Hoodies- Now I Get It

This is a little story about my visit to the medical centre this morning. Nothing serious,  just some regular blood tests that the clinic had been nagging me about.

I really resent spending time and money just to get my medication but at least these tests were free… apart from my time and and travel expenses. Oh, and the blood can only be taken in the mornings after 8am so that means Saturday morning. And it is important not to eat anything for 12 hours beforehand.

So, there I was at 8.10 am, nauseous with hunger, number 16 on the waiting list, squeezed into a narrow waiting area with 14 other people (number 1 was already under way, which was some kind of relief).  Numbers 6 and 14 were on my left and right and blessedly both were occupied with magazines.  Maybe if the blood taker was fast, and  no more people arrived, I would get out without any claustrophobia.

Stories never turn out that way, eh? Otherwise we wouldn’t bother to tell them.  Shortly after I had decided that the situation was survivable, Number 14 was greeted by a long lost buddy. They were both male, and amped up to full volume.  I slouched into the seat and willed the newc0mer away.

No such luck. Blokey platitudes were exchanged.

How’s the world treating you?

Not too shabby.

What are you here for? They checking out the ticker again?

Just getting the old  warfarin checked. What I’ve got can’t be cured, just managed. Gotta take the warfarin for the rest of my life.

Any side effects with that?

Oh, just some sore bits but not too bad.

Pretty good at home?

Yeah, can’t complain.  I’ve got two boys now. The first one is eighteen months, the young one is just coming three months. He’s pretty neat. How about you?

Oh, my boy is six. The girl is ten. Second family.

Nothing wrong with that.

As for me, I am about to lose it. What the fuck is the overweight, middle aged idiot doing producing kids when he could drop at any minute. Second family, nothing wrong with that? What did Number 14 do with his first family? Decide he could get a new one on TradeMe?

What to do when you are in a public place and about to scream, “You disgust me.  Shut the fuck up or get a room”? Survival instinct was triggered and I slumped further in my seat and pulled my hood up and over as much of my face as I could.

At this point you may be thinking, “She has issues”. Well, so what? You want to make something of it? Go on, make my day.

So, there I was, a fifty-something woman, hunched down into her hoodie, wishing I had an iPod to  blast any other noise  into my brain. Not possible for me to look like a surly teen anymore, so what was I looking like? My best guess is that I resembled a street person with a substance abuse problem (it was early Saturday morning so I was dressed in other people’s old clothes, not my weekday professional camouflage). Never mind how I looked, my hoodie (actually Dave’s hoodie) got me through another 60 minutes of inane personal details and things I never wanted to know about their workplaces and colleagues.

My hoodie experience also had a silver lining (bad English teacher pun),  because it helped me to understand why young people put up their hoods indoors. I mean, for my generation hoods are to protect one from the cold and wind outdoors, or to keep warm after sport. We get annoyed at hoodied youngsters in classrooms and malls. They are rude right? And are probably hiding their faces because they are up to no good.

My hoodie protected me from the world. It insulated me, just a little but enough, from the threat to my personal space.

Something to think about, for hoodie-hating old folk. That person hunched into their privacy may be desperately trying not to tell you to shut the fuck up and get out of their face.

Altruism

It’s been a while since I wrote anything…a whole year in fact. My last post was about the importance of happiness and this is going to be about altruism. Pretty optimistic eh? You may not like the next one though because it will be about the joys of frugality.

What confuses me about altruism is that it is supposedly doing something good for no personal gain. It is not doing something good because you have to, or because you think you should, or because it will make you look good, but just because it is good. The difficulty for me is that altruism feels good, or to quote Sus, it is “happiness-making”. How can doing something that makes me happy be counted as doing it for no personal gain?

On the other hand, if doing good feels bad it is martyrdom and that should  never be confused with altruism. Altrusim is giving with a glad heart. It is not grudging or resentful. As soon as you begin to resent giving, please stop.

Another conflict I have regarding the whole business of altruism is that even after the buzz of knowing that I have made the world a little bit better for someone else, and therefore for the world in general, I start to find that I am getting all kinds of other benefits. I don’t go into the altruism business to get personal benefit but it just happens. Do these unintended gains disqualify my altruism?

An example. I have been helping a former student of mine with academic writing. About 4 times a year she contacts me for assistance to understand the requirements of her assignments and to plan her preparation. Then, a week or so later, she talks her essay through as she writes it. Why is this process necessary? She is dyslexic. The work is intensive and exhausting, especially since we both have demanding  jobs but I have gotten to learn so much from the experience.

I have learnt about what it is like for a very competent and ambitious young person to have to struggle with academic tasks..something that  frustrated her all though school and I didn’t notice because of all the behaviours that had gotten her thrown out of numerous English classes. Of course I have read about dyslexia but there is no way I could have gained as much understanding as I have through donating the occasional weekend morning.

I have also learnt about her world of Early Childhood teaching and thought about things like how competencies and dispositions that are being developed  in young children are also relevant to the teenagers I work with. Talking about learning intentions and success criteria , or principles of language teaching, in a completely different context really challenges my brain and gives me a deeper understanding of my own work.

Of course I also get the usual altruistic buzz, knowing that I make a difference, that my student has the chance of a successful career, knowing that she will make a difference to countless children because she is an excellent, caring teacher. My egotism tells me that the world is a better place because I am in it, because I do what I do.

This altruism game sounds rather selfish but anyone can play. The best thing about altruism is that it is free!

The importance of happiness

A few days ago I watched a circus act. Not the bigtop, animal variety but an acrobatic busker show with ropes and a trapeze. I enjoyed it and it made me think and those two things go so well together.

I enjoyed it because it made me feel good. In my mind I was flying and tumbling and stretching and performing amazing gravity-defying feats. I am sure that lots of other people were feeling something similar because we were oohing and aahhing and gasping and cheering in unison. We weren’t conciously thinking about responding, we just were. We were feeling what we were seeing. I don’t know what other people were feeling but my body felt wonderful and I walked away feeling light and free.

I felt happy and part of a spontaneous community of happiness. I don’t know how long that experience lasted for other people, or how intensely other people experienced it, but I do know it was a good thing. I also know that lots of little good things add up and that happiness can be built by fostering happy experiences.

Our society could use a whole lot more happiness, especially communal happiness and there is absolutely no reason why we can’t make it a priority. As a teacher, I know that people learn better when they are happy (Maslow etc) but its crazy to justify the creation of a safe happy environment on the grounds that it will promote better academic results. Happiness is worthy in its own right. Learning, mental health, safe communities etc are way more likely to eventuate when happiness is valued but happiness comes first.

Learning difficulties (2)

Whenever I think about teaching, I always eventually end up hearing Carl Rogers’ wonderfully sensible voice. Maybe I am going bonkers, because of course I have never actually heard his voice. Another more recent realisation about teaching, is that normal people are not teachers so perhaps being bonkers is part of the package.
The latest Rogerian moment of insight is related to thinking about working with students with learning difficulties. I don’t know how they think or how they got to the place of learning difficulties, or in fact anything important about them at all. They don’t know how I think, or why learning is easy for me or how I can help them or why I might be able to help them or anything important about me at all. If we were a Venn diagram our minds would be circles floating in random isolation.

What we need to do is create an intersection. A common space where we can work on the learning difficulty together. I am not psychic and neither are my students, so we have to put the relevant bits of our experience and skills and understanding into the common space where we can work on them together. I need my students to teach me how to teach them. That concept of a common space is what brings Rogers back to me and improves both my teaching practice and my mood. I am most effective as a teacher when I am part of a learning community and my students feel that they are members of that same learning community.

I have been a much nicer and better teacher this week. Carl Rogers would have been pleased.

Vicarious travel

This, in no specific order of importance, is the third of my hobbies. I am mentioning it now because I have indulged in it rather a lot this weekend and writing about it is preferable to going out into a Christchurch morning that is grey with icy fog still at 9am. As long as I keep the curtains closed I can be somewhere other.

One of the most delightful things about vicarious travel is that there are so many ways of doing it nowadays. Letters are still good, of course, and give a vintage thrill. Putting a hand in the letterbox and finding a plump little envelope nestled among the bills and circulars. Familiar handwriting, foreign stamps, maybe a little battered and stained, that letter has been places. What next? Rip it open there and then and read it on the front lawn or take it inside and consume it slowly with a cup of coffee on the sofa? At this time of year that is a no-brainer! After that, the touch and smell of the paper….but that is another hobby and maybe I shall invite one of my special readers to write about THAT one.

Logically, we have postcards next. Another retro thrill but not as rare or endangered as the letter because postcards are one of the least demanding forms of communication. Any idiot can go into a tourist shop, or airport or convenience store even and pick up a postcard with a local image or cliche and scribble a few words in really big letters about how they are there now and bought this card for you and hope you are well and will see you soon. I suppose the purchase of stamps is an added stress but, on the other hand, postcard sellers often also sell stamps and have a handy postbox nearby. But then who am I, in the comfort of my livingroom, to know how hard it is to send a postcard in China, for example. I hope it doesn’t sound as if I don’t appreciate postcards because I do. They have their own distinctive letterbox presence, sleek and defined and cool to the touch like my new HelloMoto phone. They look good propped up against the computer screen too and that of course transitions nicely into the next paragraph.

The internet. It could be listed as a hobby by itself I suppose but I think of it as the master enabler of millions of little hobbies brewing like staphylococci and reaching out its tentacles into all the crevices of our lives. (Mixing metaphors as a hobby, ya reckin?). It is so hard to know where to start writing about the internet, isn’t it? Today the topic is vicarious travel so I will stop wandering about and map out the remainder of this post, set a course and head for journey’s end (horrible thought that, an end to the journey). There it is again, meandering, wandering in circles (is that really because we have one leg longer than the other) full of sidetracks.

Email is the one form of internet travel. The good thing about it is that it is personalised (unless the sender thinks it is like one of those appalling Xmas newsletters where acquaintances feel the need to describe their beautiful family’s achievements for the year inside a customised card they have printed out themselves on A4 paper and signed in ink with a personalised message so you feel you are not just the recipient of a Microsoft Word template). Again, a disclaimer, the occasional group email is perfectly welcome, as long as it is not the only email and the group is not too big. “Dear family” is fine when “family” means only 2 or 3 people are sharing the email that I know was actually written for me and has been copied to them too so they won’t feel left out.

Blogs can also provide vicarious experences of many kinds, including travel. I suppose the only drawback is that the writer has to sit in an internet cafe somewhere and write the thing instead of going out and experiencing the things I want to read about (not internet cafes by the way). So thank you to those of you who are not writing simply to avoid a cold Sunday morning but are nobly forgoing real experience just for me. And for those of you who haven’t posted anything for weeks on end (yes you), I know its worth waiting for because you know that I am waiting……

Another whole set of vicarious experiences has been provided by the kind people at flickr.com. Pictures can be linked to blogs or travellers can simply give their photos titles and write comments under them like a good old-fashioned photo album tranformed by modern technology into a photo travel diary. China will never look the same in my mind now that I have “Dave was here” images superimposed on those classic sites and Spain will be empty of people (other than a few crazy Basque) but full of peaceful buildings and windows and moorish arches.

Phonecalls, the best and most illicit of vicarious travel experiences. I get to hear birds singing and breakfast being prepared in the south of France, or traffic noises and raucous shouting in China. This adds another sensory layer to my images of my nearest and dearest. Talking to someone in Europe is just better somehow than talking to them in Auckland!

Time is pressing and I will just mention a few other sources of vicarious travel experiences that are available to anyone (I resort to these when I am short of emails, blogs and pictures that were created just for me). Maps, websites for towns and regions,wiki (never wrong according to Mike), STA travel website, oh, and then there are travel brochures on stands in the street and Pilot guides in bookshops, and magazine articles. I could go on, but I won’t.

I shall end with an amusing image. I have a map of the world in my head and I see Sus ricocheting around Europe like an airhockey puck. Dave, on the other hand, is a pingpong ball attached by elastic to a medium-sized town in China.

Footnote: There is a cunningly hidden message in the third paragraph

Light reading

Dave is bored and wants some light reading. I don’t do light reading! As a compromise, here is a poem I wrote while subjected to the torture of professional development. It doesn’t have a name but its context is outside Centennial Pool at 5pm on a familiar Christchurch day.

Tired feet

struggling to catch up with the day.

Fending off the static of
endless traffic,

seeking

stillness

in a damp, grey sky.

Science? (part 1)

As my only reader knows, I have long had a love/hate relationship with science. Science, as a genre, is a wonderful source of the kind of random information that my brain loves to tuck away and bring out to gloat over and play with again and again. My Viking hoard. Science, as a discipline, intensely annoys me because it seems to be so constrained by “rules” of rigour and correctness but so dishonest in not admitting that it has been so wrong so often while insisting that it is the only acceptable source of knowledge.

Why am I angry at Science right now? The lastest earth-shaking, ground-breaking news in women’s health is that Hormone Replacement Therapy increases the incidence of ovarian cancer. Science has proven that there is a statistically significant blah, blah, blah. Of course the “practioners” who have been supplying these cancer causing substances to their clients on the basis that there was no science to show thay were harmful, are explaining away the risks by using statistics to show that if 10,000 women took the drugs for a year then there would be relatively few extra deaths because this is not a VERY common type of cancer. One anticipates that these pseudo-scientists who are now denying the findings of science are going to next tell us that we are more at risk pushing a supermarket trolley across the carpark than getting ovarian cancer because of HRT.

Am I being unfair to criticise science because doctors, drug companies and politicians misuse it? No way. Science adores being used because that makes it useful and brings in the money for it to do more science. Science claims itself to be objective and value-neutral but come on, nothing done by man is objective or value-neutral and science has always served the best paymaster.

You may be thinking, “Isn’t this old news? Didn’t we hear about the risks of HRT some years ago?” Well, you are half right. We heard about the relationship between HRT and breast cancer. Actually, the incidence of breast cancer has fallen since that relationship was “discovered” and now statistics from the UK are showing that there is a clear, direct, statistically significant relationship between the reduction in the number of women taking HRT and the reduction in the rate of breast cancer. It is always good when reality proves the science.

So, why is this relationship with ovarian cancer even an issue? Surely only women who really need HRT for life-saving reasons would still be taking it? Actually it is still widely prescribed for “quality-of-life” saving reasons. Why put up with “it” if you don’t have to? “It” being a range of things like hot flashes, dry skin, wrinkles, grumpiness, heart disease and otsteoporosis, some serious some trivial but all supposedly best treated with HRT.

Again, why is this Science’s problem? Aren’t women responsible for making their own choices and if they think that wrinkles are worse than an increased cancer risk, isn’t it their choice? The thing is, doctors don’t take the time to explain to women that science is value-neutral and doesn’t care if they are in the percentage who DO get cancer because, after all someone has to be in that group just as others are in the group that DON’T get cancer. Guess what the women are thinking? “The doctor wouldn’t give this to me if it wasn’t good for me. Scientists wouldn’t have created it if it would harm me.” Innocent self-interest shuts out the possiblility of thinking, “Were the people who created, produced and marketed this product motivated by my well-being?”

Am I being a little unfair here? After all there are well-meaning doctors who believe that women don’t have to “suffer” menopause. Time for some feminist outrage. Menopause is not a disease. Yes, there is a small number of women who experience such severe changes that they feel that life is not worth living. HRT may be their best option for now but will they still feel that way when they are “living with” terminal cancer? What a choice. Life is full of choices but unfortunately we often personally don’t have much of a range of options to choose from because we are not offered the full range of theoretically possible options. As an information scavenger I know that my doctors have given me a fraction of the readily available information about my own medication. I also know that they have tried to persuade me into options that are now thought to be harmful and have not told me about alternatives because they are more expensive or not funded in NZ. As a health services consumer I have to make my choices based on label-reading just as I do as a grocery shopper (though in NZ,  prescribed medication comes packaged with way less information than a can of beans). I would love to be able to rely on an “expert”, a doctor or scientist who would just do what was best for me, so my heart goes out to all those women throughout history who thought they could do just that and ended up dead statistics.

What is the alternative to science? Isn’t it our best and only valid source of knowledge? I am torn here because there is still the love part of my stormy relationship with science. I believe that science belongs to everyone and is something that people have always “done” and we have moved too far away from an intuitive folk knowledge of science that is based on observation and common sense. Common sense says that menopause is supposed to happen because it always has. Folk knowledge said that the less pleasant effects of menopause could be dealt with using remedies that didn’t have lethal long term consequences and that once women got to the other side they had reached a new stage in life where wrinkles no longer mattered. Imagine how much money we could save if wrinkles didn’t matter and value-neutral” science” could concentrate on cures for cancer instead of fighting the seven signs of aging?

Anyway. back to my current outrage with modern science.  Folk science (otherwise known as commonsense) tells me that scientists should have known that HRT would increase the  incidence of a variety of cancers. How should they have known? Well, they already knew that women who started menstruating early, or finished late were at increased risk of cancer because of a greater number of years of exposure to estrogen. They also knew that breastfeeding reduced the life-time cancer risk because it reduced the exposure to estrogen. My outrage is that scientists didn’t consider these simple facts when they decided that it would be a good idea to try giving women extra estrogen.  I am further outraged that they also didn’t consider that the harmful effects of additional exposure to estrogen would not be evident for most women in the short-term. This is not a little “ooops we couldn’t have predicted that”. Value-neutral be damned. negligent scientists deserve a special place in hell alongside global warming denying politicians.

Buying local

On the news yestersday, some business thinktank suggesting we respond to the “buy local” movement by moving production facilities closer to overseas markets.

Why? How is it our product if it is not made in NZ? Why shouldn’t Chinese factories make Chinese products for Chinese markets and NZ factories make NZ products for NZ markets? Yeah, I know that we can pay Chinese workers very little and then pretend that the goods were made in NZ, especially when they are being sold back in NZ.

How about our main exports, all primary based? Are we going to take over English farms and grow lamb to sell in English supermarkets? Hey, why don’t we export our comparative advange in sunlight and rainfall at the same time. What is the difference between this and intellectual property?

The Export Education could export all or teachers, and since students want native-speaking classmates, we could export whole schools full of students. Tourism? now that’s a hard one. Maybe they could all imagine they are visint NZ and pay us anyway.

Actually, what interests me more is what we are going to do if the world stops importing our primary products. Given that there will be no money to buy anything from the rest of the world, we will have to start making it ourselves again. Just imagine, NZ made shoes and clothing, NZ furniture, maybe even NZ made cars. Seems to me that I can even remember those things.

Would life be any less enjoyable without the Warehouse and all those other megastores full of imported junk? Do you need Australian made canned products on the central shelves of our supermarkets?

Fewer, higher quality products, less cluttered lives, less waste, doesn’t sound too bad really.

Responsible consumption

The electric kettle died yesterday. Today I asked Mike if we really needed one. Well yes.

“What do you use it for?”

“To heat water.”

Ok, that was a dumb question.

“I just use the microwave instead.”

“So, what about when you are cooking potatoes?”

Now I am really confused.

“I don’t boil the water in the kettle first when I am cooking potatoes. I put cold water in the pot.”

“Isn’t that a waste of energy?”

“But the kettle uses electricity so it uses energy, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but when you boil water in a pot you are using gas. Isn’t that a waste of gas?”

Impasse

So, what uses more energy, using electricity to boil water, or gas? I have no idea. Should I know? Should I have known this for years already? So many confusing decisions!

Anyway, as Mike said, its convenient to have an electric kettle so I bought one.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!