Daily Observation 8/5

Just got done listening to the local noon news. There were two stories that caught my interest today, and one I recall from yesterday.

The first one was a story having to do with how a community reached out and donated enough money and supplies so that school children, in a less affluent county than Fayette, had school supplies to work with this year. 

The second story was about one of UK's football players who has broken rules and gotten in trouble, and is now being kicked off the team.

The third story, that was aired yesterday, was about how one particular school district is thinking about going to a 4 day school week because apparently it costs them almost $1500 per school bus per day to get their kids to school.

First let me say I'm all in favor of 4 day work weeks. The energy savings would be astronomical.

But, in another vein, I have to wonder how much money was spent recruiting this particular football player, and also how many times this happens. It seems like at least every year there is a particular UK basketball or football "bad boy," who just can't seem to realize the blessing they've been given and get their shit together to do a job they've signed on to do. And I also have to wonder how many school supplies, food, diesel and other supplies the money spent on these idiots would buy. 

Perhaps the UK coaches ought to add this to the player's contracts: If you get here and screw up, you have to repay all the recruiting money we spent on you. And then donate that money to the schools.

Mitake Oyasin

Being an animal lover, I have often speculated on exactly what the defining difference between animals and humans is. What is it that makes what one being does "animalistic," and what the other being does "humanistic?"

Throughout my life, I've met and been involved with a lot of animals. Whether they were technically human or not is another question. I've met humans with every advantage in the world, intelligent beyond the norm, who were the crassest, basest beings I've ever met. And I've been involved with animals from the most desperate conditions who were only "voice boxes" away from being able to talk. 

The ability to communicate with verbal language is one defining difference. That has to be said carefully, because, according to an old linguistics professor I had a thousand years ago in college, animals cannot communicate with us. Come on. What a waste of an education that man had. No, they cannot, in English, say, "How do you do this morning?" But I think everyone who has had a pet knows when their pet is happy to see them. They are able to express emotion, which is right next door to communicating openly and freely, and quite frankly, is absolutely impossible for many humans I have known. 

Psychological make up is one place that I've found a very defining difference. There are many different psychological behaviors that animals and humans have in common. For instance, obsessive/compulsive disorder. Consider the human who locks and re-locks his front door 5 times and compare him to my friend's dog, Emma Lou, who walks around with a large rubber bone in her mouth and will not tire, cease or desist from baiting you to play "fetch" with her. She is interesting in being fed, she takes care of her daily dietary and bodily needs, but her main focus in life is getting someone to throw that bone.

Seemingly unreasonable phobias is another. Come a thunderstorm, both of my dogs will be in my lap, or as close to me as they can possibly get. Come a severe thunderstorm, my border collie will stand at the sliding door and ferociously growl and bark at the storm, coming back repeatedly to me to let me know there's a monster outside the door. 

Of course the list of human phobias is practically endless. Fear of heights is my main one, ironic for a girl who loves the mountains. I have to say, and this may reveal some deep, dark secret of mine, I love to look off of a mountaintop, but I find myself with the most unnerving desire to fly off the precipice and coast like some hawk or eagle. Or try to. This is a girl who, watching an advertisement for a theme park, will suffer actual vertigo watching people go up and down on roller coasters. 

There is one huge difference I've noticed from my 15 years in the medical field. Animals do not delight in disability. We do. If I've seen it once in medicine, I've seen it a thousand times, and yes, in myself also. We hold on to illness and nurture it. We use it as an excuse to not get up. We wallow in our illness, becoming very encouched and comfortable in our disability. Very different from the little dog I had to lose earlier this year. She had every disability in the world, and tried tirelessly to be the dog that she was regardless of whether she could move freely or not. And she did become depressed, however she was always ready to change her mood. She would cry sometimes, from frustration I would guess, because it was always when she had gotten herself stuck. It was the most heartbreaking, lonely sound I had ever heard. Her little mouth made the most perfect little circle, and all of her heartbreak would just pour through. I could never get to her fast enough when I heard this song. It was an unbearable thing for me to hear. But the very instant I touched her, it was gone, replaced with the joy of being picked up and cuddled.

I have had pets who have faked having a hurt paw for a little attention, but it is never like a human being does. I address this, because I see the tendency so much in myself. I have surprised myself on many occasions when someone has asked about my health and I found myself launching, quite happily, into a detailed description of all my latest health complaints. 

I wonder if this difference can be explained because we have the ability to recognize that there is a distant future. There is instinct. Animals, I think, can surmise that a danger could be present, for instance, the canine practice of circling the nest two or three times before lying down. But I don't think this is the same as realizing that tomorrow may not come. Much like a teenager, I'm not exactly sure they can realize they are not invincible. My greatest pain with my little dog was knowing for sure that she was totally not ready to go. Neither was my father despite the tremendous pain he was in. My mother, on the other hand, I think was done with this world and with us and only wanted to be with my father again. 

Despite my professor's belief that we are so much more developed than animals, I think I have to side with the four-leggeds on this one. There's a whole lot of reasons I find myself vastly preferring four-legged company to human, unless they are humans that have great relationships with and great respect for the four-leggeds. After all, we are all related.

 

Shingles

Sorry for the delay in posting. The shingles spread to my right eye and I've had great difficulty in being able to see out of it. Things are much better now, though, there is still some fuzziness there. So sorry for any typos that might have slipped thru...

Look below for my latest thoughts on mountain top removal.

Lyn

The Eloi and the Morlocks, Kentucky style...

Of the many issues rampant today, a particularly volatile one involves the strip mining method known as mountain top removal, which is being practiced in the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky.

The ones who own an interest in the coal want it to be mined. These are not just cold-hearted coal company people who routinely go in, ravage an area, claim to re-claim it and then leave it an environmental mess. They are also honest, hard-working and at times elderly residents of the area who look at the coal as money they can pay their medical bills with and perhaps leave something for their children. It's two sides of the same coin, and I'm torn between two lovers on the issue.

I despise strip miners. I despise the way they manipulate and swindle the people, I despise what they do to the land, and I despise the way they go off and leave the slag fields for someone else to clean up.

Here is a case in point. Peabody Energy Company contacted me some time back wanting permission to lease some land that I was heir to back in Leslie County. Here was their spiel. They wanted the land so the could do exploratory drilling for gas and oil, and if they struck it, then besides the revenue from the leasing of the land, there would also be revenue from the proceeds of the drilling. I thought, well, drilling is not as bad as strip mining and the extra money would sure help my aunt and uncle. Come to find out what they are actually doing is leasing this land (thus preventing the owners from using it), drilling and finding wells, and then capping them off. No help for America, and certainly no revenue for the aforementioned aging relatives.

It's the brazen lying and manipulation of a population of people who have historically been manipulated beyond belief for generations. It is the manipulation of a part of our state that is rarely acknowledged as absolutely imperative to the survival of the state. It's the dirty little secret that we never talk about when we're advertising our great horse farms of the Bluegrass, of Central Kentucky, all of which are powered by the coal mines in Eastern Kentucky.

It's a question that has plagued me since childhood when I saw first hand the poverty that my people grew up in. It's the question that kept coming to me when I saw the affluence of the Bluegrass. What about the mountains? Where is their share? Why must my elderly aunt and uncle drive four or five counties away down two lane mountain roads to receive adequate health care? All of the coal that has been ripped out of those hills, and nothing's changed. There's a new Wal Mart in Hazard. Oh boy, that's some progress. But the health care workers at the regional hospital there had to strike for a decent wage.

Kind of reminds me of the Eloi and the Morlocks in H.G. Wells "The Time Machine."

Governor Beshear, I challenge you to make things right with Eastern Kentucky. I challenge you to empower our universities with the ability to find other, better, renewable forms of fuel, to build better health centers and clinics in the areas that are supplying the rest of you (my house is solar-powered) with power and energy. They're not just our country cousins, they're our people.

SURPRISE!!!

Surprise! I got sick -- not with one malady but with two, one right on top of the other.

It was a real mess. The first thing was shingles. Boom, right out of nowhere, the Saturday morning before Memorial Day I woke up feeling like someone had hit the right side of my scalp with a hammer of about a thousand very sharp pins. I dealt with it Saturday, and Sunday, when it was no better, I skipped a family reunion in Leslie County and instead made a little visit to the Urgent Treatment Center. The nurse practitioner gave me the lucky news plus prescriptions for about 5 different kinds of medications.

The shingles ran its course, and is still running its course. I blistered up beautifully, and was in a great deal of discomfort, especially anything that had to do with going outside and getting sunlight on my scalp, which would make the blisters act like a thousand red ants that were pissed off at my skin. The really bad thing with the singles happened when it got into my right eye. I already have glaucoma, which is increased intraoccular pressure, that causes "snow" or "white" blindness. When the singles got on my cornea, it also raised the pressure in my eyes causing me to become extremely sick at my stomach and also made any kind of light entering my eye to feel like a blinding sword.

But we weren't quite done as my reproductive system, which was supposed to have hung up it's "gone fishin'" sign several years ago, decided to kick back into gear in a real big way. Apparently I've been producing a huge amount of estrogen, and very little progesterone, resulting in a condition called endometrial hyperplasia, or, as is known in the common vernacular, bleeding like a stuck pig. A trip to the gyno secured me some progesterone tablets which helped until the prescription ran out when the bleeding, plus cramps, returned  in full force.

I haven't written because I couldn't write, and it's been a horribly frustrating time. I haven't been able to see to write, or read, or to enjoy any of the beautiful weather we've been having. Even the light from my laptop was blinding to me so that I couldn't do much more on my computer than check my mail on a daily basis, and that with an eye patch over my right eye while wearing jet black sunglasses in the house. Things are much better now, though. I'm able to type this short amount without said sunglasses or eye patch tonight, and without being doubled over in cramps. A new medication, a new course of action, and hopefully all of this will resolve itself.

I can't get over how pissed off I am at my body, though, for doing this to me. How dare it throw all this crap in my way when I have so much work to do outside and so many things to get done. I'm really angry at the illusion that we keep that we really do have control over these sorts of things. It gets back to how much you really can control your own life, your own time and your own space. What of this life really belongs to you? I can't help but be reminded of a great songwriter, John Lennon, when we said, life is what happens when you're making plans.

One thing I can do is pay homage to my dear partner who once again has had to put up with another round of drama from me. If I can do nothing else, while squinting here tonight at the screen, let me give him his Father's Day dues. And I'll follow my own teaching and try to figure out what I've learned from the experience, while thanking the Great Spirit (somewhat dubiously) for the lessons.

Arriviste

The word means one who is newly arrived on the scene, posed to take off, as it were. The question is, who does it pertain to in our upcoming election?

That McCain is the same old same old is undisputed. Despite his genial appearance on Ellen the other afternoon, still, he is one, like Kerry, who has a tendency to flip flop back and forth in what he says. He did stand his ground on gay marriage in California, denying Ellen the ability to actually marry her lover vs. having a civil contract with her. And did it with self-deprecating humor that even he says is reminiscent of Reagan. However, his old style politics have been around since the founding fathers.

Hilary and Barak are a bit of a different story. We say we want change, but can we, as a nation, really accept this much change? A woman president? An African-American president? 

This is a giant moment in history for America, that we have finally evolved to have an election truly reflecting the cross culture of our country, but instead of celebrating it, we grind it under the wheels of the press, tearing apart every innocuous slip someone might make until it winds through the sausage grinder of the American press corps into an unrecognizable mess.

What is truly sad to me, in this day of arrivistes, is that we cannot have this giant moment in history without the tried and true cries of racism and sexism when what ever electoral party in question doesn't get what they want. If we don't vote for Hilary, we're sexists. If we don't vote for Barak we're racists. What about if we simply don't like the people?

And if generalizing the American people as racists and sexists is not enough, well, then break it down in the demographics on the nightly news. It seems, after tonight's pablom, that the more educated in Kentucky are voting for Barak and the less educated are voting for Hilary. Oh puhleeease!! Suddenly now voting for Barak is the way of the enlightened!

I recently wrote to a friend that were it not for the fact that my grandmother campaigned for the women's right to vote, and was the first woman to vote in Leslie County, and had to walk from Trace Branch to Hyden on a dirt road to do so, I wouldn't even bother.

I'm not interested in any of the candidates. Not one of them has pledged any sort of interest in researching new power alternatives, although McCain came the closest on Ellen the other afternoon when he said we had to cut our dependence on foreign oil and stop sending billions of dollars to people who don't like us. Duh!!! However, he's into nuclear power and I'm not overjoyed about that.

Hilary, when asked about strip mining, mumbled something about alternative power sources but didn't expound on it. Barak is bragging on his TV commercials about the $200 million he pushed through for coal processing plants. It was high on his list, but it pretty much knocked him down to the bottom of mine. More coal processing plants means more strip mining of my beloved mountains.

I think I am an enlightened voter, as well as some of my "less educated" friends. I'm just not an interested, excited voter. I don't see any indication in any of the candidates of what I am most interested in seeing happen in my country -- that we would wake up as a nation and realize that this Earth is not going to last under this brutal attack of carbon dioxide buildup, fossil fuel mining and burning, and fairly much unconcered rape of our natural resources. We are not respecting the Earth, as we are not doing anything to preserve it. When these candidates start talking that kind of talk, then I'll be excited, and then I'll be listening. Until then, it's voting for the one who's least likely to do the most harm. Same old, same old.

Old Memories

There is a feller I fell in love with so many years ago, and it was all such a waste. I gave up so much for him, and I was totally helpless in my giving. He was always very cool -- he had that about him. He was immensely popular and that he gave me any kind of attention at all just floored me. I thought that much of him and that little of myself. If all of that wasn't embarrassing enough, I still think about him a lot, and dream about him a lot. And I don't know why, and I can't help it.

What hurt so much about losing him was that he had told me we were friends, and stupid me, I truly thought we were. But when he went on to higher education and his new friends, he dropped me like a hot potato. Where before he had found me ravishing and exciting and always welcomed my calls, now he began to be short and crisp on the phone, and to make snide remarks about my lifestyle, my friends, and the things I thought to be important. 

Honest to goodness, I think of him at least once a week, if not just about every day. Why, why, why, why?

Is it unresolved anger? Part of me would like to face him and say, you know, you just didn't know who I was. All the crap you thought you knew about me, the crappy way you treated me, none of that said anything about me. It said loads about you. 

The other part of me doesn't ever want to see him again. I know what his opinion would be on just about any subject, and I really don't want to hear it. His opinions are unimaginative. I ran into a mutual friend at a bookstore a long while back. You ought to get in touch with him, this mutual friend said. Best let sleeping dogs lie, I replied.

Because I was so hung up on this fellow, I let a lot of really good men pass by. There were a couple of really great guys I just couldn't muster anything for, and I think they held it against me. I really, really liked these guys. Maybe if they had ever just sat me down face to face and given me another option, it would have been different, but they both came in at awkward times, doing awkward things that scared me more than anything. I ran like a scalded dog.

You can't make someone fall in love with you, and I never asked that of him. We were great buddies for the longest while, and that was good enough for me. I never thought once about marrying this fellow. I would not have relished being his wife. Yet, I never could go the distance with any other man except for one. I married him -- he was the only one who ever made me forget the first one, but although he, once again, was a great guy, he had his issues, and I had mine, and the marriage fell apart almost instantly. My current fellow and I talk about marriage all the time, but that's all we do, is talk. Despite the fact that he is, of course, a great guy, and a true friend, I just can't do it. 

There's a part of me that wishes I would never think of him again. There's a part of me that hopes I never forget him. 

I have had hundreds of dreams about him, and never a satisfying one. He's always elusive in my dreams. There, but on the way out. I wake up happy that I got to see him, and missing him, and frustrated that he's gone yet again. There was a series of dreams that I had about him, one right after the other, so upsetting that I finally called and asked him if he was okay. He was, but his new girlfriend wasn't. After he dissed my profession (as a respiratory therapist - "Just a 2 year program? I thought you were a college girl..."), he asked if I was still singing. I told him no, just for meaness. The weird thing about it, something that was so strange, was that I did not recognize his voice at all. It was like talking to a complete stranger, except for his inherent snideness, which was all too familiar. I ended the conversation as soon as I could. I happen to be a college girl. That would be two degrees, thank you very much.

I guess I am still angry, and I guess I'm angry at the waste of it. I thought it was one of those great male/female friendships, till all of a sudden I wasn't good enough anymore. He was fun, and had a great sense of humor and a wry wit, and it felt good to be in his circle. It felt horrible to be left behind. But at the same time, his humor was becoming cruel and demeaning. I guess it was for the best.

I am more satisfied now than I have ever been. At long last I'm giving full bent to creative expression, damn the cost. It is such a relief. It's a luxury I never gave myself, dogmatic creature that I am. I quit the smoking, took back my space, decided I was worth taking care of. I fuss over my little family of my boyfriend, horses, alpacas, dogs and cat, and my friends. I don't think I lost anything by losing him. I'm not sure I gained much either. He might have actually lost out as well.

Well, this is a blog with no point. This is a blog with no lesson, and really with nothing said. Just a comment on the strange way we are, what sticks in our minds, and where our minds go wandering from time to time. I guess the lesson learned, is one an old woman once told me. Folks won't remember what you said to them, she said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel.