Leslea Tash's Blog, page 8

Application Period Now Open for Second Year of Native American Language-Immersion Grants of up to $90,000 each. Apply by Dec. 18. : IndianCountry

Application Period Now Open for Second Year of Native American Language-Immersion Grants of up to $90,000 each. Apply by Dec. 18. : IndianCountry:

Application Period Now Open for Second Year of Native American Language-Immersion Grants of up to $90,000 each. Apply by Dec. 18.

This is not an exhaustive list

And it’s not a promise.

And it’s not in order.

That Crackling Silence

An Honest Woman

Tether Boys

Joan of the ARC

Spectrometer

Book After Book

Brown County Blues

speechnotes

It’s fine.

I’m testing out speechnotes. So far it works about 2,000x better than Dragon NaturallySpeaking and it cost 10 times less.

I’m thinking about writing again–of course I’m always thinking about starting something completely new instead of finishing any of the six other works-in-progress that I have hanging out there. I’m not sure what I will do next, and I’m not a hundred percent sure what role voice dictation will have in it, but with decent tools, it seems like I could get a whole lot more done. Anyway, this is going to be a test post onto Tumblr :-)

And here’s the part where I test the the guide that the side of the page that says

:-) Face :-(

(this is a test)

dash!; mark does this voice dictation software make me look fat?

Hi! Wanna profit off of democracy without being a plutocrat? Check out this sweet trivia game and...

Hi! Wanna profit off of democracy without being a plutocrat? Check out this sweet trivia game and use my referral code: Leslea

systlin:neatlittlenotebooks:systlin:So I’m reading “Medieval and Renaissance Medicine” by...

systlin:

neatlittlenotebooks:

systlin:

So I’m reading “Medieval and Renaissance Medicine” by Benjamin L. Gordon and I just note that for the vast stretch of human history, it was considered a doctor’s duty to treat the poor for free, to the point where royal decrees were issued saying that doctors had to treat the poor free of charge. 

(Fredrick II of Sicily, in particular, set the following forth as the code of physicians and surgeons, along with some bits on how a doctor must have attended lectures in logic for 3 years and lectures in medicine and surgery for 5 years, and spent a year practicing under the direction of an experienced doctor.)

“Fees of the Physician According to the Code

A. The poor must be treated without charge.”

Also, unrelated but I found it interesting; a doctor was ordered by law to do house calls, and could charge half a tarenus in travel fees for patients in his city. 

I imagine this has something to do with the church’s beliefs about chariety? They used to believe a lot should be done for the poor

Partly, but it goes back further than that. 

The Greeks would often have doctors paid by the city who were ‘public doctors’; they earned an annual wage and then would treat anyone who came to them. If a rich man wished to retain a private doctor, he of course could, but the poor had access to doctors for free. This was considered a basic service. 

Later on, of course, Christian ideas of charity towards the poor entered into it as well, but the idea that poor people should be treated without cost is very, very old. The idea that poor people should be charged tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatment is very, very new, and runs counter to basic human morality going back a couple thousand years. 

A visit from my mother

Well, yesterday, as I was enjoying the hammock weather, I was reading a book about mysticism and spirit guides, and ancestors and things like that. 

The author is a white guy with credentials, so naturally, every page is taken by the reader with EXTREME SERIOUSNESS, and by that, I mean I don’t actually give a fuck about anything he says is a “must” or is “always” or “never” true. Grain of salt, anyone?

There is a very real thing going on in this world about the collective unconscious, though. Gods, spirits, ghosts, power animals, dreams, symbols…whatever you want to call things, however you identify, it is damn near IMPOSSIBLE to be a human being and not find some kind of symbolic connection to something. If you have a favorite Marvel character, that’s symbolic of something. If you keep falling back on a favorite movie franchise, that means something. If you are drawn to one particular type of housepet, color, car make/model, ethnic food, scent, music genre, ANYTHING, then by the mere fact of its existence and connection to you, a living human being, IT IS MEANINGFUL. Dispute that if you must, but I believe strongly that MEANING is the only thing that makes us human, as opposed to mere upright primate animals. 

Anyway.

Lying there, reading this white guy shit, and he says that he was riding a bike and very nervous about having to do some writing (LORDY, HOW SKEERY!), so he sent a message to his deceased parents, asking for edification. I don’t begrudge anyone their experience of loving, nurturing parents. Parents are the chief people you should miss and think of as a surviving, functional adult. I get it. I’m trying to provide that for my own kids.

By the same token, I can’t help but think that the event he described that followed was more than likely wishful thinking on his part. “I want to hear from my mommy…oh, look, a bird, that must be her.” NO, that’s not what happened exactly. YES, I’m being mean, but that’s beside the point, focus! The point is, symbols are real, it means something to him, but was it REALLY from his parents? REALLY? Maybe in his case, it doesn’t matter. Maybe wishing is enough to make it so, and that’s that.

But you know me. I had to try this thing. 

I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a message of peace and edification from MY dead parents?” I lay there in the hammock, perfectly serene, and watched the canopy. My parents fought bitterly. What might they show me now? Are they at peace? At war? They are dead, I know that. But if I could manifest ANY type of happy ending to that scenario, then wouldn’t it be nice to write something peaceful, blissful for them, now? Resting in peace, and sending love? Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Butterflies swirled above, but that is what they do in the woods. (Did you know the woods are FULL of butterflies? It’s true. Just sit and look up, high into the treetops, and you’ll see them.) I thought perhaps I heard an owl hoot. I waited, but, still, nothing happened that I could say for sure was any kind of message from the spirit realm.

Finally, I sat up, put on my shoes, and asked my familiar, Daisy, if she could talk. Yes, I actually spoke out loud to the cat. She looked away. Scratched her claws on the woodpile. Yawned. Even my black cat is a dud in the respect of power* animal communication, evidently. 

I went inside, amused with myself that I could still be hopeful and silly enough to ask the gods/ancestors/universe for signs of any type. It’s just not pragmatic. “Be patient,” I thought. “You never know when the sign will show up. That white guy had to pedal his bike a whole mile before he saw two geese.”

At bedtime, I told Tim about my experiment. We laughed, shared some stories, talked about strange encounters and reptile DNA aliens from outer space, etc. You know, basic pillow talk, married people kind of conversations.

The dogs woke us up a few times in the night, but nothing unusual. There was a thunderstorm.

This morning, Tim begged me to get out of bed and look at the garage. Usually, he lets me rest as long as I need to, but today, he was reeling. The garage door opener had been unwired. There were dozens of tools knocked off shelves on both sides of the garage. Animal shit everywhere. Our garage, which has been in dire need of a cleanup, was completely trashed.

He blamed Vera, as she slept in the garage last night, and for a moment, I thought perhaps he was right. It would have been pitch black in the garage, and there was thunder. Perhaps she got disoriented? Why would she poop on her own bed, though? Why would she poop on a bag of dog food? Weird.

Mind you, Vera weighs about 5 lbs. Maybe 6, soaking wet. It’s hard for me to imagine her knocking power tools off the wall. A can of spray paint, sure, but she’d really have to work hard and leverage her weight to do some of this stuff.

When I got outside and actually LOOKED at the damage, I knew for sure that Vera didn’t do it. It had to have been a raccoon. A google search confirmed. Then Tim found the raccoon handprint on the top of his car. Bingo.

“Well,” I said. “I DID ask my mom for a message.”

He laughed. “This is EXACTLY the kind of thing she’d do.”

She even shit the bed, literally. Crazy as a caged raccoon in a thunderstorm.

Vera, by the way, seems unharmed. She doesn’t appear to have been bitten. 

We’ll be working on cleaning out the garage later.

If you have any tips for making sure there are no raccoons in your garage at night, please get in touch. 

P.S. I have no problem with White Guy Wisdom per se. White guys are people, too. I would have less of a problem if their collected works didn’t dominate the field of study. Enough, already. Get some more voices heard, y’all.

*According to White Guy, housecats can’t** be power animals, but I feel confident Vera proved him wrong.

**As soon as anyone tells me I “can’t” do something, I stop listening. Don’t you?

Just something I made, thinking about things.

Just something I made, thinking about things.

Hammock weather

Today it’s beautiful outside. Nice enough to put the hammocks back up, lay out there and read (or color, as GiGi did). 

I was about 30 sec into my hammock time when I got the first of two phone calls. I was able to help the first person, & sort of help the second.

That first phone call was from Seamus (and his dad). I’m so pleased I was able to help. I won’t go into details. I’ll just say that raising teenagers is an ever-changing landscape.

I had a salad for lunch. Watched the butterflies swirl in the canopy. Listened for and possibly heard an owl.

Started the day with a Mr. Rogers documentary on PBS, and had a good cry. Fred Rogers is my shaman.

Every day should be hammock weather in July.

Summer of 20autism

I don’t know where to start. I guess I’ll start with the autism.

I have an autistic son. Evidently, four MDs were aware of this, but no one formally diagnosed him and no one told me of their thoughts until this summer.

What does this mean? It means my son is years behind in receiving autism-specific therapies. It means I haven’t had the opportunity to research the best practices for drug protocols for his particular neurological situation. 

It means a lot more than that, as well. It means that years of self-blame and guilt for what I was not doing correctly as a parent, for always striving to do better by him while balancing things for the rest of the kids…every bit or most of that self-examination was misguided. THERE IS NO KNOWN PARENTING TECHNIQUE TO MAKE A CHILD NEUROTYPICAL. I can’t reward/motivate/discipline the autism out of him, although I was encouraged to keep trying by doctors who knew better.

It means a whole lot of shit is wrong with medicine, but it’s still pretty much the only approach.

It means he feels ashamed, retarded. That leads to meltdowns, which leads to damage, injury, and consequences. It leads to depression.

It means the kids are absolutely baffled. The whole family needs therapy.

It means I have self-identified as high-functioning autistic, myself. Aspergers. Call it what you want. It all make sense now, how I could try and try and try for years to figure out things–emotional, social, interpersonal things, and yet understand something academic at a glance. I can read 10 books in a week and synthesize the information WITH EASE, even now, with my brain falling apart, but make me talk to 10 human beings in a week, and I go into shutdown.

It means I don’t meltdown, I shut down. It means when my kid melts down, I tend to shut down. I’m getting better.

It means parenting teenagers just got worlds more difficult. 

It means I do not know what I DO NOT KNOW.

It means I only have 3 more years before he’s an adult. So let’s try and cram as much “catch up” as we can into those three years, right? Because after that, if he decides he’s on his own…I’m out of options.

So. How was YOUR summer?

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