Category: Psychology

Brian Eno believes that singing is the key to a good life

From an interesting NPR article, here’s Brian Eno on singing as a path to happiness:

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Transphobia

Quoted from today’s tyee.ca:

 

Ten Signs of Transphobia in Our Culture, by Christopher A. Shelley

 

  1. Denial that the problem exists in the first place. 

     

  2. Inability to distinguish between categories such as queer, gay, lesbian, and trans. 

     

  3. Lack of meaningful discussion in educational and workplace settings. 

     

  4. Anxiety over not being able to tell if a person is male or female. 

     

  5. Crude jokes directed towards trans people or with trans-related content. 

     

  6. Refusal to accept trans people as one’s own teacher, doctor, politician, dentist, etc. 

     

  7. Thinking that being trans is OK but also dismissing the idea of ever dating a transperson. 

     

  8. Reducing trans to being merely and solely a psychiatric category. 

     

  9. Trivialization and media spectacles centred on trans-ness as an object of ‘fascination.’ 

     

  10. Refusing the fundamental claims of transpeople as being genuinely mis-sexed.

 

Book launch for Transpeople: Repudiation, Trauma, Healing. Event begins at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 25, at Little Sister’s bookstore, 1238 Davie St., Vancouver. RSVP to awilson@utpress.utoronto.ca.

Releasing my inner zombie /coffee

Wow, I guess I always subconsciously knew this.

Do you know what I’d do if I was at home, and there was an earthquake, and my house didn’t collapse or catch fire?

After I ensured that the cats and my brother were safe, I’d send Jeff on a mission to get another propane canister or two, and I’d make coffee.  I’d light the barbecue burner on the back deck and boil water to make coffee with.  Coffee is hot.  Coffee wakes you up. And coffee is what you are going to want when you’ve been pulling people out of buildings all morning.

The global system of commerce may collapse (I personally have my doubts that it will do anything but restructure itself after years of privation, just like the last time) but as long as people want sugar and coffee and there’s a boat that can carry them, I’m not too worried about the future of my relationship with coffee.

I mentioned coffee is hot.  A study on social isolation – it’s in the last couple of days on eurekalert.org – says that social isolation makes people literally feel cold.  That’s why hot food is an integral part of social connectedness and discourse in this and any other culture, whether it’s a tropical country or not.

After I made coffee I’d deliver it to people who needed it.  Then I’d go back to the barbecue and make an immense pot of oatmeal.  Then I’d start taking stuff out of the freezer and cooking it so it didn’t go bad.  That’s what I’d do – I’d stay close to my technologically sophisticated hearth.

How bigotry plays out in the courts

Transgender vs Library….

I had met one transgender person in my life before the welcoming congregation process at the U*U church.  Then I met two and it was quite startling.  There’s no one standard transgender person.  You can SAY all women are alike, but you know they’re not.  You can SAY all black people are alike, and that’s another damned lie.  I can understand the hiring authority being confused, but not staying confused…..

Anyway, it’s a good article and quite thought provoking.

The shame, the shame

I’m not posting the link, because my spine curls and my skin shrivels at the notion of linking to ANYthing with Paris Hilton in it, but Paris Hilton’s response video to McCain is pretty funny.  I think my favourite part is where she’s trying really hard to look presidential….

I guess there are a lot of sites I don’t like admitting going to, but hey, once you’ve admitted you had a picture of Trudeau on your wall when you were a kid, and that you pooped your pants in the Parliament buildings when you were a kid, and that you like classic seventies porn especially anything with Marilyn Chambers in it,  it’s obvious that shame is not the motivating factor. Mike showed me Autobiography of a Flea on the weekend, and I loved it.

Shame…. is there any?  I mean, I’m not exhibiting much.  I must claim to some.  After all, my parents read this blog, but I know that my mother isn’t reading right now and my dad doesn’t bother when my mom’s not around, so bwa ha ha!  I feel liberated to talk about badshit!  Actually not, if I want to talk about badshit I use the “whining” or “sexxxay” filter in livejournal.

Whining is for when it’s obvious that it’s time to ‘bang a teakettle’ in the shtetl phrase.  What?  No Yiddish?  Let me elaborate.  This is from Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions by Arthur Naiman, as I recollect (and Cousin Reck likes it too, so there).  Anyway, in the days of the pogroms back in oldt contry, when a woman had absolutely had her fill of her domestic situation, she would grab a wooden spoon and a teakettle and run into the middle of the street banging the snot out of the teakettle and yelling like a she’d been trodden on by a golem.  All her neighbours who were able would run out into the street too and there would be an impromptu therapy session.  A magnificent social invention.  Also, I have girlfriends I can call, whose lives are every bit as ‘interesting’, ‘difficult’ and ‘complicated’ as mine, some more so because they have more children and screw YOU if you don’t think that doesn’t make for more complexification, especially once you get into steps, grands, adoptees and homestays, so I can ‘bang a teakettle’ with them, but sometimes as a writer I want to keep the mood green and nothing beats that like writing it down.  After all, if I hadn’t written down my long, long paragraph of vituperative venom, I would not have kept hold of the expression “pig’s ass in vomit” which was how I characterized somebody I was, uh, not very fond of at the time.  Then I learned that you’re defined by what you hate and had to give that emotional tone up, but it’s still a damned evocative expression and I have every intention of using it where appropriate.  Except when the Dalai Lama’s in town, that would be wrong.

Sexxxay is for all the stuff that can’t make it into this blog because my mother would wince and my dad would heave.  Then they would stare at each other uncomprehendingly.  They do that a lot, with respect to their children.  I am still at the involved stage, which means I long to slap my kids instead of just look uncomprehending.

Speaking of the kids, Katie said something re shame the other day.  “In the videos you never yell at us”  and I just looked at her like she had a closed skull fracture and said, WTF?  Of COURSE I wasn’t yelling at you in the videos!!!! Why would I want evidence of my dreadful parenting and worse vocabulary immortalized for all time?  whassamatta u????  One of the best women I know thought about drowning her offspring in a bathtub when she was a young mother.  I can’t recollect ever wanting to harm the kids, but they will attest to the fact that I did use physical discipline, and they’ll also stand right by me and defend me for doing it, such are the strange ways of the simian brain.

Well, I’d simply love to ramble on more about shame.  There are times I want to take all my clothes off at work.  The right people would dig it, and the right people would get completely freaked out.  But my boss has told me that I should just let that urge roll right on over and straight on through, because she doesn’t think there’s a snowball’s chance I’d stay employed, no matter what she said in my defense afterwards.  She has a point.  Now it’s time to go to work.  Shame about that, really.

The Truman delusion?

There’s a new delusion on the block, oh goody.  Another form of mental illness I can sympathize with and not actually, you know, catch.

From the time I was little I had no interest in being famous. I watched what famous people went through and thought, that’s just nuts!  No privacy, and then at the end there’s nobody to pay attention to you.  Yuck!  I gave up waiting to be discovered (the psychological failing when you wish that you will be magically conveyed to a land of money and prestige without actually doing anything) in my early thirties, when I got a letter from a relative outlining how she was going to wish her way out of her current situation and I realized “holy crap, that’s me!”.  Now I’m posting stuff on youtube, not because I have some belief that I will magically become rich and famous, but because people ask me too, and it’s fun, and most of the people who see it think it’s cute or funny or useful or bizarre. In fact, cute, funny, useful or bizarre is kinda the focus of this blog, when I’m not whining about something or other.  I have this overwhelming urge, today, to sing the Slimfast and Methadone song into the all seeing eye of Youtube.  I should put that mental aberration aside and just go practice some more.

Still don’t know all the chord forms for Happy Feet.  Sheesh, it’s hard!  Fingees stingee.

20 hours and some thoughts about anger and hair.

It took 20 hours to convert the entire dvd from dvd format to mp4 format. It worked perfectly – but too slow. Anyway, after much agony, I can edit down the puppies and kids video. Part of me wants to kill the audio portion of it, which consists of, in a very boring way, Allegra saying, “Put the puppy down, put him down, put her down, put the puppy down, Keith don’t do that, that’s ignorant, Katie, sit down, put the puppy down, put the puppy down.” But I will avoid the temptation to do that. I can haz patience.

Continue reading 20 hours and some thoughts about anger and hair.

We haz the cool

  • I will never be cool in THAT sense, but I can certainly praise the thrice blessed Jeff, who got an air conditioner yesterday.  It made living at Geekhaven Beta a damned sight more pleasant – it was fracking hot.  Eddie was all over it.
  • I will resist the blandishments of my naturist friends today and NOT go to Wreck Beach.  Jarmo & Co and Mike will be off there today but I simply have too much life maintenance to do, and then Jeff and I will go pic-a-nic someplace, maybe. Depends how appealing it is to stay where there’s a steady stream of cold air.
  • Lawrence H, one of my coworkers, saw a Dall’s porpoise out in the Strait on Saturday.  It was just part of how awesome it all was, the trip from Vancouver to Victoria.
  • Victoria, approached from the ocean on a hot day, has a mesmerizingly beautiful scent of hot, sweet pine.  NO not like Pine Sol.  A magical, resiny gorgeousness that lifts on the breeze and drowns one in anticipation.  As drfilk noted, “Well, that’s better than I thought it would smell.”
  • I sang much of the way there, as much nautical stuff as I could remember, which isn’t much, but thanks to my mother and father I know all of the lyrics to at least one version of “The Eddystone Light”.
  • I learned last night that somebody I never talk to at work (I don’t sit with him at lunch anymore) thinks I’m a great performer.  Now I am thinking “When the hell did I ever play in front of him? And PS, thanks.”
  • Oh, is the rent due?
  • My rear end still hurts from the trip there. A little.  Not like Sunday morning, when my parents were giggling at me every time I sat down and squawked.  My back isn’t great but I know walking will fix it.
  • I have to water my plants; they got a good soaking Saturday morning but they are droopy as hell, as container plants are in this kinda heat.
  • Robof9 took pics of his wife’s work.  She is a professional plant person.  Sheesh, I guess that makes her a horticulturist… anyway, 100000 plants that she grew all needed watering on Sunday and he took pics and I await them happily.
  • Next post, various pics.  Be prepared..
  • I have booked a Can Car to deal with the box situation.
  • I think I need a summer weight housecoat.
  • For those who might be nervous on his account, Paul survived the last round of layoffs at his work.
  • The folks downstairs, in an effort to avoid us, have taken to smoking cigarettes indoors. For me this is annoying, due to my disturbed relationship with tobacco; for Jeff it is nauseating and hopelessly rude.
  • I participated in a Pagan ceremony on Sunday.  I am still processing it. When asked to pray I directed my energy towards a good outcome for somebody I despise, in an effort to cultivate both mindfulness and compassion.  The notion of praying for myself when I’m so comfortably settled with life the universe and everything (occasional bitchiness and annoyance with incompetence aside) was not on.  Runnerwolf was very specific about saying, “If you’re praying for somebody else, always pray for the best outcome – something concrete might not be what’s required for the person you’re praying for.” The psychology of this seems wise; you have formed an intention without becoming attached to the result, which is better than petitioning the lord with a laundry list of ‘want-its’ and then getting miffed when they don’t come to pass.  Funny story: she used popcorn instead of dry corn for ceremony once, with entirely predictable results come time to put the bundle in the ceremonial fire.
  • I know what copal and frankincense and myrrh look like now.
  • Why would an atheist bother with all that?  Because of Tennyson (oops, nearly said Donne)
    I am a part of all that I have met;
    Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
    Gleams that untravell’d world,

Free Fiver

These two words mean two different things to me. Both meanings originate in Britain. One involves walking away from money. The other reminds me of Fiver, the weakling shaman of Watership Down.

When the researchers were surprised that the overwhelming majority of passersby didn’t bother to stop and collect 5 quid, I frankly was surprised. I think that if they examined the motives of the people passing up the money they’d be taking research into useful places. I myself would predict any number of reasons why someone might not stop.

1. They aren’t literate in English or any language at all, or are alexic, or dyslexic. For all we know they read “Reefs” and aren’t going to stop for that.

2. They think 5 quid isn’t enough money for the time they’d have to take to pick it up; in other words, moving towards a different destination will, in their estimation, pay better than stopping to get the money. If you knew that being more than 20 minutes late meant you didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting laid that evening, a matter of some concern to you, would you stop for anything short of a hail of gunfire?

3. They have visual impairments which prevent them from seeing the sign.

4. They think it’s an advertising con, and they are paying themselves $5 to avoid looking stupid.

5. They are fiercely independent, and the notion of taking money from any sentient creature without the express purpose of a value for value exchange is anathema to them. Not a common reason, I’ll grant you, but one not outside my own experiential milieu.

6. They think it’s a religious come-on, or that they will be subject to intrusive questioning during the handover of the money.

7. They shudder at the notion that stopping would automatically make them look poor, no matter what their exterior appearance. Or, being well off and richly tidy, hesitate to look miserly or grasping.

My cherce readers will no doubt come up with a reason or two of their own.

See the thing is, I’d stop, just to get a feel for the person wearing the sign. I wouldn’t even worry about whether I looked stupid or wouldn’t get the money or would be asked to provide oral relief thereafter. I’d want to know what could possess anyone to volunteer – or take money for – wearing that sign. I’m not unique in that view.

Keith said I had neglected one important research question.  He said, “They think the guy is crazy, and they don’t wanna get any on ‘ em.”

one thing and another

Luddite turned up late and motored through the leftovers; that was fine, I wanted to watch some more Band of Brothers anyway.  He also brought organic chocolate, which was damn’ fine also.

I can see into the future!!!

Treat your rifle like a gurl…

I sure feel safer, knowing the Border Patrol is on the case.

The seven sins of memory.