He Not Busy Being Born

I am unjustly attacked by Glen Beck

2010-03-11T04:11:00Z

Slough Update

2010-03-03T01:23:27Z

We have had more than our annual rainfall here in the Goleta, SB area by a good bit. So we trucked out through the mud to see how the slough was doing.

Saw some egrets on the way:

The slough was really full:

UCSB is trying to restore the indigenous floral; those little markers mark the indigenous stuff.

We almost stepped in a vernal pool:
Right in the middle of a field.

Dental Accident

2010-02-24T01:04:50Z

As I sit here, my stomach is growling or more precisely gurgling. The GI issue remains. I am drinking ginger tea. It does not taste good, but so far it has proven to settle and sooth my distempered gut. Also I am taking some thing called Jarro-Dophilus designed to help the good bacteria make a come back in the colon. The box says, "Five Billion Organisms Per Capsule." Frankly, that freaks me out a bit--how small are these organisms that one can get 5 billion of them in a capsule. Are they dead organisms or free-dried? I suppose I could do some research. Instead I just take them.
Last week some time I was eating and felt with the tip of my tongue--as one does--out of nowhere a rough patch on one of the teeth in the upper left jaw. I probed a bit further and found--Jesus Christ!--a huge hole in one of the teeth. Whatever had been there--tooth or filling--was gone, and hanging out I assumed somewhere in my troubled gut.

Next day, the dentist said they could only take me in for an exam real late in the day, but then just as I was getting in my car to go to the grocery store, the cell rang and they said, "Hey, come on down."

So I spend the next three hours in a dentist chair. I had not planned on that, but the dentist really didn't give me a choice. First he looks in there and says, Jesus Christ! and even as he is speaking he is pumping in pain killer. Something about this dental accident seems to energize him. I was like a dental adventure. Immediately he is diagnosing the situation, and calculating what needs to be done, and how to do it so he can save the tooth by putting a cap on it--and all this while working me in between his other clients. I am also a logistical challenge.

I never did get clear on what happened exactly except that a chunk of tooth fell off, and it did not crack down below the gum line and there was no abscess and thus no need for a root canal.

I guess I was lucky, though the dentist enjoyed himself a lot more than I did.

I hope this tooth incident proves isolated.

Dyspepsia

2010-02-21T19:49:45Z

While I lack the knowledge or tools definitively to diagnose my gut problem, I have decided I suffer dyspepsia. This is an old and honorable complaint found in medical dictionaries of the 1700's. The OED describes this as: "Difficulty or derangement of digestion; indigestion: applied to various forms of disorder of the digestive organs, esp. the stomach, usually involving weakness, loss of appetite, and depression of spirits." This seems to cover all the bases as I experience them. I like that "derangement of digestion" and "depression of spirits."

The problem with such and old and honorable complaint is, of course, that it is old and honorable and probably for that reason not much up to date and not the sort of definitive diagnosis that might be supplied by modern gastrointestinal science. I find mention of dyspepsia in the modern literature. But there are all kinds of it: for example non ulcerous dyspepsia. I find this a bit alarming, for I am not sure or not if my dyspepsia is of the non-ulcerous kind. To know for sure on that head one would have to have a tube stuck down one's throat, and so far that has not happened. So dyspepsia does not appear so much a thing onto itself as a kind of catchall phrase for a variety of symptoms that might be the manifestation of any number of deeper and perhaps more serious organic problems, with their own very specific and terrifying scientific names.

Whatever it is and whether it is the sign of something deeper, I am apparently not alone. I find different numbers, but they suggest that at least a 100 million Americans, perhaps more, suffer dyspepsia. So whatever it is exactly, a lot of people have it: wind, nausea, indigestion, bloating, abdominal pain, and deranged digestion. The medical industry devoted to this problem generates billions of dollars each year. We are a gaseous nation.

The preferred treatment for these problems today are the so-called proton pump inhibitors, like Tagamet. Unfortunately I cannot take these. I was previously prescribed for my condition Levson SLO; this reduces acid and is also an antispasmodic, derived from Belladonna. But, as I now know, anything that slows down the processes of the body in any way is inclined also to be a depressant. After 14 days of Levsin, I became more than usually depressed; my brain was a vacant hole and my heart an empty bag.

So I went off the stuff--slowly--for as with any med that I have come across, one always experiences withdrawal. And I did with a concurrent, not return exactly, but resurgence of my dyspepsia.

I feel some comfort, though, in finding a word for the condition, and now when people ask me how I am, I can say, "dyspeptic."

Med Mash and the GI Issue

2010-02-12T00:55:53Z

So sometime last week I guess I get the second round of results re: my gut problem. I go in and pee and they take more blood, and later I have to harvest a heap of my own stool and put it in little bottles and take it over to the lab. That was unpleasant.

But the results are good. My urine for example is described as clear and yellow in color. Exactly as I thought it should be and as I might have predicted. And the blood tests for possible imbalances are all negative, and my medical person writes in that the stools were fine. No parasites.

all this is great except I still have a gut problem. I am not made happy by the fact that the more I mention my gut problem--which is not often--the more I realize lots of people have gut problems. One guy, much younger and fitter than I and also much more affluent, when I mentioned my gut problem said he had one so bad for several years that it drove him to contemplate suicide. Now this is a positive and upbeat guy, so it must have been an awful gut problem.

He had an expensive doctor, a GI guy, but he had to diagnose his problem himself. If one can believe, the doctor never even suggested that he might have a problem with gluten (the protein in plants). But the guy researched the web, went on a gluten free diet, and says it was a life changer.

I am pretty sure I don't have a gluten problem. It usually develops earlier in life and is a lot nastier in its manifestations than what I have (though, who knows, what I have may get worse). I guess one advantage to getting older. There are a lot of diseases out there that one is supposed to get earlier in life, and if one has not gotten them by my age one is not likely to get them.

At my last visit, my medical person gave me a med. Something called Levsin-SLO, to be taken thrice daily or as needed. After a couple days taking it my stomach did seem to calm. The stuff is an antispasmodic and derived from belladonna. When I checked out the possible side effects I freaked:

diarrhea;
confusion, hallucinations;
unusual thoughts or behavior;
fast, pounding, or uneven heart rate;
rash or flushing; or
eye pain
dizziness, drowsiness, feeling nervous; blurred vision, headache;
nausea, vomiting, bloating, heartburn, or constipation;
changes in taste;
problems with urination;
decreased sweating;
dry mouth; or
impotence, loss of interest in sex, or trouble having an orgasm.

These are pretty damn common side effects. It's crazy how the side-effects sometimes cause what they are supposed to cure. Check out the side-effects for antidepressants. They can cause depression and anxiety. And, here, you will note, this med. can cause diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, as well as bloating. All gut problems.

And oh....I forgot--not listed here as a side effect but in another place: psychosis.

That gave me pause. So I contacted a person in our condo complex, formerly a nurse, and she said doctors hand out that stuff like candy to old and young alike.

So, I thought A-OK. My gut is calmer, the flatulence less profound, and my stools nearly back to traditional.

Then--wham--I decide to cut back one pill to see how the gut is and I am hit by withdrawal (can you believe): a sudden, out of nowhere, wham in the gut bout of anxiety, plus fatigue. I have been taking the stuff 14 days and it is starting to get to my head. You put some chemical in your body and there is no way in hell it's not going to end up in your head. I am taking other meds and I am afraid this belladonna derivative is starting to muck them all up.

So now what? I guess I will have to make the time and go through the agony of cutting back further to see if I can get rid of the emotional side effects and hope that the gut has recovered some.

On the bright side--always on the bright side--I do not yet appear psychotic.

Pulse 1 (Kairo) , Pulse 2

2010-02-02T20:26:11Z

Since as part of my teaching, I am always listening for signs of the direction of the consumer society, my ears perked up when I heard mention of the exportation of anti-depressants to Japan. According to this speaker, the sale of anti-depressants in Japan is a billion dollar industry.

This was not the case even ten years ago.

The Japanese knew of something called depression.

The nation [Japan] did have a clinical diagnosis of depression - utsubyo - but it was nothing like the US version: it described an illness as devastating and as stigmatizing as schizophrenia. Worse, at least for the sales prospects of antidepressants in Japan, it was rare.

So they had depression ten years ago, but it was devastating. Further the attitude of the Japanese people towards melancholy states differed from ours:

Most other states of melancholy were not considered illnesses in Japan. Indeed, the experience of prolonged, deep sadness was often considered to be a jibyo, a personal hardship that builds character.

What a novel idea: a personal hardship building character, sadness--not as something to run away from--but something that, if endured, might make one stronger.

Clearly, not an American idea....not anymore anyway.

Which is why the Japanese version of the movie, Pulse (the original version), is better than the American version. Both are about how technology is taking over our lives; things come out of our TV sets and over our phones and drain us of our life force. Slowly people start disappearing or killing themselves for no apparent reason. That's mostly what was going on in the American film: technophobia. It had a lot of cool special effects; people turning into piles of dust and so forth.

And while technophobia plays a part in the Japanese film, something else was going on, something in a way more horrifying than anything a special effect could convey. The characters actually talked about "death," what it was, what it meant for human existence, and but most importantly death becomes the ultimate symbol of the isolation or aloneness of the individual. That's ultimately what the Japanese film was about and stated directly by the characters at different points: We are each of us alone. There is no way we can communicate with each, no way we can know or really understand each other.

The Japanese film was depressing. Yes, the heroine escapes on a ship headed to nowhere. But in the final scene, she says she has found peace sitting with her best friend, who, having been stricken by the ghosts, is now no more than a shadow on the wall. She is staring at emptiness. The American version just doesn't have that edge. Both hero and heroine escape and are heading to one those places where there is no cell phone reception.

Normal?

2010-01-31T01:46:27Z

Went to my medical person again because this stomach thing--vague nausea, loss of appetite, profound flatulence, incessant stomach gurgling (loud enough to hear across the room), non-traditional stool plus fatigue--just wouldn't remit.

I was happy to see she had on hand the results from my blood work up that is part of the yearly physical. I figured those might indicate something or better yet nothing relative to this gastrointestinal issue. And thank goodness, the results of the blood work throughout and on every item were "Normal."

That word perplexed me because it is not one I would ever think to apply to myself, not having felt normal, for at least 40 years and probably longer.

But according to the tests I fall into the norm in every area.

I have been normed but do not feel normal. You can see the word "normal" written on the test results.
But being normal did not afford a diagnostic avenue for this stomach thing.

I paid attention though when the medical person's assistant said, as she was walking me to the office, "A stomach thing, huh? I don't know what is worse. A back problem or a stomach problem." This was heartening in a way since it suggested that my stomach problem would probably prove no more fatal than the ubiquitous back problem, but not so heartening since it suggested the stomach thing could be chronic and something of a mystery--in the way back problems sometimes can be. Just one of those things--for which there is no cure precisely except to learn to live with it.

Possibly my stomach or more precisely my colon is just showing the wear and tear of age. According to the results of my colon exam a couple years back I have a good deal of diviriticula in that same colon. These can become irritated from eating the wrong sorts of food. While I may be headed in that direction I do not have full blown diverticulosis. This can be accompanied by very sharp pain and blood in the stool.

So for now--more tests most especially to check for a bladder infection, since that too could produce odd sensations in those regions--and next week I must harvest materials for a stool study to determine if I have become a habitation for a parasite.

About I can do in a personally way is to eat very bland and non-irritating foods for a couple weeks and see if that makes a difference.

Great!

So I am alive but, without Mexican food, can I call it living?

Halitosis

2010-01-26T00:36:25Z

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught this ad featuring a beautiful young woman dancing in close embrace with a handsome young man and as drew closer:

BINGO:

I am suddenly introduced to a new product. A toothbrush, actually two of them packaged together, each with a dab in the middle of the bristles of Johnny on the spot toothpaste. And this toothpaste was apparently so juicy that using it does not require the adding of water. So much for carrying around in your bag a toothbrush and a cumbersome tube of toothpaste and bottle of water. What with it being so juicy, one doesn't even head off to the bathroom, but brush behind a bush maybe and spit on the ground or something.

Talk about your convenience.

I guess the fear of halitosis runs deep. That's an odd word, halitosis. I don't hear it much any more. We now say, quite openly, "bad breath." But at one time, I think, the word served to suggest something sort of scientific that required a sort of scientific cure, like Listerine. Indeed, the Listerine people made it up by combining words from Greek and Latin. They devised a disease and gave it a scientific name.

For a long time now, women especially have been subjected to advertising suggesting that halitosis is just god awful and may completely ruin one's social life.

One ad shows a man and a women in embrace with the line "Till breath do us part." So bad breath is like death and possible grounds for divorce. Once again the ad is directed a women, suggesting that they especially must be concerned about emitting foul odors.

Below, we find that poor Milly catches the bridle bouquet. She should be next in line to wed but her friends know otherwise and they know why too. Milly has bad breath. But she doesn't know it.

Poor, poor Milly. Damn!

So there you are with a constipation so intense that you suffer loss of appetite, early weakness, nervousness, and mental dullness, but what you are really, really worried about is halitosis.

Coal Oil Point Slough

2010-01-23T20:38:04Z

I decided to check out the slough, thinking that after these heavy rains it would be maxed out. But that wasn't the case:

Some water. Yes. But lots of silt too. Possibly because the water got high enough to break on through to the ocean:

But there were some birds:

Additional pics.

Rain, Rain

2010-01-22T19:58:01Z

I think it started raining Monday and only now, Friday, does it appear to be letting up. Rare around here to have a week straight of rain (and another week appears on the horizon, a little way out).

People grumble. The rain is an inconvenience, but then they say, "Of course we need it." Because of course we do. Here in sunny Southern California.

We continue in a drought. Out where Carol and I walk, the grasses are burned out and turn charcoal black in the summer.

In class Wednesday, the row of students by the window of our horribly small room let out a gasp when the one of the trees out in the courtyard just keeled over with a bang. Luckily, it was raining so nobody was sitting on any of the benches the tree hit.

One of those damn eucalyptus. Another much bigger one fell and blocked one of the main entrances to the campus.

This eucalyptus behavior confirms me in my opinion that the eucalyptus is a pernicious weed.

And to think one of the reasons they were brought to this country was to serve as windbreaks. And as possible sources for railroad ties. Did nobody even stop to look at that corkscrew wood.

Sometimes I think the bees people get in their bonnets distract them from what is right in front of their noses.

No More Office

2010-01-16T19:40:39Z

Yesterday, I got up early, because I had a meeting at nine, and drove down to get blood drawn for the blood test for the yearly physical. Friday seems to be a good day to go because very few people were there. The lady drawing my blood asked me how I was, and I said, OK, I guess. And she said, At least you are still here (having perhaps picked up on a negative tone in my voice and the fact that I now look old), and I said, This getting old stuff is the pits. Then she started talking about how old she was--I swear she didn't look more than 45--and how she was a grandmother, and how tired she got after a day at work and then going to baby sit her daughters' children until her daughter's husband got home from work. Boy, people lead hectic lives.

She gave me the package of stuff to test your own stool. I hate that and last year I just didn't do it. She said the tests were better now and I said, yea, but they were so complicated that, well, I just tended to forget it. And she laughed really hard. I didn't think it was that funny. Maybe it was unusual for a patient just to admit well, yea, I decided to shine it on rather than come up with heaps of excuses for not having done it. Beats me.

Then I went to the meeting at nine.

Then I went to a meeting at ten. I learned there (I had some hints of this previously but hadn't paid much attention) that an "administrative reconfiguration" is going on that would mean that the Writing Program would no longer have its own office. That freaked me. I can't imagine the Writing Program without its own office. As long as the Writing Program has been the Writing Program it has had its own office. True, the turn over of staff in the WP has been enormous; still you get to know people after a while, and if you have a problem, you can go over and get some help getting it fixed, and when you walk in the office door people know who you are.

Soon we will have no office and therefore no office door to walk into and no faces on the other side that know you. Well, they may know you--but whoever they are they will be very, very busy. Because the plan is to consolidate the "administrative" aspects of the English Department (which is huge), and the Linguistics Department, and the Philosophy Department, and the lowly Writing Program in ONE office.

I wonder what the hell they will call this office; maybe the HUGE office. Sure as heck one will not get that little bit of personal touch one got in the Writing Program Office. Because sure as heck there will be fewer people in that one Huge Office than there were distributed among those four smaller offices. After all, this consolidation of offices is aimed at saving money--and would not have occurred had it not been for the ongoing financial crunch.

So some staff will be fired.

And the Writing Program will not have its own office, or dedicated administrative staff, or mail room.

This is set to happen next fall.

I left that meeting feel a little strange and light headed, perhaps from having my blood drawn.

Yearly Physical

2010-01-14T20:59:08Z

Went in for my yearly physical this morning. Don't know how many yearly physicals that makes. But it's been quite a few. The package of materials on me has reached small phone book size.

According to my PCP (primary care person) I am--and I quote--"doing great." My weight is even further down from last year to around 160. The PCP thinks I shouldn't let it go lower than that and a few more pounds wouldn't really hurt. The heart seems good, and the lungs sounded good. Also all the stuff in the lower parts is, well, hanging in there.

Still have to do the blood tests though and don't know what that will show. Brother Dave went in recently for a routine physical, and it turned out not routine at all with all sorts of follow up tests before they finally concluded that all was fine.

I think I mentioned feeling as if I were suffering a fatal attack of IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). Turns out, according to the PCP, I had an intestinal bug making the rounds, a low grade infection, down in the bowel, hard to get rid of, that makes a person feel bloated (that's what I felt) and that upsets the bowel (I had that too) and pretty much screws the appetite. I had that too. I mean I knew I was hungry but I just didn't feel like eating. At one point I started drinking a lot of water. Turns out that was the thing to do. The bug is still there a bit. But I continue drinking water and herb tea.

So things could be worse. For me, that's optimism.

On the way home from the physical, I stopped off at a Walgreens to get the H1N1 shot. Man, was that a pain. All sorts of paper work and then the person giving the shots disappeared for a half hour. So there I was mingling with a bunch of other old folks in a Walgreens waiting for a damn shot. A lady who was seated...and seemed clearly older than I...kept asking if I wanted to sit, because she would get up, if I wanted, and shouldn't feel ashamed or anything. And I kept saying no thank you and wondering how the hell old do I look or miserable that she should keep offering me her seat.

And then when the person giving the shots finally showed up, the old folks there insisted I go first (the line wasn't quite clearly defined), so I took the seat, displacing a mentally ill person who had failed to do the paper work. And the shot person kept trying to poke me through my nicotine patch, so I took it off finally. So I got up and thanked the others for their courtesy, and they said, Don't smoke. Because they had heard me talking about my nicotine patch.

And I left wondering how the hell decrepit do I look.

This getting older stuff is the pits.

For me, that's optimism.

My PCP

Cell Phones Again

2010-01-11T20:33:32Z

Some students in my morning class showed me a bit from the student paper that I had my students in the afternoon class read. The author of the piece had decided to go without his cell phone for a day. He wrote, in part:

I walked upstairs and told my roommate about my ordeal [of not using the phone]. He responded, "How would you know if any girls wanted to come over?" I just laughed in agreement, but there is a real message behind his words. People like feeling validated, feeling popular, feeling needed. Receiving and sending unproductive messages which ultimately hold no value is part of how we as a generation feel a sense of comfort and perhaps confidence. If I didn't't receive any messages in a day I would feel somewhat offended. Why don't people like me enough to want to meet up, or even just say g'day? Technology is what our generation has turned to as a means of feeling a sense of togetherness. Without Facebook and a cell phone I would feel extremely vulnerable.

My students have written things very much like this for the class blog, and the students in the afternoon class seemed to very much understand what the author of the piece was saying. It was nothing new to them. So I asked, as I do now every quarter, how frequently do you check your cell for messages. The answer was: constantly. In class too, I asked laughingly because I knew the answer. Oh yes, you bet, they said. Some phones I was told have a little light that blinks every time it gets at hit, so even without actually replying to the cell a person can sit there and track the flow.

In my next class I will have my students read a bit from Jeremy Rifkin's The Age of Access (2000) and see what they have to say. He writes in part:

" In the new world of computers, hypertext, nodes, links, and networks, the nineteenth-century idea of the self as an island--an autonomous being, solid and boundaried like the printed books and physicalcal goods bought and sold in the industrial marketplace--succumbs to a new relational self. Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard makes the point that in the electronic networks of cyberspace," the self does not amount to much ... no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations.... Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at 'nodal points' of specific communication circuits." Having access to multiple circuits--i.e., being connected--in" the new network economy is as important as being autonomous and propertied was in an earlier market economy.

Rifkin is writing here about the net, but the cell phone seems to jack up to another level the notion of "self" or the experience of having a self as somehow the result of inter-connectedness. When young people get a text message, they feel recognized.

I think, though, that, while of course, no self is an island, Rifkin may go too far in saying "the self does not amount to much..." The student felt vulnerable when disconnected from his phone. That feeling of vulnerability is an expression of the self.

The Thrill is Gone

2010-01-08T19:51:21Z

The first day of classes for the new quarter was Monday. After--and it was dark already--I bumped into a colleague and said, "You know. The thrill is gone." She said that it was still there for her, but she had previously had some horrible job for 20 years, so teaching still had a kick. I don't know, I said, but I have been teaching writing as my primary source of income since 1976. Maybe I have just worn it out.

I felt crappy. I don't like feeling the thrill is gone. But what I was feeling was a bit worse than that. I just didn't know how much longer I could go on doing it. As in, would I be able to make it through the quarter even.

The next day I woke up feeling completely washed out. I have been wrestling with some intestinal complaint and figured maybe I had contracted a fatal case of IRS (irritable bowel syndrome). Or I had stumbled into some depression hole. All I wanted to do was sleep.

Carol came home and said she knew what was wrong. One of her colleagues had missed Monday and looked terrible on Tuesday suffering from some bug that caused fatigue, headache, aching muscles and PND (post nasal drip). Honestly, that could pretty well describe my "normal" daily condition, but the idea I had a bug did help to explain the increase in intensity.

Wednesday--what do you know. Sure the IRS or whatever it is was still there, but I had some energy. That's what had not been there Monday, not so much the thrill, as no energy at all. Wednesday the classes felt better. I enjoyed myself a little, and I think it's important that teachers enjoy themselves at least a little.

So, OK. Maybe the thrill is gone. But as long as I have the energy, it's a job I can do and feel it worth doing.

Lala.com

2010-01-07T20:30:15Z

Untitled Document

The web is pretty amazing. I was clicking around randomly as they say and came across this:

I was startled. I didn't know my CD had any relationship to something called Lala.com. But I did pay 35 bucks to CD Baby and they said they would handle digital distribution. I guess they did. So I clicked on the Links there in that picture and listened to those four songs for the first time in a long time. Not too bad, I thought.

You can't click on those links here because that's a page capture.

But you can listen to the first thirty seconds of all ten songs songs on the CD if you click on the links below.

Sea of Love - Nick Tingle

This is the web for you, spreading like a spiderweb. I guess too Lala is engaged in what people call distribution or marketing. But the web is like a giant trash dump; you're not going to find anything unless you're looking for it in the first place.

Still, pretty amazing. Though I haven't made a cent on the damn CD. Wait! Except for a few kind friends who bought the CD to make me feel good. Thank you, kind friends!

And, in any case, what's really going on here is that I acting as an advertiser for Lala.