Status Update
Regular posting has been suspended due to the confluence of bad distractions--poisoning (eyes a little clearer today, but still weak and watery; more energy, but ordinary puttering-around-the-house still feels like work) and Microsoft's BLATANT HIJACKING of my e-mail for phishing purposes--and good distractions--gardening weather and kittens. Regular posting will resume in a week or so; delayed book reviews will be posted as my eyes allow.
My official age has been fifty for a good long time (depending on the web site that demanded a "birthday," some sources will tell you it's sixty). I've never worn glasses. Upon inheriting Mother's hand-held magnifying glasses I placed one in each place where I read--office, bedroom, kitchen. I've reached for them often during the past two years...always and only during glyphosate reactions. I can still read small print in dim light, without strain, when I'm not having a glyphosate reaction. This is one of the many blessings of High Sensory Perceptivity. Dad didn't own a pair of glasses into his late fifties and Mother didn't buy a pair until she was close to seventy. I do not want to waste the eyes I inherited by trying to read when my eyes are reacting to poison. I love other writers, enjoy your ARCs, and will resume binge-reading when I can.
What am I even doing on the Internet? Not staring at the screen for extended reading and writing. I happen to have a research project that involves copying and pasting, which can be done without trying to focus on the text and read actual words. I'm doing that until my eyes recover or the project is complete, whichever comes first. Some web surfing is possible; not a lot. Will I start paying more attention to pictures and music rather than words? I don't know. I know that video links I share will be, as they usually are these days, heard but not actually watched.
I feel a need to preach about this, just a little. How am I managing to work through this violent attack on my vision, breath, digestion, mood, and metabolism?
1. I'm hoping that, since the effects of this poison are so widespread, that like dicamba it will simply not sell; people aren't lazy enough to think of this as an alternative to using shears and trowels. Maybe the month's worth of butterfly posts I've already done will get the web site through this bad time.
2. I've taken better care of my body than some people have done. Since I didn't inherit any of a few genes that are more disastrous than the celiac gene, I can tell what really is caused by "growing older"--a few more white hairs, slightly drier skin than will form deeper wrinkles more easily--and should be welcomed, and what is caused by poisoning and should be grounds for a lawsuit.
(There's been a feeling that people who are dying of cancer deserve the first whacks at the chemical companies, as there's been a feeling that Bayer deserves to be the first company set up as a public pinata. This in no way means others should be left out. All businesses that have made or sold these "pesticides" need to be stripped down to their literal shirts. Every celiac on Earth needs to come out of this with a six-figure bank account, and every employee who held a responsible position in any of these companies needs to be pleading for the right to keep shirts and shoes as they move into shelters and wait on the low-income housing list. This needs to happen because these people's crime has been acting as if their wealth were more important than other people's lives. They need to be ina position where they will feel the prayer they need to be required to recite before receiving their rations of homeless-shelter soup: "Merciful God, please keep the people we have harmed better human beings than we are. Please keep us mindful of our profound inferiority, not only to the people we harmed but to tje wild creatures who have no worldly possessions at all. Please help us to be humble, hardworking, and penitential, enough to earn the moral right to look upon an ant as upon an equal.")
3. I've avoided the trap of thinking I need to feel happy all the time, and maintained a healthier focus on FIXING FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW. Trying to will yourself to feel happy when your body has in fact been poisoned with depressant chemicals requires either total loss of contact with reality, or confusion deep enough to interfere with the enjoyment of real cheerfulness, contentment, delight, satisfaction, or joy when they return. One should never try to force feelings of happiness or of anything else. One should never even try to force feelings of love. "I'm not actually feeling the love of my dog at this particular moment when walking with him on wet pavement has caused this fall, these bruises, this sprained ankle, and the destruction of a good coat as the dog dragged me from tree to tree, I am doing the practice of love of my dog." Acknowledging that love is a discipline not an emotion makes it easier to recover the emotion. If you want to fall in love with your spouse all over again, each time your hormones predispose you to fall in love with somebody, you must be able to admit that the hormone tide has gone out and you're not feeling "in love," that you're staying together because of loyalty rather than the feeling of being "in love," and wait for the hormone tide to rush back in. I don't enjoy working through the sensations of having measles, mono, and food poisoning all at once. I hate it. That said, I can get some satisfaction from focussing on the facts and getting some work done. God never told us, any more than God built us, to "be happy all the time." God gave us the ability to enjoy what we've been given to enjoy, if we don't try to bully ourselves into thinking that what we feel about what we've been given to work against is enjoyment.
To others who are feeling these sensations I say: Know what they are--ignore corporate twaddle about other possible causes, work to get the rule enacted into law that any chemical sprayed into the air is the first thing to test as a cause of any symptoms reported after spraying. "Testing," of course, means banning any further use of the chemical for a year or two and determining how many of the people who've complained of symptoms felt well immediately, improved gradually, or felt worse because their symptoms really were caused by something else. Companies need to be trained: Any time anything new is sold in a town, watch personal blogs and social media, and ask doctors to report any new complaints from any patients whose presenting symptoms diverge from an obvious cause like broken bones, heart attacks, or childbirth. Which would include slow healing from broken bones, unexpected heart attacks, or premature or unusually difficult childbirth.
Do not pretend the way you feel is acceptable. Do not tell people the way you're feeling is all right. Do not smile, unless the topic of conversation changes to something that really does please or amuse you. There's no need to maunder on about what we feel in ways that are likely to activate toxic hormone cycles for depressive cancer patients or anger-addicted cardiac patients, but save the smiles until they start telling you about their grandchildren. (No, I certainly have not felt too bad to smile at the adorableness of people's grandchildren, or for that matter of Serena's grandkittens.)
Animals
Midwestern cicadas. (Notice how different the 13-year periodical cicadas look from the annual cicada whose molting I watched a few years ago. Annual cicadas are almost twice the size of periodical cicadas, too, and what crawls out of the brown nymphal shell, before it hardens and darkens into a black and white shell, is that sequence of pastel colors.)
No comments:
Post a Comment