Financial Security or Freedom ?

I was reading The Creed Room, and on the subject of poverty came this question: “Assume you don’t know where you’ll be born or how rich you’ll be. Would you be prepared to give up the chance to live like a king for the security of knowing you won’t live like a dog?”

The author immediately says, “Merely to ask this question is to answer it.” Yet there are instances throughout history when reasonable people have answered No.

Living like a dog is having to scrounge for the basics of food and shelter. Living like a king is never having to worry about the basics, and it is about being the ruler of your own life. It is, essentially, the ultimate freedom.

There are people who would not trade the chance at freedom for even the most basic security.

Imagine you were a slave who was never mistreated, had 3 meals a day and a roof over your head, were given medical care, and were able to be with your family and gather with your community on your day off every Sunday. If someone told you that you could either remain a slave for the rest of your live or be free, which also meant taking the chance that your life could get truly worse, which would you choose?

The passengers on the Mayflower risked a dog’s life or even death, and some were on board just for the chance at great wealth.

Every day there are people who experience financial ruin and exchange the roofs over their heads for the dream of wealth or freedom. They’re called starving artists. They’re called political refugees. They’re called entrepreneurs.

These risk-takers make the case that for some people, there are fates worse than poverty.

Cyber Disinhibition

Today is the last day of my first year of blogging! Of course, when I included kittens in the title of the first post, I didn’t foresee that by the end of the year the kittens would actually be writing the posts.

The reason Spunk and Teddy have taken over recently is that months ago, a stranger left a drive-by comment that was judgmental and personal, and it has bothered me ever since. As my mother so wisely, if not sympathetically, said: If you’re going to put your thoughts out to the world, you have to be prepared for any response. So I guess all this time I have been trying to figure out if I am – or even want to be – sufficiently insensitive.

It wasn’t until someone else left a hateful post yesterday under Spunk’s Christmas pictures that I realized it may not be my problem. Call me judgmental, too, but surely there is something wrong with people who feel the need to treat the world like their own personal litterbox and leave droppings of meanness wherever they go.  I mean, what’s to hate about a kitten at Christmas?

Imagine my excitement when I found out it is a neuroscience issue! The technical term is cyber disinhibition, which is basically when people say things online that they would never say in person. The neuropsychological explanation is summarized in this great post by Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence.

The impact of cyber disinhibition is illustrated in a poem written by James W.  Foley, something I copied into my journal 20 years ago, before I ever heard of the Internet. Below is an excerpt; the full poem can be found at http://www.ripplemaker.com/pebbles.htm

Drop a pebble in the water:
just a splash, and it is gone;
But there’s half-a-hundred ripples
Circling on and on and on,
…

Drop an unkind word, or careless:
in a minute it is gone; 
But there’s half-a-hundred ripples   
circling on and on and on.     
They keep spreading, spreading, spreading       
from the center as they go,         
And there is no way to stop them,            
once you’ve started them to flow.              

Drop an unkind word, or careless:
in a minute you forget;
But there’s little waves a-flowing,
and there’s ripples circling yet,
And perhaps in some sad heart
a mighty wave of tears you’ve stirred,
And disturbed a life twas happy
ere you dropped that unkind word.

 

So, I’ve decided that from this point forward, disagreement and a good debate are welcome as always, but I will delete nasty pointless commentary, because it’s a waste of emotion and there is no need for that kind of thing to be out in the world.  And I will also try to remember:

  Drop a word of cheer and kindness:
just a flash and it is gone;
But there’s half-a-hundred ripples
circling on and on and on…

Christmas Climbing

Mama Kitty was wrong. Toys do grow on trees, they do, they do!

Them kinda trees got bad roots, though.

P.S. Teddy did it, not me.
-Spunk

Saviors of the Orderly

 

Mild-mannered kittens by day and relentless superheroes by night, we are Chaos and Entropy (a.k.a. Spunk and Teddy), fighting tidiness wherever we find it.

 

  

 

 Before our Mama Kitty left his world, she told us that in order to survive, we must submit to our keepers, but we must never forget that humans use only 1/10^th of their brain potential. We didn’t believe it could be true until we moved to Living Room, full of the stifled destiny of throw rugs and throw pillows folded into neat square blocks and lined  up in a row. We saw a great challenge before us, to transform your dull and orderly world into an ever-changing blanket cascade flowing over a mountain of fluff and upholstery.

 

But where would we start with a species so uptight that it consumes its food from an organized pile, never even touching it with your marvelous opposable thumbs? Where we come from, in Dumpster, dinner is an experience; it is to be dug into, fought for, and savored. It is a badge of honor to be covered in it, and a sign of respect to be licked clean after it. Now, we’re not saying we don’t enjoy the occasional can of juicy turkey giblets, so we keep it neat so as not to be misconstrued; a cat’s gotta work within the system. But we take liberties with the dry chow and are slowly training our keeper in the fine art of Ping-the-Friskies.

 

This incremental progress is mildly satisfying, but over the holiday weekend, our greater reason for being came into focus during a marathon of made-for-TV movies. We and our kitten minions must show keepers all over the world the true joy of Christmas. Stacks of catalogs must be toppled and skid upon. Boxes and paper packaging must be rescued from Dumpster even as we were. We will wrestle every wayward sunspot and root out electrical cords and forgotten trinkets from every dark corner and hidey hole where they exist.

 

We will stimulate that dark 9/10^th of your brain and free your orderly neurosis. We will teach you not to ignore even a single loose thread, to appreciate all your treasures. Because, in the wise words of our dear Mama Kitty, dangling ornaments and twinkling lights don’t grow on trees, you know.

Furry Halloween

 

A Halloween tip from Spunk and Teddy on behalf of our feline brethren:
When trick-or-treating tonight, watch your toes.
We are ferocious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, except for Spunk. 

 

Stay tuned for our future guest blogs…

 

Example of Excellence: Firecrackers Jump Rope

A friend of mine forwarded me the video below of a team of 4th-8th graders who do amazing things with jumpropes.  It’s worth watching all the way to the end, evidenced by the increasing amazement on the faces of the audience at the Naval Academy, who are no strangers to precision.  

In order for these 9-13 year-olds to performance their jaw-dropping show, every single one of them has to excel individually while also being a tight-knit team, and they have to put in a lot of work to do it. According to their website,  these Firecrackers from Kings Local School District in Ohio practice 2 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. That’s an inspiring example of commitment, but what’s even better is that their performance is infused with fun and pride, the greatest symptoms of excellence.

Kudos to these kids and to their coach, Lynn Kelley.

Kittens and Characters by Any Other Name

I went north for Canadian Thanksgiving and not only had a great turkey dinner but also came home with two kittens, Spunk and Teddy. Spunk (top below) was all spunked out when I took the picture. And Teddy (bottom below), well, we went to the vet this week, and it turns out Teddy is a girl.

The first time someone asked me if I planned to change her name, I responded with a stunned, “Well, no.” It would never have occurred to me to do that; I mean, it’s her name. On the 6-hour car ride from Maine to Boston, I tried on everything I could think of, and that’s the one that stuck. So, Teddy she will be. Not Bear, not Cub, not Tina or Tammy or Theodora – just Teddy.

I spend that much time naming characters, too, because it helps them come to life in my stories. A pre-reviewer for The Neurology of Angels recommended changing Galen’s name because, coincidentally, she didn’t know whether it was a male or female character. It sounds as easy as just a find and replace in Microsoft Word, but it is more like extracting a tooth; there are roots there. After 2,000 hours with these characters, they became real people in my head, people with histories and families that may never show up on the page but that influence their responses in every situation. And for Galen, whose name means “healer”, changing his name might have changed his destiny.

Am I crazy? Are there other writers out there who know what I mean?

Olfactory Hallucinations

I have been smelling a litterbox in my apartment all week — but I don’t have a cat. According to a brief search of the Internet, the word for what I’m experiencing is phantosmia, which is exactly what it sounds like – phantom smells, also known as olfactory hallucination. This can be a real chronic disorder where people have full-blown olfactory delusions, and there are a variety of related disorders, including parosmia, anosmia and hyposmia,  dysgeusia, and  cacosmia .

I would think having such a disorder would be disruptive to the extent that it could change the way you perceive life, because smell is that underrated but everpresent sense that can enhance or ruin any experience. Just imagine a romantic date at an outdoor restaurant: a lovely June breeze is making the candle on the table flicker while you gaze into each other’s eyes, and wafting on the air encircling the two of you are the summer fragrances from the lilacs to the rose bushes to the steaming garbage bin overflowing with half-eaten and rapidly decomposing shrimp, boiled broccoli, and curdling cream sauce.

Smell what I mean?

I have often thought that the next great invention will be a camera for smells, with a cartridge you can bring home and plug into a USB port to run along with the pictures. A way to truly relive the experience. But then I think, selective memory can be a wonderful thing. I wouldn’t bring home a jar of blackflies to go with a slide show of summer in Maine, so why retain a souvenir of that carcass odor in Grand Central Station? It was a lot funnier once we got away.

I ran across an article that suggested a smell disorder can cause depression and obesity, because it messes with your brain signals. It makes sense, because olfactory symptoms can also be important indications of a brain tumor, epilepsy, diabetes, or Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

My issues this week are nothing as serious as all that, thankfully. I’m quite sure they are due to the power of suggestion; my niece helped me set up my apartment for a couple of kittens we picked out last weekend. Even though another family adopted those particular kittens before I got back to the shelter to fill out the paperwork, the clean boxes and new bag of litter (or “glitter” as my niece would say) have been sitting in the hallway. It hasn’t deterred me from adopting, though; if I’m going to smell it anyway, I might as well have the furry little guys curled up on my bed to make it worthwhile.

Personalized Health vs. Mandatory Preventive Insurance

Every day, science is moving us closer to personalized health based on our own genetic makeup. The government is actually part of this progress – http://www.hhs.gov/myhealthcare/ – which is why I’m a little stymied by the concept in the health care bill of having a Health Choices Commissioner in Washington, DC deciding on a one-size-fits-all insurance coverage for preventive medicine. I’m not talking about catastrophic coverage; I’m talking about the preventive components defined as essential basic insurance, which currently includes at minimum the items in the Task Force for Clinical Preventive Services grade A/B  - e.g., HIV screening, tobacco prevention counseling, and aspirin – as well as vaccines, maternity care, well baby and child care, oral health, vision, and hearing services.

Every law-abiding U.S. citizen will be required to purchase this level of insurance, which necessarily takes away choice in a very simple way. Consider the two scenarios below:

Scenario 1

 Lila works at the computer 8 hours every day at her primary job and another 3-4 hours every night for her second job. So her risk for repetitive strain or related injury is nearly 100%. She had numbness in her hands and a physical therapist recommended her to get regular massages to reduce the strain in her neck and back, on top of the stretches and exercises for her arms and wrists.

She suffers from anxiety and depression, or what she views as just plain stress, which contributes to her weight and her blood pressure, which are of course contributing factors to other potential health issues. Exercise and meditation keep the symptoms at bay enough so she can avoid prescription medications and their known and unknown side effects. But it’s a vicious circle that makes it difficult to keep up a regimen without an external commitment.    

Finally, based on information that she has read in reputable medical journals, she believes that pesticides and preservatives may increase her risk for health issues suffered by others in her family. So when she has extra money, she chooses to shop organic.  

Lila is otherwise healthy. Due to a bad experience in the past, she hasn’t been to the dentist in 15 years, choosing instead to take meticulous care of her teeth, such that she doesn’t have a single cavity. She has no intention of ever getting a cervical exam; she has accepted the possible consequences. For minor maladies, she prefers home remedies to going to a doctor.  

So with her limited budget, she has chosen catastrophic insurance with a high deductible,  to cover any huge unforeseen circumstances. This has the lowest premium so her health budget can include periodic massages, organic food, dance lessons, and books on holistic medicine.

If the current health bill passes, she will surely pay a higher premium because her required coverage would include universal preventive care such as dental visits, gynecological exams,  and other screenings that she will never undergo. Instead, she will have to forego some of her personalized health choices.   

 

Scenario 2:

Bill has recently discovered that he has the gene for ALS. There is no treatment for ALS.  Although it is not certain he will develop the disease, he has already started to experience the same early symptoms that he saw his father and brother go through.  He would rather die of a heart attack or a car accident or a hundred other common maladies, so he has decided that he will exercise what little control he has and never go to the doctor or the emergency room again. He has filled out the paperwork and his wife has agreed. Yet to be a law-abiding citizen, he will still have to pay for the government-mandated health insurance instead of putting his money toward long-term disability insurance or a daily living fund for his wife after he becomes disabled.

His wife is barren, so fortunately they don’t have to worry about their children inheriting the gene. But she will still have to pay for insurance that covers maternity care, well baby, and child care rather than grief counseling.

 

Both of the scenarios above are real people. I’m sure you know others. In fact we could come up with a real-life scenario every day for the rest of the year in which mandatory preventive insurance will directly trade off one individual’s personalized health choices in favor of someone else’s general preventive care. Whether intentional or unintentional, the consequences are the same, and deeper than the surface of the bill.   Again, this isn’t about the part that keeps people from going broke if they get sick; this is about the scope that extends beyond catastrophic care and pushes the boundaries of freedom.

We Don’t Always Get What We Deserve

     This afternoon someone mentioned college acceptance letters, and a shiver ran through me – a good one. I remember the day years ago when I came home from school to find my acceptance letter for MIT. I can still feel the paper shaking in my hands, see the Congratulations swimming on the page, and recall where everyone was positioned in the living room, including my grandfather with his bewildered expression as I screamed unintelligibly, “I got in!” and jumped up and down then ran out of the house to go back to school to tell Mrs. Wilbur, my math teacher.

     It isn’t often that you get to experience 17 years of hard work coming to fruition in a moment. Because there is no guarantee that 17 years of hard work are going to bear fruit at all. People don’t tell you that when you’re a teenager. “Life’s not fair”, sure. “Things will be different in the Real World”, definitely. But never “You could study your butt off and work your fingers to the bone and still end up with a job you hate, or no job at all.“

     Everyone figures it out eventually, of course. When people would ask me where I wanted to go to college, I always said “MIT, but I’m not sure I’ll get in.” Because it wasn’t all up to me. In the Real World, there are plenty of Simon Cowell types who take every opportunity to tell you how hard it will be to succeed. I went to a Writer’s Digest conference a couple of weeks ago and came home with a lot of new ideas, plus the recurring theme that a person could write the greatest American novel of this century, but it doesn’t mean anyone will read it, because there is way more to being published and bought than just content.

     This could be discouraging, and it is on some days. But it’s also good to know, for planning purposes. I’m now figuring out a way to enjoy my day career so I’ll be prepared to spend many more years doing writing and marketing as just a hobby, on my own terms. (If you want to encourage my hobby, join my author page on Facebook! =))

     So, I’m interviewing for a job right now that I really want, that would make use of every varied experience I’ve chosen since that college acceptance. There are many possibilities in the role, and I have many ideas for it, but also butterflies about the obstacles being bigger than I am and crazy thoughts that I might welcome the challenge. In a way, I’m back to being 17 and knowing I’ve done everything in my power to earn what I want but my immediate future is in someone else’s hands. My head knows my value, but my heart is still not sure I’ll get in.

     I do have several contingency plans. That’s one good thing about feeling 17; a lot more options seem open. But being in my 30s, I know something better; that we don’t always get what we deserve — and it’s a mercy sometimes!