(a poem) On looking at a picture of Barack Obama sitting in Rosa Parks bus

response to  http://think-progress.tumblr.com/post/21379329055/president-obama-sits-in-rosa-parks-bus-4-18-12

I'm a lazy poet.  I probably could write good poetry if I spent time on it, but I'm impatient.  Can't be bothered to make it rhyme, but I write it anyway, occasionally.

So I wrote this little poem after seeing the photo at the link above.

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A thin man in a bus seat
A special bus seat
A historical bus seat

A bus
An old bus
A historical bus

A woman
An ordinary woman
An extraordinary woman

A woman sat in the bus seat
A woman in the past
When the bus was newer

The thin man
Wearing an ordinary suit
Looking out the window

Of a bus
Sitting still
Parked in a museum

Two images -- separated
By marches, lawsuits, burning crosses
Many people talking, screaming, crying

Two  people
Separated by time,
Just sitting.  Just sitting?

And it whizzes by
And we go forward
And are erased, all of us

Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen.

A man sits at a keyboard
A woman sits at a keyboard
One makes music, the other writes

We all pass into history
Some are remembered longer than others
All are gone, eventually

Yet, in the fading,
Of a bus, of a woman, of a man,
Sometimes, we feel a tug

A tug into the past
That makes it linger
Just a bit more

edited 11/27/12

On eating placenta

I have two children, ages 14 and 17, who were both born using certified nurse midwives.

After the birth of my first child, I had a craving to eat the placenta, but the midwife discouraged me, so I didn’t eat it.  I strongly regretted this decision.  I kept thinking about that placenta and how much I wanted to eat it for months afterwards.

I decided with the second child that I would eat the placenta.  I got my certified nurse midwife to agree to this.  My son was born precipitously in the parking lot of the birthing center, caught by my husband, but the midwife caught the placenta. 

She kept her agreement with me and let me eat it, raw. 

It was delicious.  It didn’t need salt and tasted like the best steak I’ve ever eaten.  I ate it in several stages, with ginger ale to drink.  It had some stringy parts, but I ate those too.

Afterwards, I felt great. 

What was remarkable was that I had very little bleeding after that birth, no more than a heavy period.  The bleeding stopped after two weeks and I had my first period at six weeks, despite nursing full time on demand.  My period continued regularly after that despite nursing my son until he was 3 years old.  My recovery from that second birth was much more rapid in general than after the first birth and I had much more energy.

Granted the delivery was a lot easier with the second birth, but I suspect that eating the placenta raw contributed to my rapid recovery from childbirth.  Of course, this is only one anecdotal story, but I would hope that some research would be done on this topic to see if others would have better recoveries from birth if they ate the placenta.

Statistics show more unmarried parents having babies and also many people postponing children until later in life, see http://news.yahoo.com/more-unmarried-couples-having-babies-cdc-130209558.html


Marriage has become a fraudulent institution -- promoting conspicuous consumption in the form of elaborate weddings with no real commitment attached, and enormous financial and legal ramifications, both in the areas of tax and divorce. It is no wonder that no one has confidence in it any more, except for gay people, who crave it mostly because it is denied them. 

Unfortunately, the current situation promotes huge numbers of children being raised in poverty.

Moreover, older parents are not better parents. The latest psychological studies show that children of fathers over 35 have increased instances of ADHD, Asperger's Syndrome, and bi-polar disorder -- and the instances increase with increasing age. With older parents, the kids' childhood is clouded with the mood swings of the mother's perimenopause and the father's male midlife crisis. Such kids -- and I was one of them -- grow up in an unhealthy atmosphere of extreme drama. 

Contraception allows people to postpone children. In fact, there is no convenient time to have kids. It's always inconvenient. Postponing children has its own risks. I know many baby boomers who intensely regret their decisions not to have children.

on science and religion

The scientists who formed modern scientific thought believed in a God having particular characteri­stics, namely being "loving." By "loving," they understood that He must govern the universe in accordance with laws, because the absence of law would be anarchy, which would be unloving. Moreover, they believed that the laws must be understand­able and discoverab­le by people, because the institutio­n of laws that were not understand­able and/or not discoverab­le would be tyranny. 

All reasoning starts from assumption­s. At its heart, science does depart from these assumption­s. Absent them, why would one think that any scientific discoverie­s would hold true for more than one experiment­? If the universe were governed by pure chaos, studying it would be useless. What would be to say that the sun would come up tomorrow? What would be to say that tomorrow we would not all fly out into space due to sudden, unexpected gravity failure? What would be to say that power plants, operating on establishe­d principles of power generation­, would not become dysfunctio­nal on a moment's notice?

Atheist scientists have, in fact, more faith than the religious. They believe firmly that the universe will continue to run in accordance with some kind of orderly principles­. The religious, instead, believe that God might at any point change the rules, thus causing an "Apocalyps­e," an end of all things as we know them, a falling apart. 

Why do atheist scientists have such a childlike faith that things will be orderly and follow scientific principles­?

Comparing Vibram Five Fingers and Fila Skeletoes

These shoes are very important to me.

The summer before last I was hiking in a very nice pair of Keene hiking boots.  My feet were in seventh heaven, but my knees were not.  I was wearing braces on both knees and using hiking sticks to take the weight off my knees.

During the following winter, I became persuaded, experimenting with winter boots, that excessive constraint of my feet and ankles was what was causing pain in my knees.

Therefore, last summer, I tried the Vibram Five Fingers for hiking.  These shoes had the desired effect, as far as my knees were concerned.  The knee braces and sticks stayed in my backpack & my knees felt fine.

One excellent thing about the Vibram Five Fingers was that, since I was able to point my toes while going downhill, I was much more sure-footed.  I tend to get very nervous going down, especially with confusing roots and rocks.  This nervousness is aggravated if I wear my Varilux glasses, which prevent me from seeing my feet clearly.  I found, though, that being able to feel my way toe first really helped.

In the past, when I've done long hikes, my thigh muscles have gotten very shaky on the way down, from the shock of going downhill.   I could stop and put my foot on a root and my leg would vibrate violently from the strain.  With the Vibram  Five Fingers, I had no such problems.  My thigh muscles were fine going downhill and did not get tired.

After hiking all my life -- and now being 55 -- I have to say I had more fun hiking in my Vibram Five Fingers than I have ever had.

The disadvantage, though, was that my toes were not happy.  The divider between my last two toes hit a tendon at the end of my foot between the toes.  Also, I had been forced to go a size up, because my big toe is very large compared with my other toes.  As a result, the toes in the shoes were too long for my other toes.  Since my toes ended in the middle of the toes of the shoes, they were bent in an unnatural way and were sometimes quite painful.

At one point, I tried putting on gators, to keep brambles off my lower legs.  I put the rubber bands of the gators inside the Vibram Five Fingers, because there did not seem to be enough of an indentation in front of the heel to protect them.  I found that the gators, configured this way, started to make my knees hurt again.  Even that small amount of stress of the elastic around my feet connected with the sleeve around my lower legs, was enough to hurt my knees.

This year I tried the Fila Skeletoes -- so far not for hiking, but just for walking around.   These shoes have the advantage of no divider between the last two toes, which is more comfortable for that tendon in there.  I went down to my normal, size, though, so especially in my left foot the big toe is too short, and my big toe hurts.

The Fila Skeletoes also have a more rigid sole and more arch support than the Vibram Five Fingers.  This is good for taking some pressure off my big toes, because I tend to pronate, BUT, this rigidity does put somewhat more stress on my knees.

On the whole, I think I prefer the greater flexibility of the Vibram Five Fingers, but the joined last two toes of the Fila Skeletoes.  Both manufacturers, though, need to address the issues of people with non-standard toe sizes and configurations.  Toes come in all sorts of different shapes.

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Addendum: 8/24/12 

I was hiking in my Vibram 5 fingers on Tuesday.  They performed marvelously in river wading & climbing on slippery rocks. I was amazed at my surefootedness.

Sadly, though, on the way down, I snagged my little toe on a root & sprained or broke it .... disadvantage of 5 finger shoes ... Sigh. 

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Addendum September 2013

This summer I hiked in my Vibram Five Fingers again.  They really increased my energy level on the way up and helped my knees on the way down.  And, fortunately, I did not re-break my little toe.

However, I found yet another disadvantage.  Since my big toes are longer than the toes in the sneakers, my toes slid forward & hit then ends.  This resulted in too much pressure on my toenails on the way down, which resulted in bruising under the nail.

I also met another hiker who had broken a toe in these sneakers.

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Addendum May 2014

I just got through 17 sessions of chemotherapy for cancer & have neuropathy in my feet. I'm finding that having the toes separated, as in these shoes, is good for the neuropathy.

Upcoming DSM V

 Somewhere there is a group of mental health professionals creating DSM V.  We hear that some diagnoses are going to be revised extensively, in ways that are going to affect insurance and government benefits.

I imagine these effete intellectuals, ensconced in luxurious meeting rooms, discussing the scholarly correctness of obscure terminology in light of the most advanced research, people assured of high income by their esoteric expertise, imagining that the academic integrity of their writing is the highest goal they can strive for, fundamentally out of reach of the people whose lives their deliberations will affect, perhaps even devastate.

This is the wrong process.  Since the determinations that these people make will so dramatically affect benefits, potentially for millions of people, a more transparent process is needed, preferably involving open meetings and government oversight.

The classification of phenomena into categories is a pedantic endeavor that can never finish, because, fundamentally, natural phenomena are not clearly classifiable.  Categories can keep morphing indefinitely, often in response to relatively minor concerns, and may change back and forth, fairly arbitrarily.

If only academics are affected, there is no harm in so altering categories.   When millions of people are affected, the burden of trying to achieve pedantic perfection weighs too heavily on the public.  The academic process of classifying natural phenomena should not determine the nature of insurance and government benefits.

On the use of pseudonyms

I published my novels under a pseudonym.  I did this because I did not want my novels to come up on an Internet search by someone associated with my day job, which is in a completely different field.

More recently, I have taken on several pseudonyms on the Internet -- so that I look like several different people, at least to the casual observer.  Presumably a sophisticated observer could figure it out, but not someone just doing a simple Google search.

When I take on a new pseudonym, I feel free to say whatever I feel like with that pseudonym; however, in the context of social media, I soon make friends and enemies -- and then have a community of people surrounding me.  I start having the same concerns with respect to that community that I have with respect to  people in in my real name life -- worrying about my reputation, becoming more careful about what I say, feeling constrained.

After a while, the pseudonym becomes my name in some sense, and is less and less a pseudonym and more and more a representation of me.  Then I feel like I should make a new pseudonym.

The irony of this is that this pseudonym, the one I am posting with here, is the one I would most like to draw attention to, since I am trying to sell my novels -- and, yet, this one is the one that has attracted the least attention and remains without a community.

Strange.