Owwww charlie

I wish Rite Aid carried these. I think they'd work a bit better than what I'm using and the ad suggests that even little children like them. I'm having some kind of dental adventure mystery that won't begin to be solved until tomorrow at 1:45. I haven't experienced this level of pain since the morning after my knee surgery. Though I seem to be still able to blog about it and think of things to which it compares (Dustin Hoffman vs. Laurence Olivier in "Marathon Man" comes to mind) so it can't be all that bad. The toothache drops must be kickin' in.

More than the sum of our chromosomes

My first thought as I read this NY Times op-ed, "The XY Games" was resentment for the sexism behind the requirement that female athletes have to prove they are sufficiently female. As the author of the article points out, merely testing for the presence of a Y chromosome is inconclusive. It seems like the difficulty and scandal in screening out all the performance enhancing drugs and blood doping makes trying to figure out for sure who's genetically male or female not so relevant. The Greeks had an Olympic gender test too lest any girls try to sneak in. Change is a long time coming. If an athlete who knows inside he's male wants the gold so bad that he's willing to sacrifice his male privilege on the altar, goddess bless him.

Bill Got a Laptop

and sent this post. I don't know if he typed it, which would have been quite arduous, or dictated, which also would have been arduous, but it was a good read, and I've pasted in part of it here (I added the links):

A message from the other side of brain surgery

On July 17,2008, my neurosurgeon, Dr. Muizelaar, removed an aggressive meningioma tumor from my brain. The operation was successful and removed a mass the size of a mandarin orange, according to the Doctor! Now there will be a recovery period where I will have to relearn basic functions like sitting, standing, walking, and speaking in complete sentences. I feel great support from you all, through your thoughts, prayers, and postings on CarePages.

From the ragged ruins of my swollen brain, this passage from the poem “Ullyses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson beckons. It brings comfort as evidence of a memory at least partially intact and as a reminder of the brave work of my friends and colleagues who struggle every day to make this world just a little kinder.

Come my friends.
Tis not too late to seek a newer world!
…Though much has been taken,
Much abides.
And though we are not that strength
That in younger years moved earth and heaven,
That which we are, we are.
One equal temper of heroic heart,
Made weak by time and fate,
But strong in will.
To seek, to find, to seize,
And never to yield.

My Condition

Due to general right side paralysis linked to post operative swelling of the brain, my function is quite limited. I cannot stand, walk, or manipulate the wheelchair without assistance. I cannot speak in complete sentences, though I can conceive what I want to say. The most profound symptom I am faced with is fatigue. 20 minutes of any type of activity leaves me fully spent requiring sustained rest. This will improve as the swelling goes down.

I am in good spirits feeling loved and supported by all. It seems fortuitous that most of the irritation of the brain was in the left hemisphere, the general source of our individuality and ego. As a consequence, I spend a lot of time in that blissful region of the brain where all is “one”. I get weepy at times when I feel the connections with so many who share their own stories and support at this time. We really do have more in common with each other as a species, as a community and as friends than we have dared to admit. I like this side of the brain. It joins, as one, the spiritual presence of my friends and colleagues without regard to generations, decades, or specific relationships. It sustains non-specific bliss and support from all, and in combinations never before thought of....

It sounds like his experience is similar in some respects to that of the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor who wrote a book about how her stroke & subsequent recovery lit up her right hemisphere in such a way as to change her whole view and approach to life.

Interestingly there is a passage from "Ulysses" that frequently pops into my thoughts as well, and has done so for years and years since high school so that it's like a kind of mantra:

"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."

I think especially the line "I am a part of all that I have met" is the one that has always resonated.

Zen and the science of fuel economy

Been hearing all about the benefits of driving 60 mph for some time now, and just (coincidentally) spent about $60 filling my tank, so decided to try it on the way down to this training in Los Gatos. My truck doesn't have cruise control so it requires me to pay attention. Sometimes it felt like I was moving backwards but mostly I noticed how much calmer I felt. I got behind a Prius driving 55 at one point, and thought about driving alongside it but people are probably already disturbed enough by anyone driving below the speed limit that it would be counterproductive to aggravate them by slowing down two out of the four lanes on that stretch of the 680.

I'm going to try to do it for the whole tank (which means at least until Sunday) to see what the difference is. I think I got about 25 - 26 MPG on the last tank. They said on NPR this morning that for every mile per hour you drive over 60 mph, you add about $0.30 a gallon to the price of your gas.

It seems like a form of protest against the car culture. Or at least a refusal to keep buying into the mindset that you have to get everywhere as fast as you possibly can. I've driven the hurried way for a long time and paradoxically I'm almost always late for everything. Today I drove 'slowly' and reached my destination an hour early. Maybe the gas price thing...maybe other, um, factors...enabled me to break through my resistance to the idea of not driving 70 mph everywhere I go. I drive a lot, so if I can practice mindfulness while driving, that's a lot of practice.

She can swim, too!

Now this would have been something to catch on video (or even a still photo), but the first time it happened it was unexpected. I knew that Ripley likes to wet her paws. When she's hot (which is often), she prefers to wear her water rather than drink it. I was curious to see how she would react to Heather's koi pond. However, I wasn't expecting her to jump in and swim across. The first time she did it, I don't think she expected it either...it gets deep pretty suddenly when you're only 8" tall. I was momentarily terrified, ready to wade in and fish her out, but she kept her head up and made it to the other side just fine. The next day she was a bit more cautious but eager to try it again.


I'll have to get her one of those little doggie life jackets. I don't think they make water wings short enough.

Kinda seems like my dog is getting all the exercise lately, doesn't it? If she could learn to ride a bike she'd be ready for a triathlon. Heather is coaching a women's cycling group...maybe Ripley could sign up. Or maybe her mama just needs to get her that trailer and hit the road. Ripley could be like R2-D2...when I get tired riding uphill, I could say, "Ripley, try to increase the power..."

Update on Bill

No wonder he can remember all the lines. He's obviously a member of the troupe [as I have long suspected].

Bill's out of the ICU and into a regular hospital room. A colleague from our Executive Office in Sacramento posted this yesterday:

...[It] was wonderful to see how alert, aware and fully cognitive Bill is at this point. (And it is only getting better, as they dial down the pain meds.) As I walked up to the side of his bed, Bill began to quote back to me a poem excerpt I had shared with him several years back, from Lord Tennyson's Ulysses, "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." [...] I just hung out with Bill and, as I read the newspaper, he asked about the latest news and we talked politics. It was pretty much just like hanging out with him in his office (sans his usual sartorial splendor) and parsing and flaying the latest political headlines. Allowing for the predictable effects of his being tired from the surgery and a bit dazed from the meds and all, Bill was totally all over the topic at hand.

The guy's unstoppable. We're talking 100% Bill, here.

Fetch!

She chases the ball enthusiastically and usually brings it back, but doesn't like to surrender it. H's kitty is not very impressed.

My friend Bill

Bill is one of my heroes and a great mentor. It's probably all his fault that I got a Legal Services job right out of law school (and if you're wondering what I mean by that, I'll just say that the feelings of gratitude far outweigh any feelings of blame). He has been doing this work for thirty-something years and still always seems full of compassion and enthusiasm. He is a creative and extensive thinker. Known for going off on tangents and having a rather messy office. Known for his ability to quote entire Monty Python skits. Sometime last year he was diagnosed with a non-malignant brain tumor. I think he was having horrible headaches and perhaps other problems, but he works in our main offices 90 miles away and I don't have a good sense of how he has been affected day to day. When I've seen him in the last several months I wouldn't have been able to tell anything was wrong. He's the one who made it possible for me and a co-worker to go to a conference in New Orleans last March, where he was presenting at one of the sessions, and he went out on the town with us and treated everybody (who dared) to a round of Absinthe in the French Quarter.

He's having surgery to remove the tumor tomorrow. Apparently it's quite deep in there and nobody knows to what extent his functioning will be impaired when he wakes up, or for how long. He says he's in great spirits because friends and family and colleagues have been showering him with love and appreciation. This is a very scary thing. I can't imagine how his wife and son must be feeling. His last pre-surgery post today reminded me of a famous line from Moby Dick that I know he'd appreciate: "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing"--Stubb.

Night of the living kitteh...

or maybe "28 Kittehs Later."


more cat pictures

Zombies, kittens...there's a whole untapped subgenre here.

Dogs love trucks

I picked Ripley up on Monday afternoon and Tuesday we headed back out to the coast. The trip was a bit more of an endurance event than we expected. Along Highway 20, about 20 miles from the first town near the lake (Clearlake Oaks), I thought I should pull off at a vista point to let Ripley have a potty break. In the process of removing her from her carrier and attaching her leash, I dropped my keys in the front seat and locked us out. (Both of us, thank goodness.)

My cell phone was locked in the truck but there was no service in that area anyway. Unlike Blanche Dubois I have not always relied on the kindness of strangers, though sometimes there are no alternatives. We stood by the entrance of the vista point and tried to flag somebody down, and after not too much time two men in a white crew-cab Dodge pickup stopped. Due to their very clean and well-groomed appearance as well as the immaculateness of their truck I thought at first they might be a couple, but then the one not driving showed me a cellphone photo of his wife and kids (as if to resolve any unspoken suspicions).

At any rate, they were very kind, driving us all the way into Clearlake Oaks before we had any cell service, letting me borrow a cellphone to call roadside assistance, giving Ripley water (it was pretty hot outside), and then driving us back to the intersection of highways 53 and 20 so that the tow truck could pick us up on the way back to my truck without racking up extra miles that my roadside assistance wouldn't cover. The driver told me I didn't look like a typical hitchhiker, and he thought maybe I was giving away puppies there at the roadside. He was ready to gun it and drive on by, but his buddy said, "She's in trouble," so he stopped. I thanked them as profusely as I could.

The ordeal added at least three hours to our trip (and added a good chunk of time to our rescuers' trip, too). Ripley was so well-behaved and mellow I started to worry that something was wrong with her. She just seems to go into energy- saver mode in the car and slept nearly the whole time.

She perked up when we arrived. In the last two days we've worked on 'Sit' and 'Come' and she already has those down pretty well. She had her first view / taste / feel of the ocean yesterday. And passed out when we got back to the house.

[She's in the back of the truck here for photo-op purposes only.]

His legs may run in the Olympics

[Note: Puppy update and photos from our first couple days are forthcoming.]

Just found this story in the NY Times about Van Phillips, who lives in Mendocino, and who invented a prosthetic leg for elite runners and athletes while he was working at the Center for Biomedical Design at the U. of Utah. South African double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius will attempt to qualify for the 400m sprint wearing two of Phillips' "Cheetah Foot" prosthetics after some controversy about whether the carbon graphite legs / feet would give Pistorius an unfair advantage over sprinters who are stuck with regular feet and legs. Huh.

Perhaps the I.A.A.F. was afraid that allowing Pistorius to participate would release a flood of double-amputee super athletes who would dominate the track with their springy, energy-efficient appendages. This man was born missing bones in his lower legs, so the fact that at some point, probably quite early in life, he decided he wanted to be a great runner kinda makes you rethink your sense of your own limitations, doesn't it? And Phillips' invention makes it possible. Sometimes it's a pretty neat thing to be human.

In with the bad air. Don't know if photo worked but can't capture how bad the smoke has been. Glad I'm escaping for awhile.

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18% of Americans...

...believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a poll cited in this NY Times op-ed on the brain science behind people's false beliefs (and particularly the implications for political campaigns, i.e. why people would continue to believe that Obama is Muslim despite all statements that have been made to the contrary). It has bigger implications though--actually it explains a lot of prejudice and irrational thought. For example, people keep writing letters to the editor of the local paper stating that (one of the reasons) same-sex marriage is an abomination is that gay couples can't produce children. When in reality, gays and lesbians obviously produce / acquire children by all sorts of means, sometimes even the old-fashioned accidental method, sometimes during a failed attempt at heterosexual marriage, sometimes with help from a donor, and of course by adoption in the states where they believe children should have as many chances for loving, devoted parent(s) as possible. And some people, gay or straight, choose not to have children of their own at all, but can make the world's most fabulous uncles and aunts, or can devote their energy to nurturing the world in many other ways that people with kids don't have time and resources for.

All of this information seems to have been sucked into a black hole for some people. I rode with a group of NorCal AIDS Challenge cyclists (most of whom were straight) in the Sacramento LGBT Pride parade last week, and protesters were out with signs about all the stuff God hates. We couldn't help but notice that these 'religious' people were completely fixated on one particular act as if it summed up the whole of gay male (and apparently their own) existence. And one of my favorite signs was "Hatred of Parents Causes Homosexuality." Sad, to think of all those little gay parent-hating babies.

One has to wonder sometimes what planet people are living on. But according to this article, we tend to remember information that fits our existing mental framework and forget what doesn't fit. So it probably wouldn't work to make somebody who watches FOX News all the time just listen to NPR for several hours (though I don't think that would hurt). False beliefs are difficult to undo. In order to correct them, the "truth" (i.e. Obama is a Christian, for example) has to be presented with some kind of affirmative little emotional attention-grabber, something that puts a new picture in the listener's mind. Merely contradicting the falsity can actually reinforce it.

Equal opportunity blog

I'd be remiss in not giving Kato some press. He's threatening to start his own blog if all I do is go on and on about the puppy. This is his current favorite toy. He leaps into the air and does...I'm sure there's some kind of skateboading or gymnastic term for it...but he twists and turns mid-air and lands facing the opposite way. All for the thrill of catching this blue feather. Then when he's got it, he walks off with it (and with me) to some undisclosed location, sometimes his food dish, where he lets go, and then it starts all over again.

It's a dog!

Ripley at seven weeks.
Not a gerbil or a guinea pig at all. Though if she had wings she might be mistaken for a fruit bat.

I stopped by to visit her last night, prepared with some treats to buy her attention. That was a good strategy, since otherwise she'd have completely ignored me in favor of some spilled dog food near Charlene's porch. Priorities. Understanding that she doesn't know me yet and had no reason to respond when I tried to get her attention with noise, I also have a feeling she might be one of those puppies with selective hearing. We are somewhat alike in that respect.


Less than two weeks to go.

Possibly in poor taste, considering recent events, but it's true...

Smoke does get in your eyes. I've discovered online karaoke. This is more or less how the new lead singer for Boston was discovered, so I'm hoping Richard Carpenter or the Platters (do they need a singer?) will call me one of these days.

Rate this performance at The Sims On Stage

I guess I won't ride my bike in the hills today...

And probably not this weekend, either. Not that I had plans to, but the whole place is closed down because of a 8000-acre fire burning just (barely) southeast of Chico and up into the town of Paradise. The article I just linked is updated frequently and the last update looks bad.

I first saw it on the way home from my appointments in Oroville yesterday, when it was still much smaller. Some friends of mine just recently moved out of their house on the outskirts of Paradise (yes, yes, the town lends itself to endless jokes...I can't drive there without having a litany of song lyrics play in my head, 'I've got two tickets to paradise;' 'I've been to paradise but I've never been to me;' 'awfully nice, it's paradise;' 'paradise by the dashboard light'...) to a house in Chico, and they have been preparing to put their old house on the market. The house is now in an evacuated area.

I took this photo by pointing my cellphone out the side window on the way home yesterday. I'm grateful to be upwind, not so much because the fire danger but all the smoke. Most of the burned area so far is open grassland but I read that four homes have burned (the linked map shows the location). And wind is known to change directions now and then.

If you're looking at the map, I live more or less in downtown Chico. However, one of the attorneys in our office has a lovely home in Butte Creek Canyon, which has also been evacuated, and the fire looks awfully close.

Oww charlie

My half-hour jog yesterday used some muscles that apparently haven't been used for awhile. I think I'd better go sit in the spa that my homeowner association dues are paying to keep warm.

Happy A-Knee-Versary to me

Last year on June 2, my brief and statistically unremarkable pro football career came to a sudden, expensive end. This evening, I went running in the park for a full half hour. The most running I've done in a year, and the only running I've done in months. I was happy to find that, while it kind of hurt, it was manageable, and the good feeling of running outweighed the joint discomfort.

Over the weekend I was talking to Renee, a Rage teammate who, at the age of 42, is essentially the Jerome "The Bus" Bettis of our team and scored our touchdown in the game against Portland last Saturday (after a great pass play set it up). She is doing all this with a knee brace and a torn ACL. Obviously she loves playing football way, way more than I did, and accordingly she's way, way better at it. But she made me think that my self-pitying avoidance of all running has gone on quite long enough. I don't need to start training for another marathon. But I've missed the feeling of my feet moving over the ground, of running on a path through the trees. That whole primal thing. Good to have it back.

they be stealin'

This morning I had a small, so I thought, unopened container of raspberry yogurt I got from the hotel continental breakfast. I put it in my plastic ziploc bag full of the small bottles of shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash, etc. for airport security. But they really stuck to their guns (or whatever compliance-promoting / protective devices they have) about the 3.4 ounces rule. The lady said, "Oh...I'll have to take your yogurt. It's more than 3.4 ounces. Would you like to go back so you can eat it?" (I thought, I know you're doing the right thing by offering me that choice, and it's clever psychologically as well as less illegal to offer a silly choice that preserves someone's illusion of personal property rights, than to confiscate pocketknife keyrings and baby bottles and yogurt out of hand, but NO, I WOULD NOT rather take off my shoes and empty out my pockets and unpack my laptop and remember not to put it in the same bin as the case, after adequately stowing those items again so I can leave the security area, just so I can eat this 4 ounces of yogurt.) I said, "I can't eat it right now?" (in the presence of these witnesses and all here assembled) and she said "No, afraid not." I had a spoon and everything, I could have stood aside and gobbled it right up in probably less than thirty seconds.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd said, 'Okay, I'll go back,' but then, upon accepting the container of yogurt, I'd suddenly peeled back the top and started eating it right there by the x-ray conveyor belt. Would I have been detained, or cited, or forbidden to board a plane? Or perhaps I'd never have had that option because she would have walked the yogurt outside the security area before returning it to me, as there is protocol for this kind of thing, these scenarios with yogurt.