When last I posted, it was Wednesday night/Thursday morning and there was much whinging.

( Then it got better... )

Upshot: things are better. I still can't quite predict WHEN SLEEP ATTACKS and I miss all my appointments or fuck up my plans for the day. Those days are not good days. But setting up a to-do list the night before, splitting that to-do list into tasks FOR THAT DAY and a separate list for more general tasks that need to get done and that I don't want to forget is incredibly helpful. Writing in a journal IN ADDITION to that is also helpful. This MUST be three separate tasks. I've tried them in various combination before and they've never helped this much (or maybe my brain wasn't ready, I dunno, but I'm more inclined to believe that I need them as three separate things because they are addressing three separate categories of stuff that buzzes through my brain).

During my 57 hour trip home from Jacmel, via U.N. transport, moto-taxis, three planes, BART, and my own two feet, with an overnight in Port-au-Prince and Los Angeles, my thoughts raced, processing the last two weeks.

Especially today, after two nights sleep in real beds, truly alone for the first time in two weeks, I found that I have come away with more questions than answers. Listening to “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley in the hostel near LAX, I wondered what will become of Haiti. There is still so much work to be done, and yet, there is also a sense that the emergency is over, and relief organizations will focus their time and money on the next disaster, leaving the country to fend for itself without the infrastructure to support it.

Already, Haiti seems far away and long ago. Two weeks is not enough time to become so accustomed to a place that home doesn’t feel like home. I flip through the photos on my camera, and they are at once familiar and strange. While stopped at the Daly City BART station, I looked out the window and saw houses in one piece, wondering where the rubble was. I thought about “the Big One” that will happen sometime, maybe even sooner than later what with all of the earthquakes in the first three months of the year – Haiti, Chile, Taiwan, and Cuba just today. Mother Earth is restless. When it’s our turn, will our buildings fare better? One hopes.

At West Oakland, I looked out to the port, the container loaders lined up, ready to transfer cargo to and from ships, a pit-stop on the road of commerce. There were thousands of containers, probably empty, stacked high and wide, and I wished that some of the wasted relief money could go towards sending them to Haiti, and converting them into housing that would survive the coming rainy and hurricane seasons. How much would it cost to buy, ship, distribute, and convert these useful castoffs of consumerism?

Before Fruitvale I looked at the passengers on the train as we passed the local Goodwill distribution center, wondering how long it would be until their tshirts, emblazoned with American pop culture, would end up discarded, donated, and shipped off to third world countries like Haiti, only to end up in the markets for meager profit.

As I walked home, I felt uneasy, noting that the streets were too clean, without moto-taxis and colorful tap-taps communicating with each other through their horns. Buildings were standing and there were no tents or rubble to navigate past. Now in the comfort of home, a weariness sets in as I wait for my love to come home, looking forward to being quiet, and holding each other, thankful for our privileged lives.

Originally published at The Pocket Explorer. You can comment here or there.

Had PHG Study Group last night. Enjoyed that very much. Had a lovely day of Freeforming today, though also a 4 am start to get to London for that.

Unfortunately there were rowdy, drunk football fans on the train home. ( Read more... )

I'm glad I had Freeforming anyway. I enjoyed the day, and feel very good about that. The group was lovely, and we did all kinds of interesting things. I was pretty tired towards the end. We finished the day with some Freeforming as a group. A couple of people were lying down on cushions in the middle of the floor. I did that too, lying on my tummy. Reached out above my head with my hands, and some of us held hands. Felt like the closest thing to a cuddle party I've had in years. :^) Really lovely, warm, quiet way to end a very full day.

Oh, and you know it's going to be a good day when the first exercise we did in pairs was to smell each other! :^D Everyone smelled really nice. :^) And also, I discovered the difference between sniffing the other person, and breathing them in. It's really amazing. Oh man, I love this stuff so much! I was thinking: how would I describe the day? Well, we smell each other. (Oh LOL! :^D) We touch each other. Sometimes we work with eyes closed. Sometimes with vision. We're wanting to self-support to be fully receptive. We do all this really intimate stuff, mostly non-verbally. It feels like play; I end up giggling quite often. It's intense, and has a meditative quality. It's like eating fruit cake - very rich. I end up tired, satisfied and full of oxytocin. I want MORE. :^D

Come to think of it, something we did in the day might have helped with my train trip home. ( Read more... )

Had a hot bath when I got home, because London always leaves me feeling covered with a fine layer of grime (it's the high level of particulates in the air), and it's nice to relax. So now I am waiting for my hair to dry before I go to sleep. Tomorrow morning I'm up and off to Manchester to meet the new lot of trainees, with my Trainee Rep hat on. Monday I have line management and supervision in Leeds, so another Weds, Leeds, therapy and work - again with the early start. I have Thursday off, and then I'm in Manchester for training from Fri-Sun. More early starts. I have intense travelling all this week, and not a lot of time to sleep or rest.

Today feels like a really good start to all of that.

Old post, but I just stumbled across it and enjoyed it enough to signal-boost: How Boys Learn Which Questions Not to Ask

I was involved in a conversation recently about sin, and the ways in which my interlocutor's feelings of obligation to do various things were shaped by early religious indoctrination about sin.

And it got me thinking, somewhat tangentially (which is why I'm doing it here instead of there), about sin.

It seemed to me that there were two different threads running through my friend's head that were deeply intertwined but important to separate. The first was the acknowledgment that X is not, generally speaking, a good thing. The second was a vast negative emotional storm of fear, guilt, and shame tied to the doing of X.

And this is by no means unique to my friend. Quite the contrary; large swaths of my culture partake of it in a big way. In fact, large swaths of my culture don't seem to understand even abstractly that they are in fact different things... they equate the rejection of fear, guilt, and shame with the rejection of the very notion of good and bad (or, if you prefer, Good and Evil) acts.

I tend to associate the emphasis on fear, guilt, and shame most firmly with Catholic religious teachings, but that is likely more a sampling error than anything fundamental. It's pretty pervasive. And the eliding of this distinction between the knowledge of good and evil on the one hand and the fear/shame/guilt/hatred of evil on the other is a source of enormous confusion and heartbreak in my culture.

As I so often do these days, I see a lot of this through the lens of animal behavior training. Because really, this is the classic model of behavior training through negative conditioning. "It is not enough that they love and choose to serve God," say its apologists, "it is also necessary that they hate and fear Hell." And it has exactly the failure mode that negative conditioning always has: too many other things get poisoned in the process. Fear and hate and shame have a way of infecting everything they touch.

And they work. Say what I will about negative conditioning (and I say a lot, at sometimes tedious length), the fact remains that it is a powerful way to control and constrain behavior. There are things you can't do with it -- it sucks as a way to inspire creativity or love, for example -- but if you're willing to set those things aside in favor of obedience and you're willing to live with the toxic side-effects in the affected population, you get way more behavior-control bang for your buck with fear and hate and shame than with pretty much anything else available to you.

So this emphasis on fear, hate, and shame is no accident, no incidental side-effect of clumsy handling. This is, at the very least historically, an deliberately selected mechanism for crowd control.

Of course, I say all this as a Jew, albeit a lapsed one, and my own feelings about sin are steeped in the Jewish tradition. "These are God's commandments," say the rabbis of my youth, "and we follow them because that's what He has asked of us, and we are His people."

Here, the implicit threat is not of punishment, but of isolation. "Reject these commandments," the sentence continues silently, "and you therefore set yourself apart from your people and from the very living spirit of the Universe, and you condemn yourself to isolation."

And here I am, of course, struggling with the pervasive and irrational fear of rejection and social isolation. I've never made that connection before, and I don't know how significant it really is, but it's certainly neat.

Many years ago I worked out my own formulation of sin, in part as a way of addressing that confusion, and it draws heavily from that isolation model. Sin, to my mind, is the property of separating people from one another and from the universe. Acts are sinful insofar as they have that property. So are thoughts and attitudes. And sin is only punished in the sense that beating yourself over the head with a stick is punished... that is, it is an intrinsically damaging thing, but there is no external agency that imposes further damages because of it.

Sartre famously wrote that "Hell is other people" (L'enfer, c'est les autres), and I don't disagree with the point he was making. But the way out isn't more isolation, it's less.

And I have completely lost sight of what point I was setting out to make, if indeed I had one at all... so, I'll sign off here.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

mood: amused

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mood: busy

This also deserves signal-boosting. H/T to desert_born.



(a sandwich whose filling is a 3x3 block of cubes of cheeses and cold-cuts)

This deserves signal-boosting.



(A black T-shirt displaying, in white, the slogan "White text on a black shirt")

The last two days have been about saying goodbye – to Jacmel, to SIDR, to Haiti.

Instead of working onsite yesterday, I walked around Jacmel. I went to the market with Bill, bustling with activity which had been utterly quiet on Sunday. The cobbled streets were lined with vendors, and between them people, moto-taxis, and trucks jostled for position. Then I set off on my own, catching a ride with ‘Black’, a gentleman who I kept running into for a week, who took me to an artist gallery that he represents. I saw a painting I liked, but not for $80. I then walked through Zone 2, the hardest hit of the city. I saw more destruction than I’d seen anywhere else, but was heartened by the number of crews I saw who were working to clear rubble. I met an artist named Isidor whose workshop collapsed, his art still under the collapsed roof. I met four sisters who are living in tents in the street, looking for work. I took their names and numbers to give to SIDR. I ended up at the river, and walked along it to the bay. Along the way I passed a bulldozer ambling along like some big yellow giraffe, both out of place and yet joining the dogs, goats, and cattle also roaming the shoreline. I took my sandals off when I got to the beach and walked through the surf. Turning inland again, I passed the grade school that we’d worked on when I first arrived. Feeling I had said goodbye to Jacmel, I hopped on a moto-taxi back to camp.

A few of the guys decided that a trip to the beach would be a proper send-off, so we took a tap-tap up to the party beach. It was much less crowded than Sunday which was kind of nice. I frolicked in the waves and then watched the guys play in a soccer match. An orange sun set behind palm trees, and then I joined the guys in the water again before we left the beach in darkness, a crescent moon replacing the sun.

This morning started earlier than usual so that I could pack up. For the first time ever, I leave with less than I arrived with – my tent, sleeping pad, and sandals being further donations to SIDR. As it rains tonight, I am comforted to know that Cherilus, my friend and camp cook, now has his own home away from home. Both items cost about $100, and would have gone right into storage when I got home. Now I now that they will be used every night, providing a home to someone who busts his ass cooking in the morning, and shoveling rubble in the afternoon.

Then my ride arrived – a white SUV, marked U.N. Police. I caught a lift with Laura who was heading back to Canada to see a friend who had a stroke and is in a coma. Our driver was a Columbian officer, and we listened to Tito Puente as we twisted thru the lush hills between Jacmel and Leogane. When we finally arrived at the Minustah base in P-au-P, I felt like an interloper, surrounded by military personnel from Chile, Uruguay, Japan, Yemen, and India. I finally took my leave of Laura and the U.N., and hopped on a moto-taxi to my hotel, Auberge du Quebec in Carrefour, a district farther away from the airport than I’d like. The trip was interesting tho, as we wound through traffic for half an hour, a motorcycle being the perfect vehicle for negotiating past trucks and over rough roads.

Finally at the hotel, my culture shock continued as I was surrounded by more blancas than I’d seen in two weeks. Suddenly I felt very removed from the Haiti that I’d come to know. It was too clean, the bar has color-cycling LED lights, and the security guards have shotguns. I took a shower, a dip in the pool, and enjoyed the quiet luxury of reading a book while sipping Barbancourt and Coke. I had an early dinner of tender Lamby, and then decided to leave my comfortable hotel and walk the streets. Ostensibly I was scoping out where to try to catch my morning transport, but really it was to get back to something more familiar. I didn’t have far to walk until I was once again among street vendors, colorful tap-taps, and streets overrun with trash and overflowing water.

An old grey-haired man approached me who spoke very good English and asked me where I was from. We struck up a conversation, and Mathieu told me he was an artist who also used to be a boxer and a timeshare salesman. His sister died in the earthquake. He took me to see some of his family, and I got to meet his albino neice, as well as a cousin living next door, living under a tarp anchored to a wall. We walked back down the street towards my hotel, and when he asked for money, I gave him a couple of American dollars. Whether it had all been a beggars ploy I don’t know, but it was a small sum in life’s grand scheme, and worth the experience.

Now back at the poolside cabana bar, I listen to a pouring rain. Soon I will go to bed on a real mattress, underneath a celing fan, and I won’t need earplugs to block the sound of dogs, goats, and roosters. I look forward to continuing my long trip home tomorrow, ever closer to the waiting arms of my one true love.

Originally published at The Pocket Explorer. You can comment here or there.

(Wrote this as a comment and decided to own it here)

When I'm in that place where there seems no way of getting from where I am, not just to where I want to be, but to anywhere further up any slope whatsoever, I usually need to recalibrate the size of my steps.

This was a hard-learned lesson of rehab, and I have to keep reminding myself of it now that it's less obviously true.

It wasn't actually impossible for me to climb a flight of stairs, for example, once I started walking again... it was bloody hard, but not impossible. But I needed to reconceptualize the task... getting my foot to the top of a step was an involved, somewhat tiring process; a "single step" was actually a multi-step operation.

Once I got that in my head, climbing a flight of stairs was not impossible, just long and exhausting and complicated. But until I got that in my head, it felt impossible... I kept trying to just step up onto the first step, and it just didn't work.

And it was humiliating, either way. It seemed like it ought to be a single step. It was for everyone else, after all. Heck, even the language made it seem that way... how could a single step not be a single step?

I try to remember that about other stuff. If I conceptualize my quantum as too large, then I can't make any progress, because what I think of as the smallest possible step is more than what I can manage. In effect I round what I'm actually capable of down to zero.

And in those cases I need to work with smaller steps, humiliating as that sometimes is. I need to work in a unit small enough that the step I can make, however small, rounds up to 1. Because given enough patience, ones add up, but zeroes never do.

This seems worth signal-boosting. (H/T to beah

The FDA announced that HVP manufactured by Basic Food Flavors has been recalled, and an estimated 10,000 products are affected by this recall. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) is a flavor enhancer commonly used in processed foods. HVP is found in snack foods such as potato chips and pretzels. It's also used in dry mixes for chip dips, gravy, au jus and marinades. HVP is also used in frozen foods (such as taquitos and quesadillas) and in fresh foods such as potato salad and fresh dips. In addition to these items, it is also used in many other grocery products. The recall was issued due to possible salmonella contamination. Salmonella is one of the most common causes of bacterial food-borne illness in the United States. It can cause fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain.

The following soup and dip mix products are included in the HVP recall...

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mood: excited

Today is not yet fired, but it is on notice.
So I turn to my f'list for its usual combination of inspiration and distraction.
Tell me about something you did successfully!

Ok, so, lists and journaling are helping quiet my mind.

Last night, I finished with everything by ~1:45am. My thoughts were pretty quiet and I easily slipped into a doze (well, easily for me, which meant less than an hour, I think), but I stayed in that uneasy place where I felt really tired and was almost sleeping, but not really sleeping; I was in a sort of light doze that's just frustrating.

Finally fell asleep and couldn't wake up today at all. I had an appointment at 3pm that I failed to make; couldn't fight thru it to get the phone for any of the 4 phone calls that came in; couldn't even really respond to the BF (who was working from home today) during any of his multiple visits on any topic, whether it was the lovely day that should be enjoyed and how I should get up and didn't I have an appointment? Nada. Hate that.

So while I have more energy and motivation, my sleep is still broken. I don't know how long I should give the Adderall to affect my sleep before shifting gears. It's been four weeks since I started on a half-pill; two weeks since I went to a full pill (I forget the dosage).

And I'm starting to feel sorta emotionally jittery & brittle. It doesn't feel intrinsic... I mean, I don't have any particularly bad feelings that are engendering the urge to cry or freak out. It feels external. I wonder if it's my thyroid. Or too much Adderall. Or both. Fuck.

Despite only waking up around 7pm, I feel like crap & exhausted.

( Continuing my wanderings through the space of power, authority, responsibility, decision-making, accountability, people being upset with me, and related topics... )

After the first day of a world brewing convention in the states, the CEO's of various brewing organisations retire to the bar.

Bruce, the CEO of Fosters, shouts to the barman: "In 'Straiyla, we make the best beer in the world, so pour me a Fosters mate.

Bob, CEO of Budweiser calls out next: "In the States we brew the finest beer known to mankind and I make the king of them all. Gimme a Bud".

Hans steps up next: "In Germany we invented das beer. Give me ein Becks, der real King of beers."

Paddy, CEO of Guinness steps forward: "Barman give me a diet coke with ice and lemon please."

The others stare at him in stunned silence, amazement written over their faces. Eventually Bruce asks: "Are you not going to have a Guinness Pat?"

To which Paddy replies "Well, if you pussies aren't drinking, then neither am I".

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mood: aggravated

Many years ago, when I was a technical writer, my team explored the option of moving away from writing the source files for documentation as actual document files (FrameMaker, Word, etc.) and towards writing them as heavily-indexed articles in a database out of which we could assemble documents as needed.

The idea being that if you wanted a manual that documented everything about process X, we could produce that; if you wanted a manual that documented operational instructions for all our processes, we could produce that; if you wanted a manual that documented operational instructions and technical reference data for all processes in a particular group, we could produce that. The three manuals would overlap significantly, but be distinct manuals written for distinct audiences.

We dropped the idea after a while, but I often think about it when contemplating the ways that the web behaves differently from published books. In some ways, it's precisely that model -- especially what the "semantic web" folks are trying to move towards -- although people are still mostly talking in terms of search operations rather than filter/sort/assemble operations.

All of which has gotten me wondering whether there's anyone out there marketing into the "assemble-your-own-book" market for reference materials.

For example, I can totally imagine a company that publishes travel books exposing a web service whereby you can identify where you want to travel, what price range you are operating in, and what sorts of things you are interested in, and they print up a nicely bound volume of "Exploring Nature Trails, Snail Farms, and Art Museums in France, West Germany, and Denmark on $50-$100 a Day" that you can take with you.

I wonder whether there's actually a market for that sort of service.