Parts 1 and 2

Oh, Jens Lekman.
You’re all fun with your singing and tinging of the triangle.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been having more frequent “epiphanies” or realizations - the “a-ha” moments in life. Usually, they relate to the past… and it’s not so much hindsight being 20/20, as much as me being a little slow in putting pieces together and really seeing things I should have seen before - about myself and the way I react and respond and deal with things, or how I don’t react and don’t respond because I don’t see how things affect me or just assume that there aren’t direct correlations between things around me and me.

And what does this have to do with calculus (or the Calculus, which I believe is the technically proper way to refer to this branch of mathematics)?

Well, just that math was never my strong suit in high school. I did very well with geometry and most of trigonometry. I got through calculus and took the advanced levels of all the math classes I did take in high school and passed with Bs, but when I got to NYU and learned that their academic plan didn’t require me to take a specific mathematics course if I wasn’t planning on a math-related major, I rejoiced, took the “math for non-math people” course (which was, admittedly, a waste of time) and was done with it.

The point is that I was able to handle the math - but that maybe it just wasn’t the time or place for me to handle it (and I should have stuck with it a bit more in college, yeah). I think I have the brain power for it. At this stage in the game, I find myself thinking that I would be able to understand the overarching concepts that didn’t gel at that time and that no one could explain to me satisfactorily. I was looking for a bigger “why” - and now I’d be able to answer that for myself with a few searches on Google. That wasn’t the case in 1995 or 1996. If I decided right now that I wanted to relearn it all (because I’d have to step back a bit and start somewhere in the middle of algebra 2) I’d probably have (gulp) fun with it.

And some of this extends to interpersonal relationships, too. Having a nice span of time away from my family a few weeks ago really gave me a solid sense of perspective on me - something I really haven’t had a chance to get a feel for in YEARS. Seriously. Like, four years. The only thing separating me from an apartment of my own right now is debt (debt that makes it impossible to afford living solo in the metro NYC area at the moment, but I move steadily in the right direction there). I had two glorious weeks of time to be by myself and spend time with friends when I wanted to and do things when and if I chose to. I was actually happy - really happy, not just content - and felt like myself again.

So another realization - there is a version of me I enjoy so much better than the one who’s usually around (the one who has to put up a lot of bitch armor to deal with everything around her and who has a tendency to verbally castrate everyone - both male and female alike - when she gets upset because that’s defense) and having her around for a few weeks was really very nice. My friends liked having her around, too. She’s still sort of here… I’m really trying to hang onto her and keep going with some of the good habits she instilled in me when she came for a visit.

And now I will stop speaking about myself in the third person because that’s just creepy.

I love makeup and I love heels and clothes and being able to paint my nails a different color every day if I want to without being looked at strangely. I don’t mind that my haircuts cost twice or three times as much as a guy’s - or that I’m expected to shave my legs (I sort of enjoy it and I like how they look). But this whole process of looking for a new gynecologist has got to be the least fun part of being a chick to date in my life - the yearly exam itself is a breeze comparatively.

I’m sitting here scrolling through pages and pages of listings on my health insurance website, looking for a new doctor. Scrolling and scrolling… and checking medical school graduation dates, for one thing. It’s somewhat ageist of me, but I think that I want a doctor who’s graduated from medical school more recently because she’d be less likely to have conservative views about giving me birth control pills just to keep my cycle regular, keep my skin nicer, and prevent the hormonal upheaval that just makes depression that much worse once a month… I’ve had that experience with one doctor before and I don’t want it again.

Then I’m looking to see if the doctor is board certified (because that’s another important indicator) and then to see if they have evening or weekend hours (my work schedule is pretty flexible, but it’s good to have the option) and then, finally, to see where they are. Just because the website says they’re 3.6 miles from my home doesn’t mean they’re easy to get to.

Finally, it’s Google time. I type in the names of the finalists to see what pops up. Have people entered comments on sites like ratemds.com? How recently? What’s the nature of these comments? As with any user-generated content, I have my grains of salt handy. Then I go further - are there other sites where they’re mentioned? Any papers they’ve written? Studies or panels they’ve participated in? If so, this could be good or bad - yay, they’re staying on top of advancements in their field, but does this mean anything about their bedside manner? Are there any blog entries naming them - saying anything good or bad?

After all that, I’m still left pretty much where I started. With a name, a phone number, and just as much patient commentary attesting to the kindness, patience and attentiveness of Dr. Pinkparts as there is saying that Dr. Pinkparts is cold and unfeeling and rushes through exams.

By and large, I’ve had exceptionally good luck with doctors in the past - really and truly - so I don’t know why I’m worrying so much. It’s probably because I’ve heard a few recent horror stories from friends and it’s making me anxious. I just need to chill. Make a few phone calls, check out the vibes, make sure Mercury isn’t in retrograde or whatever hippie bullshit makes things weird, and I’ll be fine.

With the exception of a pleasant lunch with a co-worker and a phone call from a friend, today was pretty sucktastic.

I’ve spent the last three hours doing work from home that would normally be lots of fun, but wasn’t because I’m tired, pissed at people (family for almost burning the house down just now - while they were sleeping and I was awake wandering the house and noticed the smell of vanilla and something coming from a closed bathroom and opened the door to find candles left burning near some wicker baskets) and the muse isn’t with me. At all. You can’t force that - at least I can’t.

It’s midnight. I’m going to crawl into bed with The Brothers Karamazov. I’m almost halfway through The Tin Drum and I’ve been having trouble sticking with the narrative. I can’t say that the story is riveting and makes me want to tear through the book, but it’s not yawn-inducing either (I’m not exactly looking for crazy action in my literature). I don’t know what it is, but I keep plugging along and I haven’t had that moment where the book has drawn me in and made me lose track of time. That means I have to change it up and then come back to it.

The Dostoevsky is going much more smoothly. I opened it up, read the intro and dove right in; it seemed like mere minutes later that my train was arriving at my stop when the actual elapsed time was 45 minutes. Yes, this book is engaging. I’m finding myself wondering why I didn’t read it much, much sooner in life. It’s not like I decided that the only Russian writer I could ever like was Nabokov… but I never made the effort to go beyond Anna Karenina, Notes from the Underground and a half-hearted attempt at Crime and Punishment. I may have read some Pushkin somewhere along the way, and probably some others - but not a whole lot.

Maybe I’m moving into a Russian appreciation phase. Maybe I need to buy a balaclava and learn to appreciate vodka and chess more. I already like beet soup.

I woke up at 6:06 and tried to stay in bed, just relaxing since I wasn’t anywhere near rested enough. During my ruminations, I somehow started thinking about kids eating paint and couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the medical condition that compels them to eat paint (and dirt and other things).

The need to look this up is what pulled me out of bed.

The answer is pica, from the Latin for magpie: “As many as 25% to 30% of kids have an eating disorder called pica, which is characterized by persistent and compulsive cravings (lasting 1 month or longer) to eat nonfood items.”

The more you know… before 7 a.m.

Geez.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Howl” being ruled “not obscene” there have been a few posts about “Howl” and free-speech all over this hizzee. An NYC public radio station isn’t going to be playing a reading of it because they’re afraid that the FCC will fine them for the offensive language - and that could come to over $325K or more in fines.

ANYWAY - you can listen to it online anyway. That and a whole lot of other poetry and writing related lectures, thanks to Naropa University’s archive project:

“The Naropa University Archive Project is preserving and providing access to over 5000 hours of recordings made at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The library was developed under the auspices of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (the university’s Department of Writing and Poetics) founded in 1974 by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. It contains readings, lectures, performances, seminars, panels and workshops conducted at Naropa by many of the leading figures of the U.S.literary avant-garde.”

http://www.archive.org/details/naropa

There are readings of “Howl”, and lectures like:

• Peter Warshall lecture on squirrels on earth and stars above.
• a Surrealist poetry reading
• Clark Coolidge bop prosody lecture

Admittedly, some of them are sounding a wee bit avant-garde for my taste, but I’ll take a listen to a few later. It’s all good - a learning experience, if you will.

Earlier this week, someone at work asked me to pull some photos from a Flickr community we set up (and that people shared their images on) so we could include them in a newsletter piece talking about a blog we’d done.

The assumption was that since they were up there, they were free to use and print wherever and however we would like. But that’s not the case, really, is it?

I wrote back - trying to be clear but not snotty about it - that just because the photos are up doesn’t mean they’re ours to share or distribute, and said that we’d have to contact the images’ owners to get permission - just in case. They’d probably be pleased to have them used in this fashion, but the last thing we’d want would be someone getting angry and upset - or threatening legal action - because we didn’t take the 5 minutes to fire off an email asking if it was OK to use their photo. Apparently, time was of the greatest essence and we needed to have the photos and permissions within an hour or so, so the plan to pull from Flickr was scrapped altogether.

It was interesting to me that in this day and age of (I thought) awareness of rights, permissions, fair use, copyright and trademark infringement, etc., that there are people (and people who are fairly tech savvy at that) who have gotten very used to thinking about the Internet as a huge source of free stuff and assume that anything there is free to use with no worries. There are guidelines for fair use - in terms of how many words from a novel or article you can use in a review or commentary without it being a case of you repurposing content or plagiarizing. There are pages and pages of information on any stock photo or stock art site letting you know how you can use comp images and alerting you to the differences between free stock art, royalty free images, rights managed images, etc. But the information is there, if you care to look into it and find out.

The photos on Flickr can be posted up for viewing by everyone in the world, but someone else distributing or using them without permission is an issue - and can turn into a legal issue. Some folks go ahead and license their Flickr photos under a Creative Commons License (you can select the type/level of license. There’s legal info to read through, but it’s not so dense that you’d give up. Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani answered a question about it back in March.)

More recently - Oct. 1 - the NY Times ran a piece about companies using people’s Flickr (and other such) photos without permission. There was a 15-year old high school student whose Flickr photo was taken and used without permission in a Virgin Mobile advertising campaign.

Anyway - yeah. I feel good when I’m able to say, “Hey - this is not a good idea. This is something that might cause problems - we can’t assume that we can just take stuff from people without their permission.” - and when that advice is taken.