Dearest Rosalynn, rest in peace eternal. Few deserve that rest as much as you do. You will be deely mourned and greatly missed. And that mourning will not be for your fate, but for our own loss. Don’t begrudge it to us.
I am not up to a real tribute yet, although I am slowly but steadily improving. But I suspect by the time everyone has seen this, the comments will be filled wwith tributes, including some to Jimmy, whi is now, at least for a while, alone.
Personal:
I woke up this morning without my usual back pain – oddly, the same thing happened when I was in the hospital – after I moved to rehab, I continued to wake up pin free untill the final 3 or 4 days I was there. It appears my body craves a change of bed every couple of weeks or so. Well, sorry, body, that’s not going to happen. But thanks for the respite.
From now, I’ll try to keep posting at least every other day, though it’s likely to be short It isn’t just me – I need to get things done around the house to make it safer, some of which I should have already done, and that takes time. So the house has to heal was well as me. I do have one contractor coming tomorrow. But Rome, as they say, wasn’t built in a day, and neither will this be. Stay tuned for updates.
So, first full day home amd I am grumpy as a grinch. No one’s fault (unless there are some kind of gremllins that are in charge of these things.) And it’s a story going back to 1976, when , newly out of the Marine Corps, I sprained my ankle. Of course I used “RICE” and eventually it stopped hurting – until the late 1990s, when it started to notify me that I had osteoarthritis there. That was when I started using a cane. I would not call that a flare-up – just a more or less constant annoyance which gradually eased off. I didn’t forget about the sprain, because it had affected the angle of the left foot a little, as well as the configuration of the arch area (which is a story in itself, but not for now), which were always reminders, but I had forgotten about the pain – until today, when I woke up with a full-blown flare-up – along with my usual back pain, which is on the right side. Suddenly, when neither leg is weightbearing, using a walker wasn’t so easy any more. Normally I ise the TENS in the den (at the opposite end of the house from the bedroom) but I wasn’t going to get there without something giving. Fortunately I remembered I had taken a spare TENS to the bedroom ages ago – the pads were smaller than I use on my back (they were intended for my shoulder) and the TENS had gottn unplugged from the charger somehow (fortunately there was enough charge to get me vertical) so I made it to the den, getting ice for the ankle along the way, so I’m much more comfortable now. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the flareup won’t be back tomorrow morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that, for up to four weeks. I did get a new wheelchair ordered, the samre make and model I have been using to visit Virgil, but one size smaller because doors (and just enough weight loss to fit comfortably),but that was about it. I did note that, one day after SCOTUS adopted a “Code of Ethics, ” pundits are saying it is about as efficacious as a paper parasol in a hurricane – which was what I had guessed, and y’all had probably also guessed.
I shall now leave the “den” (and therefore the good computer) for the living room for a while, and attempt to find some things that I know I packed to come home with me – so they must be somewhere – but I haven’t figured out where yet. Wish me luck!
The call went swimmingly … it did end up requiring help from one of the hospital staff who was most gracious also. We could hear eaxh other clearly (lix\ke most of our convwersations, it was fairly monotonous – a lot of “I love you,” “I love you too,” :I miss you,” I miss you too”s But it lifted both our spirits
If I can find a way to express my gratitude to Governor Polis without getting intercepted by some Karen just waiting to jump on someone for being compassionate, I shall. But Karens can be sneaky.
I am packing up the lapto now, to save time later, and to force me to watch and read the instructions for discharge So probably no more till tomorrow. – even responding to comments.
I wish this meant that I’m fully recovered. It doesn’t. It does mean that I am recovered enough to manage my own recovery from here. And that means work. And that means less time and energy for PP during the process.
It does, of course, also mean a good shot at a better future. But that will require patience… and we all know cats and patience.
On the bright side, I just got a call from Virgil’s facility and they will arrange a call from him today between my therapies. Woo hoo!
This article is from John Pavlovitz, the Evangelical Christian pastor who was kicked out by his congregation for preaching Christianity (he’s not the only one but may be the best known.)
I’m going to be leaning on random articles for a while, and not every day at that. This one is kind of a companion to Freya’s newest Sound Off!, but looking forward. (It had also occurred to me that we might build on these election successes, so dependent on turnout all) with variations on “See now? That wasn’t so bad/difficult/painful to vote/ We can keep doing it,” but I digress.) John’s points too are important.
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Polls don’t vote. People Do.
By John Pavlovitz
Friends,
Last week was a reminder that elections aren’t won by the media, they’re won by voters.
You’d think we’d have figured this out by now, watching an antiquated process that has proven over and over again in recent years to be less and less reliable in measuring the actual intentions of the electorate. In both terrible and wonderful ways, we’ve all watched the results of contests roll in and defy the prevailing narrative that ushered them in.
And it isn’t simply the faulty nature of the assessment tools that’s a problem, it’s the emotional impact of them on ordinary people; of the toll of these tools on the voting population—in the hands of mainstream media outlets that in an ever-crowded landscape, strain to command the attention of the nation the way they once did.
Simply put: sound, rational leadership, the kind offered by President Biden and the Democrats, is boring.
Competence is boring.
Emotional maturity is boring.
Thoughtful discussion of complex ideas is boring.
Consensus and compromise are boring.
And boring is bad for business.
These things don’t move the needle of mass attention, they don’t garner hits and clicks and trend. They can’t be leveraged to drive engagement and lure eyeballs and sustain urgency.
For that, the media requires chaos.
For that, they need the sideshow.
For that, they need the sh*show.
For that, they want Donald Trump and his cadre of content creators.
The Republican Party is a giant human car crash: a headline-generating monstrosity that daily traffics in manufactured emergencies, culture war histrionics, unhinged rants, and abhorrent behavior. It is a regular creator of the laughably horrible that is honestly tragic for our nation’s government but riveting as performance art.
What this all means, is that because we now exist in perpetually-flooded inboxes and timelines, the mainstream media will never lead with a story that is based on reasoned responses, on measured conversations, on sound policies. In these days, the steady, mature leadership of President Biden and the Democrats isn’t profitable.
And ultimately what this means for us is that we need to ignore all the polls other than the ones we marshal people to, the ones we enter on those pivotal Tuesdays, the ones we collectively flip the script in.
If we continue to work toward those polls, we will prevail. We will create a nation that is slowly weaned from needing its politics to entertain and become a place where terrifying crises and unnecessary drama are relegated to fiction.
Last week, We the People need to remember that although we face legislative threats and Conservative assaults, for now, our voices and our choices determine our fate.
And if good people organize and work and show up, we can still be the difference in the day.
It can be boring but beautiful.
Be encouraged.
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GBS (George Bernard Shaw) and GKC (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) were British intellectuals of the early (roughly first quarter of the) 20th century. Shaw was an atheist, Chesterton a convert too Roman Catholicism. There’s a story that once they encountered eaxh other and Chesterton said, “Shaw, anyone who saw you might think there was a famine in England,” and Shaw replied, “And anyone looking at you might think he had found the cause of it. Shaw was a lifelong bachelor, Cwesterton a devoted husband. Clearly they had little in common. But there was one thing (at least) on which they agreed.
Nameless asked me in an email whether I had an idea of goals toward discharge, and whether I was being unexpectedly moved around and returned to my room (as his Mom was after hip surgery and found annoying.) Well, his Mom (and others who felt the same) must have impacted the standards of care.
Yesterday, here is the printout schedule I received (abbreviated):
OT 7:15-8:15 patient room
OT 8:15-8:45 patient room
PT 10:00-11:00 Gym (This was a sitdown lecture/roundtable on avoiding future falls)
PT 11:30-12:00 Gym
It all adds up to 3 hours, so I know it’s the full schedule – they have promised me three hours a day and no more (it may even be only 5 days a week.)
As far as goals toward getting out, that iis largely what they are working on shaping for me. The first PT workout Tuesday was exhausting, but it gave me a very clear idea of what they want me to be able to do. Some of it I can do now but need repetition to build strength and stamina – like walking with a walker around the gym. Tuesday I did it and it didn’t affect my oxygen but it skyrocketed my pulse. Yesterday I did it much more easily. (Interestingly, Tuesday also made it clear that my pulse going up presents as shortness of breath. But I digress.) Other tasks I can do but not in the target time frame. Still others – mostly those involving balance – not in this universe at this time (It’s not the fall – I have had balance issues my whole life. Of course the upside of that is that I have a pretty good idea of my limitations.) So specific goals are being formed, and I haven’t looked, but it would not surprise me if they are being slipped into the binder they gave me. And if not, I can probably request a copy. Also, at my leisure, the center’s TV system has about a dozen treatment-related videos, including one about what to expect on the discharge day.
I hope no one else here will ever need to go to rehab. But if you do, I hope this will help you have an idea what to expect, and mitigate any fear or nervousness. And the staff have been great (sure, some are better than others,and sure, some of them, being demanding is their job, so they are not going to seem as warm as others. But they are good at what they do.)
This is all for today, other than reading and rating comments (and responding to a few.) Today But rest assured I’m feeling good for the circumstances and getting better.
Today is the Marine Corps Birthday. Trinette has the day free after a long hard week of training and will be able to visit in daylight even in standard time. I shan’t be idle.
Click the picture for a guided tour
p. s. They also have an in-house psychologist! We just met, and I don’t think I’ll need her, but then I didn’t have surgery, so no mind numbing anesthesia, and besides I have Trinette and you all.
Just a short rant today based on what I have been watching on PBS (having nothing better to do).
Cultural genocide is something of which we and Canada are both guilty. We largely used boarding schools and techniques like washing kids’ mouths out with soap should one, God forbid, breathe a Native American word. Canada mostly used breaking up families by adoption into different cultures, doing all they could to avoid siblings ever meeting again. (If you want your heart broken, a dramatization called “Little Bird” addresses just one of these stories – PBS aired it but it was not made for them and may well be available to stream for free if you search.)
You probably know some of this. You may know all of it. You may even know what I didn’t but learned from an elderly Di’neh on one of the shows whose mouth survived the soap – That as we were doing this to them, we told them we were doing it because “Tradition is the enemy of progress.” Yes, you read that right. One of the most unprogressive populations in history, patriarchal white Americans, justified themselves to their victims by citing “progress.”
And now, pleading before the Supreme Court of the US, y are arguing in a 2A case that a DV abuser should be allowed to have guns because “tradition.”
Someone needs to tell them that
“TRADITION IS THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS!”
JD update by JD:
Yes, I moved to rehab yesterday, just before sunset. Until an hour before it happened, I had excected just to move up one floor, but the plan changed so fast I had to move in a gown. Trinette (my Wendy) was in work training And I did NOT want to interrupt, but after the long day I reached her and she brought me two complete outfits and other comforts.
I am now in the care of Encompass Health (719) 630-8000) in Room 227. It is a double but I know not whether there is an A/B. I had initial PT/OT eval today which was mostly exhausting physical tests, some downright scary, and I’m very tired, but I have found on line (and have a date with) the opera local PBS cheated me out of because God forbid some innocent child might hear a gay word. But I’ll leave you with a picture of Trinette in one of the first sweaters I have made for her – and pick up my knitting (one of the other comforts she brought last night) and keep my opera date.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
If anyone feels that today’s article coupled with my remarks constitute more of a personal rant than a political statement, I won’t disagree. However, if politics is to be regarded as a means of improving (and then maintaining and building upon those improvements – a proposition which seems to be losing suppport, but which should not be, then the personal Is political – is, indeed, the foundation of all politics. And it distresses me personally me that we seem to be going backwards, not only on this political point, but also on our cultural understanding of reality. I am not old enough to have see Christine Jorgenson in a movie, but I am old enough to have heard about her, and heard that she was a female soul (or person, or personality – I’m sure not everyone used the word soul – born into a male body. That made sense to me thenm and it still makes sense as an explanation, and still makes it quite clear that Christine had no choice in the matter. Yet, we were told then, and many of our worse, this youth are still being told today, that “gay” is a choice. Because “God doesn’t make mistakes.” No one appears to grasp the implication here -that, “No, God doesn’t make mistakes. You just think, in your arrogance, that you know what constitutes a mistake better than God does.” Dorothy L. Sayers knew better than that – in a novel published in the 1930’s, she has the character of a poorly educated farmer say of an elderly lesbian, “The Lord makes some on ’em that way to suit his own purposes.” These days, our “poorly educated” think they know better then their own all-knowing God.
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Biological sex is far from binary − this college course examines the science of sex diversity in people, fungi and across the animal kingdom
Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.
Title of course:
Diversity of Biological Sex Characteristics
What prompted the idea for the course?
Most people view biological sex, or the physical features related to reproduction, as simple and binary – either male or female. Even those who recognize that gender – referring to cultural norms around biological sex, or a person’s internal feeling of being masculine, feminine or both – can be complex and nuanced don’t see biological sex in the same way. Many also regard variability in sex and gender as exclusive to people – not found in nonhuman animals.
I am a behavioral neurobiologist who has been teaching human physiology since 1998. Over the past several years, I have focused my reading and writingon the biology of sex. It struck me that many of my students had misguided assumptions about sex characteristics, including that all people are physically either 100% male or 100% female.
First, we examine why sexual reproduction evolved in any species. This question is still hotly debated among biologists because sex is inefficient. It requires time and energy to find a suitable mate and unite your sex cells, plus it allows you to pass on only half your genes to your offspring.
In comparison, asexual reproduction – essentially cloning yourself – is much more efficient. You don’t have to find a mate, and everyone can produce offspring themselves because there are no males. In biology, “male” refers to an individual that makes small sex cells like sperm, and “female” refers to an individual that makes large sex cells like eggs.
Sex characteristics manifest in different ways across the animal kingdom.
We then transition from nonhuman animals to people, via the brain. We learn about a few smallbrain structures in vertebrates that likely have reproductive functions and are differently sized in females versus males on average. We also learn that most people have some brain structures that are more typically male, others that are more typically female and still others that are intermediate – in other words, most people are mosaics of female-typical and male-typical brain sex characteristics.
Perhaps more than ever, there is a debate about how to treat people who do not fit neatly into a female or a male box. Many assume that biological sex is binary and regard transgender and nonbinary people as mistaken or confused. In addition, for many decades, intersex infants have undergone surgical procedures to make them appear more typically male or female. Even those who support transgender, nonbinary and intersex people often assume that biological sex is binary. But this assumption is not anchored in evidence.
What will the course prepare students to do?
Students often say that before they took this course, they had no idea biological sex characteristics could be so diverse, despite having taken several biology courses.
An improved awareness of the complexity of biological sex may help shape the research and teaching of future biologists. This will help them design experiments that take account of the diversity of their subjects and be more inclusive in their teaching. It may also help all students ask better questions and make better judgments about social and political issues related to sex and gender.
Ari Berkowitz, Presidential Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Biology; Director, Cellular & Behavioral Neurobiology Graduate Program, University of Oklahoma
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, that’s really all I have to say – and no doubt it’s more than enough.
