It snowed today. About 3 inches, which in Michigan would just mean getting up half an hour earlier to shovel snow, and otherwise winter as usual, but here in York meant they panicked. And by "They" I mean the school districts. At first they notified us there would be a two-hour delay, something that never even existed when I was young in Michigan, but by the time we started getting moving in the morning they had canceled school.

This worked out well for Rosie, who wasn't feeling well anyway, but I had an appointment for massage therapy and chiropractic care, and Brian still had to go teach. Brian actually decided to walk to work to skip dealing with PA drivers who have no idea how to handle snow and also avoid putting his car out in the snow. That left me to shovel, which mostly just consisted of shoving the snow off to the side. The ground was still above freezing, so the snow was wet and heavy, and one of my biggest jobs was pushing the two-foot wide swamp of slush in the road down past our driveway and into the storm water drain that is just downhill from our mailbox. Once I did that the water was able to drain past our property instead of accumulating in the road, but the plows may ruin that tonight just in time for it to freeze by morning.

I don't know if school will be delayed or canceled tomorrow but I'm guessing it will be one or the other.

Rosie's synchro swim practice was also canceled, which again was just as well. I really can't tell if this is a new cold or a relapse of the ongoing cold but either way she seems pretty miserable. She did get dressed (blue like Jewel the Macaw) in time to go to Brian's work so I could hit my appointment. She likes to play with the legos his colleague Joan keeps on hand, and later she told me she played with Brian's Transformers as well. She got moving to let me go to the appointment because she wants me to be relaxed, she said. I admit I can get pretty snappish these days when I'm stressed and headache-y.

I also just get snappish because I make silly mistakes and feel stupid when I'm tired, which is a lot of the time. I was thinking about this as I went down for my nap before going to pick her back up after lunch. I had just recently told a new associate about my condition and how I had to nap in the middle of the day or I get stupid tired. He kind of chuckled and shrugged it off a bit, saying we all get a little stupid when we're tired. Not me. When I am crashing I feel like my IQ plummets at least 70 points in very little time.

I'm sure Brian can confirm this, but here are just a few examples of how this affects me. For one thing, although I *know* I need to nap around the same time each day, which I get tired enough to really need a nap, I get easily distracted, such that my 8-year-old comes up to me me and asks, "Did you nap yet?" and pointedly orders me to bed. Today I went to the guest room to take my nap, picked up my phone to set the timer, and promptly forgot why the phone was in my hand. I remembered I had to set the timer and opened the clock function. The display was totally confusing. I could make no sense of it for a second. Then I realized it was on "world clock" or something and I needed to change the function setting. I looked down at the bottom of the screen, proudly remembered "timer" was on the bottom right, and hit that button. Then I set the timer for 25 minutes, put the phone down, lay down, and fell deeply asleep.

Outside of shoveling the snow, taking out the garbage and recycling, remembering to finally give the recycling guys their winter holiday tip, that appointment, that nap, a quick stop at the butcher, managing Rosie, making Chili for tonight, pre-preparing burgers for tomorrow, doing the dishes, processing one load of laundry, and getting Rosie to bed, I didn't get much done today.

I have a bunch of volunteer web design and event promotion work I wanted to get done last week (Does anyone have a copy of the font Winner Narrow Black, btw?), and am also working on a wikipedia article I want to finish and get out there. I managed to get Rosie to finish writing a letter to her pen pal and to make some progress on a needlepoint project she's doing, but I have to admit that she also spent a fair amount of time lounging on the couch with tea and a cat, watching Rio and Moana on my laptop.

Now that she is in bed I have just caught up on email a little and on updating my calendar, and other correspondence. I don't know if Rosie will be staying home tomorrow but even if she is I'm going to have to insist on using my laptop myself.

How was YOUR day?

Despite the title, this is really pretty much just a talk about Google My Business:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ACvHwZzl1o

I attended the workshop and found it useful.


This is part of a Grow With Google series, which included a talk on email, spreadsheets, etc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBym5IUrTU8

Reaching Customers Online with Google
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99b8qINA8o

Digital skills for your community:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sMsGHRymNU

Might be an impossible task, but still. Goals.

I am steadily reducing the number of things I am subscribed to and deleting old notifications, especially from lists.

A couple months ago I nuked the promotions tab in my gmail account, at which point my Inbox swelled to 48,000 UNREAD messages. Some have suggested I should have just deleted everything in the promotions tab FIRST, but part of the reason I was getting rid of it was there were things in there I wanted to see, in a timely manner, and letting gmail pseudo-randomly decide what to filter out of my inbox really wasn't working for me.
Before I nuked my Promotions tab, I believe my inbox already had roughly 12K unread emails in it.

Last night I got the unread emails in my inbox down below 10K.

So... that feels good.

What are your goals right now?

Have a good Monday!

So... How'd I do on my to do list yesterday? well... I got plenty of rest. I did not catch up on mail, though I did do the dishes and I got started unpacking From Rosie's and my trip to Michigan.

I haven't gotten caught up on photos yet from that trip. I may post some to Flickr. I've been maintaining my Flickr pro account and I remembered the other day it was partly because it was pretty easy to share photos from there to here/LJ.

since I was still coughing and sometimes so badly I got lightheaded, I promised B that I'd go to the doctor today, which I did. he's putting me on another round of antibiotics.

I also got my monthly shot of Octreotide today, and blood pulled for some chromatin labs.

Did not get far on the hair scrunchies yesterday. :( am going to try a different kind of needle but in the meantime I ordered a backup plan from Amazon.com that should be here tomorrow. Rosie's Synchro meet is Saturday.

But first, I go mentor fifth grade journalists and pick up my antibiotics and new sewing needles.

Today's plan:
* continue to catch up on email and online tasks

* rest (still getting over bad bronchitis)

* play hookie and go see Aquaman at the cheap theater with Brian

* take spider plants and bags and some books to Hannah Penn for students End the era of baby spider plants taking over my life. Except there are still some at YCDS. hmm. But not in my house!

* rest some more

* stop in at the Goodridge Freedom Center event tonight.

* fold laundry and watch a movie with Rosie

(recommendations for movie?)

I was frustrated today to be reminded of how much the Eurocentric/"Western" viewpoint still dominates American education. I subbed for a social studies teacher last week, and again today, and as she laid out the plan for the class for me we were commiserating over how her students didn't know or care about why the History of the middle East and Israel is important, and then she said something I thought about for the rest of the day. Speaking of Egypt, Jerusalem, and the events she was having them study between 3000 and 200 B.C., in three different parts of the Mediterranean, she described it as "The beginning of religion." The religions of the Book, I clarified, and she agreed, but I didn't contradict her overall thesis. Meanwhile, at another point in the conversation she had indicated that she would love to just teach European History, like especially World War I, that era.
And I think, honestly, that she has probably never deeply thought about the fact that people had spread out across India and Asia, and even to the Americas, thousands of years before 3000 BC. And that those people developed their own religions and beliefs without having any connection to the culture of what Western history calls "The cradle of civilization." She might not even know that many world scholars would consider Hinduism to be the world's "oldest" major living religion of which we have historical record.
Or that, written history or not, as Jill Lepore puts it in These Truths, "People order their worlds with tales of their dead and of their gods and of the origins of their laws."

People populated the Americas about 20,000 years ago across the land bridge, and then the water rose again, cutting Asia and North America apart from one another. This was about 18,000 BC. By 1000 A.D, the great city Cahokia, on the Mississippi floodplains, had been built, housed over ten thousand people, and been abandoned. The Aztec city of Tenochtítlan, with a population of over a quarter million people, was founded in 1325. By 1492 when Columbus landed in Haiti, there were an estimated 75 million people living in the Americas--15 million more than in Europe. And even the fairly simple Taíno villagers of Haiti had their own religion. which did not begin, in any way shape or form, in the Mediterranean post 3,000 BC.

(in case you're wondering, in 1500 AD there were approximately 125 million people in China, in the Ming Dynasty, many of whom were Taoist, Buddhist, etc, but some of whom were also Christian or Islamic. There was trade between China and Europe overland, which is how the Europeans came to possess gunpowder and the Compass, both first established in China during the Song Dynasty, before the Mongol-led regimes took over around 1271.)

I believe religion begins in the natural tendencies of human being to a) wonder about the nature of the universe and b) create stories that explain our world. this is also, in fact the origin of science. Both science and religion arose in various forms around the world. They did not "begin" in the Mediterranean any more than did music or dance or other elements of culture, and I hope that future course materials will make that more clear to teachers and students alike.

(as a side note, if you are interested in this sort of thing, look up the recent discussion between Stephen Colbert and Neil Degrasse Tyson.)

Written to the Then-President of Grinnell College on the subject of alumni volunteering:


Feb 20, 2011

I have in the past done a couple of things for GRASP but have otherwise not volunteered as a Grinnell Alum. I wanted to write to say that one thing I would love to do would be to coordinate with students on projects that would benefit the community. Whether that's an ongoing research project I could advise or consult on from a distance, or a spring break or similar short-term project in my local area that students came to participate in, I think it would be great to get alumni and students together to help make a difference in serving society.

While I was a master's student at the University of Waterloo, I saw how their partnerships between industry and students in the engineering program inspired students to tackle real, practical problems in school projects. I can only imagine that all kinds of alumni are in a good position to help Grinnell students identify and understand interesting questions and challenges in their fields of study, even as students are looking for topics to tackle for papers and projects.

For me, for instance, I would love to work with students who are interested in better understanding the history of the country's prison situation, and how many people have lost years of their freedom and in many cases their right to vote and their ability to pursue work in a career field based on convictions early in their lives, often related to the so-called War on Drugs. Alternatively, if any journalism or pre-law students are interested in documenting current conditions or cases, that would also be something I'd be interested in encouraging and being involved with. Similarly it would be good to document and understand conditions in our inner city communities and schools, for instance, and there might be ways we could set up spring or fall break projects to help address those by canvassing suburb library sales to build inner city school libraries or get books to kids a la the RIF program.

I would find collaborations like that really inspiring. If there's anything like that coming to Michigan, I haven't heard of it, but with Flint and Detroit being some of the poorest cities in the country, if I can bring attention and energy here I will.


Thank you for inviting ideas, and I hope you are enjoying your presidency.

Best wishes,

Anne (Gay) Gray, '96

So... this past week while I was watching my Facebook fill with posts of "Me too" and "I believe you," I was also reading The Round House, by Louise Erdrich. It's not an easy novel to read, but it is an important one. Told from the point of view of an adolescent boy in North Dakota, the novel chronicles the impact on him and his family of the rape of his mom by someone who calculatedly did it in a location that makes it hard to prosecute, because they live on Tribal land, but the attack might have happened within state or even Federal jurisdiction. Because of that and other circumstances, this story has the basis for powerfully expressing the difference between the relief felt when an abuser is locked up and the paralysing fear and powerlessness of trying to continue living while they are free and around in the same town. Erdrich is exposing the continuing barriers to justice in reservation life while also bring us along on a coming of age journey for the narrator. I highly recommend this book to everyone 14 or older.

Note: while there is a rape in this book and some details of the attack come to light, there are no graphic details of sexual violence. However, there are other scenes and conversations that have to do with sex, sexuality, body parts, and violence. In fact the intergenerational dialogue (both spoken and acted out) about sexuality, drinking, violence, and how to treat each other is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book.

Reading comments about the white woman who was recently lambasted for darkening her face to cosplay Whoopi Goldberg's character Guinan from Star Trek, I feel like there is an underbelly of the issue that is being missed by many of the white people in the discussion, and not necessarily brought up by the people of color, either.

I appreciate comments saying that someone's race is not something you should put on as a costume when depicting characters they played - that in and of itself is a good point, and an interesting one.

But I feel that simply calling what the woman did "blackface" fails to really connect most people to some of the wounds that are at play here.

Largely because current/younger generations, especially white people, have little-to-no awareness or concept about how pervasive blackface minstrelcy was, to what purpose it was used, and how it has continued to influence how characters of color are depicted in theater and the media, and also how people of color are perceived on the street.

If you are confused by the level of emotion invested in the backlash directed at this white cosplayer, I encourage you to read Let Black Kids Just Be Kids, a recent and very relevant New York Times Op-Ed by Robin Bernstein.

Berstein draws a very credible connection between the practice of blackface minstrelcy and the current patterns of perception that contribute to tragedies like the death of Trayvon Martin and the daily overpolicing and underprotecting of black kids in America.

Bernstein goes on to explain, "only white kids were allowed to be innocent. The more that popular writers, playwrights, actors and visual artists created images of innocent white children, the more they depicted children of color, especially black children, as unconstrained imps. Over time, this resulted in them being defined as nonchildren."

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” one of the most influential books of the 19th century, was pivotal to this process. When Harriet Beecher Stowe published her novel in 1852, she created the angelic white Eva, who contrasted with Topsy, the mischievous black girl.

Stowe carefully showed, however, that Topsy was at heart an innocent child who misbehaved because she had been traumatized, “hardened,” by slavery’s violence. Topsy’s bad behavior implicated slavery, not her or black children in general.

The novel’s success prompted theatrical troupes across the country to adapt “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” into what became one of the most popular stage shows of all time. But to attract the biggest audiences, these productions combined Stowe’s story with the era’s other hugely popular entertainment: minstrelsy.

Topsys onstage, often played by white women in blackface, were adultlike, cartoonish characters who laughed as they were beaten, and who invited audiences to laugh, too. In these shows, Topsy’s innocence and vulnerability vanished. The violence that Stowe condemned became a source of delight for white theater audiences.

This minstrel version of Topsy turned into the pickaninny, one of the most damaging racist images ever created. This dehumanized black juvenile character was comically impervious to pain and never needed protection or tenderness.

Other Blackface Minstrel characters created or perpetuated equally damaging stereotypes of black people, almost all of which were used only as comic relief, and young white people today are largely ignorant about those characters and performances, which continued into the 1970s in some places.

Heck, most of us don't even know or think about where the term "Jim Crow" came from.

Sometime around 1830, a white NYC ctor named Thomas D. Rice learned a popular African-American song-and-dance routine, based on the myth of a trickster figure, an escaped, possibly physically disabled slave named Jim Crow, who would dance and boast. His face blacked out with burnt cork, Rice perfected the act and sparked the tradition of the minstrel act. At first the blackface character was actually a smart and sympathetic one. But as time went on, the minstrel show took on a more racist tone.

Blackface Minstrelcy was very popular in the US in the 1830s and 1840s, but it continued to be practiced well into the 1900s and its legacy continues in the lack of African American characters of content who have primary roles in mainstream US media (books, film, plays, tv shows, etc). This legacy has caused an implicit bias in almost all of us, too little acknowledged, and is very hard to address with counter-cultural re-programming, especially while white people continue to dominate the production fields of those media.

If you think people are over-reacting to white people who darken their faces to portray people of color, please take a step back and learn more about why they are reacting the way they are.

On the topic of depictions in film and theater, btw, I highly recommend you read the historical fantasy novel Redwood and Wildfire, by playwright Andrea Hairston.

Thank you.

When a cousin of mine found out I have a type of cancer, he sent me a note that said "It's all about Turmeric." I did some research on turmeric supplements, and found myself skeptical about that as a delivery system. Now, reading Anticancer, by David Servan-schreiber, I find my skepticism confirmed -- what is best is to COOK with Turmeric, especially combined with ginger or pepper. It is a powerful anti-inflammatory agent, due to the component curcumin, but not when isolated. Servan-Schreiber writes:

"Turmeric magnificently illustrates the benefit of the great culinary traditions, in comparison to the consumption of isolated substances. When researcher in Taiwan tried treating cancerous tumors with turmeric delivered in capsules, they discovered that it was very poorly absorbed by the digestive system. In fact, when it is not mixed with pepper or ginger -- as it always has been in curry -- turmeric does not pass the intestinal barrier. Pepper increases the body's absorption of Turmeric by 2,000 percent. Indian wisdom has thus been far ahead of modern science in the discovery of natural affinities between foods.

"When I was researching information on my own cancer, I was astonished to find out that even brain tumors such as glioblastomas were more sensitive to chemotherapy when curcumin was prescribed at the same time.

"According to the Aggarwal team in Houston, turmeric's extraordinary effect seems to be due in large part to its capacity to interfere directly with the black knight of cancer we identified in chapter 4, NF-Kappa B, which protects cancer cells against the body's defense mechanisms. The entire pharmaceutical industry is looking for new, nontoxic molecules capable of fighting this mechanism of cancer promotion. It is now known that curcumin is a powerful NF-kappa B antagonist, while over two thousand years of daily use in indian cooking has proved that it is totally innocuous. Turmeric can also be eaten with soy products that replace animal proteins and provide the genistein mentioned above, which detoxifies and helps check angiogenesis. Add a cup of gree tea and imagine the powerful cocktail that, with no side effects, keeps in check three of the principal mechanisms of cancer growth."

References:


• Servan-schreiber, D., Anticancer: A New Way of Life. Viking (2009).
  
• Carter, A., " "Curry Compound Fights Cncer in the Clinic," Journal of the National Cancer Institute (2008). p. djn141.
  
• Cheng, A.L., C. H. Hsu, J. K. Lin, et al., "Phase I Clinical Trial of Curcumin, a Chemoprotective Agent, in Patients with High-Risk or Pre-Malignant Lesions," Ancitcancer Research 21, no. 4B (2001): 2895-900
  
• Shoba, G., D. Joy, T. Joseph, et al., "Influence of Piperine on the Pharmacokinetics of Curcumin in Animals and Human Volunteers," Planta Medica 64, no. 4 (1998): 353-56.
  
• Gao, X., D. Deeb, H. Jiang, et. al., "Curcumin Differentially Sensitizes Malignant Glioma Cells to TRAIL/Apo2L-Mediated Apoptis Through Activation of Prospases and Release of Cytochrome c from Mitichondria," Journal of Experimental Therapeutics & Oncology 5, no. 1 (2005): 39-48.