Wormhole
When I lived above that chocolate shop on Haight Street, it was impossible to receive a package or a repairman. I had to be at home at the exact moment the doorbell rang, then I had to tear down the hallway, around the stairs, and fling myself outside before it was too late. Often the delivery man had such poor luck with this building, (s)he wouldn’t even ring the doorbell. Which was great. I’d stay home all day, waiting, and emerge at dusk to find the “Sorry We Missed You” slip right there, taunting me. Nine times out of ten I had to take public transportation 20 miles out of town to pick up the package.
Now I live two blocks away, one block off the Haight, and my apartment complex has this awesome, fancy doorbell system that calls my cell phone to buzz open the lobby door. When I see the right number calling, I answer the call, press “9″ and in goes the delivery man. It works great.
So a few days ago I had my iPhone in the back pocket of my jeans and, oh!, it fell in a coffee shop toilet when I sat down to pee. After a couple days of the rice trick failure, I surrendered myself to fate and late last night I ordered a refurbished iPhone from AT&T.
Just over 12 hours later it dawns on me: I need a cell phone if I’m going to buzz in the delivery of a cell phone.
The Psychology of Death and Dying
That’s the name of one of the classes I’m taking this semester. So far it’s truly excellent. Beyond words, really. If I can find a way to post some of our readings without violating copyright, I’ll do it. In the meantime, have you read these? They’re a couple of my favorites.
The Long Goodbye
In those days, extended family cared for the oldest. Now, in an age when family members are separated by hundreds of miles, we leave it up to nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. And the need has never been greater. The fastest-growing age group in America is the eighty-five-and-older cohort. As the population ages, healthcare costs continue to outpace inflation. Many older people have seen a sharp decline in their retirement investments since the 2008 economic collapse and are rapidly losing value in their homes. American political leaders are not preparing adequately for the huge demographic shift caused by the aging of the boomers, who began turning sixty-five in 2011. Many of them are retiring at the same time they are dealing with parents who are still alive.
Costs for long-term care are skyrocketing because only 3 percent of adults carry long-term care insurance. As a result, middle-class people without Daddy’s pension income are bankrupting themselves and then applying for Medicaid to pay for a nursing home in which they may languish for years.
The Unsayable
Last week I picked up The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma when I heard it was written by a disciple of Jacques Lacan. I’m not even halfway through this book, by Annie Rogers, PhD, and I cannot recommend it enough. Here are a couple snippets from the New York Times review:
Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.
How doctors die
Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. These are his observations:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. [...]
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.
How has it come to this — that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.
dear clusterflock, serious edition
How do you move through your grudges? Is it a process of letting go? Giving in? If you focus on forgiveness, do you feel that you’ve metabolized your anger?
Hudson Bay inspired blanket
I am knitting this.
If I like it in its small form, I will also knit a much larger version. Almost everything I knit becomes a gift*, and every time I visit Deron and Amy I am reminded how special it is to surround yourself with your own creations. Thanks for the inspiration, friends.
* I get to keep the holey, mismeasured projects.
Megaphones
italian designers isabella lovero and enrico bosa of en&is studio have updated ‘megaphone’, a ceramic passive amplifier created for the iphone and ipod touch. using no electricity, the sound waves are reverberated and distributed throughout the space. originally only available in white, the polished black and hand-painted gold versions further accentuate the contours of the form.
both the ceramic body and the solid wooden stand is developed and hand-made in italy.
although the black finish is applied in the same manner as the white, the gold version requires skilled decorators to paint the surface in the 24kt precious metal, after which it is fired in 720°C (1328°F). the high temperature assures the glazing is cohesive and the material is long lasting. the high gloss finish found on all three options are to help the sound resonate while the stand lifts the frame off any surface, increasing the vibrations emitted from the object.
Putting the caped crusader on the couch
From a New York Times Op-Ed published several weeks ago:
Comic books have long relied on mental disorders to drive their most memorable villains. Consider the Batman line, in which the Joker, Harley Quinn and other “criminally insane” rogues are residents of Gotham City’s forensic psychiatric hospital, Arkham Asylum.
Introduced in 1974, Arkham grossly confuses the concepts of psychiatric hospital and prison. Patients are called “inmates,” decked out in shackles and orange jumpsuits, while a mental health professional doubles as the “warden.” Even the antiquated word “asylum” implies that the patients are locked away with no treatment and little hope of rejoining society. [...]
Of course, DC Comics, and comic books in general, are hardly the only source of these stereotypes or the only contributors to discrimination. At the same time, they are widely consumed, whether in the original form or as story lines for movies, TV shows and video games. Modernized mental health depictions in the Batman titles alone would reach millions of people worldwide through its billion-dollar-grossing films and blockbuster video games.
That’s why DC Comics should seize the opportunity with The New 52 to move to the forefront in transforming mental health depictions in comics. To start, writers should stop overemphasizing a link between violence and mental disorders to explain criminal behavior.
Government logic
Josh recommended that I post this here.
Dear clusterflock
How do you relate to your limitations? With acceptance? Regret? Shame? Resignation? Do you know them at all?
quote out of context
Ian McEwan makes a telling point. “What I believe but cannot prove,” he says, “is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death.” His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife “divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere.” The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.
Bill Murray (Vector Portrait)
Guess Who?: The Many Faces of Noma Bar features over 50 minimalist vector illustrations that encapsulate, with brilliant subtlety and visual eloquence, the essence of famous politicians, philosophers and pop culture legends — a masterpiece of capturing character and sentiment with uncanny precision.
Cindy?
dear clusterflock
Forgive me if this question has been asked before. Do you have any preferences for how your life is memorialized and celebrated after you’re gone?
One hour ago
I was still walking home from my therapy appointment when I received a call from United Airlines. My connecting flight scheduled from Chicago to Cleveland tomorrow morning has been cancelled, but luckily I’ve been rebooked to depart late tomorrow evening so I’ll still make it to my destination. The first half of my brother-in-law’s memorial weekend begins in the town he grew up in, Milan, Ohio, tomorrow morning. So I called my dad. One of his flights to Cleveland today was cancelled. He and my stepmom are hours late, but almost there. They got the same notification. They told me they’d call United and, with Dad’s world-traveling clout, make something happen. I was about two blocks from my apartment when I got the new itinerary. 9pm departure to Newark. I hadn’t even packed yet! My original red-eye to Chicago departs long after 11. I packed. I kissed Nina. I jumped in a taxi. Halfway there I realized I didn’t have any cash on me. The driver assured me he could accept credit. We pulled up to the airport and he charged my card. The tip was $5.70, for an even $43. Instead the receipt showed a tip of $55.70. We settled with a cash difference. I checked in, I walked through security, my flight boards in a half hour.
The sporadic campaigns of “Girl Power” aren’t really getting the job done
Feminist vlogger NineteenPercent posted this response to Beyonce’s “Run The World” video, challenging some of the singer’s overly positive views on women’s empowerment:
Swedish Smörgåstårta
Since we’re on the subject of angry cooking show comedy:
(Via David’s brother-in-law)
Up in the redwoods
Flint Hill Special – Sleepy Man Banjo Blues
Brothers Jonny Mizzone age 8 on banjo, Robbie Mizzone age 12 on fiddle, and Tommy Mizzone age 13 on guitar:
How to land your kid in therapy
MFT intern Lori Gottlieb writes:
Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”
Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.
Dear clusterflock
What activates your denial? When do you shut down instead of maintaining your awareness?
Cowboys and Pit Crews
Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School:
You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn’t prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.
e.g., cognitive dissonance
What happens to a doomsday cult when the world doesn’t end?
When Prophecy Fails has become a landmark in the history of psychology, but few realize that many other studies have looked at the same question: What happens to a small but dedicated group of people who wait in vain for the end of the world? Ironically, Festinger’s own prediction—that a failed apocalypse leads to a redoubling of recruitment efforts—turned out to be false: Not one of these follow-ups found evidence to support his claim. The real story turns out to be far more complex.
What Festinger failed to understand is that prophecies, per se, almost never fail. They are instead component parts of a complex and interwoven belief system which tends to be very resilient to challenge from outsiders. While the rest of us might focus on the accuracy of an isolated claim as a test of a group’s legitimacy, those who are part of that group—and already accept its whole theology—may not be troubled by what seems to them like a minor mismatch. A few people might abandon the group, typically the newest or least-committed adherents, but the vast majority experience little cognitive dissonance and so make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. They carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched as a result.
Everything Tracy Jordan Said Season 5
Oh no! I missed it. Do it again:
Episode 3
-That’s Tracy Jordan spelled backwards.
-Don’t worry about it, Jacky D, I’m on it. Call Griz. I need someone around me who’s not just a yes man.
-So, what do we want to see on TV? I personally love cop shows. I can’t wait for Law and Order to start back up.
-Why? It was a tent pole. A tent pole!
-I’d like to see that incorporated in to your re-write. OK, meeting over.
-The only thing that worked in the read through was the dog.
-Good, and there’s a lot of buzz. Can you hear it, too? Or is my tinnitus acting up. Hey, that food is for DotCom Productions only. TGS’s food is backstage.
-Yo, Jacky D. I had dinner with Don Imus last night. He told the following joke…
-And thank you, Representative. What you’re doing is very important. I can assure you that NBC is committed to making diversity, a priority. Then just walk away, and don’t try to kiss her, Tracy. And don’t say that last part.
-I’ll kill you, white devil.
-I’m cutting that fat cracker’s head off.
-Yes! Great fix, Griz.
Dear clusterflock
Today is more than just your routine Tuesday. Michael Smith is now 30 years old today! I heard from a reliable source that he really was torn up over missing clusterflockstock this year. Happy birthday, Mr. Smith. We missed you there too.
HipHop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
Apologies if you already know about this documentary, but I was just exposed to it in my Cross-Cultural Counseling class.
If you hadn’t heard of this and liked it, try checking out The New Jim Crow.
