Advice

I am one of those people who gives advice. In part, because it is my job. Although, I will hand scissors and pens so that they can be immediately used, which confuses most folks, the job mostly bleeds off the excess tendency to meddle, to offer unwanted help. I have a weakness for advice columns. Not to follow their advice, but to be nosy. Which is much of why I watch COPS! I can, actually, defend it, as lessons in dealing with difficult people - and I have learned much from the show. But really, it's just prurient entertainment. I spend time talking to the perps, "No, no, just stay there and be calm. Now, see, that cop knows you're lying, just shut up. Don't make armed people nervous." And they never listen to me. As I would expect. Which is why I watch. With my friends, I try not to imply any imperative in my suggestions.

So, let me share with you some really good advice. Not the usual stuff like, Don't smoke, floss your teeth, wear seatbelts. All good, but everyone knows it already. No, I mean the stuff I didn't know when I heard it, and have not heard it very often.

Ibuprofin (Advil, Motrin) has a maximum effective dosage of 800 MG per 6 hours. Exceeding this will not help more with the pain, but will increase the risk of bad side effects. And taking the stuff daily over weeks could well give you a headache, and you will need to wean off of it. It is not a good drug to commit suicide with, you will wind up alive and looking very stupid. (As a strange girl I went most of the way through Basic with found out.)

Keep your bellybutton clean. If you are taken in for emergency surgery, much of it today is laparoscopic, and they use the navel as a reliable anatomical landmark. We will make fun of you if it has more than a day's worth of lint. And if it is very encrusted, it increases your risk of infection.

Smoking is highly associated with bladder cancers, which are often misdiagnosed for years as bladder infections, leaving them a lot of time to grow well.

A bit of cayenne in a hot drink, like tea or cocoa, does wonders for a sore throat. A paste of it will heal up cuts and scrapes. Just go easy, and don't leave it on for more than an hour, and be careful not to get it in eyes. Which means, don't use it for kids.

Vanilla, even the cheap artificial kind, will take the smell of fresh paint out of a room. Just a small dish, or saucer of it, will work very well. A boon to my childhood, when the house was painted all the time, and I was ill from the fumes often.

Wheat germ, eaten daily, works as well as the commercial bulk fibers, but tends to cause less gas. Good in muffins and with cream of wheat.

Try to be positive in speech, rather than not negative. Amazing what it does for the attitude.

If you get a tattoo, that gel ice is great for taking out the pain, as well as the subsequent itch. Those gel ices can be stored in the freezer, and I earnestly tell you, for muscle pain, Ice is your Friend.

Avoid contempt, it poisons any relationship it touches. Even if it is your idiot boss. Contempt never allows change, and only elicits disdain. Bemused frustration is sufficient, and leaves wiggle room for improvement. Don't feed anger, by the same token. It is insatiable and will devour lives. Let it pass through like air through a net.

Call your friends, keep contact with them, even if you are busy. Especially if you are busy.

Elope.

Buzz all your hair off at least once in your life.

Rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle works great for flying insects. Well, badly for them.

No, you don't have to.

Block

mud blooming pollen
no words articulate
congestion smothers

Three

Three books that have shaken my worldview.

Gone-away Lake. This was the first non-picture book I read. I had been afraid to read so much text, daunted by the lack of colorful illustrations. For my reading level, I resisted reading a long book for a long time. But I plunged in, randomly picking this one from the shelves, and loved it. I became a reader that week.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. Taking absurdity to an almost spiritual level, Douglas Adams broke open my over serious and rule ridden conscience. I finally got the Cosmic Joke.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I had tried to read it, on recommendation, but could not get through the many names and complexities. But there I was in Saudi Arabia, with little to do with my down time, and D coaxed me through his favorite book, and I kept at it. I can still read this one with great pleasure in the richness of the story and the wit of the dialogue and the depth of the insights.



Three movies that make me wish I'd written the script.

Murder My Sweet. Which is kind of cheating, being based on the incomparable smart-ass dialogue of Chandler from Farewell my Lovely. And Dick Powell delivers it so well.

The Big Labowski. The Dude never says anything he hasn't heard someone else say. I know these people. Every character has such a potent voice. Such amazingly particular humor that improves with every pass.

Young Frankenstein. I giggle just thinking about it. "He vasss...... my BVOYFRHIEND!"


Three things I like about myself.

I love my own sense of humor, and ability to come up with that most pointed comment that gets the best laugh occasionally. And making my friends laugh often.

I love my own ruthless nurse competence delivered with calm, kind reassurance.

I love that I can come up with the perfect metaphor so often, the one that elicits understanding, and if I am lucky, a laugh.


Three careers I could have been good at.

I could have been a Muppeteer.

I'd have made a good librarian. I spent so much time as the hands in libraries, I have an instinct for where stuff is. I like finding information for questers. I have never killed anyone for a stupid question. Yet.

I'd have been a good clinical massage therapist, as long as I didn't have to do the business and billing side of it.

Three things I say to myself.

Breathe.
Life is good.
It's quiet... . Too quiet.


Three things I know that I didn't three years ago.

Every stop on the Green Line.

How much the ADHD was effecting D.

How flexible I am, and how far I have come. Being a traveling RN for over a year was so difficult, but I am immensely reassured at my own ability to deal with so much change and challenge, with the Mighty Weapon of Cheerfulness.

Swear

I endured growing up under the authority of an angry man with a foul mouth. I was called all kinds of intentionally demeaning names. I heard the whole curse vocabulary of this father every time he got angry. There was the usual assortment, including racial slurs, and then there were the combinations that were conflated inventions. If I could hear it today, I might find it grimly amusing, in a mocking vein. Even then, as the target, after spending some time researching the meanings, I could appreciate and ridicule his stupidity and muddle. Small comfort. I took it all too seriously when he goddamned me to hell, and it cut deep when he called me a selfish brat. When he called me a son of a bitch, I hated it, but it rather rolled off the mark.

But my mother's reaction, to interrupt and correct him, excoriate his use of vulgarity, never worked. The violent opposite, as far as I could see. And by the time I was ten and checking the Scatological Dictionary at the library, she had been hearing him swear for well over twenty years without changing his habitual mouth.

Knowing my mother's extreme, and largely irrational, aversion, to any word impolite, made me hold my tongue very tightly indeed. She vocally and bitterly complained about any off color language in movies, and I could feel her cringe if a swear word came out in a social situation where she would never utter a reproach. She would not allow me so much as Crap, or even darn, if said with any real anger. My frustrations and any sign of it were not tolerated. I heard her say Hell once, and Damn once. I was shocked.

.

Mr. Novak talked about swearing, in ninth grade.

"These are powerful words, not bad ones. And as such, you have to treat them carefully. Obscenity is for obscene situations. Swearing is a reaction to powerful feelings. Control these words, it's not wrong to use them in the right conditions. It is wrong to use them all the time for everything, it takes the power out of them."

I'd begun to practice the words, swearing silently when alone and inside my head. This touched me, and relieved me of a great deal of guilt about learning the words. I vowed to know what they meant, and to use them consciously, and with intent.

By the time I was in college, I had gathered a reasonable vocabulary, though I still used cursing with some embarrassment. Nothing like a bunch of theater students to practice shouting out rude names. Except, of course, for Army folks. Obscene words for an obscene situation. I found myself, at 26, rather proudly in possession of quite the potty mouth. Partly because of the great flexibility of the f-word. (Fanfuckintastic, for instance.) My language became turbo charged and potent, surrounded by constant swearing. I think I needed it. I hated the choices I'd made, I hated what my life was becoming, I needed those toxic words to kill off the old assumptions, the old habits and fears.

And when I started toward nursing, working with elderly folks in a nursing home? That took some steely control to keep my language presentable, and not to shock nor dismay, nor get myself fired. After one of my Guard weekends, it was damn near impossible. I allowed myself "Shit," being knee deep in it. I know shit. I defend my right to say it. Being surrounded by very religious minded cow-orkers, I had to keep myself in clean words. I gained control over my own exclamations. I still do not swear at work, with one exception. (See above.) Well, and bugger, but that is because most Americans don't know what it means. I don't say it around our Brit surgeon.

My father, for all his years of practice, swore badly. I swear well. I acknowledge this inheritance, the anger, the hurt. But I grew my own cuss collection. I never use the term sonofabitch. I will never swear at anyone, nor damn anyone to anywhere. Color and culture are not fair targets.


The goddamnedpigshit fuckwits are.

Robot (Photo)

Blooming (Photo)

Art (Photo)

Found this in the Riverway. A Goldsworthyworthy attempt.

Abecedary

A is for Anonymous aching angel denouncing anger and anxiously awaiting answers.

B is for black brown hair, blues and bellydance, books and brooks.

C is for Catholic and catholic and cynic, clarity, clay and chocolate.

D is for dancing, dithering, doorknobs attacking.

E is for emotion and empathy and emptiness.

F is for fish flying and falling fortuitously, for friendships lost and found.

G is for grass stained and grateful and goofy and goobered.

H is for hopeful and happy and hiccups.

I is for instinct and itchy feet and ice.

J is for journeys and jobs, joints and joy.

K is for kisses, knees and knowledge.

L is for laughter and livers and love.

M is for muscles, music and mysteries.

N is for nuzzling and nothingness and North.

O is for opa! and orange peel flames, obligations and openings.

P is for purple and plainness and parades,

Q is for quizzical and quickness and queries.

R is for random ridiculous reasons.

S is for surgery, silly solutions and saving graces.

T is for theater, trains, tea and tabula rasa.

U is for uniform, and ugliness, unveiled and undercut.

V is for victory, voracious curiosity, variety varied.

W is for words wound wildly in wind.

X is for x-rays, and examination and exultation and extenuating circumstances.

Y is for yes, and yards of bright fabric.

Z is for sleeping.

Talk

When I got back from Gulf War I, I was having a hard time. Reality adjustment. It felt very amorphous at the time, and even more so now. I went to see a counselor at the VA. She was kind, but had not been in the military at all, and I found myself explaining all kinds of largely irrelevant details. Later, I found myself chatting with a counselor in a vet center where D was working as a work study. This went much better, felt more like swapping stories, fluid and easy. The language was there, so the distress I was having trouble defining, nonetheless communicating, hove into view. He talked with me for almost three hours, and at the end, I had the clarity to deal on my own. A tough old Vietnam Vet, with an understanding ear for a vaguely stressed National Guard weekender back from a footnote war. But he didn't see me that way, and I am deeply grateful.

Yesterday, I worked with a rep, and I assume he did some kind of military service. An offhand remark, a proper response. It's like I'm in some weird secret society, having done even my little bit of military service. Perhaps because I do not blow it up, never pretend more experience than I had, I am allowed in. I know how to talk to soldiers, even reluctant part time ones.

That kind of shorthand learned in similar circumstances gives a background of ease. I knew I would never marry anyone who had not done some kind of military service, needing to explain so many little reactions and in jokes would have been exhausting every moment of every day. Less so 15 years on, as other life changes have overlaid them. But I know why D removes his hat at the same moment I do when we go into a building. When a dish is heard to drop, we say Airborn. I straighten his collars, he adjusts my hat. The shirts in the closet face right. We see an actor in a movie and I say,

"Remember that guy?" Meaning Sgt. Hull, and D says,

"Yeah."

And we do. And probably a hundred other small actions germinated there, that we are no longer conscious of.


It came to me then, that the pervasive subtle racism, as opposed to the self conscious and overt bigotry, is in part, the same mechanism. It's just hard, all the time, to have to translate, never assume, never flow, in daily conversation. So much less work to interact with those for whom a look transmits a completely understood message- with all implications a thousand words would require to get the gist across for an outsider. I'm still dealing with Boston speech, where door and drawer are pronounced identically. I feel this overwhelming ache to be around others like myself, even though I have no idea who they would be. It's important, it's enriching, but tiring, and we are a lazy species.

And putting everyone through the Army is not the answer. To quote D,
"The Army is an Idiot."

I know what he means.

Undercurrent (Photo)

This is one of those photos that says a lot more than it seems to.

Sister-in-law, myself (birthday), Uncle M (father's brother) and his (second wife) Aunt A, Aunt E (mother's sister, standing) and her husband Uncle E(standing). My mom standing, hands on shoulders of her mum. Picture taken by (?) ( I may have cropped out my father and my brother (not the one married to SIL) took the picture. Picture of Last Supper and ubiquitous '70's sunburst clock on wall. White bread stack, potatoes, baked chicken, mayonaise, and ballerina cake on table.

I once made fun of my D's new very suburban and mormon in-laws for serving an entire meal that was orange. I think this kind of meal is why I noticed.

If you just love the kitsch of it all, try the Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Frame (Photo)

Jacket (Photo)

This is what happens when we don't hang up fleece jackets. Not being tidy people, this is inevitable.

Here

I do not exactly know where my genetic material comes from. Oh, I know who my biological parents are, no doubt in my mind on that. I know the previous generation of my family, no big mystery there. Beyond them lie long and tangled lines of subsistence farmers and immigrants, unknown, and I suspect, unknowable. I never asked much when I was younger, and they were still alive. It was, and is, a family of 'not talking about it.' "It" being anything at all really. I do not even know the names to start to look, even if I were willing to look.

Which I am not. I worked at a local history/genealogical library, shelving material, for several years in college. Dusty old stuff, microfilm, maps, daguerreotypes and other early photographs, newspapers from the previous century, a whole wall of books about Lincoln. So many books on one (geographical) subject that the first two Dewey numbers were omitted, being redundant. All of which, honestly, I do find interesting. The majority of genealogists I wanted to hit with a large atlas. The handful of historians and a few amusing and pleasant genealogists could not defray the cost of the nasty ones. When the requests came down for more rolls of microfilm than could be looked at in a week, all urgently needed immediately, I yelled at them - from the safety of the sub-basement, "Who cares! They are all DEAD! And they were probably idiots just like you!"

I often wondered at the familiar names of strips of farms on a framed map near the always-breaking microfilm machines. But that was the side of the family I didn't much like anyway. It felt too hypocritical to look for family I would not have wanted to know. I don't care what their names are, what kinds of work they did. They were all poor, they are all dead. This is my inheritance. I take no blame, no credit, I have only my own life and I am satisfied.

On the local news last night was information on getting genetic testing, to map the path of my ancestors. I wanted it. Then felt guilty. I am not on speaking terms with my immediate family, but I want to know my ancestors? Yes, I do. I want to know if my meager evidence suggesting I have native genes as well as Old World ones is accurate. (The impressive family noses, the straight black-brown hair, the inability to handle alcohol, despite being Irish and French.) I have seen girls in French Impressionist paintings that are clearly cousins, Bouguereau painted my genes. I want to know the path taken, the streams flowing through, the obscure story. We all come from a handful of mothers many thousands of generations ago. The record of love and rape is mapped in our DNA, our mitochondria, expressed in our noses and appendices.

I have always liked maps. I want one that accurately says "You are here."

Shadow (Photo)

Moss (Photo)

But ignore my scruffy photos, go to
Paula's House of Toast, and be transformed.

Beer (Photo)

Sleep and muscle relaxant. Much better now, thanks for all the sympathy.

Slept through the night from infancy. Without sleep, I'm a flaming wreck.

Stroh's

Once, long ago, in fictional dystopia called The Narrows, I struggled up out of the mud of dark and dull urbanity. Neither Princess nor street Urchin, neither destitute nor middle class, I had neither the advantage of money, nor the charity of poverty. I ate sufficient, mediocre, malnourishing food, and had a creaking but not leaking roof over my head, and wore cheaply unfashionable clothing. I had a solid education, without sports or music, save for a nun playing a record of meaningful pop music, and expecting us to write profound responses to it. I drank the milk my mother wanted to have had in her childhood. And the City rumbled and belched around me.

But this sovereignty held a secret, since debased, long gone now. There were men toiling to create a beverage of such flavor, such subtle bitter undertow, and gentle magical properties, as to bring penitent tears to the unholy. I had come of age, and was found by an apprentice-master, She Who Taught Me About Stroh's. She thought she was teaching me about Tea, and I certainly love and know much of the properties of Tea. But the secret teaching, the real message inadvertently disclosed was that of the golden liquid, Beer. And not the tawdry, street corner whores of that juice of joy. No, this was meant not for shameful drunkenness and debauchery. This was ambrosia, food for gods. Gods not for the wretched poor, nor for the pretentious nobility - who needed the sweetness of wine, or the potent numbing of usquebaugh. No, for gods who knew neither luxury nor squalor. For the godless in between.

As I sadly foreshadowed, Stroh's is gone now, although the name lives on, a grotesque zombie, a degenerate bastard heir. But its spirit soared, escaped and scattered a thousand seeds to the winds of the universe, to grow in the bramble of arcane laws and unlikely cracks in the sidewalks. And heavenly brew flowed forth, foaming onto the happy and discerning tongues of acolytes of the Brewers Who Really Care.

Amen.