Absquatulate

Getting Public

I've pulled back quite a bit on this site over the last few years. Life. It kind of gets in the way. But on thing I'd love to tap the wonders of the intarweb is fitness and exercise. I've just started logging exercise at Daily Run. I'm trialing it for now, but I'm also using Run Keeper on my iPhone to track the actual workout. Anybody out there want to join in and start a group to stay motivated?

Hi. Whatcha reading? | MetaFilter

I also want to show why women might end up coming across "cold" to men, EVEN IF they don't think of a guy as a potential rapist.

Hi. Whatcha reading? | MetaFilter

An unusually good, long post on a MeFi thread about why women come off as cold sometimes. Read it and wonder why we are the way we are, men and women alike.

UPDATE: Here's the short article/blog post that started it all: Shrodinger's Rapist. Read that first for the 'theory', then the MeFi post for the 'reality'.

Bucket list?

Well I don't really see this as a bucket list, but hey I was tagged most recently by Dr. W to fill this thing out, and it's one I don't mind doing:

Things you have done during your lifetime:

(X) Gone on a blind date
(X) Skipped school
() Watched someone die
( X ) Been to Canada
(X ) Been to Mexico
( X ) Been to Florida
( ) Been to Hawaii
(X) Been on a plane
(X ) Been on a helicopter
( X ) Been lost
( X ) Gone to Washington, DC
( X ) Swam in the ocean
(x) Cried yourself to sleep
( X ) Played cops and robbers
(X ) Recently colored with crayons
(X ) Sang Karaoke
( x) Paid for a meal with coins only and recently, too!
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(X ) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't
(X) Made prank phone calls
( ) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
(x) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
(x) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Danced in the rain-naked
(X ) Written a letter to Santa Claus
(x ) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(x ) Watched the sunrise with someone
( X ) Blown bubbles
(x) Gone ice-skating
( X ) Gone to the movies
() Been deep sea fishing
(X ) Driven across the United States
( ) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
( ) Gone snowmobiling
( ) Lived in more than one country
( x) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
(x ) Seen a falling star and made a wish
( ) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
( X ) Seen the Statue of Liberty
( ) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
(X) Been on a cruise
(X) Traveled by train
( ) Traveled by motorcycle
(X) Been horse back riding
(X) Ridden on a San Francisco CABLE CAR
( ) Been in a rain forest
(X ) Been to Niagara Falls
( ) Ridden on an elephant
( ) Ridden on a camel
( x) Swam with dolphins
( ) Been to the Olympics
( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China
( ) Saw and heard a glacier calf
( x) Been spinnaker flying
( ) Been water-skiing WITH dolphins!
(X) Been snow-skiing (and snowboarding!)
( ) Been to Westminster Abbey
( ) Been to the Louvre (not yet, but it's in the works for next year)
( ) Swam in the Mediterranean
(x ) Been to a Major League Baseball game
() Been to a National Football League game
( ) Seen the pyramids in Egypt
( ) Seen the Eiffel tower in Paris from an airplane
( ) Seen the Running of the Bulls in Spain
( ) Been jet skiing
( ) Driven a Race Car
( x) Been over 100mph on a highway
(X) Been to a drive-in theatre
() Got an F as a final grade (C- was the closest I got)
( ) Been on the Concorde
( ) Been to an National Hockey League game
( ) Totalled a car in an accident
(X) Spent the night in a hospital (sevel total!)

Well - Kept From a Dying Partner’s Bedside - NYTimes.com

Well - Kept From a Dying Partner’s Bedside - NYTimes.com.

I must be fortunate as it seems I live in an area where families of all kinds are given access to loved ones during a crisis.  However that's not the case in some parts of the country.  I might have the heterosexual luxury of presenting as a married couple, but not all committed, loving couples look like the one I'm in. 

We are not alone

I just watched this talk from TED (the smartaymanz conference) from John Hodgman and I laughed and cried and was rendered almost in two by his touching account of life in the universe. If I say any more I might ruin it:

Neuroscience: A History

Often I am want to forget how fascinated I am with neuroscience. Undergrad was tumultuous, for reasons known only to those involved and that's fine. I've finally gotten myself back on track with my graduate degree in Communication Disorders and blog entries like these make me regret my undergrad course of study a little bit. I wasn't ready, I was depressed, I was too far from home. But regardless, it's a big part of who I am and it's not too late to set things right. I'd like to believe there's still a place in this world for the thinker.

Nesting

Not quite the type of nesting my sister is doing for sure, but since being felled by pneumonia I've created a nest for myself on the couch in the living room. Within a 3 foot radius are the following:

• A tank of oxygen, just in case
• A box of tissues
• Every remote control known to man
• Two empty glasses, each of which once contained ginger ale
• My digital camera
• A heating pad that also vibrates
• A down comforter
• Three blankets
• A thermometer
• The stuffed tiger my sister got me when I was in the ICU
• One pillow from the bed
• My DS Lite
• Get well cards from the Cedrones and the Belangers
• My discharge info from the hospital
• Jess's wedding invitation
• My machine, on which I am spending TOO MUCH TIME booking flights to Pittsburgh, looking at www.nau.com, and reading blogs
• A copy of The Smithsonian Magazine
• Thank you notes waiting to be written to all the kind people who sent their best wishes to me over the last two weeks

Why get up? My only wish was that turning on the WII or the PS2 didn't involve getting up and bending over, which makes me very dizzy.

Perspective

Before this illness rececdes into that murky fog of memory there were a few things I wanted to jot down before I forget them that I also thought you might find amusing or interesting.

During my hospital stay, especially the first three nights, I was incredibly sick. My kidneys had started to shut down, I was very dehydrated and had a very hard time breathing. I also hadn't slept more than three hours in four days. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I don't think I am. Every time I would doze off I would wake myself up coughing. Repeat every 30 minutes, and you end up a little delirious. By the time I was in the hospital I was out of my gourd. Mind you I was still quite lucid, but the hallucinations! My god, I had no idea they could be THAT real. In the room there was an observation window which was covered with a curtain with some sort of tapestry pattern on it. I spent hours during the night watching the pattern of the curtain flip in and out, sort of like an advent calendar, watching characters out of Hieronymous Bosch paintings look to me, wave hello, and morph into something else. It was fascinating yet quite disturbing as the characters became more grotesque and more evil as my stay wore on.

The second night I was there I asked for something to help me sleep; between the full re-breather mask and vitals being checked every 2 hours I was hardly sleeping at all. They offered me some Ativan and I took it, and rather than make me more sleepy it made me hallucinate even MORE. The turning point came when I was describing to Steve and the nurse, quite calmly, how in the reflection of the window there was the three of us, the hospital bed, and then two children right behind the nurse. A boy, about age 4, from the early 20th century perhaps, wearing a tweed hat, white shirt, knickers, and his sister, just behind him, both of them talking to each other (although I couldn't hear them) and looking directly at me, smiling and waving. When I looked back to the nurse and to Steve their eyes were are big as saucers. I told them that wasn't the HALF of the stuff I'd been seeing over the last few nights. I'm not sure if they administered something to either make me go to sleep or what, but after that I think I blacked out, and as my hydration returned to normal and my kidneys kicked in, the room wasn't quite as terrifying as it had been those first two nights.

What was absolutely amazing to me was how REAL the hallucinations were, and how LUCID I felt looking at them. I was clearly conscious, I was oriented for almost the entire time (at the end I had trouble telling people where I was or what day it was), and it was just a fact that I was seeing all this STUFF, all these people looking in and out of that window, peeking from behind that curitain, standing off in the corner. It was was, similar to how we assume that London exists even though we might not have been there ourselves.

Reality is so incredibly tenuous, tied so closely to a couple million cells packed into our cranium that only shares the same reality as all the other craniums in the world because biology makes it so. Mess that up and reality becomes a whole different matter. What is real? What we see? What we measure? What we believe? In those 48 hours reality was kids coming to visit, old guys with evil smiles and long fingers passing in and out of that curtain, medieval peasants walking to and fro across the window, and that brother and sister, stopping by to say hi.

I'm Not Dead Yet...

I had these grandiose ideas of publishing links the week after BAW to highlight your magnificent brain (and okay, nervous system too) and all the amazing things it does.

And then I was going to wrap things up, head on a plane, go to San Francisco, tour the Six Apart offices, meet one of Steve's good friends, meet WhitneyB in the flesh for the first time ever, eat alot of sushi, enjoy some sunshine possibly, and wear some new threads I bought exclusively for the excessively hip SanFran fashioni.st scene.

What did I do instead?

Which do you choose?

Enjoy this amazing talk from TED from Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who describes her experiences when she suffers a hemmorage and how it changed her.

And quite frankly, it has changed me, and what it means to be treating adults with aphasia.

I missed Brain Awareness Week, having mistakenly thought it was THIS week. But rather than wait another 51 weeks to celebrate it again, I'll push it on into this week and feature a new brainy post each day for your amusement (or consternation :).

Update: Video link fixed.