Category Archives: Uncategorized

I think my lips match the song in this one.

Wednesday of this last week was hot for us. Eighty degrees at four o’clock, and with no air conditioning and afternoon light streaming in my classroom was cooking and my students sagging. Just as I was to start, in walks this young, handsome guy with lots of hair (unlike me) with tattoos running up and down his arms and his little dog trailing behind him on a leash. He said he was from the Arts Department and had an announcement to make. I said OK, since I don’t mind announcements. Then the guy began to read from a prepared statement indicating that I, Nick Tingle, had been selected Distinguished Teacher of the Year (2009-2010) from among the non-senate faculty.

I was embarrassed and surprised sitting there having praise heaped on me. The students didn’t really get what was going on, but applauded politely at the appropriate moment. The guy took his dog from a student who had been holding it and left. Then I had to teach for an hour and forty minutes. By the time that was over, I felt as if the whole thing with the guy with the dog and tattoos had been an hallucination.

I honestly wasn’t sure it had happened. The University makes mistakes. For example, I knew I had been nominated for the honor, and I had been informed in an email that the person selected would be notified by the end of last week. Having not heard anything by the end of that week, I concluded I had been passed over, and had already gone through denial and then anger in the grieving process. What a waste of energy…and then this guy shows up.

Given who I am (paranoid) and the slight irregularity of the situation, I still was not convinced it had happened the following morning. Eventually though I got this: Tingle.pdf

So it looks like it did happen, and I have indeed been selected as Distinguished Teacher of the Year (2009-2010).

And I am honored.

The guy with tattoos.

Just got my grades and my TA’s grades in this last Tuesday. Then spent a couple of days getting stuff ready for the next quarter which starts TOMORROW!

Not much of a Spring Break, though that’s always the case. Winter and Spring Quarters just blur into each other making one 22 week marathon.

New quarter makes 93 quarters that I have taught at UCSB. I doubt I will make the 100 quarter club. I will probably retire before that, though if I throw in my time as a Teaching Assistant, I am already there. In the 100 Quarter Club.

Not that there is such a thing.

After a heavier than usual rainfall at Coal Oil Point near Goleta, CA, USA:

The L.A. Times ran a not bad article on the affect of depressed mothers upon their children.  A  selected quotation:

The harmful effects [of a parent’s depression] on children were summed up last year in a report by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. Problems begin early, as the infants of depressed mothers cry more than other babies. They have greater fear of strangers and less tolerance for frustration, according to the report. Starting in preschool, kids with depressed parents are more likely than classmates to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Across all stages of childhood, they have more behavior problems at school and higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders.

By adolescence, children with depressed parents have poorer
social relations than the teens of parents who aren’t depressed, and
they’re more likely to be dependent on alcohol and drugs, the federal
report indicates. Depression in parents also is linked to poorer
academic performance, according to studies in the report.

And some harmful effects of growing up with a depressed parent
appear to linger well into adulthood. A 20-year study following the
children of depressed parents and a comparison sample of kids whose
parents had no mental disorders found that those with depressed
parents suffered about triple the rate of anxiety disorders and
depression by their 30s, were in poorer health than peers and much
more likely to be dependent on drugs and alcohol. The study, believed
to be the longest ever done on kids of depressed parents, was
published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2006.

These effects may not only be long-lasting but also
far-reaching. Serious depression affects about one in five American
parents, and 15.6 million children live with an adult who has had
major depression in the last year, according to government data.

They go a little into theory:

About one in 11 infants has a mother with major depression, according to a research update report last December by Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. Healthy emotional and brain development depends on a “serve and return” interaction, just like a tennis game. Tots engage parents’ attention, prompting parents to respond with words or facial expressions, which stimulate more infant communication.

If caregivers are withdrawn or hostile, this shuts down the
game and may even alter the architecture of the child’s brain.

Of course long before brain scans gave us terms like “brain architecture” psychoanalysts were onto this stuff by simply listening to their clients.  Too bad we needed brain scans to confirm that a non-responsive mother (or father) can especially, in the earliest phases of development, do great damage to the psyche of the infant. That the infant needs to experience itself in a relatively safe environment (Winnicott: good enough mothering) ought to be obvious.

I don’t think I felt all that safe since my mother thought–and I quote–that I am “the devil’s spawn.”

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.

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.”