaths.
More later, since I have to listen to Randi Rhodes' take on the current group of Republican psychopaths in Congress who are holding the debt ceiling legislation hostage.
Another characteristic: When you are caught commiting a crime, blame everyone else!
Friday, July 8, 2011
Habitual patterns and adventure
The doctor said that my progress continues to be excellent. I still can't drive, lift heavy weights (which rules out gigs) lie on my back (which rules out comfort) or wash my hair in the shower (which rules out that clean-hair feeling--yesterday I tried a no-rinse shampoo said to be used by NASA on the space shuttle, but it left a greasy residue.) I can, however, be up and around all day with no head positioning (hallelujah!)
I do have to sleep prone for 8 hours.
Being up and around has been a strange experience. Having a bandage over your eye prompts sympathetic passers-by to say things like "Oh, that must really hurt!" and offer to do things for you. I have the staggering walk of an alcoholic because I am not yet accustomed to my lack of depth perception. I have defied medical advice and carried home 10 lbs. of groceries from the supermarket because if I didn't, no one else would.
And, not to sound trite but walking around in the July sunshine feels fantastic after weeks of lying prone indoors. Yesterday late afternoon was perfect weather--not hot, but warm and dry with a light breeze. I soaked it up, knowing that the unbearably humid July New England weather would be here all too soon. And sure enough, today was sullenly humid with clouds that refused to produce the predicted thunderstorms. I stayed indoors in my air-conditioned bedroom all day because I didn't want my bangs to frizz. Yes, that's the truth, ladies and gentlemen, and I am not proud of it. It occurred to me today that my hair was a frizzy nightmare the entire 4 days I spent in the rain forest. Yet I still long to return. Once I got there, though, I would be trying in vain to make myself look presentable as I did every morning. Habitual patterns have a way of asserting themselves even in the jungle. I ended up slicking my bangs down with straightening gel which was of no use whatsoever in straightening. Then I pinned it all to the side of my head and braided my hair into pigtails. With my glasses and safari hat on, I looked like an extra on Freaks and Geeks. But it was worth it. I'd gladly go through hair hell again to be back there with the squirrel monkeys, the parrots, and the orapendulas. Even the tarantulas, boas, and piranhas. In The Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield says near the end that sooner or later you end up missing everybody. And it's true. I even miss my compulsions when I can't give full vent to them.
My eyes welled up with tears a week or so ago when I was about to board the T and overheard two women speaking French. I still have a terrible, lonely nostalgia for France, especially Paris. France and Ecuador. If only I had serious money I could divide my time between them. But I can only dream about it.
I can't say that I miss driving, although I have the constant nagging feeling that I need to run errands in places only accessible by car. I also don't miss teaching, which is so often an exercise in frustration and even futility. I do miss gardening and yard work, even mowing the lawn. I miss my yoga class a lot and long to ride my bike again. I really miss my Weight Watchers meetings: without them I am floundering in a sea of mental cravings for hot fudge sundaes and guilt from overeating. The predictable but comforting routine of my pre-retinal detachment life is something I yearn for even though I detested its predictability and lack of adventure. France and Ecuador have been my only forays into adventure in the past two years. I need more adventure in my life. I realize this even more now that I have been sidelined. I wish Curtiss could be my companion in future adventures--we had many in New York City and in Paris together. But I am afraid that he will never be strong enough again for the kinds of adventures I crave.
Who will accompany me? Adventures are lonely when you are alone: I am convinced that being with my son in the jungle added a richness to the experience which it would otherwise have lacked. And in writing these lines I have suddenly realized that my son was born with a sense of adventure and he communicated it to me on this recent trip. He urged me to jump into the murky river and follow the jungle trail without fear. And I felt that I was truly living for the first time in a long time. Since my last trip to France, in fact, which, although it did not require risking physical danger, did require traveling through a big foreign city alone much of the time, armed with only minimal French.
Here's to more adventures and laughing at habitual patterns.
I do have to sleep prone for 8 hours.
Being up and around has been a strange experience. Having a bandage over your eye prompts sympathetic passers-by to say things like "Oh, that must really hurt!" and offer to do things for you. I have the staggering walk of an alcoholic because I am not yet accustomed to my lack of depth perception. I have defied medical advice and carried home 10 lbs. of groceries from the supermarket because if I didn't, no one else would.
And, not to sound trite but walking around in the July sunshine feels fantastic after weeks of lying prone indoors. Yesterday late afternoon was perfect weather--not hot, but warm and dry with a light breeze. I soaked it up, knowing that the unbearably humid July New England weather would be here all too soon. And sure enough, today was sullenly humid with clouds that refused to produce the predicted thunderstorms. I stayed indoors in my air-conditioned bedroom all day because I didn't want my bangs to frizz. Yes, that's the truth, ladies and gentlemen, and I am not proud of it. It occurred to me today that my hair was a frizzy nightmare the entire 4 days I spent in the rain forest. Yet I still long to return. Once I got there, though, I would be trying in vain to make myself look presentable as I did every morning. Habitual patterns have a way of asserting themselves even in the jungle. I ended up slicking my bangs down with straightening gel which was of no use whatsoever in straightening. Then I pinned it all to the side of my head and braided my hair into pigtails. With my glasses and safari hat on, I looked like an extra on Freaks and Geeks. But it was worth it. I'd gladly go through hair hell again to be back there with the squirrel monkeys, the parrots, and the orapendulas. Even the tarantulas, boas, and piranhas. In The Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield says near the end that sooner or later you end up missing everybody. And it's true. I even miss my compulsions when I can't give full vent to them.
My eyes welled up with tears a week or so ago when I was about to board the T and overheard two women speaking French. I still have a terrible, lonely nostalgia for France, especially Paris. France and Ecuador. If only I had serious money I could divide my time between them. But I can only dream about it.
I can't say that I miss driving, although I have the constant nagging feeling that I need to run errands in places only accessible by car. I also don't miss teaching, which is so often an exercise in frustration and even futility. I do miss gardening and yard work, even mowing the lawn. I miss my yoga class a lot and long to ride my bike again. I really miss my Weight Watchers meetings: without them I am floundering in a sea of mental cravings for hot fudge sundaes and guilt from overeating. The predictable but comforting routine of my pre-retinal detachment life is something I yearn for even though I detested its predictability and lack of adventure. France and Ecuador have been my only forays into adventure in the past two years. I need more adventure in my life. I realize this even more now that I have been sidelined. I wish Curtiss could be my companion in future adventures--we had many in New York City and in Paris together. But I am afraid that he will never be strong enough again for the kinds of adventures I crave.
Who will accompany me? Adventures are lonely when you are alone: I am convinced that being with my son in the jungle added a richness to the experience which it would otherwise have lacked. And in writing these lines I have suddenly realized that my son was born with a sense of adventure and he communicated it to me on this recent trip. He urged me to jump into the murky river and follow the jungle trail without fear. And I felt that I was truly living for the first time in a long time. Since my last trip to France, in fact, which, although it did not require risking physical danger, did require traveling through a big foreign city alone much of the time, armed with only minimal French.
Here's to more adventures and laughing at habitual patterns.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Could I still be hot?
My personal assistant is 21 years old and about to graduate from a famous music college which shall remain nameless--it's the one I teach at, and I don't need any trouble from them. She is a brilliant Renaissance woman who can play jazz piano like Oscar Peterson (and I am not exaggerating) She can sing in a unique, quirky jazz voice. She writes great songs. She takes photographs like a professional fashion photographer. She paints and makes films. She does everything well. She has been helping me to give my flagging performing career a shot in the ass. She got me in touch with a web designer who redesigned my website, she designed and printed business cards for me, she took hundreds of photos, and she got a special phone number that people can call to book me--they will get her on the phone. In theory this should all work like a charm, but I have not gotten any gigs as a result of this yet and it's almost a year. It is so exquisitely difficult to put yourself on the map as a musician at any age, and if you have not succeeded in doing so by the age I am now, you are at a distinct disadvantage.
The economic downturn isn't helping things. Being a jazz musician is 3 strikes against you right there. I have heard of bands that developed a following when they got a million hits on their YouTube video. They don't play very many shows. Apparently their young fans are content to download mP3s of their music. The question is: How do you come up with the next big thing song-wise?
There is also the issue of getting tired of playing jazz, which I have been doing for 30 years. While I love free jazz, almost no one else does. Playing standards no longer excites me after 30 years. And even when I was young I didn't want to be Diana Krall. I am now over 50 and I hope it is not too late to re-invent myself. I told myself I would never sing again, but it's a fact that singers are wildly more popular than the most accomplished instrumentalist. Lady Gaga knows this instinctively. Although she can play jazz standards, she sings (and extremely well) and uses the piano as a prop. When she does play, she plays minimally. It's all about the performance with her even though she has a lot of musical talent. She has created a persona in much the same way Madonna created Madonna, the difference being that Madonna has little musical talent. Even if I were to start writing catchy soulful R&B dance tunes right now, I would still be faced with the problem that even Madonna at age 50 doesn't look that great in her underwear on stage. Photos can be morphed with Photoshop (I look like a better version of my 21 year old self) but when you are onstage, you are...well, onstage in all your glory or lack thereof. I wouldn't have to go the dance route--I could do the Nora Jones thing, or the Sarah McLachlan thing, and be the pensive singer-songwriter. I am not sure if I am ready for this yet.
Although my assistant and my BF say I look hot, I don't quite believe them. I have never thought of myself as a beautiful, sexy woman. Thinking of yourself that way is 99% of it.
Last night I was on Facebook and one of my former students, now in his mid to late 20s, suddenly popped up on chat. He was flirting with me and apologized for being "inappropriate" when he said I should wear hot outfits when I perform and I would have a huge male following. He knows that I am old enough to be his mother, and in any case I am not contemplating cheating on my BF with him. But maybe he has a point and I could still give the illusion of being hot (as I see it--that isn't what he said.)
I need to experiment with some hot outfits. I also need to compose some hot songs and maybe start singing them. Or am I abandoning my free jazz dreams? is it possible to play free jazz, be popular with millions of young people, and be hot all at the same time? And do I have the courage to go that route?
The economic downturn isn't helping things. Being a jazz musician is 3 strikes against you right there. I have heard of bands that developed a following when they got a million hits on their YouTube video. They don't play very many shows. Apparently their young fans are content to download mP3s of their music. The question is: How do you come up with the next big thing song-wise?
There is also the issue of getting tired of playing jazz, which I have been doing for 30 years. While I love free jazz, almost no one else does. Playing standards no longer excites me after 30 years. And even when I was young I didn't want to be Diana Krall. I am now over 50 and I hope it is not too late to re-invent myself. I told myself I would never sing again, but it's a fact that singers are wildly more popular than the most accomplished instrumentalist. Lady Gaga knows this instinctively. Although she can play jazz standards, she sings (and extremely well) and uses the piano as a prop. When she does play, she plays minimally. It's all about the performance with her even though she has a lot of musical talent. She has created a persona in much the same way Madonna created Madonna, the difference being that Madonna has little musical talent. Even if I were to start writing catchy soulful R&B dance tunes right now, I would still be faced with the problem that even Madonna at age 50 doesn't look that great in her underwear on stage. Photos can be morphed with Photoshop (I look like a better version of my 21 year old self) but when you are onstage, you are...well, onstage in all your glory or lack thereof. I wouldn't have to go the dance route--I could do the Nora Jones thing, or the Sarah McLachlan thing, and be the pensive singer-songwriter. I am not sure if I am ready for this yet.
Although my assistant and my BF say I look hot, I don't quite believe them. I have never thought of myself as a beautiful, sexy woman. Thinking of yourself that way is 99% of it.
Last night I was on Facebook and one of my former students, now in his mid to late 20s, suddenly popped up on chat. He was flirting with me and apologized for being "inappropriate" when he said I should wear hot outfits when I perform and I would have a huge male following. He knows that I am old enough to be his mother, and in any case I am not contemplating cheating on my BF with him. But maybe he has a point and I could still give the illusion of being hot (as I see it--that isn't what he said.)
I need to experiment with some hot outfits. I also need to compose some hot songs and maybe start singing them. Or am I abandoning my free jazz dreams? is it possible to play free jazz, be popular with millions of young people, and be hot all at the same time? And do I have the courage to go that route?
Monday, July 4, 2011
Through the Looking Glass (Bubble)
I’ve been watching the gas bubble in my eye shrink gradually since it was put there by Dr. Sang, retinal surgeon, about a month ago. It used to cover the entire field of vision in my left eye, and looking through it was very much like looking through the bottom of a drinking glass: you can tell what things are, but they are very blurry and distorted. I imagine that this was the way James Thurber (who eventually became almost totally blind) saw the world.
The gas bubble eventually gets absorbed by the body. At the moment, my left eye appears to hold a clear grayish orb which shivers like Jello whenever I move my head.
The upper arc of the orb is like the dark horizon of the ocean at night as seen from a boat.
Above the arc is a clear area through which I can see objects across the room, although they are blurry without my glasses. With glasses, my vision above the arc of the bubble is only a little less clear than it was before the operation. This gives me hope that my vision will return, although I’m told that the process takes several months.
I am now allowed to walk around all day. I am still not allowed to lie on my back, bend with my head below my waist, exercise, drive, or play the piano with “large body movements.” My piano, in any event, is miserably out of tune and cannot be tuned until July 14. I have been watching a frightening amount of TV. This can’t be good for my brain cells and maybe isn’t even good for my vision. If I attempt to read, I get eyestrain and headaches. So that leaves watching TV marathons of the Twilight Zone and Drop Dead Diva. Also the modern day Sherlock Holmes series on PBS which I have summoned onto my computer screen. Curtiss and I watched several Coen brothers movies together. And other guilty pleasures—though I hesitate to describe them thus—like Hoarders and Say Yes to the Dress (These TV reality shows are like watching a car wreck: you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t look away.) Distractions are good for warding off depression. And TV will do nicely if you can’t read a book.
Everyone tells me to get audio books, but they are as expensive as regular books and I have no income for the foreseeable future. Most of the podcasts I download end up putting me to sleep (if you suffer from insomnia, listen to the Journal of Neurology podcasts—works like a charm.) And I have had to stop listening to radio because world events depress me even more. Listening to music is OK, but makes me feel unproductive. I have certain musician friends who, if sidelined this way, would be tapping and recording polyrhythms, singing melodies, practicing their ear training, transcribing, etc. There is always something you can do if you are determined enough. But I can’t motivate myself to do anything that requires more activity than just passively sitting in a chair or on my bed. This is the first time I have defied eyestrain to type on my laptop for more than a minute or so at a time. I suppose it will get better if after I see the doc tomorrow she says I can drive and/or exercise. I need to get back to my habitual patterns.
The gas bubble eventually gets absorbed by the body. At the moment, my left eye appears to hold a clear grayish orb which shivers like Jello whenever I move my head.
The upper arc of the orb is like the dark horizon of the ocean at night as seen from a boat.
Above the arc is a clear area through which I can see objects across the room, although they are blurry without my glasses. With glasses, my vision above the arc of the bubble is only a little less clear than it was before the operation. This gives me hope that my vision will return, although I’m told that the process takes several months.
I am now allowed to walk around all day. I am still not allowed to lie on my back, bend with my head below my waist, exercise, drive, or play the piano with “large body movements.” My piano, in any event, is miserably out of tune and cannot be tuned until July 14. I have been watching a frightening amount of TV. This can’t be good for my brain cells and maybe isn’t even good for my vision. If I attempt to read, I get eyestrain and headaches. So that leaves watching TV marathons of the Twilight Zone and Drop Dead Diva. Also the modern day Sherlock Holmes series on PBS which I have summoned onto my computer screen. Curtiss and I watched several Coen brothers movies together. And other guilty pleasures—though I hesitate to describe them thus—like Hoarders and Say Yes to the Dress (These TV reality shows are like watching a car wreck: you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t look away.) Distractions are good for warding off depression. And TV will do nicely if you can’t read a book.
Everyone tells me to get audio books, but they are as expensive as regular books and I have no income for the foreseeable future. Most of the podcasts I download end up putting me to sleep (if you suffer from insomnia, listen to the Journal of Neurology podcasts—works like a charm.) And I have had to stop listening to radio because world events depress me even more. Listening to music is OK, but makes me feel unproductive. I have certain musician friends who, if sidelined this way, would be tapping and recording polyrhythms, singing melodies, practicing their ear training, transcribing, etc. There is always something you can do if you are determined enough. But I can’t motivate myself to do anything that requires more activity than just passively sitting in a chair or on my bed. This is the first time I have defied eyestrain to type on my laptop for more than a minute or so at a time. I suppose it will get better if after I see the doc tomorrow she says I can drive and/or exercise. I need to get back to my habitual patterns.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Some real angst
Wednesday (June 1) I went to my eye doctor because of a shadow in my field of vision in my left eye. It turns out that I have a retinal detachment, a condition that can result in blindness if I don't have an operation immediately. In the course of being examined by 4 doctors (!) it was determined that I need a vitrectomy (removal of the vitreous fluid inside the eye and surgically re-attaching the retina.) I was referred to one of the best retina surgeons in the country, who spoke to me for an hour about the operation and the followup (aftercare) The op isn't a big deal--I had cataract surgery and this is similar. But post-op, I have to stay lying in bed on my stomach with my right cheek on the mattress for 23 out of 24 hours a day for two weeks! Actually, she said that I should only get up to go to the bathroom, but I'm hoping I'm allowed to brush my teeth too! Then, for the next two weeks, I still have to do this but I am allowed three 2 hour periods a day on my feet. Then, for the 5th week, I only have to do it at night. This is done so that the retina heals in exactly the right way with no scar tissue (which I am susceptible to since I have recurring eye inflammation which contributed to this problem.) So, the surgery is this Friday, and tomorrow (Thurs.) I have to go to a pre-op appointment at Mass Eye and Ear.
I will not be able to work for 5 weeks. I have had to cancel literally everything on my calendar for 5 weeks. My father and brother have offered to send me money, so my main worry has been alleviated somewhat. I broke down in the doctor's office and apologized profusely--I usually can't cry in front of people and rarely cry in general, but the stress of not being able to work with Curtiss on disability gave rise to fears that I would not be able to pay my mortgage and bills. The prestigious and very impressive Dr. Sang thought that perhaps my students could come to me once I was able to get up for a few hours a day. I didn't have the heart to tell her that things just don't work that way at Berklee. She was very kind, but she was also very insistent that I have the surgery and that I follow her instructions to the letter afterwards. It seems that I am at risk for the formation of excessive scar tissue (because of my uveitis) which threatens to detach the retina again once it is healed.
The idea is to have it heal just enough (not enough means it won't stick to the back of the eye, and too much means scar tissue formation) so it is a tricky, delicate process. Whereas most people have a 90% chance of success with no future detachments, my chances are only 80-85%. Still pretty good odds, though.
Dr. Sang amazed me by rattling off a rapid-fire list of descriptions to her nurse, who typed them into a computer. This was while she was shining the slit lamp into my eyes (checking both eyes to make sure that nothing was wrong with the right eye) and gazing through a complicated lens to get an even better view. These descriptions occasionally had the word "normal" in them, which made me feel a little better, and lots of opthamological shorthand such as OS (left eye, or os sinister) and OD ( right eye, or os dexter) I felt better until she told me that there were about 20 million pigment cells floating around in my vitreous which had no business being there--they were supposed to be in fluid safely confined behind the retina, but they had now broken loose to cause trouble, namely by increasing inflammation in the eye which will slow the healing process. So Dr. Sang brought out the big prednisone pill guns--I took one tonight and I'm supposed to take another tomorrow--plus the eyedrops that fight inflammation (4X a day tomorrow)
Dr. Sang succeeded where three docs before her (including Dr. Foster) had failed: she found the holes in my retina, which were very small and elusive. By the time I reached her at about 4:30 pm, my eye had been poked, prodded, and abused by bright light from about 8 a.m. until 11 a.m. My eye muscles were sore from moving up, down, right, and left as I was instructed. I wasn't looking forward to another bout with the slit lamp. And the final round with Dr. Sang was more painful and uncomfortable than the previous bouts: she had to hold my lid open with an instrument that pinched. While this was nothing compared to labor pains, it was still no day at the beach. It seemed like forever but in fact it probably only took about 5 minutes. She was speedier than the other doctors and she knew exactly what she was looking for. She proceeded to explain the operation to me using several excellent analogies--the structure of the eye is hard for the lay person to understand, but she was well-practiced at explaining. I was referred to her by Dr. Foster, who for about 6 years now has been assiduously trying to cure my persistent uveitis. Dr. Foster is a world-famous expert in inflammatory eye disease, so I would expect him to refer me to someone similar for this surgery. Dr. Foster's mottoes (which are inscribed on two pieces of crystal in a glass case in the lobby of his office) are "Whatever it takes" and "Never, never give up." Now, this may sound corny, but I have tried to adopt these as my own mottoes. I am normally persistent in most things and not prone to giving up, but this eye condition has been extremely discouraging and demoralizing, especially since it has contributed to an even more serious condition. I of course will do whatever it takes to save the sight in my left eye, and certainly the post-op instructions are heroic if not fanatical, but at this moment I don't know how the hell I can stay in that prone position day and night without getting bedsores, strained muscles and tendons, and temporary insanity from forced inactivity.
I won't be able to read (eye patch on left eye and right eye sunk into the mattress, as the surgeon described it) or type on a computer. Thank God that a) Curtiss will be here to take care of me and b)this didn't happen in Ecuador. It would have been bad enough in Quito, but at least there are doctors there--what if it had occurred in the rain forest? Flying in a plane is absolutely forbidden and I would have risked further damage flying home. Although Dr. S. believes that these tears have been forming slowly over time and doesn't think that the elevations in Ecuador or the flights had anything to do with the problem as it is now.
My best hope is that I will find something funny in the experience of immobility that I am about to have. Funny or instructive, perhaps in a spiritual way. It will force me to abandon my habitual patterns, as the Buddhists call them: being online, watching TV, listening to progressive political polemics on talk radio, practicing, exercising, tracking my food intake a la Weight Watchers, tidying up the house, yard work, driving, shopping, even reading. Actually, everything you do on a daily basis is a habitual pattern, even meditation. But the ones that are particularly insidious tend to be the addictive ones and ones that usually involve multitasking. I think I could use a vacation from multitasking. Who knows, my mind and mood might emerge stronger from this. But I could also take to drinking. I had a large brandy tonight which was the only thing that took my mind off this for a while. And I am willing myself not to cry because my left eye hurts and it's red, and I don't want to make matters worse.
OK, bright side: I don't have to worry about money (as my father said emphatically at least 3 times on the phone) I have Curtiss to help me and a brilliant surgeon will be operating on me. Something can and will be done to fix my eye and even maybe prevent future detachments. They probably couldn't do this 50 years ago. Lots of people have to do something similar to the regimen I'm getting. Also, lots of people have to lie on their backs for weeks after back surgery. People have their legs in casts and suspension for weeks and can't work. I'm not the only one. So I'm not going to ask, Why me? Why shouldn't it be me?
I will not be able to work for 5 weeks. I have had to cancel literally everything on my calendar for 5 weeks. My father and brother have offered to send me money, so my main worry has been alleviated somewhat. I broke down in the doctor's office and apologized profusely--I usually can't cry in front of people and rarely cry in general, but the stress of not being able to work with Curtiss on disability gave rise to fears that I would not be able to pay my mortgage and bills. The prestigious and very impressive Dr. Sang thought that perhaps my students could come to me once I was able to get up for a few hours a day. I didn't have the heart to tell her that things just don't work that way at Berklee. She was very kind, but she was also very insistent that I have the surgery and that I follow her instructions to the letter afterwards. It seems that I am at risk for the formation of excessive scar tissue (because of my uveitis) which threatens to detach the retina again once it is healed.
The idea is to have it heal just enough (not enough means it won't stick to the back of the eye, and too much means scar tissue formation) so it is a tricky, delicate process. Whereas most people have a 90% chance of success with no future detachments, my chances are only 80-85%. Still pretty good odds, though.
Dr. Sang amazed me by rattling off a rapid-fire list of descriptions to her nurse, who typed them into a computer. This was while she was shining the slit lamp into my eyes (checking both eyes to make sure that nothing was wrong with the right eye) and gazing through a complicated lens to get an even better view. These descriptions occasionally had the word "normal" in them, which made me feel a little better, and lots of opthamological shorthand such as OS (left eye, or os sinister) and OD ( right eye, or os dexter) I felt better until she told me that there were about 20 million pigment cells floating around in my vitreous which had no business being there--they were supposed to be in fluid safely confined behind the retina, but they had now broken loose to cause trouble, namely by increasing inflammation in the eye which will slow the healing process. So Dr. Sang brought out the big prednisone pill guns--I took one tonight and I'm supposed to take another tomorrow--plus the eyedrops that fight inflammation (4X a day tomorrow)
Dr. Sang succeeded where three docs before her (including Dr. Foster) had failed: she found the holes in my retina, which were very small and elusive. By the time I reached her at about 4:30 pm, my eye had been poked, prodded, and abused by bright light from about 8 a.m. until 11 a.m. My eye muscles were sore from moving up, down, right, and left as I was instructed. I wasn't looking forward to another bout with the slit lamp. And the final round with Dr. Sang was more painful and uncomfortable than the previous bouts: she had to hold my lid open with an instrument that pinched. While this was nothing compared to labor pains, it was still no day at the beach. It seemed like forever but in fact it probably only took about 5 minutes. She was speedier than the other doctors and she knew exactly what she was looking for. She proceeded to explain the operation to me using several excellent analogies--the structure of the eye is hard for the lay person to understand, but she was well-practiced at explaining. I was referred to her by Dr. Foster, who for about 6 years now has been assiduously trying to cure my persistent uveitis. Dr. Foster is a world-famous expert in inflammatory eye disease, so I would expect him to refer me to someone similar for this surgery. Dr. Foster's mottoes (which are inscribed on two pieces of crystal in a glass case in the lobby of his office) are "Whatever it takes" and "Never, never give up." Now, this may sound corny, but I have tried to adopt these as my own mottoes. I am normally persistent in most things and not prone to giving up, but this eye condition has been extremely discouraging and demoralizing, especially since it has contributed to an even more serious condition. I of course will do whatever it takes to save the sight in my left eye, and certainly the post-op instructions are heroic if not fanatical, but at this moment I don't know how the hell I can stay in that prone position day and night without getting bedsores, strained muscles and tendons, and temporary insanity from forced inactivity.
I won't be able to read (eye patch on left eye and right eye sunk into the mattress, as the surgeon described it) or type on a computer. Thank God that a) Curtiss will be here to take care of me and b)this didn't happen in Ecuador. It would have been bad enough in Quito, but at least there are doctors there--what if it had occurred in the rain forest? Flying in a plane is absolutely forbidden and I would have risked further damage flying home. Although Dr. S. believes that these tears have been forming slowly over time and doesn't think that the elevations in Ecuador or the flights had anything to do with the problem as it is now.
My best hope is that I will find something funny in the experience of immobility that I am about to have. Funny or instructive, perhaps in a spiritual way. It will force me to abandon my habitual patterns, as the Buddhists call them: being online, watching TV, listening to progressive political polemics on talk radio, practicing, exercising, tracking my food intake a la Weight Watchers, tidying up the house, yard work, driving, shopping, even reading. Actually, everything you do on a daily basis is a habitual pattern, even meditation. But the ones that are particularly insidious tend to be the addictive ones and ones that usually involve multitasking. I think I could use a vacation from multitasking. Who knows, my mind and mood might emerge stronger from this. But I could also take to drinking. I had a large brandy tonight which was the only thing that took my mind off this for a while. And I am willing myself not to cry because my left eye hurts and it's red, and I don't want to make matters worse.
OK, bright side: I don't have to worry about money (as my father said emphatically at least 3 times on the phone) I have Curtiss to help me and a brilliant surgeon will be operating on me. Something can and will be done to fix my eye and even maybe prevent future detachments. They probably couldn't do this 50 years ago. Lots of people have to do something similar to the regimen I'm getting. Also, lots of people have to lie on their backs for weeks after back surgery. People have their legs in casts and suspension for weeks and can't work. I'm not the only one. So I'm not going to ask, Why me? Why shouldn't it be me?
Sunday, May 29, 2011
And you thought men and women had different brains.
The following is an excerpt from an article in Smithsonian magazine called Ten Myths about the Brain.
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It was a relief to see this one put to rest, presumably by those in the know. [I bought the silly book with that title about 10 years ago. I'm no scientist, but I thought the observations were based on stereotypes.] The entire article is worth reading. I was absurdly happy to learn that, contrary to popular belief, we do not use only 10% of our brains. And that the brain is not like a computer, or the Internet, or a social network. Sometimes a brain is only a brain.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.
Women are thought to outperform men on tests of empathy. They do—unless test subjects are told that men are particularly good at the test, in which case men perform as well as or better than women. The same pattern holds in reverse for tests of spatial reasoning. Whenever stereotypes are brought to mind, even by something as simple as asking test subjects to check a box next to their gender, sex differences are exaggerated. Women college students told that a test is something women usually do poorly on, do poorly. Women college students told that a test is something college students usually do well on, do well. Across countries—and across time—the more prevalent the belief is that men are better than women in math, the greater the difference in girls’ and boys’ math scores. And that’s not because girls in Iceland have more specialized brain hemispheres than do girls in Italy.
Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we’re looking for a mate, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html#ixzz1NoXTvdlD
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It was a relief to see this one put to rest, presumably by those in the know. [I bought the silly book with that title about 10 years ago. I'm no scientist, but I thought the observations were based on stereotypes.] The entire article is worth reading. I was absurdly happy to learn that, contrary to popular belief, we do not use only 10% of our brains. And that the brain is not like a computer, or the Internet, or a social network. Sometimes a brain is only a brain.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.
Women are thought to outperform men on tests of empathy. They do—unless test subjects are told that men are particularly good at the test, in which case men perform as well as or better than women. The same pattern holds in reverse for tests of spatial reasoning. Whenever stereotypes are brought to mind, even by something as simple as asking test subjects to check a box next to their gender, sex differences are exaggerated. Women college students told that a test is something women usually do poorly on, do poorly. Women college students told that a test is something college students usually do well on, do well. Across countries—and across time—the more prevalent the belief is that men are better than women in math, the greater the difference in girls’ and boys’ math scores. And that’s not because girls in Iceland have more specialized brain hemispheres than do girls in Italy.
Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we’re looking for a mate, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html#ixzz1NoXTvdlD
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
On flying, risks, and the end of the world: May 21, 2011
I am on the penultimate flight of my trip home from Quito. I am headed to Miami, and after a 3 hour layover, I will fly to Boston. I can’t sleep on the plane despite only 3.5 hours of sleep last night. I had to catch a 6:40 a.m. flight, and when I got to the airport at 4:45 there was a huge line of people waiting to check in. Things moved excruciatingly slowly, but I finally got past customs and onto the plane just under the wire!
I have just watched The Tourist, an Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp vehicle which is the onboard movie. A predictable story, but just watching the two handsomest actors in the movie business is soothing to me and keeps my mind off my fear of heights and being in planes at 30,000 feet. It’s not a paralyzing fear. I have convinced myself on an intellectual level that flying is safer than driving or any other means of transportation, but on a visceral level, I don’t believe it. I hate being in a cramped and uncomfortable seat with my ears popping and occasionally painful from rapid ascents and descents. It feels like some kind of punishment. I have already read the SkyMall catalog, wondering who actually buys this stuff, and the airline magazine (which is boring enough to put me to sleep but doesn’t) so I whip out my travel diary and begin writing to distract myself from the discomfort.
If Ecuador were any less wonderful, it would not have been worth the 15+ hours of travel time each way that are required. You have to devote a whole day of your vacation to getting there and another to getting home. Seeing Ecuador and my son did make it all worthwhile, but I think I’m done flying for a while. Some people say that getting there is half the fun, but every time I travel by plane I thank God not only that I made it to solid ground alive but also that I don’t have a job (like my friend Barbara) which requires a lot of air travel. It’s exhausting, irritating, maddeningly inefficient, dehydrating, deep-vein thrombosis-inducing, and most of all, IT TAKES FOREVER. OK, I’m done complaining now. The one compensation that air travel offers apart from seeing the world and one’s family is spectacular views from up in the clouds. Coming into and flying out of Quito, you see some of the most beautiful sights in nature, and they are only
visible at 10,000 feet and above. A sea of cumulus clouds. Volcanic peaks 14,000 ft. high and covered with snow. Sunlight glinting on the metal roofs of buildings when you get a little lower. Patchwork of greens and browns. Even the seacoast line of Miami alongside tall buildings is magnificent to behold.
There are just some things in life that require trust and faith even if you are a nonbeliever. The anesthesiologist, the heart or brain surgeon who operates on you or a loved one, for example. You put your life in their hands because you know they have been trained long and hard NOT TO MAKE A FATAL MISTAKE. The odds of waking up/surviving the surgery are in your favor except with some emergency life-saving procedures. I’m told that the pilots who fly in and out of Quito are the best in the business because it is exceedingly difficult to land on the very short landing strip. This gives me a certain degree of reassurance. And of course it has been proven that flying is infinitely safer than driving or riding in a car. The act of driving especially gives you a false sense of being in control. You have to have this delusion or you would never drive anywhere. Sort of like hiking through the Ecuadoran jungle and fearlessly not expecting a 25 foot long boa constrictor to drop on you from a tree or slither stealthily up behind you. You can’t afford to have these kinds of fears if you ever expect to have exciting jungle adventures (which more often than not don’t involve dangerous snakes.) And when you are being slowly lifted in a cable car on a ski lift type cable which is taking you up the side of a very tall mountain, you have to have faith that those cables (which look very thick and strong) are not going to snap. (I’m referring to the Teleferico in Quito, which took me up Pichincha, a 14,000 foot peak. Once it let me off, there was still quite a distance to hike if you wanted to reach the summit and see the volcano. I chose to do the easiest hike, since the air was thin and I was gasping for breath.) And speaking of volcanoes: This one hasn’t erupted in a very long time, but there are active vocanoes in Ecuador which my fearless son has viewed from what I consider to be an unsafe distance. But it must be safe or they wouldn’t let tourists go there! Or would they?
Getting back to air travel: what about the threat of terrorism? My answer: after the grueling inspections I went through in both airport security and customs (Quito officials searched everyone’s carryons a second time after they had gone through the X-ray scanner) I can say with confidence that it is virtually impossible for anyone to get on board an aircraft with a gun, blade, poison, or bomb. Now that Obama and the Seals have taken out bin Laden, there is supposedly the threat of terrorist retaliation, but if there is an incident, it won’t be on board a plane unless they are able to pull off an inside job involving an evil pilot and copilot. Not likely.
So: I have effectively argued against irrational fears of heights, flying, riding in a cable car up the side of a mountain, and hiking through the jungle. WHAT ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD?
No less a source than the New York Times had an article yesterday about a fanatical Christian group which prophesied the end of the world on May 21, 2011. It’s not clear where this information came from, but apparently not from Jesus. I’m wondering why they didn’t give us more notice—say six months—so we could all get our affairs in order, at least wash the car and get someone to feed the cat, and in general do whatever is necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Rapture. Because we all know what happens to the people who aren’t Raptured. I haven’t viewed all those great Last Judgment Renaissance paintings for nothing. Wailing and gnashing of teeth, and burning forever in the lake of fire. (See James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for further details.) The word is that if you do not turn over your soul completely to Jesus, you will not be Raptured. Instead you will be condemned to eternal damnation.
There’s apparently a cover your ass clause in the doomsayers’ prediction: if, as has thus far been my experience (though the day isn’t over yet!) there are no clear signs of the world coming to an end, this simply means that the world HAS BEGUN to come to an end, presumably in ways too tricky, sinister, and subtle to be recognized until it’s too late. Like a panther pouncing on you after following you a mile or so through the forest while you whistled a happy tune. [Update! When the world failed to end as scheduled, the leader of the sect said that God in His mercy had postponed the end of the world until Oct. 21. Whew.] Oh, and lest we forget: it's all the fault of gay people. God decided to destroy the world because gay sex is proliferating! Not because of evil corporations that destroy people's lives and the environment. Not because of murderers, skinheads, fascists, and bigots. Gay people, who dare to love each other.
I would argue that for many of us—-survivors and victims of 9/11, the Haitian earthquake, hurricane Katrina, the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan, monster tornadoes in the southern U.S., and the many wars which still rage pointlessly in the world today—-the world has already come to an end. In some cases, ten years ago or more. I could also argue that we humans are the architects of our own destruction in our continued foolhardy and desperate search for oil and other non-sustainable fossil fuels. We’re causing wildfires, floods, killer tornadoes the likes of which the world has never seen, deforestation and the resultant extinction and endangerment of animal and plant species. We’re melting the polar ice caps and creating a greenhouse of CO2 instead of an atmosphere. This is more than 40 years after scientists warned us about this. If we had begun work on solar power in 1970 there would be no need for nuclear power today. And to those who say that nuclear power plants are safe, this is my retort:
1) Three Mile Island [contaminated]
2) Chernobyl [contaminated and uninhabitable for decades to come]
3) Reactors in Fukushima, Japan [damaged by a tsunami which destroyed the cooling system, with the result of cores overheating and the release of radioactive isotopes like cesium into ground water and being dumped into the ocean in an attempt to cool down the cores and avoid meltdown] Traces of radiation being detected in vegetables and milk. After two months, cores are still overheated. Scary.
4) NUCLEAR WASTE. Just what are we supposed to do with lethally poisonous by-products of nuclear fission, some of which will remain radioactive for tens and maybe hundreds of years? BURY IT IN THE DESERT? YEAH, RIGHT. NOT AN OPTION. NOR IS SENDING PLUTONIUM INTO SPACE (WHAT GENIUS CAME UP WITH THAT PLAN?) WHEN ONE TINY PARTICLE CAN CAUSE LUNG CANCER.
These are the things that we should be afraid of, people. They are the end of the world.
But it seems that greed is a more powerful motivator than fear or even caution.
The ancient Siona shaman I met in Cuyabeno said that in the sixty-plus years he has lived on a certain reservation on the river, he has seen animals dwindle in number and disappear. Some of this is from over-hunting and fishing but the biggest problem is oil companies deforesting the jungle. Our jungle guide, Hugo, showed us a patch of “young” forest which is what grew after oil companies slashed and burned the forest more than 25 years ago. THE TREES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. And no one stopped the oil companies, who just did whatever they wanted because they could. Today they are more restricted in their depredation, but it continues. The road to Cuyabeno is lined with huge storage tanks and oil fires burning off impurities. Insidiously, the companies offer the poor local people low-paying jobs. The people continue to live in the hundreds of wretched shacks that also line the road to Cuyabeno.
This will be one of the many environmental/humanitarian battles that my son and his generation will have to fight. My generation has utterly failed. We have either joined the ranks of the enemy, or we ignored at our peril the dead canary in the mineshaft. Seduced by consumer goods and technological toys, we continue to be in denial about the future of this planet. Al Gore, an expert on this subject, has warned us that we may already have reached the tipping point. We may have irreparably destroyed the climate of the earth that our children and grandchildren will inherit. It is to be hoped that they will clean up the mess we self-absorbed postwar babies have made.
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.
I have just watched The Tourist, an Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp vehicle which is the onboard movie. A predictable story, but just watching the two handsomest actors in the movie business is soothing to me and keeps my mind off my fear of heights and being in planes at 30,000 feet. It’s not a paralyzing fear. I have convinced myself on an intellectual level that flying is safer than driving or any other means of transportation, but on a visceral level, I don’t believe it. I hate being in a cramped and uncomfortable seat with my ears popping and occasionally painful from rapid ascents and descents. It feels like some kind of punishment. I have already read the SkyMall catalog, wondering who actually buys this stuff, and the airline magazine (which is boring enough to put me to sleep but doesn’t) so I whip out my travel diary and begin writing to distract myself from the discomfort.
If Ecuador were any less wonderful, it would not have been worth the 15+ hours of travel time each way that are required. You have to devote a whole day of your vacation to getting there and another to getting home. Seeing Ecuador and my son did make it all worthwhile, but I think I’m done flying for a while. Some people say that getting there is half the fun, but every time I travel by plane I thank God not only that I made it to solid ground alive but also that I don’t have a job (like my friend Barbara) which requires a lot of air travel. It’s exhausting, irritating, maddeningly inefficient, dehydrating, deep-vein thrombosis-inducing, and most of all, IT TAKES FOREVER. OK, I’m done complaining now. The one compensation that air travel offers apart from seeing the world and one’s family is spectacular views from up in the clouds. Coming into and flying out of Quito, you see some of the most beautiful sights in nature, and they are only
visible at 10,000 feet and above. A sea of cumulus clouds. Volcanic peaks 14,000 ft. high and covered with snow. Sunlight glinting on the metal roofs of buildings when you get a little lower. Patchwork of greens and browns. Even the seacoast line of Miami alongside tall buildings is magnificent to behold.
There are just some things in life that require trust and faith even if you are a nonbeliever. The anesthesiologist, the heart or brain surgeon who operates on you or a loved one, for example. You put your life in their hands because you know they have been trained long and hard NOT TO MAKE A FATAL MISTAKE. The odds of waking up/surviving the surgery are in your favor except with some emergency life-saving procedures. I’m told that the pilots who fly in and out of Quito are the best in the business because it is exceedingly difficult to land on the very short landing strip. This gives me a certain degree of reassurance. And of course it has been proven that flying is infinitely safer than driving or riding in a car. The act of driving especially gives you a false sense of being in control. You have to have this delusion or you would never drive anywhere. Sort of like hiking through the Ecuadoran jungle and fearlessly not expecting a 25 foot long boa constrictor to drop on you from a tree or slither stealthily up behind you. You can’t afford to have these kinds of fears if you ever expect to have exciting jungle adventures (which more often than not don’t involve dangerous snakes.) And when you are being slowly lifted in a cable car on a ski lift type cable which is taking you up the side of a very tall mountain, you have to have faith that those cables (which look very thick and strong) are not going to snap. (I’m referring to the Teleferico in Quito, which took me up Pichincha, a 14,000 foot peak. Once it let me off, there was still quite a distance to hike if you wanted to reach the summit and see the volcano. I chose to do the easiest hike, since the air was thin and I was gasping for breath.) And speaking of volcanoes: This one hasn’t erupted in a very long time, but there are active vocanoes in Ecuador which my fearless son has viewed from what I consider to be an unsafe distance. But it must be safe or they wouldn’t let tourists go there! Or would they?
Getting back to air travel: what about the threat of terrorism? My answer: after the grueling inspections I went through in both airport security and customs (Quito officials searched everyone’s carryons a second time after they had gone through the X-ray scanner) I can say with confidence that it is virtually impossible for anyone to get on board an aircraft with a gun, blade, poison, or bomb. Now that Obama and the Seals have taken out bin Laden, there is supposedly the threat of terrorist retaliation, but if there is an incident, it won’t be on board a plane unless they are able to pull off an inside job involving an evil pilot and copilot. Not likely.
So: I have effectively argued against irrational fears of heights, flying, riding in a cable car up the side of a mountain, and hiking through the jungle. WHAT ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD?
No less a source than the New York Times had an article yesterday about a fanatical Christian group which prophesied the end of the world on May 21, 2011. It’s not clear where this information came from, but apparently not from Jesus. I’m wondering why they didn’t give us more notice—say six months—so we could all get our affairs in order, at least wash the car and get someone to feed the cat, and in general do whatever is necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Rapture. Because we all know what happens to the people who aren’t Raptured. I haven’t viewed all those great Last Judgment Renaissance paintings for nothing. Wailing and gnashing of teeth, and burning forever in the lake of fire. (See James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for further details.) The word is that if you do not turn over your soul completely to Jesus, you will not be Raptured. Instead you will be condemned to eternal damnation.
There’s apparently a cover your ass clause in the doomsayers’ prediction: if, as has thus far been my experience (though the day isn’t over yet!) there are no clear signs of the world coming to an end, this simply means that the world HAS BEGUN to come to an end, presumably in ways too tricky, sinister, and subtle to be recognized until it’s too late. Like a panther pouncing on you after following you a mile or so through the forest while you whistled a happy tune. [Update! When the world failed to end as scheduled, the leader of the sect said that God in His mercy had postponed the end of the world until Oct. 21. Whew.] Oh, and lest we forget: it's all the fault of gay people. God decided to destroy the world because gay sex is proliferating! Not because of evil corporations that destroy people's lives and the environment. Not because of murderers, skinheads, fascists, and bigots. Gay people, who dare to love each other.
I would argue that for many of us—-survivors and victims of 9/11, the Haitian earthquake, hurricane Katrina, the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan, monster tornadoes in the southern U.S., and the many wars which still rage pointlessly in the world today—-the world has already come to an end. In some cases, ten years ago or more. I could also argue that we humans are the architects of our own destruction in our continued foolhardy and desperate search for oil and other non-sustainable fossil fuels. We’re causing wildfires, floods, killer tornadoes the likes of which the world has never seen, deforestation and the resultant extinction and endangerment of animal and plant species. We’re melting the polar ice caps and creating a greenhouse of CO2 instead of an atmosphere. This is more than 40 years after scientists warned us about this. If we had begun work on solar power in 1970 there would be no need for nuclear power today. And to those who say that nuclear power plants are safe, this is my retort:
1) Three Mile Island [contaminated]
2) Chernobyl [contaminated and uninhabitable for decades to come]
3) Reactors in Fukushima, Japan [damaged by a tsunami which destroyed the cooling system, with the result of cores overheating and the release of radioactive isotopes like cesium into ground water and being dumped into the ocean in an attempt to cool down the cores and avoid meltdown] Traces of radiation being detected in vegetables and milk. After two months, cores are still overheated. Scary.
4) NUCLEAR WASTE. Just what are we supposed to do with lethally poisonous by-products of nuclear fission, some of which will remain radioactive for tens and maybe hundreds of years? BURY IT IN THE DESERT? YEAH, RIGHT. NOT AN OPTION. NOR IS SENDING PLUTONIUM INTO SPACE (WHAT GENIUS CAME UP WITH THAT PLAN?) WHEN ONE TINY PARTICLE CAN CAUSE LUNG CANCER.
These are the things that we should be afraid of, people. They are the end of the world.
But it seems that greed is a more powerful motivator than fear or even caution.
The ancient Siona shaman I met in Cuyabeno said that in the sixty-plus years he has lived on a certain reservation on the river, he has seen animals dwindle in number and disappear. Some of this is from over-hunting and fishing but the biggest problem is oil companies deforesting the jungle. Our jungle guide, Hugo, showed us a patch of “young” forest which is what grew after oil companies slashed and burned the forest more than 25 years ago. THE TREES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. And no one stopped the oil companies, who just did whatever they wanted because they could. Today they are more restricted in their depredation, but it continues. The road to Cuyabeno is lined with huge storage tanks and oil fires burning off impurities. Insidiously, the companies offer the poor local people low-paying jobs. The people continue to live in the hundreds of wretched shacks that also line the road to Cuyabeno.
This will be one of the many environmental/humanitarian battles that my son and his generation will have to fight. My generation has utterly failed. We have either joined the ranks of the enemy, or we ignored at our peril the dead canary in the mineshaft. Seduced by consumer goods and technological toys, we continue to be in denial about the future of this planet. Al Gore, an expert on this subject, has warned us that we may already have reached the tipping point. We may have irreparably destroyed the climate of the earth that our children and grandchildren will inherit. It is to be hoped that they will clean up the mess we self-absorbed postwar babies have made.
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Rainforest Part III: Mowgli, cacao, and piranha fishing
It seems that the collective attention span collapsed after my first installment, but I will continue to write as if people were still reading this blog.
More stories of the lodge at Cuyabeno:
The owners of the lodge adopted a boy who was abandoned by his mother as a baby. He is a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, beautiful child whose real name is John but whose nickname is Mowgli after the hero of Kipling's The Jungle Book.
Mowgli is eight years old, and like most eight year old boys (and I am an expert on them) is a constantly running, jumping, spinning ball of energy. He hung from the rafters at least 6 feet from the floor and dropped to the floor without sustaining any injury. He scurried up several flights of steps to the roof of the hut where there were hammocks for resting and enjoying the view. He wasn't supervised, and I feared that he might somehow fall over the railing, but he was careful enough not to. He is an affectionate child, greeting me by throwing his arms around me and attempting to teach me Spanish. He would get impatient with me if I didn't grasp what he was saying immediately, but I was surprised to find that I was actually learning some words and phrases from him. One evening I was more or less in the role of baby sitter because I was too exhausted to go for a night ride in the canoe, having hiked all day. His parents were occupied with chores and Mowgli had no one to play with. He brought me books from the pile intended for perusal by tourists. One book had beautiful color pictures of the various animals of the jungle. We looked at it together and he commented on each photo. Another book was a history of indigenous people in the area, written by an archaeologist. Mowgli directed my attention to the fact that the people in the drawings were naked (this reminded me of the scene in Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield goes to the Museum of Natural History and is relieved to see that things haven't changed: the figures of the Indian women were still naked above the waist.) He insisted that we search for "las cucarachas" in the dining room, which unfortunately were not a figment of his imagination. His mother eventually called him into the kitchen to eat dinner, but not before he brought a couple of 6 packs of Oreos from the kitchen to me and insisted that I eat them.
Speaking of eating, I tasted for the first time the fruit of the cacao tree, the source of chocolate. The pendulous fruits have a hard outer shell which is red when they are unripe and banana-yellow when ripe. Mike and I split one open to reveal many large seeds which were covered with a clear gooey gel-like substance. You suck the gel off the seed and dispose of the hard nut-like interior. The gel, while deliciously sweet, does not in the least taste like chocolate. When chocolate is made, the seeds are dried in the sun, fermented, and roasted, then ground up into cocoa powder. There are further steps in the process depending on whether sugar is added and whether it is to be made into bars or liquid. I tasted an Ecuadoran chocolate
bar, which was 70% cacao and very good.
One of the scheduled activities was fishing for piranhas. When asked if I wanted to do it, I initially said no because I have mixed feelings about fishing. It seems cruel to catch a fish on a hook and then let it flop around until it suffocates. Then again, I eat fish and seafood. Also, my son and I spent many hours fishing on the lake we vacationed near on Cape Cod when Mike was the age Mowgli is now, and I could tell that Mike wanted to re-live those experiences. So I agreed to go.
Hugo, Mike and I set out in the canoe and reached a small cove where the water was relatively still. Armed with crude fishing poles which were sticks with fishing line and a hook attached (no reel, flies or lures) we took our places in the canoe, baited our hooks with pieces of raw meat, and churned up the water with our poles as instructed by Hugo so that the fish would be fooled into thinking the bait was live prey. Well, piranhas are not easily fooled. They are brilliant at removing the bait from the hook, and no matter how many times I re-baited, they would always steal it.
Hugo caught one, but it was too small and he threw it back. Then Mike caught one. It was on the small side but large enough to cook and eat. I was glad that there were no large piranhas in this part of the river for obvious reasons. Fishing is a patient sport (if it can be called a sport when you don't need skill to land the fish, only to hook it.) I am not good at things that require me to sit and wait for long periods of time. And I was getting irritated at the fish for stealing the bait. Eventually we returned with only the one fish that Mike caught. The cook fried it for dinner. Mike ate it and I had only a bite. I have to admit that piranha is a good-tasting mild white fish similar to trout, flounder, or the dourade Curtiss and I used to eat at the Blue Ribbon bistro in Brooklyn.
The next installment will be a whiny piece about my Quito adventures. Stay tuned.
More stories of the lodge at Cuyabeno:
The owners of the lodge adopted a boy who was abandoned by his mother as a baby. He is a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, beautiful child whose real name is John but whose nickname is Mowgli after the hero of Kipling's The Jungle Book.
Mowgli is eight years old, and like most eight year old boys (and I am an expert on them) is a constantly running, jumping, spinning ball of energy. He hung from the rafters at least 6 feet from the floor and dropped to the floor without sustaining any injury. He scurried up several flights of steps to the roof of the hut where there were hammocks for resting and enjoying the view. He wasn't supervised, and I feared that he might somehow fall over the railing, but he was careful enough not to. He is an affectionate child, greeting me by throwing his arms around me and attempting to teach me Spanish. He would get impatient with me if I didn't grasp what he was saying immediately, but I was surprised to find that I was actually learning some words and phrases from him. One evening I was more or less in the role of baby sitter because I was too exhausted to go for a night ride in the canoe, having hiked all day. His parents were occupied with chores and Mowgli had no one to play with. He brought me books from the pile intended for perusal by tourists. One book had beautiful color pictures of the various animals of the jungle. We looked at it together and he commented on each photo. Another book was a history of indigenous people in the area, written by an archaeologist. Mowgli directed my attention to the fact that the people in the drawings were naked (this reminded me of the scene in Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield goes to the Museum of Natural History and is relieved to see that things haven't changed: the figures of the Indian women were still naked above the waist.) He insisted that we search for "las cucarachas" in the dining room, which unfortunately were not a figment of his imagination. His mother eventually called him into the kitchen to eat dinner, but not before he brought a couple of 6 packs of Oreos from the kitchen to me and insisted that I eat them.
Speaking of eating, I tasted for the first time the fruit of the cacao tree, the source of chocolate. The pendulous fruits have a hard outer shell which is red when they are unripe and banana-yellow when ripe. Mike and I split one open to reveal many large seeds which were covered with a clear gooey gel-like substance. You suck the gel off the seed and dispose of the hard nut-like interior. The gel, while deliciously sweet, does not in the least taste like chocolate. When chocolate is made, the seeds are dried in the sun, fermented, and roasted, then ground up into cocoa powder. There are further steps in the process depending on whether sugar is added and whether it is to be made into bars or liquid. I tasted an Ecuadoran chocolate
bar, which was 70% cacao and very good.
One of the scheduled activities was fishing for piranhas. When asked if I wanted to do it, I initially said no because I have mixed feelings about fishing. It seems cruel to catch a fish on a hook and then let it flop around until it suffocates. Then again, I eat fish and seafood. Also, my son and I spent many hours fishing on the lake we vacationed near on Cape Cod when Mike was the age Mowgli is now, and I could tell that Mike wanted to re-live those experiences. So I agreed to go.
Hugo, Mike and I set out in the canoe and reached a small cove where the water was relatively still. Armed with crude fishing poles which were sticks with fishing line and a hook attached (no reel, flies or lures) we took our places in the canoe, baited our hooks with pieces of raw meat, and churned up the water with our poles as instructed by Hugo so that the fish would be fooled into thinking the bait was live prey. Well, piranhas are not easily fooled. They are brilliant at removing the bait from the hook, and no matter how many times I re-baited, they would always steal it.
Hugo caught one, but it was too small and he threw it back. Then Mike caught one. It was on the small side but large enough to cook and eat. I was glad that there were no large piranhas in this part of the river for obvious reasons. Fishing is a patient sport (if it can be called a sport when you don't need skill to land the fish, only to hook it.) I am not good at things that require me to sit and wait for long periods of time. And I was getting irritated at the fish for stealing the bait. Eventually we returned with only the one fish that Mike caught. The cook fried it for dinner. Mike ate it and I had only a bite. I have to admit that piranha is a good-tasting mild white fish similar to trout, flounder, or the dourade Curtiss and I used to eat at the Blue Ribbon bistro in Brooklyn.
The next installment will be a whiny piece about my Quito adventures. Stay tuned.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Rain Forest Part II: The trip to Cuyabeno, jungle life with monkeys, birds, and boa constrictors
We arrived at Cuyabeno at ten o’clock at night after a hair-raising day full of travel snafus: our flight to Lago Agria was cancelled because the plane needed maintenance,
so we had to take the only remaining flight to another town. From there, a cab took us to Coca, from which we were supposed to take the 6:30 bus (the last bus!) which turned out to have left at 6:00 (the tour agency told us it was leaving at 6:30) When we asked how much it would cost for the cab driver to take us to Cuyabeno, he wanted $60.
It was still a good 2.5 hour drive away, so the fee was not unreasonable, especially since he had to drive right back to Coca. Luckily, there was a cash machine in Coca, and Mike was able to withdraw the cash. The cab driver drove like a racing car driver in the dark taking hairpin turns at terrifying speeds, but somehow always knowing where the speed bumps were in the road and slowing down to accommodate them. (There are no speed limits or police, and we soon discovered that all cab drivers in Ecuador drive this way.) We went through several small towns, and by small I mean 3 or 4 blocks and then you’re on the main road again. The driver had never driven as far as Cuyabeno and was not sure of the route. The signage was unhelpful and infrequent, and when we finally came to a rotary I was convinced we were going the wrong way. But as fate would have it, we eventually ended up at a junction by the river where the guide and the cook were waiting to take us by motorized canoe to the lodge at Cuyabeno, a 10 minute canoe trip away.
We tried to convince the cab driver to leave his cab at the junction and stay at the lodge with us, but he refused, insisting he had to drive back to Coca that night. He had been driving us since that afternoon and not a drop of coffee had crossed his lips. He said he never drank it and didn’t get sleepy while driving, which is a good thing because the road between Coca and Cuyabeno does not have any 24 hour McDonald’s serving bad coffee.* So we gratefully said goodbye to him and started the next leg of our journey.
A canoe trip at night on a dark, slow-moving river—-you could barely see any current, and I was relieved at the absence of rapids—-is a mystical experience, and even more so if the river runs through an Amazon rain forest. Vines like small ropes hung from the trees and brushed the water. The sound of thousands of insects and frogs filled the air that would have otherwise been silent except for the quiet low-power motor. There was the thrilling, anxiety-inducing possibility of the appearance of an anaconda or an alligator. (None appeared.) Soon we were at the slimy wooden steps leading up to a wooden terrace which led to the main lodge dining room, which was a large hut with a palm-frond thatched roof and a kitchen in back. There were maybe ten tables. Our table was neatly set and our dinner was soon served. The food was very tasty. I think our first meal was composed of fried piranha (the dreaded flesh-eating fish of the Amazon), fried plantains, and rice, followed by a delicious tropical fruit compote. In Ecuador, you’ve got all your basic starch food groups covered, plus your basic fried food groups. Throw in a little meat, corn, and some fruit for dessert, and you’ve got a meal. Green vegetables, while not unknown, are not commonly served. I had asked for vegetarian food, and they complied nicely by sautéing some green beans and giving me beans and rice with the fish (I agreed to eat seafood). At each meal we were served a juice made from a different fruit. Many of these fruits are not exported to the U.S. and are delicious.
* You can get KFC in Quito, though. Mike says they use the locally raised chickens, which are much tastier than factory-farmed birds, and when combined with that secret mix of herbs and spices with some empanadas on the side, you've got yourself a treat!
We chatted with Hugo, our guide, about plans for our hike the next day, and then walked down a long elevated board “sidewalk” (every structure was on stilts, perhaps because of flooding) to our cabanas.
Mike and I each had our own hut. The huts are like hotel rooms—-some have twin beds, others have a double bed and two twins, more like a suite. There is a private bath with a toilet, sink, and shower, but no hot water. There are shelves and tables for clothes and other items. I was surprised to see that there were no screens or glass on the windows—they were just rectangular openings in the board walls. To protect the occupant from deadly mosquitoes, spiders, and vampire bats, a pink mosquito net was draped above each bed, to be pulled down around one’s body while sleeping. I liked the mosquito net—it felt like being in a little tent without the claustrophobia.
Everything reminded me of summer camp, except that it was a lot better because there were toilets instead of latrines, and we didn’t have to play tetherball or capture the flag. The dampness was amazing—nothing ever really dried out completely, and I kept my clothing in plastic bags to protect it from the damp. Amazingly, the bedclothes stayed dry. I soon found that the “quick-dry” hiking pants, jacket, and socks that I bought at REI were not quick to dry. In fact, they never got dry at all, so every day my clothes were a little damp. I had brought two swimsuits expecting to plunge gleefully into the river at the end of every day, but in fact I only went in the water twice. I don’t like swimming anywhere I can’t see the bottom, and the thought of electric eels and piranhas nibbling at my ankles was discouraging. Mike insisted that I jump in, so I did, and what I thought was a feeble current began to drag me downriver! It took all my strength to swim against it and return to the boat dock. I washed my hair with biodegradable soap and then got out.
I had to get over my city girl high-maintenance beauty regimen. To begin with, it was absurd that I was in the jungle with magenta nail polish on my nails, and it was even more absurd that I thought I might actually style my hair with a hairdryer since there was an outlet handy. No matter what I did, my hair returned to its natural state of wavy frizz within minutes because that’s what humidity does to hair like mine! So I took to wearing it in a long braid with my bangs slicked down to one side and fastened with bobby pins. With my blue glasses and my cloth sunhat, I looked like geek of the week, but it wasn’t a goddamn beauty pageant anyway!
The next day a bird with a foolish-sounding call awoke me at 6 a.m. (I had slept so soundly that I had not been awakened by the eerie distant roar of the howler monkeys which awakened Mike.) We were going on a hike after breakfast. In preparation, I slathered every inch of exposed skin with sunblock and mosquito repellent. Then I put on my long-sleeved jacket and my trail pants. Since the jungle was wet, the lodge provided us with knee-high rubber boots which proved useful for trekking through streams (although they leaked). I put my sun hat on, and we were off: Hugo leading, Mike next, and me usually at the rear. We stopped frequently to marvel at insects, birds, monkeys, armadillo holes, termite nests and tall anthills. Hugo also showed us rainforest trees which were used by indigenous people like drums—the sound produced by striking the buttresses of the trunk were said to be heard for long distances. We also saw a fallen tree which was the source of a psychedelic drug: the bark was boiled with various other ingredients until the resulting liquid was deemed potent enough. Then, after you drank it, you would vomit (there is nothing in the world that I would rather avoid than vomiting, except maybe a 25-foot boa constrictor) but after the vomiting, you would experience an excellent high. And this is no joke: the tour agency we used actually offered hallucinogenic tours during which this beverage would be consumed. If it hadn’t been for the vomiting, I would have been tempted. Just as well—-I have already destroyed a large number of badly needed brain cells from using drugs in the 70s and 80s.
We encountered a baby boa constrictor which was about 3 feet long when extended. I like snakes when the startle factor is removed, as it was in this case because Hugo was the first to encounter it. Snakes are always at their worst when you encounter one unexpectedly. But this one was well-behaved and regarded us calmly and motionlessly (it was probably terrified) because we were obviously too large to be its prey. Its markings were beautiful and we took pictures before we treaded delicately around it and continued on our way. (The next night, the cook appeared after dinner with another baby boa which he had found in one of the empty cabanas. It was even smaller than the one we saw, and not dangerous-looking at all. It coiled itself around Mike’s arm. The thought that immediately sprang to mind was, Two baby boas! The mother must not be too far away! One of them was found in a cabana! What if the mother is waiting to get me in my cabana?) However, I was assured by the guide that a) mother boas are not nurturing and abandon their spawn soon after birth to return to the deep jungle and b) full-grown boas generally live deep in the jungle. They can grow to be anywhere between 15-25 feet long, can climb trees and swim, so there is no escaping them. A well-aimed slash with the big mean-looking machete that Hugo carried might save us. Maybe. But you can’t have these fears if you expect to have exciting jungle adventures, most of which do not involve dangerous snakes.
That first day also provided my first glimpse of monkeys in their natural habitat.
A family of little squirrel monkeys is hard to see because they inhabit the tops of very tall, very leafy trees which are usually at some distance away. Moving branches are a clue that they are there. I was very glad to have binoculars because otherwise they would have been impossible to see. They really are cute—-unfortunately, no other word describes them accurately, unless that word is “mischievous.” My childhood friend Annie had a squirrel monkey as a pet (she also had a horse and I longed to switch parents with her.) It had very unsanitary habits—-refused to be toilet trained and would leap onto the kitchen table and make tracks through the butter. Mike told me that monkeys will drop poop on you, so I kept my distance. We could hear their high-pitched chatter punctuated by the patter of fruit peels dropping to the ground as they ate.
In the next chapter: Mowgli, cacao seeds, and fishing for piranhas
so we had to take the only remaining flight to another town. From there, a cab took us to Coca, from which we were supposed to take the 6:30 bus (the last bus!) which turned out to have left at 6:00 (the tour agency told us it was leaving at 6:30) When we asked how much it would cost for the cab driver to take us to Cuyabeno, he wanted $60.
It was still a good 2.5 hour drive away, so the fee was not unreasonable, especially since he had to drive right back to Coca. Luckily, there was a cash machine in Coca, and Mike was able to withdraw the cash. The cab driver drove like a racing car driver in the dark taking hairpin turns at terrifying speeds, but somehow always knowing where the speed bumps were in the road and slowing down to accommodate them. (There are no speed limits or police, and we soon discovered that all cab drivers in Ecuador drive this way.) We went through several small towns, and by small I mean 3 or 4 blocks and then you’re on the main road again. The driver had never driven as far as Cuyabeno and was not sure of the route. The signage was unhelpful and infrequent, and when we finally came to a rotary I was convinced we were going the wrong way. But as fate would have it, we eventually ended up at a junction by the river where the guide and the cook were waiting to take us by motorized canoe to the lodge at Cuyabeno, a 10 minute canoe trip away.
We tried to convince the cab driver to leave his cab at the junction and stay at the lodge with us, but he refused, insisting he had to drive back to Coca that night. He had been driving us since that afternoon and not a drop of coffee had crossed his lips. He said he never drank it and didn’t get sleepy while driving, which is a good thing because the road between Coca and Cuyabeno does not have any 24 hour McDonald’s serving bad coffee.* So we gratefully said goodbye to him and started the next leg of our journey.
A canoe trip at night on a dark, slow-moving river—-you could barely see any current, and I was relieved at the absence of rapids—-is a mystical experience, and even more so if the river runs through an Amazon rain forest. Vines like small ropes hung from the trees and brushed the water. The sound of thousands of insects and frogs filled the air that would have otherwise been silent except for the quiet low-power motor. There was the thrilling, anxiety-inducing possibility of the appearance of an anaconda or an alligator. (None appeared.) Soon we were at the slimy wooden steps leading up to a wooden terrace which led to the main lodge dining room, which was a large hut with a palm-frond thatched roof and a kitchen in back. There were maybe ten tables. Our table was neatly set and our dinner was soon served. The food was very tasty. I think our first meal was composed of fried piranha (the dreaded flesh-eating fish of the Amazon), fried plantains, and rice, followed by a delicious tropical fruit compote. In Ecuador, you’ve got all your basic starch food groups covered, plus your basic fried food groups. Throw in a little meat, corn, and some fruit for dessert, and you’ve got a meal. Green vegetables, while not unknown, are not commonly served. I had asked for vegetarian food, and they complied nicely by sautéing some green beans and giving me beans and rice with the fish (I agreed to eat seafood). At each meal we were served a juice made from a different fruit. Many of these fruits are not exported to the U.S. and are delicious.
* You can get KFC in Quito, though. Mike says they use the locally raised chickens, which are much tastier than factory-farmed birds, and when combined with that secret mix of herbs and spices with some empanadas on the side, you've got yourself a treat!
We chatted with Hugo, our guide, about plans for our hike the next day, and then walked down a long elevated board “sidewalk” (every structure was on stilts, perhaps because of flooding) to our cabanas.
Mike and I each had our own hut. The huts are like hotel rooms—-some have twin beds, others have a double bed and two twins, more like a suite. There is a private bath with a toilet, sink, and shower, but no hot water. There are shelves and tables for clothes and other items. I was surprised to see that there were no screens or glass on the windows—they were just rectangular openings in the board walls. To protect the occupant from deadly mosquitoes, spiders, and vampire bats, a pink mosquito net was draped above each bed, to be pulled down around one’s body while sleeping. I liked the mosquito net—it felt like being in a little tent without the claustrophobia.
Everything reminded me of summer camp, except that it was a lot better because there were toilets instead of latrines, and we didn’t have to play tetherball or capture the flag. The dampness was amazing—nothing ever really dried out completely, and I kept my clothing in plastic bags to protect it from the damp. Amazingly, the bedclothes stayed dry. I soon found that the “quick-dry” hiking pants, jacket, and socks that I bought at REI were not quick to dry. In fact, they never got dry at all, so every day my clothes were a little damp. I had brought two swimsuits expecting to plunge gleefully into the river at the end of every day, but in fact I only went in the water twice. I don’t like swimming anywhere I can’t see the bottom, and the thought of electric eels and piranhas nibbling at my ankles was discouraging. Mike insisted that I jump in, so I did, and what I thought was a feeble current began to drag me downriver! It took all my strength to swim against it and return to the boat dock. I washed my hair with biodegradable soap and then got out.
I had to get over my city girl high-maintenance beauty regimen. To begin with, it was absurd that I was in the jungle with magenta nail polish on my nails, and it was even more absurd that I thought I might actually style my hair with a hairdryer since there was an outlet handy. No matter what I did, my hair returned to its natural state of wavy frizz within minutes because that’s what humidity does to hair like mine! So I took to wearing it in a long braid with my bangs slicked down to one side and fastened with bobby pins. With my blue glasses and my cloth sunhat, I looked like geek of the week, but it wasn’t a goddamn beauty pageant anyway!
The next day a bird with a foolish-sounding call awoke me at 6 a.m. (I had slept so soundly that I had not been awakened by the eerie distant roar of the howler monkeys which awakened Mike.) We were going on a hike after breakfast. In preparation, I slathered every inch of exposed skin with sunblock and mosquito repellent. Then I put on my long-sleeved jacket and my trail pants. Since the jungle was wet, the lodge provided us with knee-high rubber boots which proved useful for trekking through streams (although they leaked). I put my sun hat on, and we were off: Hugo leading, Mike next, and me usually at the rear. We stopped frequently to marvel at insects, birds, monkeys, armadillo holes, termite nests and tall anthills. Hugo also showed us rainforest trees which were used by indigenous people like drums—the sound produced by striking the buttresses of the trunk were said to be heard for long distances. We also saw a fallen tree which was the source of a psychedelic drug: the bark was boiled with various other ingredients until the resulting liquid was deemed potent enough. Then, after you drank it, you would vomit (there is nothing in the world that I would rather avoid than vomiting, except maybe a 25-foot boa constrictor) but after the vomiting, you would experience an excellent high. And this is no joke: the tour agency we used actually offered hallucinogenic tours during which this beverage would be consumed. If it hadn’t been for the vomiting, I would have been tempted. Just as well—-I have already destroyed a large number of badly needed brain cells from using drugs in the 70s and 80s.
We encountered a baby boa constrictor which was about 3 feet long when extended. I like snakes when the startle factor is removed, as it was in this case because Hugo was the first to encounter it. Snakes are always at their worst when you encounter one unexpectedly. But this one was well-behaved and regarded us calmly and motionlessly (it was probably terrified) because we were obviously too large to be its prey. Its markings were beautiful and we took pictures before we treaded delicately around it and continued on our way. (The next night, the cook appeared after dinner with another baby boa which he had found in one of the empty cabanas. It was even smaller than the one we saw, and not dangerous-looking at all. It coiled itself around Mike’s arm. The thought that immediately sprang to mind was, Two baby boas! The mother must not be too far away! One of them was found in a cabana! What if the mother is waiting to get me in my cabana?) However, I was assured by the guide that a) mother boas are not nurturing and abandon their spawn soon after birth to return to the deep jungle and b) full-grown boas generally live deep in the jungle. They can grow to be anywhere between 15-25 feet long, can climb trees and swim, so there is no escaping them. A well-aimed slash with the big mean-looking machete that Hugo carried might save us. Maybe. But you can’t have these fears if you expect to have exciting jungle adventures, most of which do not involve dangerous snakes.
That first day also provided my first glimpse of monkeys in their natural habitat.
A family of little squirrel monkeys is hard to see because they inhabit the tops of very tall, very leafy trees which are usually at some distance away. Moving branches are a clue that they are there. I was very glad to have binoculars because otherwise they would have been impossible to see. They really are cute—-unfortunately, no other word describes them accurately, unless that word is “mischievous.” My childhood friend Annie had a squirrel monkey as a pet (she also had a horse and I longed to switch parents with her.) It had very unsanitary habits—-refused to be toilet trained and would leap onto the kitchen table and make tracks through the butter. Mike told me that monkeys will drop poop on you, so I kept my distance. We could hear their high-pitched chatter punctuated by the patter of fruit peels dropping to the ground as they ate.
In the next chapter: Mowgli, cacao seeds, and fishing for piranhas
Sunday, May 22, 2011
My adventures in Ecuador part I: The Rain Forest (Jungle)
The area of eastern Ecuador known as "the jungle" is tropical rainforest rich in plant and animal species. For its size, Ecuador hosts more plant and animal species than any other country. On May 17, my son Mike and I traveled to Cuyabeno, a protected wildlife reserve. If we had traveled one hour more to the north we would have been in Colombia.
We were also not far from the border of Ecuador and Peru.
Our guide's name was Hugo and he had been leading expeditions in the forest for about 25 years. I was struck and impressed by Hugo's knowledge of flora and fauna and his good eye for seeing things that were small and camoflauged or which required skill to see, such as animal trails (he showed us the trail of a wild pig and of an armadillo, which to me just looked like leaves on the forest floor.) Also impressive was Hugo's obvious love for nature and his enthusiasm for finding things to show us. One night after dinner, we took flashlights and searched for tarantulas in the empty cabanas (thatched huts which resembled tents but had board walls and no screens on the window. More on that later.) We didn't find any that night, but we eventually found one, and I was to see a few others in various places in Ecuador before I left the country! While I am on the subject of spiders: a large, scary-looking spider took up residence on the ceiling of my cabana (luckily not above my bed) and did not move once during my entire 4 day stay. I assumed it was alive but didn't want to find out, so I didn't attempt to disturb it.
Cuyabeno has been a protected area since the late 70s and since then has been a magnet for ecotourism, a thriving field in Ecuador. The mission of ecotourism is to educate tourists about the importance of protecting endangered species by providing hikes and trips in large canoes down the small river (a tributary of the Amazon) which runs alongside the main lodge and the guest cabanas. Among the endangered species are the red macaw and the jaguar. Sadly, animals are still being caught and sold for huge amounts of money on the black market--a macaw can bring as much as $10,000. Along the river are some remote communities of indigenous peoples who have been there since before the Spanish brutally conquered them in the 1500s. Some of these communities allow tourists to come and visit. We visited one which was a 4 hour canoe trip (by motorized canoe) away from the lodge. This community now has electricity, running water, plumbing, gas stoves, and a satellite dish, but for generations people lived very simply and self-sufficiently. Now they must grow crops to sell to survive. Hugo pointed out cacao and papaya trees, which were growing alongside the corn and yucca. Chickens (the real free-range kind) were ranging freely, as were some dogs and a pet woolly monkey named Nacho who insisted on wrapping his limbs and tail around whatever part of your body he could get to and nipping you like a puppy. He stopped nipping and settled down when I spoke to him gently, and he sat contentedly on my arm as we walked into the main hut. (Just call me the Monkey Whisperer.)
In the main hut we were introduced to an old woman and an old man--the relationship between them was not clear. The old woman was pounding yucca with a large pestle in a huge wooden trough. She was making a fermented beverage out of what looked like heaps of mashed potatoes--yucca is a starchy root and a staple of Ecuadoran cuisine. We were invited to taste some yucca bread, which was like a large, hard flour tortilla.
The old man was a shaman. Usually he would dress in his traditional clothing for visiting tourists, and perhaps perform some incantations--I never did find out what he did, unfortunately--he said he was feeling ill that day and he was probably tired of performing for gringo tourists. He said he was 100 years old. I doubt if birth certificates were prevalent when he was born, and if he really was 100 he looked damn good for his age. I would have guessed that he was about 75-85. He had all his teeth and hair and looked very fit. At first, he seemed somewhat distant but warmed up to us when he realized that we were in agreement with him about the importance of saving the rainforest from the depredations of oil companies which are plundering Ecuador for oil and destroying human and animal habitat in the process. He said he had lived on that particular reservation for 60 years and had seen many species of animals decline and disappear. My son translated his Spanish for me, and I tried to express my gratitude to him in the few phrases that I know. His children and grandchildren lived in the surrounding huts, and the ground was solid clay-based mud. It rains every day here and there were large barrels set out to collect the massive amounts of rain water. It rained for about 5 minutes while we were there and the barrels rose by about 3 inches. It also rained in the canoe during our journey. We wore large ponchos but got wet anyway and Mike had to bail out the canoe. On this same day trip we
saw a gray river dolphin sticking its nose out of the water, several birds including two beautiful large herons, a woolly monkey family high in the trees along the river, a family of squirrel monkeys, also in the trees, and a three toed sloth (these are very hard to see because they hang motionless from branches in very tall trees and without binoculars they are indistinguishable from the various large dark patches of leaves.) A canoe in front of us full of tourists had spotted the sloth and called out to us.
Also along the banks of the dark, slow-moving, muddy brown river we saw a white orchid in flower with large 5 petal star shaped blooms. In the Laguna (a large lake that the river fed in and out of) were many large trees growing out of the water. Each tree was the host of several hundred oncidium orchids (I know this because I am an orchid geek and recognized the leaves even though the flowers were not in bloom.) We saw large, bright azure-blue butterflies and a flock of bats that flew across the boat when we disturbed their tree branch.
I have compiled a list of all the plants and animals (including insects) that we saw in Cuyabeno. You'll find some great photos of them if you Google search; the photos Mike and I took were not that great because you really need a telephoto lens.
Here it is:
Squirrel monkeys
Woolly monkeys
Capuchin monkeys
Black tamarind monkey
Saki monkey
Howler monkey
Three toed sloth
Gray river dolphin
Toucan
Pappagallo (blue and yellow macaw)
Parrots
Blue anis
Aninga
Heron
Kingfisher
Swallows
Red tanager
Red-capped cardinal
Crested woodpecker
Trogan (a bird Mike really wanted to see)
Bats
Turtle
Tiger heron
Baby boa constrictor (we saw 2 of them)
Frogs
Grasshoppers (over an inch long with wings that looked exactly like brown leaves)
Leaf cutter ants
Conga ants (bite is poisonous and can cause temporary paralysis)
Lemon ants (tiny ants that tasted like lemon--yes, I bravely tasted them!)
Red ants (one bit me on the hand and it felt like a bee sting--not fun!)
Wasps (one stung Mike on the arm--again, not fun! luckily the whole swarm didn't come after us!)
Termites (in enormous nests)
Morfo butterfly (bright blue)
Swallowtail butterfly
Worker ants
Orapendalas (a bird with a funny cry which awakened me at 6 every morning)
Cacique (a bird that makes a nest like a bag hanging from a tree branch)
Hoatzin (a prehistoric bird, I was told)
Vultures
Piranhas (we went fishing for them and ate them--more on that later!)
Chachalaca (bird)
Some BIGASS spiders
Social spiders (a community of small spiders which spin a large tent-like web)
Tarantulas
Ghost orchid (I'm not sure--it really looked like pics I have seen of them--they are rare, though, so maybe not)
White orchid not sure what kind
Oncidium orchids
Pet wild parrot owned by lodge owners
I'm going to end this post but will write much, much more in days to come, so as Ira Glass says, "Stay with us!"
We were also not far from the border of Ecuador and Peru.
Our guide's name was Hugo and he had been leading expeditions in the forest for about 25 years. I was struck and impressed by Hugo's knowledge of flora and fauna and his good eye for seeing things that were small and camoflauged or which required skill to see, such as animal trails (he showed us the trail of a wild pig and of an armadillo, which to me just looked like leaves on the forest floor.) Also impressive was Hugo's obvious love for nature and his enthusiasm for finding things to show us. One night after dinner, we took flashlights and searched for tarantulas in the empty cabanas (thatched huts which resembled tents but had board walls and no screens on the window. More on that later.) We didn't find any that night, but we eventually found one, and I was to see a few others in various places in Ecuador before I left the country! While I am on the subject of spiders: a large, scary-looking spider took up residence on the ceiling of my cabana (luckily not above my bed) and did not move once during my entire 4 day stay. I assumed it was alive but didn't want to find out, so I didn't attempt to disturb it.
Cuyabeno has been a protected area since the late 70s and since then has been a magnet for ecotourism, a thriving field in Ecuador. The mission of ecotourism is to educate tourists about the importance of protecting endangered species by providing hikes and trips in large canoes down the small river (a tributary of the Amazon) which runs alongside the main lodge and the guest cabanas. Among the endangered species are the red macaw and the jaguar. Sadly, animals are still being caught and sold for huge amounts of money on the black market--a macaw can bring as much as $10,000. Along the river are some remote communities of indigenous peoples who have been there since before the Spanish brutally conquered them in the 1500s. Some of these communities allow tourists to come and visit. We visited one which was a 4 hour canoe trip (by motorized canoe) away from the lodge. This community now has electricity, running water, plumbing, gas stoves, and a satellite dish, but for generations people lived very simply and self-sufficiently. Now they must grow crops to sell to survive. Hugo pointed out cacao and papaya trees, which were growing alongside the corn and yucca. Chickens (the real free-range kind) were ranging freely, as were some dogs and a pet woolly monkey named Nacho who insisted on wrapping his limbs and tail around whatever part of your body he could get to and nipping you like a puppy. He stopped nipping and settled down when I spoke to him gently, and he sat contentedly on my arm as we walked into the main hut. (Just call me the Monkey Whisperer.)
In the main hut we were introduced to an old woman and an old man--the relationship between them was not clear. The old woman was pounding yucca with a large pestle in a huge wooden trough. She was making a fermented beverage out of what looked like heaps of mashed potatoes--yucca is a starchy root and a staple of Ecuadoran cuisine. We were invited to taste some yucca bread, which was like a large, hard flour tortilla.
The old man was a shaman. Usually he would dress in his traditional clothing for visiting tourists, and perhaps perform some incantations--I never did find out what he did, unfortunately--he said he was feeling ill that day and he was probably tired of performing for gringo tourists. He said he was 100 years old. I doubt if birth certificates were prevalent when he was born, and if he really was 100 he looked damn good for his age. I would have guessed that he was about 75-85. He had all his teeth and hair and looked very fit. At first, he seemed somewhat distant but warmed up to us when he realized that we were in agreement with him about the importance of saving the rainforest from the depredations of oil companies which are plundering Ecuador for oil and destroying human and animal habitat in the process. He said he had lived on that particular reservation for 60 years and had seen many species of animals decline and disappear. My son translated his Spanish for me, and I tried to express my gratitude to him in the few phrases that I know. His children and grandchildren lived in the surrounding huts, and the ground was solid clay-based mud. It rains every day here and there were large barrels set out to collect the massive amounts of rain water. It rained for about 5 minutes while we were there and the barrels rose by about 3 inches. It also rained in the canoe during our journey. We wore large ponchos but got wet anyway and Mike had to bail out the canoe. On this same day trip we
saw a gray river dolphin sticking its nose out of the water, several birds including two beautiful large herons, a woolly monkey family high in the trees along the river, a family of squirrel monkeys, also in the trees, and a three toed sloth (these are very hard to see because they hang motionless from branches in very tall trees and without binoculars they are indistinguishable from the various large dark patches of leaves.) A canoe in front of us full of tourists had spotted the sloth and called out to us.
Also along the banks of the dark, slow-moving, muddy brown river we saw a white orchid in flower with large 5 petal star shaped blooms. In the Laguna (a large lake that the river fed in and out of) were many large trees growing out of the water. Each tree was the host of several hundred oncidium orchids (I know this because I am an orchid geek and recognized the leaves even though the flowers were not in bloom.) We saw large, bright azure-blue butterflies and a flock of bats that flew across the boat when we disturbed their tree branch.
I have compiled a list of all the plants and animals (including insects) that we saw in Cuyabeno. You'll find some great photos of them if you Google search; the photos Mike and I took were not that great because you really need a telephoto lens.
Here it is:
Squirrel monkeys
Woolly monkeys
Capuchin monkeys
Black tamarind monkey
Saki monkey
Howler monkey
Three toed sloth
Gray river dolphin
Toucan
Pappagallo (blue and yellow macaw)
Parrots
Blue anis
Aninga
Heron
Kingfisher
Swallows
Red tanager
Red-capped cardinal
Crested woodpecker
Trogan (a bird Mike really wanted to see)
Bats
Turtle
Tiger heron
Baby boa constrictor (we saw 2 of them)
Frogs
Grasshoppers (over an inch long with wings that looked exactly like brown leaves)
Leaf cutter ants
Conga ants (bite is poisonous and can cause temporary paralysis)
Lemon ants (tiny ants that tasted like lemon--yes, I bravely tasted them!)
Red ants (one bit me on the hand and it felt like a bee sting--not fun!)
Wasps (one stung Mike on the arm--again, not fun! luckily the whole swarm didn't come after us!)
Termites (in enormous nests)
Morfo butterfly (bright blue)
Swallowtail butterfly
Worker ants
Orapendalas (a bird with a funny cry which awakened me at 6 every morning)
Cacique (a bird that makes a nest like a bag hanging from a tree branch)
Hoatzin (a prehistoric bird, I was told)
Vultures
Piranhas (we went fishing for them and ate them--more on that later!)
Chachalaca (bird)
Some BIGASS spiders
Social spiders (a community of small spiders which spin a large tent-like web)
Tarantulas
Ghost orchid (I'm not sure--it really looked like pics I have seen of them--they are rare, though, so maybe not)
White orchid not sure what kind
Oncidium orchids
Pet wild parrot owned by lodge owners
I'm going to end this post but will write much, much more in days to come, so as Ira Glass says, "Stay with us!"
Friday, May 6, 2011
Hey, I killed bin Laden! What more do you want?
I'm having trouble understanding how the President could have the stones to order a daring Special Ops search and destroy mission to take out Osama bin Laden--this after being the worst wimp imaginable during the health care debate and now showing signs of knuckling under to the Repigs when the budget bill is finally passed. After the constant threat of government shutdown for weeks, they apparently decided that shutting it down would not have the dramatic effect they wanted. Then, the news cycle having abandoned the fallout in Japan and the devastation of monster tornadoes in the U.S. South, it took up the increasingly annoying "why doesn't Obama produce his birth certificate" being trumpeted by Trump in his most boorish and self-aggrandizing manner.
Apparently even a President can't get hold of his "long form" birth certificate (who knew they even existed?) without a Papal dispensation. But it was finally obtained and displayed in all its glory, whereupon the Birthers all screamed that it was a fake. Everyone knows that the CIA can create any document you want! Then, a miracle occurred.
President Obama gave the order to have Osama bin Laden killed. The government knew where he was holed up and the Navy Seals were sent to do what they do best. They shot an unarmed bin Laden in the head, according to some reports in view of his wife and daughter. Four other men were killed in the raid, but not one American! This was Obama's moment of glory, and for once he milked it and took advantage of the spike in popularity that this event precipitated. 70% of the U.S. people now believe Obama walks on water. There was the solemn ceremony at Ground Zero with the 9/11 survivors at which the Master Speechmaker and Master of Gravitas did not make a speech because there are no words to describe the horror of what occurred that day almost 10 years ago. I have to admit that it was classy of him to pass up a golden opportunity to underline his recent achievement. Problem is, the wingnuts lost no time in giving the torture that occurred under GW Bush the credit for killing bin Laden, not Obama. And now we have "Deathers" (whom I suspect to be the same folks as the Birthers) who are saying that he's not really dead, and if he is, Obama can't take the credit because it was Bush's waterboarding that supplied the info. (Bush was invited to the Ground Zero ceremony but declined the invitation--the stinking little weasel knows very well that he would appear to be even more of a stinking little weasel alongside Obama.) The indisputable fact that Bush was the cause of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seems to have gotten lost in all the fanfare. In fact, Bush is an even bigger mass murderer than bin Laden if you count the thousands who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the course of Bush's wars which never would have been started if Bush were not in the White House. And unlike bin Laden, Bush will never be the recipient of the harsh justice he deserves because Obama lacks the political will to pursue him, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Crime Family, as Mike Malloy calls it.
The fake news media are still having a field day 5 days later. Should the grisly photo of bin Laden with his skull blown off be published for all to see? "No drama Obama" predictably decided against it, even though there are good arguments on both sides of this issue. Strangely enough, Americans don't trust their government enough to take their word for it that bin Laden is really dead. Hey, can we see those DNA test results? Supposedly certain members of Congress have been discreetly shown the photo. We are supposed to believe them, I guess. But when you realize that pics can be easily photoshopped, there would be no way of knowing if an "official" photo was really what it claimed to be.
I don't want to see it.
What gets me is that
a) the Pakistani government undoubtedly knew that bin Laden was holed up in this compound for years and never told us after receiving billions in aid from the U.S.
b) that same government is now chastising Obama for having bin Laden killed
c) al Qaeda and the Taliban have acknowledged the death of their leader and are calling him a martyr. (Isn't that as good as proof that he's dead?)
d) We are still dicking around in Afghanistan when we could be getting out of there NOW since there is no more mission there. (Actually, we have suspected for years that b.L. was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and thousands of lives have been sacrificed in the name of destroying the Taliban, which no military venture can do.)
e) And what exactly is our mission in Iraq?
I am relieved that b.L. is dead. Had he been captured, there would have been an endless circus surrounding his trial, and every crazy terrorist organization in the world would be rallying around him and grandstanding. Had he been buried on land, they would have erected a shrine at the gravesite where all the criminally insane acolytes could gather. I am against the death penalty for ordinary individuals and I do not exult in anyone's death, no matter how heinous their crimes. But I would not have hesitated to kill Hitler if I had the opportunity, and b.L. falls into the Hitler category of Individuals Extremely Dangerous to Humanity who must be put down like rabid dogs to prevent the death and suffering of thousands, even millions. A long prison sentence simply allows a worshipful cult to spring up around the monster, and there is always the possibility that the laws will change and he will be released at some time in the future. We can't take that chance.
My friend Peter Gluck saw the towers burst into flames and was physically ill and permanently traumatized by the spectacle. Others saw people jumping from the burning skyscrapers. It was bad enough to see the same shot repeated endlessly on TV for days and weeks until it burned itself into your brain. Curtiss and I went to Ground Zero in Oct. or Nov. of that year and you could still smell the mixture of plastic, chemicals, ashes, and burned flesh in the air. On the fences surrounding the footprint of the Towers were posters with names and photos of the missing loved ones who would never be found. To this day when I drive across the Manhattan Bridge and see the bare space where the Towers once stood, tears come to my eyes and a heartsick feeling overwhelms me. Yes, it was Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda's plot, but George Bush bears the responsibility for allowing it to happen. I cannot and will not forgive him.
Apparently even a President can't get hold of his "long form" birth certificate (who knew they even existed?) without a Papal dispensation. But it was finally obtained and displayed in all its glory, whereupon the Birthers all screamed that it was a fake. Everyone knows that the CIA can create any document you want! Then, a miracle occurred.
President Obama gave the order to have Osama bin Laden killed. The government knew where he was holed up and the Navy Seals were sent to do what they do best. They shot an unarmed bin Laden in the head, according to some reports in view of his wife and daughter. Four other men were killed in the raid, but not one American! This was Obama's moment of glory, and for once he milked it and took advantage of the spike in popularity that this event precipitated. 70% of the U.S. people now believe Obama walks on water. There was the solemn ceremony at Ground Zero with the 9/11 survivors at which the Master Speechmaker and Master of Gravitas did not make a speech because there are no words to describe the horror of what occurred that day almost 10 years ago. I have to admit that it was classy of him to pass up a golden opportunity to underline his recent achievement. Problem is, the wingnuts lost no time in giving the torture that occurred under GW Bush the credit for killing bin Laden, not Obama. And now we have "Deathers" (whom I suspect to be the same folks as the Birthers) who are saying that he's not really dead, and if he is, Obama can't take the credit because it was Bush's waterboarding that supplied the info. (Bush was invited to the Ground Zero ceremony but declined the invitation--the stinking little weasel knows very well that he would appear to be even more of a stinking little weasel alongside Obama.) The indisputable fact that Bush was the cause of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seems to have gotten lost in all the fanfare. In fact, Bush is an even bigger mass murderer than bin Laden if you count the thousands who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the course of Bush's wars which never would have been started if Bush were not in the White House. And unlike bin Laden, Bush will never be the recipient of the harsh justice he deserves because Obama lacks the political will to pursue him, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Crime Family, as Mike Malloy calls it.
The fake news media are still having a field day 5 days later. Should the grisly photo of bin Laden with his skull blown off be published for all to see? "No drama Obama" predictably decided against it, even though there are good arguments on both sides of this issue. Strangely enough, Americans don't trust their government enough to take their word for it that bin Laden is really dead. Hey, can we see those DNA test results? Supposedly certain members of Congress have been discreetly shown the photo. We are supposed to believe them, I guess. But when you realize that pics can be easily photoshopped, there would be no way of knowing if an "official" photo was really what it claimed to be.
I don't want to see it.
What gets me is that
a) the Pakistani government undoubtedly knew that bin Laden was holed up in this compound for years and never told us after receiving billions in aid from the U.S.
b) that same government is now chastising Obama for having bin Laden killed
c) al Qaeda and the Taliban have acknowledged the death of their leader and are calling him a martyr. (Isn't that as good as proof that he's dead?)
d) We are still dicking around in Afghanistan when we could be getting out of there NOW since there is no more mission there. (Actually, we have suspected for years that b.L. was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and thousands of lives have been sacrificed in the name of destroying the Taliban, which no military venture can do.)
e) And what exactly is our mission in Iraq?
I am relieved that b.L. is dead. Had he been captured, there would have been an endless circus surrounding his trial, and every crazy terrorist organization in the world would be rallying around him and grandstanding. Had he been buried on land, they would have erected a shrine at the gravesite where all the criminally insane acolytes could gather. I am against the death penalty for ordinary individuals and I do not exult in anyone's death, no matter how heinous their crimes. But I would not have hesitated to kill Hitler if I had the opportunity, and b.L. falls into the Hitler category of Individuals Extremely Dangerous to Humanity who must be put down like rabid dogs to prevent the death and suffering of thousands, even millions. A long prison sentence simply allows a worshipful cult to spring up around the monster, and there is always the possibility that the laws will change and he will be released at some time in the future. We can't take that chance.
My friend Peter Gluck saw the towers burst into flames and was physically ill and permanently traumatized by the spectacle. Others saw people jumping from the burning skyscrapers. It was bad enough to see the same shot repeated endlessly on TV for days and weeks until it burned itself into your brain. Curtiss and I went to Ground Zero in Oct. or Nov. of that year and you could still smell the mixture of plastic, chemicals, ashes, and burned flesh in the air. On the fences surrounding the footprint of the Towers were posters with names and photos of the missing loved ones who would never be found. To this day when I drive across the Manhattan Bridge and see the bare space where the Towers once stood, tears come to my eyes and a heartsick feeling overwhelms me. Yes, it was Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda's plot, but George Bush bears the responsibility for allowing it to happen. I cannot and will not forgive him.
Another post in 2011
I'm just not a blogger.
I try to be, but I can never think of anything to blog about.
Oh, I have something! I'll be going to Ecuador to visit my son on May 10.
I've never been South of the border and I only know a few words of Spanish! Eek.
It will be SuzCC's big adventure. If PeeWee can have one, I can.
It will take me 2 flights and 12 hours to get there. Longer than to Europe and you can't get a direct flight. I will be touring the jungle (is that different from the rain forest?) for several days and will have to take anti-malaria medicine before I leave. To get my money's worth, I am demanding to see at least one monkey, parrot, snake, tarantula, and wild orchid.
More later.
I try to be, but I can never think of anything to blog about.
Oh, I have something! I'll be going to Ecuador to visit my son on May 10.
I've never been South of the border and I only know a few words of Spanish! Eek.
It will be SuzCC's big adventure. If PeeWee can have one, I can.
It will take me 2 flights and 12 hours to get there. Longer than to Europe and you can't get a direct flight. I will be touring the jungle (is that different from the rain forest?) for several days and will have to take anti-malaria medicine before I leave. To get my money's worth, I am demanding to see at least one monkey, parrot, snake, tarantula, and wild orchid.
More later.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
I have not posted here in 2 years
No one ever reads this blog even though I have put a link on Facebook. Maybe it needs another link...
Update: Curtiss OK, no cancer return, but still residual pain.
I'm more or less not OK. Not to have a pity party, but I am stressed to the max. Between worry about Curtiss' physical and mental well-being, my finances (we are only just getting by thanks to my stringent efforts at economizing, which means that indulgences are rare and every purchase must be justified.) Also my own health--for once I am free of uveitis, no longer taking tamoxifen, but one thing about aging is that it always seems to cause little pieces of bricks and mortar to crumble so that eventually the entire edifice collapses. I suspect that I have nascent arthritis in my hands and my left hip. I have had various tooth mishaps lately (crown for back molar, chipped front tooth) probably hastened by the fact that I ground my teeth while sleeping since I was a tot, and have thereby weakened whatever enamel still remains. I get this picture of myself in a few years as a cartoon character whose teeth become covered with cracks and then fall apart like a windshield.
I am also stressed by the fact that my book on comping is nowhere near complete and I have allowed the editor to place me under the gun to finish by April 1, 2011. Even though i realize that it doesn't matter if the book is published in 2011 or 2012. It matters for Berklee press because I am costing them money until it is ready to be sold.
Wage slavery...
And, last but not least, there is the economy which continues to suck for all musicians. I had a meltdown the other night during which I chastised myself repeatedly for ever becoming a musician when I could have gone to grad school and had a real career of some kind. In what other field do you make less money than you did 30 years ago? Back then it was $50 plus a meal or a drink and it's still that today, which in 2010 dollars probably amounts to almost nothing. I don't need to elaborate on the obvious never-ending frustration and gnashing of teeth (teeth again) over the minimally talented musicians who have successfully stoked the star maker machine while I languish in oblivion because I wasted 19 years playing at the Four Seasons and not promoting myself. And now I'm too old to get another career, so I am stuck with a last-ditch attempt to launch myself on my own petard. Poor little me.
Update: Curtiss OK, no cancer return, but still residual pain.
I'm more or less not OK. Not to have a pity party, but I am stressed to the max. Between worry about Curtiss' physical and mental well-being, my finances (we are only just getting by thanks to my stringent efforts at economizing, which means that indulgences are rare and every purchase must be justified.) Also my own health--for once I am free of uveitis, no longer taking tamoxifen, but one thing about aging is that it always seems to cause little pieces of bricks and mortar to crumble so that eventually the entire edifice collapses. I suspect that I have nascent arthritis in my hands and my left hip. I have had various tooth mishaps lately (crown for back molar, chipped front tooth) probably hastened by the fact that I ground my teeth while sleeping since I was a tot, and have thereby weakened whatever enamel still remains. I get this picture of myself in a few years as a cartoon character whose teeth become covered with cracks and then fall apart like a windshield.
I am also stressed by the fact that my book on comping is nowhere near complete and I have allowed the editor to place me under the gun to finish by April 1, 2011. Even though i realize that it doesn't matter if the book is published in 2011 or 2012. It matters for Berklee press because I am costing them money until it is ready to be sold.
Wage slavery...
And, last but not least, there is the economy which continues to suck for all musicians. I had a meltdown the other night during which I chastised myself repeatedly for ever becoming a musician when I could have gone to grad school and had a real career of some kind. In what other field do you make less money than you did 30 years ago? Back then it was $50 plus a meal or a drink and it's still that today, which in 2010 dollars probably amounts to almost nothing. I don't need to elaborate on the obvious never-ending frustration and gnashing of teeth (teeth again) over the minimally talented musicians who have successfully stoked the star maker machine while I languish in oblivion because I wasted 19 years playing at the Four Seasons and not promoting myself. And now I'm too old to get another career, so I am stuck with a last-ditch attempt to launch myself on my own petard. Poor little me.
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