Bad Habits Die Hard

Destructive habits fight for survival like hyenas would fight for the last scrap of tendon from the last tough gazelle on the planet.

I’m a deadline junkie. When the countdown hits those final seconds, I go to work: It’s DO or DIE, dearie, so yes I do it, I pull it off, I slide in right under the wire. Watch me crank, every move a ballet, Hail Mary – nothing but net!

The deadline crunch is a way of life, a drug-free adrenaline rush. I write for a living. For 35 years, that copy due-date has ruled my brain. Since my car was rear-ended last November, I’ve been suffering a solid week of misery month after month. All that 11th-hour work, glued to the computer in a deadline frenzy, just kills my injured neck. It turns around and murders ME, and then I have to go prone for two straight days to let my neck recover.

My physical therapist and my AA sponsor have been noodling me to change my way of life. I say, yeah, yeah, I need to do things differently, and then habit takes over, and I’m doing the same old thing, getting the same old results, month after month.

Habits hate change. They’re living creatures who will fight for survival. They live in your brain. They pull strings there, sometimes subtly sabotaging your thoughts (“That can wait till tomorrow…”), and sometimes screaming outright (“NoNoNoNoNO! You can’t do that!”). They’ll try every trick in the book to preserve themselves.

Excessive Misery Is A Good Teacher. That’s scrawled in big orange letters in one of my AA books (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, to be exact, at the end of Step Six, where we address the character flaws that made our lives so adventurous, so thrilling, so disastrous). A short paragraph is highlighted in pink: “in no case does He render us white as snow and keep us that way without our cooperation [blue-ink underline there]. This is something we are supposed to be willing to work toward ourselves.”

Excessive Misery Is A Good Teacher. Sick and tired of being miserable, huh? Maybe…do something different? Change, perhaps? Commit, say, to slaughter a bad habit, even if it bites, scratches and goes down fighting? Whose brain is it, anyway? Who’s in charge here?

So I acted like I was in charge. I knuckled down this past week, made a real effort to be smarter about meeting my writing deadline. Started earlier. Worked shorter hours at the computer. Stayed off the computer entirely if I wasn’t working on a story. Took those breaks everyone was advising I take.

Got the work done a day early! Holy crap! Didn’t have to go to bed for two days! Didn’t get the adrenaline rush, either. Ho-hum. Life threatens to get boring. [That’s a whisper from a dying bad habit…those suckers die hard.] Ah. Maybe I’ll take up bungee-jumping…

A Priceless Gift

The garden's last flowers

I received a precious gift on my birthday, making it the most beautiful of birthdays in a long time. It came from a beloved member of my family, who was given the great burden of a severe-early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis, shortly after Mom died of that disease.

To understand the gift’s significance, you have to understand that severe Alzheimer’s steals not just memories, not just language in all its totality as the foundation of communicating between people. It steals the brain’s computer processor, so it can’t access stored information, filter data, recognize context, transfer essential messages, or discern logical pathways in the process of decision-making. Areas within itself are isolated from each other. The brain fights through this incredible interference to make sense of a whole world in incoherent motion, as it tries to serve its owner’s needs.

After months of withdrawal, as my loved one struggled in the aftermath that diagnosis, a birthday card arrived the day before my birthday. It was followed by a phone call on my birthday, opening with the birthday song, and then a long conversation, full of news and willingness to patiently work through spots where words would vanish, a strength of attention to hear my words. Love lived energetically in that phone call, a wonderful feat of reaching out.

At dinner with my husband later, I opened all my birthday cards, saving that special one for last. It was signed with a loving message, warm with recognition of our history together. At first I wept at the evidence of language difficulty, fleeing to the ladies room for another (brief) war with God over this. I washed my face, came back, and read the card again, this time thankful for the strength and love that glowed in its message. Sorrow can be blinding. When I wipe my eyes, I can see the tender mercies that always there.

It was a blessed birthday, rich with loving gifts from my family. I’m thankful to be part of the human experience, present and sober and wiser for the life given to me to live on this planet. May all our days be rich with reaching out, offering some simple blessing to someone else.

So You Think You’re a Polyglot?

Does this happen to anyone else? You’re minding you own business when along comes some random word and it takes a dump in your head!

Slowly you become aware of that dogshit-in-the-house odor. You go in search of it, checking your shoes every 10-12 feet. You open the door into your head and there it is, the pile of crap, dead center on the carpet, soft poop on a mid-high shag. You have been dumped on and now you own it. It lives with you.

That’s what happened to me with the word “polyglot.” What sort of word is that to have stuck in your head? I had to look it up: When it's a noun, “polyglot” means someone who is fluent in many languages. Then it sat there in my head, stinking to high heaven, until I wrote a poem about a person who needs to speak several different languages but who is stuck with only one, and it is inadequate. Plus, I made the sections into 55 words each so that I could share the stench with the world-renowned G-Man, Mr. Knowitall Himself!

Languages You Don’t Speak

I.
Who is this stranger living in your home
eyeing you bitterly, wishing you dead?
who is this misbegotten manchild
who once flung himself into your arms
with a toddler’s faith in you, his god
almighty? Now you are his nemesis
you walk on broken glass
to say I love you, son
and you wonder: really?

II.
Your bedfellow, your partner
your opponent strikes the high lob
that sends you racing for the corner:
why don’t you… in reply you slice:
If you’d only… and then the backhand:
you’re so... all over the court
a series of mad dashes defending yourself
against the constant barrage
in a conversation of love, or war.

III.
It was like a dream, she said
the corners of her mouth bloody
your mother, emerging, soon to walk
on that new hip, and later
her dream becomes your nightmare
as sundown madness steals her mind
and you say please doctor
do something besides tie her hands
this is my beloved mother
this infantile lunatic

IV.
The sound of you
is the sound darkness makes
spreading from a lake of streetlight
yet you rise, greet the day
endure the day, then return
lie on your sleepless bed
for a night of marauding thoughts
the sound of your groaning
so weighted with silence
you could hear a fly drop
to its knees

(Click on the G-Man's link to see what others are doing with their 55 words.)

An Earful on Narcissism

It’s not everyday the Doc looks inside your left ear and says, “Wow!”
Wow? Wow what, Doc? I’m here for my RIGHT ear.
Your ear drum is really inflamed! says Doc. It’s really red!
And that’s exciting news…. why? I know: It’s exciting because I’m feeling the pain in my RIGHT ear, right? You’ve never seen that happen, right, Doc?
He hardly glanced in my right ear. It must be dull in there.

So, after learning the new diagnostic terminology of “Wow!” I received antibiotics to treat the phenomenon of pain zooming through my brain to be felt in the opposite ear. Maybe Doc will write me up for a medical journal. I will become the famous Patient C, studied by medical students for decades to come.

And I spent the night ooing and ahing over my amazing ear. No, I guess I really spent the night groaning and moaning, wishing there were an opium den next door. Alas, there is not, which is a good thing for an alcoholic like moi.

To self-treat the annoying situation of deafness in my left ear and pain in my right ear, I opened my email. I found a curious missive there, from a psychology researcher. She’s doing a project on the phenomenon of pain transferred through the brain from one ear to the other!

Not really. Her name is Katy, and she addressed me as “Dear Blogger.” I’m a random contact for a research project about the personality of bloggers.
Katy says, “I am a doctoral student in the psychology department at the University of Texas at Arlington. I am completing my dissertation research on the topic of the personality characteristics of bloggers. One of my goals for this study is to contact actual bloggers and record their self-reported personality traits, and view information posted to their blogs.”

Well, I figure if I can’t be the famous Patient C, I might as well be the famous Blogger A. As a lifelong journalist, I love to research topics, and I thought, why not do a favor for a fellow researcher? So I checked out Katy’s credentials and then participated in her study questionnaire.

It consisted of the expected stuff like “Do you agree or disagree with the following statements: I feel more alive online than I do in real life. I like to look at myself in the mirror. People view me as the It Girl of blogging.” And so on. It was easy to choose my answers (nope, nope, nope).

Then I came to this one: I am more capable than others. Wow! as my Doc would say. In certain useless situations, like knowing what’s what with English grammar, I am more capable than the average bear. But in other situations, like diagnosing my ear trouble, I am a complete dolt. After much back and forthing, I said I agree, but I thought: This one is going to mess up my whole personality profile.

And at the end of the questionnaire, I learned my qualms were justified. One of the things the study was going to discover was whether or not I have “Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a condition in which there is an inflated sense of self-importance and an extreme preoccupation with one's self.” Uh-oh.

These are some symptoms (which I googled to find): Has feelings of self-importance; Exaggerates achievements and talents; Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence, or ideal love; Has obsessive self-interest; Pursues mainly selfish goals…

Now, not only do I have a weird ear thing going on, but I am also doomed to being Blogger A who suffers an acute case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I’m going to skew Katy’s research study and make a bad name for bloggers everywhere.
As my Doc would say, “Wow!”

If you’d like to do your part for bloggers everywhere, you can take part in Katy’s questionnaire here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L7M59GV or contact her here: Katy Rollings at rollings.research@gmail.com.

But you have to forget everything I just said, and please eat this post, because we don't want it to get out to the general public. Or to the specific public either. I promised Katy we wouldn't cheat, okay?

*****

The Paralysis of Thinking

“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

Do butterflies have a brain?
Why does a tube of toothpaste have directions on it?
If microwaves were fluorescent green, what would your microwave oven look like while they bombard a cup of water?

Those are three thoughts I had between 4:30 and 4:45 this morning. They amused me, so I’m sharing them. Anyone have answers?

I could find the answers within a half-hour, thanks to the wonder of Google. But I’d rather talk about Napoleon. Should we take seriously the advice of a guy who ended up in exile because of his actions?

Of course we should. Many enormously gifted people have landed in prison because a more powerful faction could put them there. Just because he was a grandiose fellow whose aspirations exceeded his abilities doesn’t make him wrong.

Napoleon’s advice about taking action makes me think of some 12-step sayings that I love. For example: Take the action and the feelings will follow.

And this one: It’s easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting. I personally love this axiom. It’s helped me do everything from the large (staying sober) to the little (cleaning house).

Excessive thinking often leads to paralysis by analysis. What I’m learning to do is this: Stop thinking and re-thinking, wringing my hands and pondering something every which way from Sunday, worrying an idea like a dog gnawing on a bone. Instead: Pray, deliberate, ask my advisors, and take the next action.

Just take the first indicated step into the situation. As Napoleon said, “Stop thinking and go in.”

Can you relate?

~~~~~

It's Raining on My Parade

Showers are in today's forecast, with thunderstorms possible. It's a fine day for sitting in my sunroom office, surrounded by wet, yet snug and dry, working on a story assignment about, of all things, rain.

I have beside me on my desk a compilation of numbers, 350 sets of numbers to a page, representing the past seven decades of rainfall in my hometown. It's my job today to pore over these figures (hm) and analyze trends, then write an entertaining magazine article about them.

Ha! Sometimes I laugh at the work I am paid to do. What I know about rain you could put in a teaspoon. Let's see: The water cycle is this, evaporation from ocean surfaces, water vapor in the air, condensation, formation of clouds, collision of warm air and cold air, the jet stream, and voila ~~~ snow in Virginia, rain in California.

The only difference between me and the next nincompoop is that I'm motivated to go find out about rain, whereas the next nice nincompoop actually has real work to do.

(Silence for all of five minutes, while subject refers to the magic of Google, unearths the USGS water cycle diagram, and says, Aha!)

Now well-schooled in the water cycle, I turn my attention to an unrelated question: Is writing a left-brain or right-brain activity?

That question comes up while I pour myself another cup of French roast coffee. If I were in the same zip code as my friend and neuroscientist Mariana, I would call her up and ask. But I can hear her answer: Depends on the type of writing.

Nothing is simple. Nothing is ... Wait. Creativity is a right-brain activity. Why don't I go write a poem about rain, and put all the rest of it on the back burner for a while?

You see how my mind works. That's why I'm blogging rather than working. Being in my head at the moment is like riding a bucking bronco. There's no steering this beast.

So here's a list I found of the primary actions of the two brain hemispheres. Just a quick look-see tells me which side dominates in me right now. What about you? Which side is in charge?

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

uses logic

detail oriented

facts rule

words and language

present and past

math and science

can comprehend

order/pattern perception

knows object name

reality based

forms strategies

practical

safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling

"big picture" oriented

imagination rules

symbols and images
present and future

philosophy & religion

can "get it" (i.e. meaning)

believes

appreciates

spatial perception

knows object function

fantasy based

presents possibilities

impetuous

risk taking

~~~~~~~~