I love eclipses. They're a highlight of my existence. Tonight is a double-shot: a full lunar eclipse on the solstice.Yummy.
The results of my latest labs came back today. Everything is solidly normal. The psychiatrist has diagnosed me as misdiagnosed and relatively sane.
It's official. I'm part Republican. I've known this for a long time, but today I had one of those moments when it was obvious.
My sister is going to be sooo disappointed. Oh, that's right. She doesn't realize this is her problem, anyway.
I've been working at my current jobs for almost 15 years. Prior to that, being at the same job for more than three years was epic for me.
This week, the FBI foiled a plot by Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Somalia, in Portland, Oregon.CoffeeMaybe tomorrow and going forward I can cut that in half. I feel pretty disgusting right now, but I'm not a purger, so I have to live with this shame and failure for now.
Scrambled egg whites
1 slice of cheese
3 fingerling potatoes
6 0z. orange juice
1 bowl miso soup with cabbage
a slice 70-calorie lowfat cheese
a glass of wine
10 small lowfat raviolis
1/3 cup fat-free spaghetti sauce
green salad
1/3 cup sugar-free applesauce
The only feeling that pulls me off kilter more than depression is anxiety. Lately, I'm swimming in it, but I don't know why.
Dr. S looked over my food log and said that eating every four hours is bad. She has banned me from eating anything between meals, so I must combine the calories from the snacks into my meals, and I must wait full six-hour intervals before eating again.
Let's face it, in America, if you're not thin, you're nothing. You are sneered at and waved off by the medical establishment. You can't even buy clothes for a body that isn't toothpick thin and curveless. I know this because I went shopping for pants on Sunday. I still wear a size 16. That hasn't changed. What I found were racks and racks of "Skinny Jeans," "jeggings," (see photo at left) "narrow-leg trousers," "trim-fit pants," and more of the same. I personally know of two people who can dress in those styles. The rest of us will look ridiculous. The message here is, though, that you should never be fat or even curvy. We must all adhere to the fashion choices available and become shaped like little boys. Apparently, that's the American ideal. If it weren't, there would actually be clothes out there that fit.
I can't even imagine who gets to stumble upon this blog.
The Wii arrived on Thursday in a slender box with an Amazon logo. I never really wanted one, but so many people told me I'd like it, that when the opportunity came, I bought a console.
It seems that antidepressants can make people who aren't bipolar hypomanic. This can take the form of dysinhibition, personality change, impulsive spending, hypersexuality. You mentioned regretting your behavior while on paxil... I have the same regrets. When on antidepressants I had less empathy, could be somewhat impulsive with the things I said to people, and was occasionally incredibly insensitive to the feelings of others. I also expressed a lot of anger that I think in large part was due to the meds. My spending wasn't outrageous but it was beyond our means and we are now in debt.
After reading some more, I feel that I can finally discontinue the tiny amount of lithium I've been taking. I've suspected for a long time that this was a misdiagnosis. More drugs just made the whole mess much worse. After having discontinued everything except a daily token dose of lithium, this is the best I"ve felt in about eight years.
I'd jump off a cliff, but there's no way I could even work up the energy to climb anything higher than the bed.
The US government, which was largely responsible for the installation of Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan, has found him to be a frustrating choice. He doesn't always say what the State Department wants him to say. Sometimes he admits that he wants the U.S. out of his country. Sometimes he's agreeable. Sometimes he cries at press conferences. Sometimes he speaks the words of a seriously paranoid and angry man who is very willing to bite the hand that pushed him into office.
When we got home, Frank headed straight for the couch. He was asleep within minutes. I took the time to review his post-surgical instructions. So much to monitor. So much to remember.
Jupiter will appear very close to the moon tonight. NASA's Tony Phillips writes:I plan to get up and take it all in after midnight.
"A Super Harvest Moon, a rare twilight glow, a midnight conjunction--rarely does
autumn begin with such celestial fanfare."
For the moment, though, I'm going outside to enjoy the perfectly perfect rainbow that just appeared after a day of spitting rain.
Ugh. There is a skunk in my neighborhood. I've lived in this part of the country for 15 years, and was under the impression there were no skunks here. At all.What do you want, May, what do you want?
I want to be loved for who I am, neuroses and all.
I want people to stop hurting each other.
I want people to drive more conscientiously (I almost got hit crossing the street--on foot--yesterday by a driver who ran a red light 15 seconds into the 30-second red)
I would like to see significantly more ethics and much less self-serving behavior in all governments, everywhere.
I want customer service to actually serve the customer first.
I want people to be diligent about spaying and neutering their pets.
I want pet owners to step up and embrace the responsibility required.
I want twenty-somethings to stop feeling so goddamned precious and entitled and start earning the respect and rewards they believe they inherently deserve.
It’s that time of year when the weather is changing and the sunrise comes a little later each day. Nights are almost cold here, but the days, although sunny, clear, and dry, are steadily edging toward the inevitable. You can't really see the change yet, but you can definitely feel it.Doctors have zero incentive to care about their patients. Think about it--the doctor gets paid, no matter what the outcome is for the patient. No improvement, deterioration, death: A check is waiting, regardless. I think too many physicians prefer the hard work of quantity rather than the challenge of quality.
Personally, I have figured out more critical elements of my own conditions through my own time and hard work than any doctor has. The TV program Mystery Diagnosis shows again and again how many doctors have no interest in the patient's wellbeing--they are focused only on the quick fix, easy explanation. And if they're wrong? So what if they're wrong? They still get paid.
I can't quit my job, but I think it might be time to reduce the rest of my life to the minimum daily requirements. Those requirements are: sleep, eat, hygiene, job, deal with bills and mail, do laundry, tend to house as necessary, watch TV, use Internet. Nothing more.
Last night, I watched the Glee episode, "Home" for the second time. For the second time, it brought me to tears. Frank thought I was an emotional idiot. Sometimes, he doesn't realize what my upbringing was like.How many of you at this school feel fat?Mercedes begins to sing...
How many of you feel like maybe you’re not worth very much?
Or you’re ugly or you have too many pimples and not enough friends?
Well, I felt all those things about myself at one time or another. Hell, I felt most of those things about myself today, and that just ain’t right.
And we’ve got something to say about it.
It has been over three months since I stopped taking mental health medications. So far, I appear to be sane. Maybe more so than before. No more mood treks to the poles. In fact, I don't seem to stray far from the equator.
Updated Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs
By Rick Nauert PhD, Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on August 23, 2010
A team of psychologists have updated a cornerstone of modern psychology — Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs.
Maslow’s pyramid describes human motivations from the most basic to the most advanced. According to experts, Maslow’s time-tested pyramid, first proposed in the 1940s, needed to be updated to reflect the last 50 years of research.
A team of psychologists, including two from Arizona State University, recast the pyramid. In doing so, they have taken on one of psychology’s iconic symbols and have generated some controversy along the way.
The revamp of Maslow’s pyramid reflects new findings and theory from fields like neuroscience, developmental psychology and evolutionary psychology, said Douglas Kenrick, an ASU professor of psychology and lead author of the paper, “Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations.”
Despite being one of psychology’s most memorable images, Maslow’s pyramid hasn’t always been supported by empirical research, said Steven Neuberg, an ASU Foundation professor and coauthor of the paper.
“Within the psychological sciences, the pyramid was increasingly viewed as quaint and oldfashioned, and badly in need of updating,” Neuberg added.
“It was based on some great ideas, several of which are worth preserving,” Kenrick said.
“But it missed out on some very basic facts about human nature, facts which weren’t well understood in Maslow’s time, but were established by later research and theory at the interface of psychology, biology and anthropology.”
Maslow developed the pyramid of needs to represent a hierarchy of human motives, with those at the bottom taking precedence over those higher up. At the base of Maslow’s pyramid are physiological needs – hunger, thirst and sexual desire.
According to Maslow, if you are starving and craving food that will trump all other goals. But if you are satisfied on one level, you move to the next. So, once you are well fed, you worry about safety. Once you are safe, you worry about affection and esteem and so forth. Perhaps most famously, at the top of Maslow’s pyramid sat the need for self-actualization – the desire to fulfill one’s own unique creative potential.
The research team – which included Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver – restructured the famous pyramid after observing how psychological processes radically change in response to evolutionarily fundamental motives, such as self-protection, mating or status concerns.
The bottom four levels of the new pyramid are highly compatible with Maslow’s, but big changes are at the top. Perhaps the most controversial modification is that self-actualization no longer appears on the pyramid at all.
At the top of the new pyramid are three evolutionarily critical motives that Maslow overlooked – mate acquisition, mate retention and parenting.
The researchers state in the article that while self-actualization is interesting and important, it isn’t an evolutionarily fundamental need.
Instead, many of the activities that Maslow labeled as self-actualizing (artistic creativity, for example) reflect more biologically basic drives to gain status, which in turn serves the goal of attracting mates.
“Among human aspirations that are most biologically fundamental are those that ultimately facilitate reproduction of our genes in our children’s children,” Kenrick explained. “For that reason, parenting is paramount.”
The researchers are not saying that artists or poets are consciously thinking about increasing their reproductive success when they feel the inspiration to paint or write.
“Reproductive goals are ultimate causes,” Kenrick added, “like the desire of birds to migrate because it helps them survive and reproduce. But at a proximate (or immediate psychological) level, the bird migrates because its brain registers that the length of day is changing. In our minds, we humans create simply because it feels good to us; we’re not aware of its ultimate function.”
“You could argue that a peacock’s display is as beautiful as anything any human artist has ever produced,” Kenrick said.
“Yet it has a clear biological function – to attract a mate. We suspect that self actualization is also simply an expression of the more evolutionarily fundamental need to reproduce.”
But, Kenrick adds, for humans reproduction is not just about sex and producing children. It’s also about raising those children to the age at which they can reproduce as well. Consequently, parenting sits atop the revamped pyramid.
There are other distinctions as well. For Maslow, once a need was met, it disappeared as the individual moved on to the next level. In the reworked pyramid, needs overlap one another and coexist, instead of completely replacing each other.
For example, certain environmental cues can make them come back. If you are walking down the street thinking about love, art or the meaning of life, you will revert quickly to the self-protection level if you see an ominous-looking gang of young men headed your way.
The new pyramid already has generated some controversy within the field. The published article was accompanied by four commentaries. While the commentaries agreed with the basic evolutionary premise of the new pyramid, they take issue with some of the specific details, including the removal of self-actualization and the prominence of parenting in the new pyramid.
“The pyramid of needs is a wonderful idea of Maslow’s,” Kenrick said.
“He just got some of it wrong. Now people are talking about it again, which will help us get it right.”
The paper was published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Sciences.
Then there's the whole doctrine of "If you don't believe as I believe, you are evil and must be eliminated." Many a conflict, war, slaughter, oppression, holocaust, conquest, and discriminatory act have been based on this. Research any religion and you'll conclude there has been bad behavior all around. Believing in a deity is one thing; forming an entire social construct around it is a recipe for narrowing minds.
Hey, I received the "sacrament" of confirmation at the age of eight. The Catholic Church demanded that I commit to the faith with all of my body, heart, and soul, a little Papist soldier of Christ, promising to do whatever I was told to do in the name of Christ. I was in the third grade. Had I been told it was God's will to blow up Protestant children, I probably would have done it out of fear that disobeying the command would have led to my spending eternity in Hell. My madrasa was a well-respected parochial school in the Philadelphia suburbs. I was taught that Catholics were the only people who had any chance of getting into heaven, and everyone else who couldn't be converted should be not just be avoided, but shunned.
It appears I am having a recurrence of shingles. No rash yet, but the pain is taking my breath away. The graphic (from lidoderm.com) shows common shingles pain areas in orange. My pain area is circled in red, but also includes the underside of my right arm, as well.If you think, that putting up a mosque, 600 ft. from ground zero and have the inauguration, on the anniversary of 9/11/11, is immoral, inhuman and a complete lack of respect for the memories, of all that perished there, on that day and their survivors. That politicians are doing a grave injustice to the fallen heroes, ...their families and all the people of New York City, THEN PLEASE COPY AND PASTE THIS TO YOUR WALL
You with the sad eyes
Dear President Obama,
Hey, here's a friendly heads up: If your religion requires you to go out and pound the pavement to recruit new members, you are in a cult.Note: We are not ambiguous on this point. There is a sign next to the doorbell that reads: "No Solicitiation. Definition: We do not want to hear about your religion. We do not want to buy anything. We do not want to sign your petition. Basically, if you are not USPS, FedEx, UPS, or a friend of ours, you are trespassing, so do not ring the doorbell."
