A few minutes ago, while I was brewing coffee and thinking about
blogging, I didn’t know if this would be a movie review, today’s
journal entry (well, yesterday’s really, as it is 3:33AM right now), or
a memoir segment.  I guess the only thing to do is to write it out
and see how it comes out.  I may be able to fit some of all of
those things in.  I guess a good place to start is where I left
off last time.  There’s a comment on my earliest memory blog that I want to respond to:

leafylady wrote:

I suppose that means she was saddened by it.  The memory I hold in
my mind is not sad.  I don’t feel sad when I think of it, and I
certainly won’t accept responsibility for the judgement anyone else
lays on my story.  The memory is just a memory.  Any
emotion attached to it is in the mind of whomever is feeling that
emotion.  The feelings that surround that memory for me are like
an “AHA!” of understanding–so much of what came later makes sense in
the light of that night.  I’m glad I remember.

I have felt saddened sometimes by the thing that reportedly gladdens
leafylady:  the fact that “most children” are so traumatized by
the cognitive dissonance inherent in the abuse and neglect they receive
at the hands of  their “loving” parents that they dissociate and
block out the memories or deny the events.  I put “most” in quotes
because I am not at all sure that most of us do not have unpleasant
memories of parental misdeeds that we’d prefer not to recall. 

The denial dance is one of the main rituals of this culture:  “You
didn’t like that, eh?  Okay, just pretend it didn’t happen. 
If you tell anyone I did it, I’ll say you’re lying, anyway.”  That
few have the courage to face reality within themselves, and even fewer
have enough courage to speak it out loud, tends in my weaker moments to
sadden me.

I do not suppose that hypothetical “what if” question was anything
other than rhetorical.  Unless I miss my guess, I’m not supposed
to answer it–so, I’ll just echo it:  “What IF your child
remembers?”  I want mine to remember.  Remembering is
healthy, and in people with unhealthy pasts it can be
therapeutic.  We cannot process and transcend trauma that we do
not remember.  I work at remembering, and to whatever extent I am
successful, I profit by it.

---

I’m watching the sky grow lighter.  An hour or two ago it was as
dark as it gets this time of year, not dark but just twilight. 
Each summer in recent years I’ve done at least one up-all-nighter and
sometimes Doug has stayed up with me.  He’s in bed now, and it
looks like this will be an all-nighter for me.  His sleep schedule
had him in bed rather early Monday evening, he was up again in the wee-small hours
of Tuesday soon after I’d gone to bed, and I kept him busy through most of
Tuesday.

Koji had an appointment with the vet for his annual health checkup and immunization boosters.  Taking him anywhere
in the car is not something anyone would want to do alone, and Doug
likes to get away from here when he gets a chance, anyway.  Our
dog never wants the pack to be separated, so when one of us goes
anywhere, he thinks we should all go.  That would be fine, except
he’s the only member of this pack with the stamina to run for miles,
and when we take him anywhere in the car he gets stress diarrhea. 
The vet thinks it’s interesting that he never gets car sick, but always
has to have a stop or two along the way to relieve the peristaltic
pressure.

He was sweet and funny at the vet’s.  We were early because I left
home early enough to allow for stops along the way.  During our
long wait, Doug and I took him outside once to offer him a drink of
water, but he just whined and pulled back toward the clinic door. 
He knew he was there for a purpose and he wasn’t going to leave without
seeing the vet.  When we all got into the exam room together Koji
trembled and cringed but made no move to bolt, nor displayed any
hostility or aggression.  He’s a trouper, that dog. 

He’s healthy, she said, but getting a little fat pad on his middle, so
she wants us to get his weight down by about a pound and a half, to an
even 60 lbs.  That seems an arbitrarily round number, and she gave
us no clues on how to do it.  She also wants us to have him
neutered, although she said that the testosterone he produces by virtue
of being intact helps keep his weight down.  I’m getting cognitive
dissonance here.  My menfolk are both aware that their own
testosterone makes them vulnerable to similar prostate problems to
those the vet warned us about for Koji, and neither of them wants to be
neutered to prevent such problems.  I guess I’ll have to ask Koji
how he feels about it.  He’s sleeping now.  We wore him out.

After the vet visit, it was just a short trip to Felony Flats, so we
dropped Koji with Greyfox while Doug and I had lunch and went
shopping.  I introduced him to the taco bar at Yukon’s, then he
led me to the bookstore.  He was delighted to find a whole section
of manga, and bought three, each the first episode of its series. 
I found a special sale on bargain books, bought two at big discounts
and got a third free.  Two were recent novels by authors I
like.  The real prize was The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. 
I can tell that having this book is going to be fun.  My mind lit
up when I saw it there at under ten dollars, and I saw both Doug’s and
Greyfox’s eyes light up when I showed it to them.

While Doug and I were buying groceries I noticed that sugar was on sale
at a good price, so I purchased some for the NA group.  I saw Doug
look disbelievingly at the two bags as I put them in the cart, then
look questioningly at me.  He knows the stuff is poison to me,
because I remind him every time I see him indulging in it.  I’m
sure I’d mentioned before that one
of my service positions is to supply the drugs:  the coffee
(caffeine is addictive), sugar (addictive), and creamer (containing
casein, also addictive) for our little group in that “program of complete abstinence from all drugs.”

Anyhow, since I had the sugar to drop off and it was near time for the
Tuesday night meeting, we went out to Felony Flats and relieved Greyfox
of Koji’s company to make it easier for him to close up his stand for
the day, then Doug and Koji waited for me in the car while I attended
the meeting.  After that, it was back to Greyfox’s cabin to pick
up empty water jugs for me to fill on my way back in on Thursday, and a
few other things he had for me.

We stopped at the local general store before coming home, because Doug
wanted to rent a video.  We ended up with a (sorta) western double
feature:  Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Knights and Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner.  He watched all of the Chan with me, and faded out in the middle of Earp.

I remember the first time I heard Wyatt Earp’s name.  I thought
the kids were saying “white urp” and since “urp” was a popular
euphemism for vomitus, I couldn’t understand why the kids wanted to
play white urp and I hadn’t a clue what would be involved in such a
game.  I was a California kid newly arrived in Kansas.  It
didn’t take those kids long to clue me in that the game was similar to
the games of Cowboys and Indians I’d played on the Coast, and that
White Urp was a local hero.

Over time, I learned that it was Wyatt Earp, and learned some other
associated names such as Dave Rudabaugh, Johnny Ringo, Bat Masterson,
and Doc Holliday.  There in Kansas in the 1950s, the lines between
the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were clear cut and plain.  I
recall that in that first game of White Urp I was assigned to be Johnny
Ringo, a bad guy.  *sigh*  Out west, I’d always been assigned
to play an Indian, since I was a girl and most of my playmates were
boys.  Actually, I had always sorta liked being an Indian, and
Johnny Ringo had a cool name.  The only problem was that I’d
always get shot, but I’d get some fun out of it by doing a dramatic
death scene.

To my great relief and increased viewing pleasure tonight, the movie
was more true to life than most are, and so the characters were not so
clearly delineated in black and white.  I suppose it’s
understandable that those Kansas kids would see the Earp brothers as
heroes, being descendants of settlers and sodbusters whose towns had
been cleared of lawless drunken cowhands and trail riders by such rough
and rowdy lawmen.  The museums I recall visiting in Wichita and
Dodge City portrayed the Earps as heroes and displayed guns and other
artifacts of theirs along with those such as Bat Masterson’s cane and
Doc Holliday’s hip flask.

It’s a different story in Tombstone, Arizona, where Doc and the Earps
had to face a judge after the gunfight at the OK Corral, and where to
this day Wyatt is considered by many to be a deranged spree killer who
became unhinged and hunted down everyone who might possibly have been
involved in his brother Morgan’s murder.  That story involves a
lot of unsolved crimes, and much of it remains a mystery except to
those who have made their minds up on one side or the other based more
on where their loyalties lie than on the facts, because facts are in
short supply and much dispute.

I have always loved a good story, especially when the storyteller got
it straight.  I have seen, heard and read many versions of the
Earps’ story, most of which played fast and loose with those facts that
are known and embroidered freely to fill in the gaps.  Most of the
movie or novel versions of the gunfight in Tombstone have it fought in
a corral, but it was on a streetcorner near the OK Livery Stable’s
corral.  The re-enactors in Tombstone do a pretty good job of
presenting it, complete with noise and gunsmoke, but completely without
the fake blood that might make it more believable.  Some acting
ability among the reenactors wouldn’t hurt, either.  The ones I’ve
seen were just phoning in their parts.

Often, time is condensed in those stories and Morgan is killed in the
gunfight on October 26, 1881.  He really died about five months
later, either shot while shooting pool in a billiards room or shot
while on the boardwalk outside the billiards room and carried in and
laid out on a pool table where he died.  That latter is what was
reported in the Tombstone Epitaph
at the time, and is the version reported currently on a plaque outside
the building in question in Tombstone.   The former is the
way the movie I saw tonight presented it, and the way it is told in
several other accounts I’ve read.  Who knows?  The Epitaph, like the Weekly World News of today, said mostly what it’s editor wanted to say and occasionally threw in the true facts just to throw people off guard.

Tombstone has many of those little plaques that say something like, “On
this site, on October 26, 1881″ or “…on October 27, 1881,” etc., this
or that happened.  One of my favorite such signs says, “On October
26, 1881, nothing much happened on this site.”

Despite a few real floaters that just didn’t fit the generally accepted
facts, I liked the movie.  One aspect of it that continually
distracted me from the story and detracted from my enjoyment probably
wouldn’t bother most viewers.  They kept jumping around
geographically.  One sweet love scene outside “Tombstone” was shot
on the banks of Oak Creek in Sedona with Courthouse Rock in the
background.  A chase and gunfight that was supposed to be between
Tombstone and Bisbee was actually at Pine Flat between Sedona and
Flagstaff.  That’s understandable, because Sedona is a much more
pleasant area to be than down around Tombstone.  If I had a movie
to make, I’d shoot it in Sedona, even if it was set on the Moon. 
But in the next scene after that fight, they ride over a little hill
and suddenly they’re in Utah.  It’s jolting.  That’s what I
get for paying attention to geography and geology.  

I guess this entry is long enough, now, and it is well and truly full
daylight outside, or as light as it is going to get under this pall of
smoke from the wildfires.  Tuesday’s Anchorage Daily News reported
fifty-five separate fires in the state at press time.  During
lunch at Yukon’s I caught a teaser for the TV news, which showed a
street scene in Fairbanks, like pea soup fog, only brown.  Each
time yesterday that the sun became visible through the clouds it was a
dim red-orange disk in the sky.  The  smoke in the air even
here at least a couple of hundred miles from the fires is making
breathing more difficult and stinging my eyes and throat.

I’m off to bed to read my new book.  Later, all.

Some of my readers have been discussing intelligence with me through
comments since I posted my confession yesterday about my social faux
pas at the NA barbecue.   quiltnmomi
brought up a new generation of tests designed to measure not just the
left-brained intellectual form of intelligence, but such things as
creative thinking and “emotional IQ” or people skills.  This
brought up a number of memories for me, of discussions I’ve had with
family members, co-workers in the psych and social service professions,
my clients, and some Mensans.

It was a hot issue for a while, and I’ve been away from those
professions and from the certified intelligentsia long enough now that
I don’t really know where the matter stands currently.  In the
discussions that I remember from a few decades ago, we were in general
agreement that a single score that combined or averaged such diverse
types of “intelligence” would be essentially meaningless, since it is
quite common for someone to have great creative ability or people
skills without much of what is measured by traditional IQ tests, and
vice versa.  Thus someone scoring very high in one area and very
low in the other would come out in the middle, precisely where he does
not belong both because of the high ability and the low one.

I think the move toward such testing was part of the same movement that
has brought us the proliferation of such politically correct terms as
“developmentally challenged.”  It sought to reduce the cultural
bias toward
left-brain learning and to “include” those who have been stigmatized or
left out of educational opportunities because they lack such
intelligence.  I respect the motives of those who would make
education more inclusive, and I wish we had less of that cultural
bias.  It can be hard on everyone  when one group is left
behind because of low expectations and another is subjected to stress
because of expectations that are too high. 

Phencyclidene‘s 
experience in school sounds very similar to my son Doug’s.  He
scores extremely high on intelligence and achievement tests, but it
took him fourteen years to complete a 12-year high school education
because he was bored and uninterested in school.  We have a screwy
system, and I don’t see it getting better right now.

When I was seven and being tested by the psych faculty and grad
students at San Jose State, one of them told me that “intelligence” is
the ability to learn.  In Mensa, we used to talk about
intelligence and what it might be.  The consensus was that
intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.  Some aptitudes
seem to have become common to every modern IQ test.  These include
visual/spatial ability, pattern recognition, and memory… and I’m
going to let that be the lead-in to my blog:

My Earliest Memory

What I recall:

It was nighttime, and my mother and I were in the kitchen of the house
where we lived until I was six years old.  The kitchen light was
turned off, and the only light was from a source outside that room,
possibly the bathroom or maybe the back porch.  I was on her lap
in an overstuffed armchair that was placed in an unlikely
location.  It was backed against the west window close beside a
built-in cupboard, partially blocking the normal traffic flow in that
room.  Except for this one memory, I recall that chair as always
being in the living room.  Normally, nothing impeded either the
line of sight or traffic, straight through that “shotgun” house from
front door to back door.

The radio was playing softly, and my mother had on a silky-feeling pink
nightgown.  I was feverish, hot and headachey, and my mother’s
hands and body felt cool.  It  would make me shiver with
chills when she patted my bare back.  I was hungry, whimpering and
reaching for her breast.  I kept repeating “bubbie”, her word for
breast.  She would push my face away, or grasp my hand and pull it
away from her breast, or slap my hand and say, “no”, or “no
bubbie.”  I felt desperate, frantic, ill and frightened.  She
sounded angry and impatient.

She kept trying to put a dry cloth thing in my mouth, and I kept
turning my head away, pushing it away, and trying to nuzzle into her
bosom.  After a while, the cloth became moistened with my saliva
and I tasted a cloying, sharp sweetness.  I took it into my mouth
and sucked on it, got dizzy and sleepy and faded out.

What my mother told me when I related this memory to her:

The chair had been placed in the kitchen (the room where our family did
most of its living) for her when she came home from a stay in the
hospital.  She had breast-fed me until that hospital stay, and her
milk had then dried up.  I had been switched to bottle feeding
while she was away.  That night I was feverish and restless and
she took me into the kitchen so I would not wake my father.  The
radio was on because it usually soothed me, and it wouldn’t disturb my
father..  (I remember the radio being on constantly as I was
growing up.)

The cloth was a “sugar tit”, just granulated white sugar tied in a
piece of cloth.  Mama and her brothers and sisters and nieces and
nephews had been weaned on a sugar tit, and so was I.  I was six
months old then.

What I can infer from this:

It seems likely this was the start of my lifelong sugar
addiction.  My mother’s typical impatience and the many little
slaps and shoves of her brand of “discipline” also seem to have shaped
and shaded our relationship right from the start.

Since this isolated memory is all I can recall of the time before I was
two or three years old, I suppose it was the trauma of the illness and
of my frustration at not being allowed to nurse that imprinted it.

And, further comments:

The early memory is clearer in my mind than my mother’s
explanation.  I think we talked about it several times on the
phone during the late 1960s when that memory first surfaced while I was
doing psychedelic drugs, and again in 1979, when I visited her for the
last time before her death.

When I was small, I always wanted sugar, in any form.  I refused
to drink water and demanded juice or Kool-aid.  Mama would stir a
spoonful of sugar or chocolate syrup into my milk to get me to drink
it.  After my doctor told her to stop because that wasn’t good for
me, she would tape money to the bottom of the glass, or colorful
pictures, in an attempt to seduce me into drinking straight milk. 
After my father died she gave up trying to get me to drink milk and
went to trying to limit my intake of sugar.  In response to that,
I began to sneak it any way I could–typical addictive behavior.

On weather:

quiltnmomi commented:

I
haven’t stopped to catalog the changes that I’ve observed in the
weather over the past fifteen years, but I know they have been
occurring.  Thunder and lightning are amazing phenomena … and now I’m
realizing that the snow “storm” I witnessed in Minnesota was even more
unusual than I was aware at the time.  Massive thunder and lightning,
with big fluffy snowflakes falling.

 
This reminds me of an anomalous snowstorm last year that I’d almost
forgotten.  I had seen a flash of lightning and heard the thunder,
but no one else in the household noticed it.  They thought I was
imagining things.  Thanks for the validation.

Regarding the changes in our weather, Greyfox likes to say that climate
is what you expect and weather is what you get, and we don’t have a
climate any more, just weather.

---

On IQ:

morriganshadow commented:

little
blurb on MENSA…did you know that they wont even test you if you’re
outside the US and haven’t gone to University?  heh…I’ve met a lot of
people who’ve been to university.  I can count on one hand those who I
consider intelligent that came from the first crowd.

I
hadn’t known that, and it just confirms my opinions of Mensa.  I
was a member briefly in the mid-1970s.  Watching a pack of
self-important lawyers and computer geeks get drunk wasn’t my idea of
fun, so when they raised the annual dues, I quit.  When I joined,
and during my
childhood when I was first approached about joining Mensa, acceptance
was based on a score in the top two percent on IQ tests. 

By the time Greyfox joined (on the opposite Coast from where I was, and
under new standard Mensa rules) in the late 1970s, they had begun
accepting members based not only on intelligence test scores but on
achievement tests such as the SATs. 

This changes the basic nature of the organization, in my opinion, from
one based on measurable intelligence, to one based on test
scores.  What Shadow reports suggests that they’ve gone from
regarding achievement in school to simply regarding attendance. 
Academic achievement (or attendance) and intelligence are largely
independent of each other.  If that trend continues, they may
begin accepting Trivial Pursuit champions and the winners of chili
cook-offs.  Not that there’s anything wrong with either: 
Greyfox is great at TP, and I’m a competitive cook.  Those are
simply skills not directly related to IQ, and Mensa was, at its start,
the “high-IQ society.”

sobasysta
had some consoling words for me regarding my conversational gaffes
yesterday, and mentioned some IQ numbers and norms.  The main
problem with such numbers (a fact I temporarily forgot yesterday) is
that the norms vary from one scale to another.  Each test has its
own scoring system. 

IQ, or intelligence quotient, was originally seen as one’s test score
converted to a “mental age” based on norms, divided by one’s
chronological age, expressed as a percentage.  Thus 100 is the
norm, any two-digit number is sub-normal, and there is theoretically no
top limit although de facto limits are imposed by the scoring
systems.  Single-digit numbers are not just sub-normal but
severely-handicapped aberrations.

I was tested using one of those old-style tests when I was seven years
old.  My mother was told that I had the mental age of “a high
school senior”.  If you assume that a senior is about sixteen or
seventeen, then my IQ was sixteen or seventeen divided by seven, or
something around 230 to 240.  On the same test, seven years later,
my score had dropped to 187.  I hadn’t really grown significantly
stupider, I don’t think, unless being boy-crazy had addled my
brains.  It was just a demonstration of the weaknesses of that
testing system.

The early generations of IQ tests have been discredited because of
cultural and gender bias.  The old “mental age” scoring system has
also fallen into disuse, generally replaced by a percentile score that
simply places the testee somewhere within the ranks of the general
population based on how a supposedly representative sample have scored
on the same test.  In that system, Mensans are in the
ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth percentiles, and members of Intertel are
all in the ninety-ninth.  Four-Sigma society and other
ultra-brainy groups cut the requirements for membership even finer.

In my thirties, after I dropped out of Mensa, I took Four-Sigma’s
“World’s Hardest IQ Test” and failed to qualify for membership, at
99.94%.  I will not try to pretend that all of this is meaningless
to me, because the fact I’m writing about it would put the lie to
that.  I recognized how competitive I was when, in my twenties, I
concentrated on getting good at shooting pool (a game I never enjoyed
and no longer play) only so I could beat the pack of drunken blowhards
who hung out in the bar where I worked.  I’d always been told I
was awfully competitive, “for a girl,” as if that’s supposed to make a
difference.  The whole point for me in playing pool was to win.

One of the trivial uses to which I enjoy putting this amazing
cybernetic technology with which I’m playing here is figuring out how
many people on the planet are “smarter” than I am today.  Assuming
that the Four-Sigma test is not significantly biased and/or outdated,
and that my intelligence has not changed significantly since I took it,
and that the population clock I use for my calculation is reasonably
accurate, out of the more than six billion humans on the planet today,
less than four million of them might be expected to score above me on
that test.  **and she signs off, laughing at herself, and
wondering where she might find a congenial few of those millions from
whom to learn a thing or three**

Alaska is burning.

The first thing I did when I got a chance to sit down at the computer after I came home tonight was go to the geomac.gov
site and look at the wildfire map.  Fires were a big topic of
conversation at the barbecue today and at the Double Trouble meeting I
went to afterward.  Today, suddenly, our valley was cooler than it
had been in weeks, because the sun wasn’t getting through the smoky
haze. 

One person spoke of a fire, hundreds of thousands of acres, that had
the highway on both sides of the town of Chicken, northeast of here
near the international border with Yukon Territory, cut off. 
Tonight
I read that the 150 residents who had been trapped there were taken out
by air today.

Somebody else mentioned a big fire up by Fairbanks.  Geomac shows
nine fires in all, in Interior Alaska, but a news story I read from the
Fairbanks News-Miner said that accurate mapping was impossible because
of smoke.

As I drove toward home tonight, the further I got, the more my eyes
burned.  I started smelling smoke after I came through
Willow.  Ahead, to the north, I could see a few shadowy
columns between clouds and ground and I couldn’t tell whether they were
smoke going up or rain coming down.  The sky and clouds were
brown.  I started wondering how close to home those fires were
getting.

Then, about five miles from home I crested a hill and two fat drops of
rain hit my windshield.  Within a hundred yards I was on wet
pavement, then rain was falling so hard and thick my wipers had trouble
keeping up.  It was hitting the pavement faster than it could
drain off, and traffic slowed as we all started hydroplaning. 
Suddenly all I could smell was the wet, green, rain smell.  The
air at ground level was washed clear of smoke, but overhead was a solid
layer of smoky brown cloud.

I saw lightning and heard thunder.  That used to be rare
here.  Now with global warming it has become just unusual. 
Old sourdoughs around here say it never used to thunder and
lightning.  I lived in this valley five years before I saw my
first thunderstorm here, and in the intervening fifteen years I’ve
probably been through fewer than ten of them.  It takes heat to
make thunder and lightning.  Southwest U.S. tribes call winter,
“the season when thunder sleeps.”  We once did not have enough
heat in this area to generate summer thunderstorms, but now we
have.  We’ve even had a few hailstorms, which require even more
heat.

This weather didn’t feel “natural” to me, just didn’t feel right. 
As soon as I came in the house, I went to the barometer.  It
hadn’t fallen any from this morning, but was up a hair–not at all what
I’d expect with a change from fair and hazy to heavy rain.  Now
it’s quiet outside, little breeze even, no birdsong–eerie.

Well, enough talk about the weather.  What I really wanted to blog about tonight was my day.

---

GAUCHE: 

lacking social experience or grace: tactless: crude: awkward.

When the barbecue ended this afternoon around four, I drove out to
Felony Flats and told Greyfox about a couple of “stupid” things I’d
blurted out in conversation.  He said they weren’t stupid, that
I’m not stupid.  I’m just gauche.  He nailed it.  Gauche
is just what I am.

My host and hostess had been telling us at meetings for several weeks
about their new puppy.  He was getting into things a lot, making
messes, being a pup.  Also, the family was having a hard time
agreeing on a name for him, and the only thing they ever called him at
meetings was, “the puppy.”  So, when I got there today and met the
friendly little pug and someone called him “Nemo,” I remarked what a
clever solution they’d come up with for settling the naming
debate:  naming him “nobody” or “no-name”.  That’s what Nemo
means, in Latin.  But until today, they hadn’t known that. 
As far as they knew, they were just naming him after a movie
fish.  So, in trying to tell them how clever they were, I came off
like I was showing off my smarts and showing up their ignorance. 
It was an awkward moment all around.  

Later on, in a relaxed conversational group, talk was centering on a
job two of the members were doing for a man who is an engineer. 
They’d been talking about how hard it was taking instruction from him
on how he wanted his landscaping done, because he used engineering
jargon and generally talked over their heads.  One of them said
the man and his wife are, “both very smart, their IQs must be 150 or
so.”  Right off the top of my head, out of my mouth comes,
“One-fifty’s not that smart.” 

Shit!  Will I never learn to think before I speak?  One
person looked hurt and said it sure seemed smart to her.  I then
compounded my gaffe by saying (feeling nothing but sympathy, trying to
recover and smooth over the gaffe), “It depends on your point of
view.”  Then someone else said, “What did you say!?”  So I
repeated it and elucidated, “point. of. view:  perspective.” 
Then, belatedly, I realized what that “What did you say!?” had really
meant.  I’m too damned literal-minded, I tell you.

It is crap like this that caused me so much trouble in childhood and
earned me names like “Egghead” and “Brain”.  It’s not as if I
didn’t learn long ago that nobody likes to be reminded that they’re not
the sharpest knife in the drawer.  When I was a kid, sometimes I
threw my “weight” around in the only way I could, by showing off my
intellect.  That was because I didn’t like being made fun of for
my physical defects, and wanted to get back at the bullies.  By
adolescence, I’d gone to the opposite extreme, playing dumb because
that was what my mother had told me would attract boys.

Since then, I’ve developed some true compassion and humility.  I
know that this intellect is none of my doing.  I was born with it,
like some are born beautiful, or strong, or with a good singing
voice.  I cannot take credit for creating it, and there is
precious little that I’ve done with it for which I can take any
credit.   Mostly, I’ve accumulated a vast store of trivial
information.

I never did adopt the derogatory term used by many Mensans for “normal”
people:  densans.  Greyfox used that word tonight as he was
trying to console me for my gaucheries at the party.  I don’t feel
superior, but I know it often comes off sounding that way.  Nor do
I feel ashamed of my gifts.  I feel blessed.   I feel
that the mind has helped me survive in this defective body, and the
body has helped keep me from getting carried away with arrogance. 
It balances.

I feel like shit when some tactless remark of mine makes someone feel
stupid.  And when that happens and I see them withdraw from me, I
know I have no one but myself to blame for my isolation.  Thank
God that when I’m alone I’m in good company, anyway.  It’s some
consolation.  And right now, I’m beginning to feel like I’m
bitching about being the poor little rich girl.  Time to quit.

---

I’m back to the same dilemma I was having a year and more ago, when I
was doing frequent memoir blogs:  I’m wanting to do both memoirs
and current journal entries.  Life is rich right now with
blogfodder, more things in my days and my thoughts than I have time to
put in my journal.  I’ve also broken through whatever had me
blocked on the memoirs, and have been giving a lot of thought the last
few days, not just to a continuation of my sexual awakening where I
left off, but also to my very earliest memory in infancy.  All
that is totally beside the point right now, because I’ve had little
sleep in the past week and must stop right now and get to bed before I
start bleeding from the eyes.  Maybe I could blame my gaucherie on
sleep deprivation….

News doesn’t get much better than this.

A “mentally disturbed” man, heavily armed, stopped in a park to load
his guns before going on a shooting rampage.  Along came a playful
pup and changed his mind.  I can hardly wait to share this story
with Greyfox.  One extremely gratifying aspect of his recovery has
been his growing appreciation of dogs and cats.  I’ve heard him
say at meetings that he learned first to love rocks (and I know he’s
not joking about that), then the three cats who were here when we came
to housesit warmed his heart a little more.  The village dogs in
Talkeetna brought a little more love into his life, and now he’s
working on learning to love primates.  He will love this story.

I have another town trip planned for today.  It’s a potluck
barbecue with a bunch of dope fiends from NA, not just our little home
group, but some from Anchorage, too.  Good clean fun in the
sun.  That huge high pressure system is still here making things
hot, and the midnight sun keeps it from cooling off significantly at
night.  I have a big salad to prepare and a few other things to
pull together before I hit the road.  Seeya!

Puppy prevents Canadian killing spree. 25/06/2004. ABC News Online

It could have been worse.

After
the appropriately-named Dick Cheney, on the floor of the Senate, told
Senator Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself, he said it made him feel
better.  Well, good for him.  One mustn’t keep such things
bottled up.  Bagging your feelings can cause pressures to build
and then violence can erupt.  But then again, to some people such
a suggestion would be fighting words, and there could have been a
violent reaction, such as the one when Preston Brooks thrashed Charles
Sumner in the Senate in 1856.   I wonder how many spectators
would revel in a good free-for-all in the halls of Congress.  It
might be preferable to the decorous deference that passes for respect
among that rabble.

---

My latest crop of quizshit, mostly the usual semi-literate drivel:

I guess the most egregious floater is that “hate trends” line in the
“deeper look” result.  Shallow would be my judgment on that
quiz.  Aside from the point that I’m not much of a hater of
anything, I’d never resort to the word “trend” as the noun-form for
something trendy.  Trends are not necessarily trendy.  The
sentence that follows that one was a nonsensical ungrammatical hash, so
I edited it.  I left in the two references to “hate” to illustrate
where the quiz creator’s head is at.   And who, by the way,
is “Good Charlotte, anyway?

As for monarchy, I couldn’t care less.

When I get the computer back from Doug (he’s impatiently waiting right
now), I’m going to google Tsai Wen-Chi.  She sounds interesting.
 

Which Royalty Are You? Find out! By Nishi.

Which Woman of Legend Are You? Find out! By Nishi.

Updated–

After visiting Leylach and reading last Sunday’s entry, I decided Friday would be an appropriate time to post this:

There is a simple way to avoid alcohol hangovers and improve your
neurological function and general health at the same time–no, not as
simple as simple abstinence, but probably preferable to many of
you.  I mean a way to overindulge without suffering the next
day.  You will still make a fool of yourself the night before, and
mercifully probably not recall much of it.  It won’t sober you up
or improve coordination or reasoning faculties while under the influence, etc.  All it will
do is prevent hangovers and decrease the amount of brain damage the
alcohol causes.

Ever hear of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw?  No?  Well, then,
welcome to the New Age, the age of life extension and cognitive
enhancement.  Durk and Sandy and others like them have formulated
a number of powders and potions to do various things such as clear up
bad skin and make hair grow better, improve learning and memory, repair joints
damaged by arthritis, etc.  One of their formulas is the Party Pill. 
Primarily a bunch of antioxidants and amino acids, I credit it and our
general regimen of cognitive enhancers with helping keep Greyfox alive
and functioning until he decided to sober up and get sane.

Have a safe and happy weekend, everyone.

---

WooHooo!

As you may or may not know, depending on whether you receive instant updates on ArmsMerchant‘s
xanga site or have synchronistically or serendipitously been there in
the last few hours,  Greyfox has posted  the initial episode
of  The Ludicrous Adventures of Captain Blogfodder.

---

Thursdays are town-trip days.  Alaska is having a heat wave, temps in the eighties, which is hothothot
for us.  To those acclimated to our extreme cold, fifty Fahrenheit
is t-shirt weather, and by the time the temp gets up to seventy, we’re
sweltering in the shade with iced drinks, fanning ourselves.  At
last night’s meeting, after reading “How it Works”, I sat there and
fanned myself with the laminated script sheet.  In the supermarket
last night, one of the few air conditioned places I was in yesterday, I
heard a woman in shorts and a halter top complaining that she was
freezing….”What, are we in Arizona here!?!”, apparently miffed at the
A/C, something we are not accustomed to dealing with.

Temps at this end of the valley are often ten to twenty degrees lower
than down at the other end, summer or winter.  I left here around
noon, dressed comfortably.  When I got to Wasilla in my denim
skirt and long-sleeve tee, I was way too warm, so I went to the thrift
store at the rehab ranch to find a cooler shirt.  It’s a Gloria
Vanderbilt, Hawaiian print, big turquoise-blue flowers on a navy blue
ground.  The tee I’d worn had some turquoise studs on it, so I’d
worn turquoise and silver jewelry with it.  I might have
overlooked that neato shirt if I hadn’t been looking for something to
go with the turquoise–I don’t usually go for big Hawaiian
prints.  While I was looking, I also found two more cold-weather
shirts, one new and the other like-new:  a forest green waffle
knit shirt with a collar and lacings up the front, and an oatmeal color
henley.  Got all of them for a couple of bucks.

Last night on the way home from town, I was talking to myself. 
Only thing unusual about that this time was that I was speaking
aloud.  It was just strings of words, free associating.  Some
of them sorta strung themselves together for me.

When I got home, I searched out exact text for and posted a few more of
my favorite quotes.  They can be found at the top of the list in
my sidebar, main Xanga page.

Word play?

    conviction
        commitment    
            will

courage
    honor
       strength

the courage of one’s convictions
    to honor one’s commitments
       with strength of will

presence
    attention
    be present and pay attention

FAIR WARNING!

I’ve been most of the day at the keyboard, producing a new memoir segment.

It is long and rambling, with some old black and white pictures from my
archives and a couple of color pics I snatched from online sources.

I know it’s long and rambling.  I just told you so, so I don’t
want to see any complaints about that, y’hear?  You don’t have to
read it, y’know.

It will probably be finished and posted before I sleep tonight.

Seeya later.

Do you have a cervix?

If you don’t have one, and the one you used to have wasn’t removed
because of cancer, don’t ask your doctor for a Pap smear.  Even
though you don’t need one, the chances are better than fifty-fifty that
the doctor will perform the procedure anyway.

One in five women in the U.S. over the age of eighteen, twenty-two
million women in this country, have had hysterectomies.  That
means, presumably, that none of them has a cervix.  However, ten million of
them have reportedly had Pap smears to detect precancerous cells on the
cervix.  That number does not include any whose uterus was removed
because of cancer, or whose cervix was not removed with the uterus, all
of whom it would be appropriate for a doctor to screen for cervical
cancer.  Those ten million Pap tests were entirely unnecessary.

Not surprisingly, some
published reports are quick to defend the doctors who do this, claiming
that insurance company benchmarks and patients’ demands account for the
unnecessary testing.  That sounds like bullshit to me, unless of
course the extra testing is used as justification for higher insurance
premiums that more than pay for the tests, and unless–of course–the
doctor in question would prefer to subject his patient to unnecessary
discomfort and possibly unneeded cancer treatment, rather than risk
losing her to another doctor by telling her she doesn’t really need a
test on an organ she no longer possesses.

Bah, humbug!
 
Feminist Daily News 6/23/2004: Unnecessary Pap Smears Administered to 10 Million Women

The Levity Vortex

I may have a blog of my own to post later today, but meanwhile I just
want to share some of the giggles that have been going around here
lately.  Both of my men are in high (or LOW) comedy mode
currently, and I’ve been getting lots of giggles.  I also get to
pass them along both ways in my phone conversations with Greyfox. 

For Greyfox’s part, he has been working on a new serial even funnier
(we all think), and certainly more topical and timely, than his old Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaperson (of the female persuasion) to the Rich and Fatuous,
the collection of egregious injokes, outrageous puns and uproarious
physical comedy (quite a trick in and of itself, in a Xeroxed
newsletter), that ran for years in The Shaman Papers.

The protagonist of this new serial will be Captain Blogfodder.  I
get credit for his name.  Blogfodder is the word I coined to refer
to–well blog fodder, of course:  ideas to blog about.  If
someone else has already coined that word, I’ll share credit and we can
credit spontaneous synchronous generation.  It’s MY word!

For a while, he had a sidekick, but then he morphed into more of a
loner along the lines of Spiderman.  We don’t know when Greyfox
will get a chance to blog the Captain, but he’s scribbling notes on a
daily basis, notes that frequently even he cannot read.

Having teased you with a mere scent of Capt. BF,  I’ll share some
of what Doug has been writing.  This is today’s post in the beta
test he’s participating in, of a new tournament system.  Online
fanfic writing tournaments are his primary creative outlet at this time.

The character he is portraying in Another Damn Beta of Another Damn Tournament is Bam Margera of Jackass. 
In round one, a rule was posted that, “pants may not be
destroyed.”  Doug protested that it would be in character for Bam
to destroy pants.  For Doug to be protesting a rule against
destroying pants is perfectly in-character for him, and consequently
funny to me, since I’m privy to several instances where he has gotten
everything from FOFLMAOs and kudos to slaps on the wrist for his risque
writing.

The rule was amended, so that only Bam can destroy pants.  Subsequently and consequently, he devised:

The action here takes place in Garden State Plaza, New Jersey.