Penspective: what bird is this?

By: | November 4, 2020

On some days, one thing looks like another. It’s easy to be fooled. That’s where a pen helps.

Over the last couple years I’ve been taking pictures of objects that require scale to grasp. What I’ve used as reference is my pen, so I’m starting an ongoing LWON series of photographed objects using one for scale, calling it penspective. My hope is that fellow writers from LWON will add in with their own from time to time.

Starting this series, I give you what looks at first like a small, dead bird on the ground. Closer inspection reveals a piece of old, splintered juniper in the desert where rings in the wood have dried and split apart, forming what looks like wings, body, head, and tail.

The pen helps. I recommend carrying one around to use as a baseline, something that lets you know where an object stands. If nothing else, it helps for seeing, a reminder to look for what might be out of scale.

Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol

By: | November 1, 2020

This was first published December 8, 2016 and since then I have stopped doing yoga — not stopped needing to, just stopped doing it, the result of the pandemic and massive personal character flaws. The need for bullshit detection, however, will never stop, never.

I did not want to join yoga class.  I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure.  But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up.  I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t either.

So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the pre-K of yoga classes. I think the principle is that you get into some pose that has cosmic implications and then hold the pose until you are enlightened or bored silly.  I like the bridge pose where you lie flat on your back and put a rubber block under your butt.  I don’t much like the warrior pose where you stand with one leg bent, foot pointing forward, and the other leg straight, foot pointing sideways, arms out straight at your sides, hands turned up or down or both, I can’t get that part straight, and when I do all that I don’t have the mental reserves to keep breathing.  The less said about the pose called downward dog, the better.  I purely hate the eagle pose where you wind your arms around each other and then wrap your legs around each other and stand on one foot; I drop like a sprayed mosquito.  The teacher is forgiving:  “yogi’s choice,” she says, meaning that I’m now a yogi and I can do what I want.  She says we’re not trying to get anywhere, and I deeply appreciate not trying to get anywhere.

I enjoy a stretchy pose where you sit with a knee crossed over a leg and the opposite arm wrapped around the knee but the point is, says the teacher, to wring the toxins out of your internal organs.  I’m not going to wring out my internal organs.  Sometimes she wants us to lower our shoulders and raise our chests to open up our hearts – a phrase that gives me cardiac-surgical creeps.   The best is the sponge or corpse pose which is what it sounds like.  I’m fully competent at being a sponge, except you’re supposed to breathe in all the way up your left side and breathe out on your right because this activates your left and right brains.  I just breathe on both sides.  Then we sit on some folded-up locally-sourced blankets that smell like unwashed humanity, with legs crossed and the teacher says this is called sukhasana which means easy seat, but it’s no such thing so I stretch my legs out in front of me, yogi’s choice. We end in sukhasana with our hands in prayer and say to each other Namaste, which is apparently Sanskrit for the godhead in me salutes the godhead in you, but which my brain hears as Basta, which is Italian for stop it, enough.  I’m a polite student but noncompliant.

I’m ok with all this, even the pretend science which I’m free to ignore or better yet, to subject to Person of LWON Michelle’s stellar Bullshit Prevention Protocol (BPP) which in these days of blatant disinformation if you haven’t read, clipped out, and taped to your computer screen, you may as well join an ant colony.

Some bullshit you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain.  But it’s true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn’t hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn’t irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn’t do anything except drive.  Am I an N of 1? Does yoga work? I’d answer this but working through the full BPP takes time.

So I took two shortcuts.  One, I searched for yoga and efficacy in PubMed and skimmed the titles of review articles.  No answer, or rather, too many answers: yoga for cancer, chronic low back pain, diabetes, cystitis, sleep disorders, hypertension, schizophrenia, depression, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and that was just on the first page.

The other shortcut was no better.  I searched the website of the National Academies Press, the publications of the National Academies, the independent scientists who undertake studies for the government.  Again, yoga showed up in studies on, among others, pain management, alternative medicine, improving bus operators’ health and teens’ sleep habits, obesity, fitness, Gulf War syndrome, astronaut care, and PTSD.

My personal rule for any one thing that affects so many different diseases and functions is that it affects none of them and completely fails the BPP.  Or else it affects something huge and general like mood or immune function or both, that in turn affects everything else.

In general, what with lots of kinds of yogas, lots of different diseases, lots of different kinds of studies, and difficult-to-quantify entities like mood or immune function, I’m giving up. I haven’t a clue whether yoga helps at all, let alone how.  You’re on your own here.  For myself, I’ll keep going, not because it’s not bullshit but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains.  Besides, I’m finally getting competent at the infant version of the Sun Salute and I’ve learned never to look at the other people in the class.  But I have no plans to advance to Beginning Yoga.

_________

photo: via Wellcome Images, Creative Commons license

The poetry of the morning walk. Murmuration.

By: | October 30, 2020

This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only -1F. But the dogs were eager, the sun was shining, and my day never feels quite right without our morning ritual.

And so we pulled on our snow boots, bundled up and headed out the door. The snow was squeaky cold, and the air had a briskness that put a hustle in our strides. Halfway up the hill to the lookout, a loud ruckus. Dave turned to me. “Stop. Shhhh…” We looked at each other. “Hear that?” A lush symphony of bird song. Starlings, from the sound of it. But where?

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How are you?

By: | October 28, 2020

Lately, I’ve had some form of this conversation several times a week:

Hello!
Hello!
How are you?
Good! How are you?
Pretty good. Or, you know, good considering…everything.
[chuckle] Oh yes, me too — fine considering it all.

Usually, this is the preamble to whatever the meat of our conversation will be. But a few days ago, the person I was talking with joked that we needed a new way to respond to this question in 2020 — something way to indicate a little verbal asterisk on “fine” — and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Why does it feel so fraught to answer this question? Personally, my discomfort lies in the clashing of norms. The philosopher Paul Grice established what came to be known as Gricean maxims of language, the implicit rules we’re all following in the course of conversation. One of those norms is the maxim of quality: you’re expected to tell the truth. Saying I’m fine or good feels like a lie these days! But also, there’s the maxim of relation, which compels you to say only what’s relevant to the conversation, as well as the maxim of quantity, which requires you to succinctly reply without giving too much information, so it feels wrong to tell a near-stranger about how deflating it is to read the news or the filling replacement I had to get from grinding my teeth too much in my sleep. Lose-lose!

Plus, the very question we’re being asked doesn’t actually mean what we think. Usually, in conversation, it’s safe to assume that words just mean what they mean, but “how are you” is a slightly different type of speech — linguists call it a “phatic expression.” Here’s one delightful characterization of phatic communication, from a 1992 paper:

talk that is aimless, prefatory, obvious, uninteresting,
sometimes suspect, and even irrelevant, but part of the
process of fulfilling our intrinsically human needs for
social cohesiveness and mutual recognition.

In other words, it’s conversational filler — a scripted interaction. In the same way we mindlessly reply “you’re welcome” when someone thanks us, we reflexively say “good” or “fine” when we’re asked how we are. (In fact, the other day, after I asked someone how he was and he replied and asked me in return and I replied, I then accidentally asked him again, just out of habit.) It’s weird to break out of that reflex.

This has always been an issue, of course. Anyone who’s gone through any kind of personal crisis — an illness, a family death, a breakup — knows the discomfort of cringing at the question, then lying through our teeth to keep the social peace. And when we don’t, we make it weird for everyone. The authors of that 1992 paper highlight an old linguist joke (the best kind of joke):

A: How are you?
B: I have bursitis; my nose is itching; I worry about my
 future; and my uncle is wearing a dress these days.

(While we're on the subject of linguistics jokes, a brief
 diversion: My husband, a former linguist, tells me that
 another common joke among linguists is to reply to one
 phatic expression with a mismatched reply from a different
 phatic expression, like: "How are you?" "Not much, you?")

Beyond the joke, this type of reply represents a real phenomenon: when things aren’t fine, we’re more likely to reply to how are you as if it’s an actual question, and not just phatic speech. A couple papers — that delightful 1992 one I keep referencing, and a 2003 paper geared towards nurses working in mental health — report that patients at care facilities being asked how are you sometimes assume the question is phatic, but also use it as a launching off point to talk about how they actually are. A patient might say, “Not so bad,” but then tack on a mention of their arthritis flaring up last Sunday, or how they’ve recently really been missing their late husband. The asker can do things to prime an honest response, too: the 2003 paper suggests caregivers ask follow-up questions like “what do you mean by ‘fine’?”

In the before times, we breezed through our little language rituals without much thought. But now, we’re wondering about the weight of those words: how are we? We’re living through a pandemic, we’re grappling with anti-Blackness and white supremacy, we’re on the cusp of an incredibly important election. None of us are fine and we all know it. So many other norms have been reset recently; why not this one? I, for one, would be delighted to know how you really are, warts and depression and anxiety and all, especially if it means we all feel a bit more sane for it.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons; street art in Austin, TX by Daniel Johnston.)

Mounting evidence to the contrary

By: | October 26, 2020

If you asked me in the abstract, and I wasn’t thinking about it too hard, I might tell you that most people are a bit stupid. A bit provincial, a bit ignorant, a bit wrapped up in consumer culture. I might think, if not say, that your average Joe is a bit of a philistine, a little bit trite, that the sales figures for tabloids and Hallmark cards don’t lie.

But then there are the people I meet.

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Guest post: Waiting for the End

By: | October 23, 2020

I have never watched anyone die before, so I didn’t realize how much of it would be time spent watching Ativan dissolve in Morphine. The mixture is cloudy sea glass blue, ocean colored when it comes together. Florida is swamp hot in September, so hard to breathe, and I’m here swirling the two together in a graduated measuring cup every four hours, then every two, then every single one.

Every morning I’m sure my aunt will be gone, but now it’s been a week and each day she’s skinnier and greyer, groaning more, fighting less, but still breathing. When we hold her to wash her or turn her our fingers make pockmarks on her skin that don’t spring back, a sign that her circulation is slowing. This is supposed to be the good way to go, hospice at home, but instead it feels almost inhumanely drawn out, like we’re wallowing in the pain.

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The Fall of the Giant

By: | October 21, 2020

The sky was a deep sapphire blue the day they cut down the giant. It was a matter of time, we knew, because they had already cleared out the scrub oaks and the wild cherry trees and the scraggly mountain mahogany. But it was still a shock to see it fall. 

The giant must have been 300 feet tall. Actually I have no idea, because I am really lousy at guessing these things. But it was huge. The height of a mid-size building. Like, not a restaurant, not one of those bland dun-colored bank offices, but a proper building, one with at least 10 floors and possibly more, not quite a skyscraper but definitely tall enough to warrant an elevator.  

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Gold Fever

By: | October 19, 2020

Last week my mother and I drove up into the Sierra Nevada and stopped at a creek lined with aspens, their leaves falling on the water like lucky gold coins. 

We passed a wedding party, bridesmaids clutching bouquets with one hand and using the other to keep their sheer purple dresses from flying up in the wind. 

Minivans, cars and trucks lined the highway, and people piled out into the meadows with their camera phones to take seasonal family photos.

Once, I might have been snippy about the hordes of tourists flooding Hope Valley, never-you-mind the hypocrisy of being one of them.

But these are pandemic times, wildfire times, and instead I recognized my fellow leaf-peepers as thirsty hummingbirds sipping on the nectar of fall color; exhausted pilgrims lining up to be anointed.

Dusty and ragged after this punishing summer, we Californians treasure our fleeting few weeks of pale yellow foliage. Dreaming of the rain that we hope will soon wet them, we lick the leaves and press them to our hearts.