Hurl Words

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
RICHARD WRIGHT

Glucose is the only form of energy that can cross the blood-brain barrier

Resch also warns against skipping meals. That habit can backfire, she says. When the brain is deprived of fuel, it calls for more to be delivered, ASAP. That translates to wanting carbohydrate-heavy foods, since those convert quickly to glucose (blood sugar), which is the body’s main energy source.

“Glucose is the only form of energy that can cross the blood-brain barrier”—that is, permeate from the bloodstream into the brain—“so if you deny your body food, you will go after carbs in a big way,” says Resch.

Therefore, she advises, don’t go more than four hours without eating.

*****

Inadequate sleep causes changes in the hormones that regulate appetite: ghrelin, which is released by the stomach and stimulates appetite, and leptin, which is produced by fat cells and inhibits appetite.

“Lack of sleep suppresses hormones linked to regulating appetite … so you don’t have a filter telling you to stop eating,” says Su-nui Escobar, RD. “You are hungrier all the time.”

 

Dream

I dreamed I went to a friends house and suddenly remembered I was baking banana bread in my oven at home. This counts as a nightmare. I raced home.

Julian Wasser Photographs

https://www.julianwasser.com/

 https://www.artsy.net/artwork/julian-wasser-two-girls-in-hollywood-at-lee-drugs

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/julian-wasser-duchamp-playing-chess-with-a-nude-eve-babitz-duchamp-retrospective-pasadena-art-museum-1963

Mushroom and Green Onion Stir-Fry

 So simple and good

Piadina (Italian Flatbread)

 https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/piadina-italian-flatbread

Laura Lazzaroni's recipe for piadina, a traditional Italian flatbread... It's made with extra-virgin olive oil (instead of lard) and sourdough starter discard. Lazzaroni lets the dough ferment in the fridge for 2 days: This adds creaminess and a delicious hint of acidity. 

 Nutty whole-wheat flour and semola rimacinata, a finely ground, twice-milled flour, contribute to the flatbread's soft, fluffy texture.

New England Cranberry Harvesting

DECAS FARM out of Carver MA is THE BEST they have the best dried cranberries and video

Growers use helicopters to reduce the damage caused by driving equipment on the bog. Most helicopter use consists of lifting ditch mud, making crop inspections, applying fertilizer and lifting dry-picked berries.
https://www.cranberries.org/faq/why-do-you-use-helicopters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_92Zk4lctg

What happened?

He deleted his email exchange with Clapton because it pained him to look at it.“I’ve told myself, I don’t need to have a conversation,” Cray says. “I’d just rather not associate with somebody who’s on the extreme and being so selfish. 

source

Familiar + Familial Child Abuse

http://www.brainwashingchildren.com/narcissistic-mother-narcissistic-father/

http://www.brainwashingchildren.com/munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy-a-severe-and-sick-form-of-child-abuse/

http://www.brainwashingchildren.com/the-narcissistic-parent/

The Red Hand Files: Nick Cave

Issue #182 / January 2022

If you could live forever (and remain healthy in body and mind) would you do it?

ELISE, PITTSBURGH, USA

Where do we find meaning in life?

ASSAF, JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

Dear Elise and Assaf,

Susie has hung a cuckoo clock in the garden of our house in London. Behind the house there is a primary school, obscured by a high, ivy-covered wall, and each day we hear the sounds of children playing. To the side of the house, across the lane, is a church. The church is forever tolling its bell. Right now everything seems to be happening at once. The crazy cuckoo clock marks out time — cuckoo! cuckoo! cuckoo!, the children scream in the schoolyard, and the bells from the church ring forth, promising us everlasting life. I sit here with my wife, two people placed within this cosmic drama, drinking coffee, absorbed in our separate temporary worlds — right now hers is Instagram and mine is answering your questions.

Elise, you asked if I would live forever if I could, well, the answer must be no. I wouldn’t because, as far as I can see, the meaning of life is nested within the set terms of our own mortality. ‘Forever’ is both incomprehensible and utterly meaningless. I don’t believe we live just for the sake of it; rather we live our lives within the poetry of our own demise, within our own time, and our own limitations, and for that very reason alone we do so meaningfully. We work, we love, we care for each other, and we suffer together, knowing that one day we will die. The children in the schoolyard run headlong toward adulthood and their own disappearance, and we adults are the living breathing reminders of that. The man who waves at me as he walks his dog up the lane will die, as will the people filing into the church at the ringing of the bell, and the shop assistant hurrying to work, and the parking inspector, and the street sweeper, all will die in time — oh, and the squirrel (ah, there he is), he too will die (ouch), and the flowers, the swaying trees, and the earth itself. It is toward this temporal inconvenience — our finitude — that we move, with only a few precious moments to add value to this world. What can we do in this time that we are given, that is running through our fingers, even now? How can we lighten our mutual predicament that is drawing ever closer? Assaf, there lies the meaning in life — it is in the expansion of ourselves, in our benevolence, to fully occupy our allotted time.

And so the cuckoo stops cuckooing, and the little wooden bird retreats to await the next hour, the children have gone back to class, and the church bells fall silent as those inside kneel and pray, and the startled sunlight catches the side of my wife’s face with sudden purpose. Unaware, she scrolls and scrolls.

Love, Nick

Paul Krugman

Opinion

Attack of the Right-Wing Thought Police

Paul Krugman

Jan. 24, 2022

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Americans like to think of their nation as a beacon of freedom. And despite all the ways in which we have failed to live up to our self-image, above all the vast injustices that sprang from the original sin of slavery, freedom — not just free elections, but also freedom of speech and thought — has long been a key element of the American idea.

Now, however, freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, the refusal by a large majority of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a lost election. But there are many other areas in which freedom is not just under assault but in retreat.

Let’s talk, in particular, about the attack on education, especially but not only in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion.

Republicans have made considerable political hay by denouncing the teaching of critical race theory; this strategy has succeeded even though most voters have no idea what that theory is and it isn’t actually being taught in public schools. But the facts in this case don’t matter, because denunciations of C.R.T. are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.

I use that last word advisedly: There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”

Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision — maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt? — should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory” — because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed six million Jews.

What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents. If you imagine that the effects of applying this principle would be limited to teaching about race relations, you’re being utterly naïve.

For one thing, racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq — or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam — makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!

Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the G.O.P. base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?

Geology, by the way, has the same problem. I’ve been on nature tours where the guides refuse to talk about the origins of rock formations, saying that they’ve had problems with some religious guests.

Oh, and given the growing importance of anti-vaccination posturing as a badge of conservative allegiance, how long before basic epidemiology — maybe even the germ theory of disease — gets the critical race theory treatment?

And then there’s economics, which these days is widely taught at the high school level. (Full disclosure: Many high schools use an adapted version of the principles text I co-author.) Given the long history of politically driven attempts to prevent the teaching of Keynesian economics, what do you think the Florida standard would do to teaching in my home field?

The point is that the smear campaign against critical race theory is almost certainly the start of an attempt to subject education in general to rule by the right-wing thought police, which will have dire effects far beyond the specific topic of racism.

And who will enforce the rules? State-sponsored vigilantes! Last month Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proposed a “Stop Woke Act” that would empower parents to sue school districts they claim teach critical race theory — and collect lawyer fees, a setup modeled on the bounties under Texas’ new anti-abortion law. Even the prospect of such lawsuits would have a chilling effect on teaching.

Did I mention that DeSantis also wants to create a special police force to investigate election fraud? Like the attacks on critical race theory, this is obviously an attempt to use a made-up issue — voter fraud is largely nonexistent — as an excuse for intimidation.

OK, I’m sure that some people will say that I’m making too much of these issues. But ask yourself: Has there been any point over, say, the past five years when warnings about right-wing extremism have proved overblown and those dismissing those warnings as “alarmist” have been right?

Fresh Pasta

 https://www.seriouseats.com/best-easy-all-purpose-fresh-pasta-dough-recipe-instructions

Virginia Woolf Born on this day, in 1882

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

“I'm letting my pen fling itself on paper like a leopard starved for blood.” 

 

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”

 

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

 

 Virginia Woolf  Born on this day, in 1882

Oh the torture of never being left alone!

“Oh the torture of never being left alone! I find it impossible to disentangle myself from those instincts, affections, passions, attachments…which bound me…from the first moment of consciousness to other people. I need solitude; I need to feel I belong to myself.’”

— Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897 - 1909

Lost Child

 “My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy?

“Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, a silence there;[...] the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary  

“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary  

“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.”

― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

True!

You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.

NEIL GAIMAN

You have to stick at it

What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
DORIS LESSING

Why are veggies and noodles so comforting?

chop scallions, jalapenos, mushrooms, saute in olive oil

add cooked pasta

add fresh spinach+more chopped scallions + soy sauce.

ENJOY!

Control Freak, How Can I Take Care of Them?

By Koob Moua September 05, 2020 Aging

Caring for an aging parent is a responsibility that is commonly taken by their adult children but is accompanied by many compromises. As a caregiver, you may have already sacrificed your personal, work, and social life in order to attend to the daily care needs of your parent.

When your aging parent meets you with resistance and pushes back on every caretaking decision you make, it may add on even more stress to your changed lifestyle. Whether this controlling behavior is new or pre-existing, it may be an indication that something larger is looming at hand.

For example, mom would become unreasonably angry and frustrated if trying to change the layout of her home to decrease her chances of falling. Dad may become aggressive when you lend a helping hand around his house post his stroke experience. If this sounds familiar, you may have already coined your parent as a ‘control freak’.

Controlling behaviors are often the product of underlying anxieties. It’s important to understand what these underlying anxieties are in your aging parents in order to best navigate around their frustrated, aggressive, and resistant behaviors.

What Is Psychological Control?

‘Control freak’ is recognized as a trait among personality disorders within the field of psychology. However, we will refer to the formal term for control freak as ‘psychological control’ or ‘psychologically controlling’.

‘Psychological control’ refers to a method used to manipulate another person’s thoughts, feelings, and attachment.

It is exhausting to be a caregiver when your controlling parent will not budge on anything. You can easily become overwhelmed. Your objective is to look out for their best interests, so feelings of guilt for not following their wishes is common, no matter how unreasonable or strict their requests are.

Doubting yourself when you don’t meet your controlling parent’s expectations is a path you should avoid. Don’t let their manipulation get the better of you.

Communication is not a strong quality among controlling parents. Their inability to communicate effectively causes them to lash out with hostility, verbal and physical aggression, and unreasonable sensitivities.

It is helpful and necessary to understand the common traits and objectives among control freaks. Usually, these include:

• Being overly involved in their own personal needs.
• Lack of appropriate sense of empathy for their children’s perspective and goals.
• Discouraging the autonomous development and personal identity of their children.
• Manipulating and exploiting the parent-child bond through guilt, disappointment, and shame.
• Excessive personal control.
• Being unresponsive to their children’s emotional needs.
• Primary concerns are their own needs and feelings rather than those of the child.

Aging is not an easy process for anyone. Older adults naturally lose more control over their independence as they encounter medical complications, loss of memory, or new forms of physical disability.

It’s normal for an aging parent to become frustrated over their progressive decline in autonomy. It’s not normal, however, for an aging parent to become manipulative, excessively controlling, and lacking in empathy towards their children.

Having Power and Psychological Control

Control freaks need to have the sense of ‘being in control’ within a relationship. If they feel they are starting to lose power over their adult children’s behavior, they see this as a threat and become anxious.

What’s the usual result of this?

When a controlling parent feels they are losing their grip on power, they are at the greatest risk for being coercive and manipulative. As a result, they may withdraw their love for you, guilt/shame you, or act out in unreasonable emotional behavior.

The end goal for controlling parents during their ‘low power’ phase is to influence your behavior and ultimately get their way.

What are some things to look out for?

Becoming Submissive

Many adult children simply conform to the parent’s views or rules in order to maintain the relationship. But this usually leads to the child feeling depression, becoming helpless under their parent’s will, and developing more mental health problems.

Chilling Effect

Adult children who feel powerless or fear aggression from their parents tend to withhold their grievances and avoid conflict. Overtime, children will continue accommodating their controlling parent’s wishes to avoid confrontation.

Need for Acceptance

When a controlling parent acts out, it may actually be a cry for help. A summary of research studies has shown that hurt feelings were associated with anger and verbal/physical aggression. Controlling parents may blame you and other loved ones around them for their difficulties.

Taking no recognition or responsibility for their previous behaviors leading to their current situation is the telltale sign of self-protection. Controlling parents feel the need to self-protect themselves because they need acceptance from their children. When a parent feels less important, less close, and less valuable, they are actually expressing that they are hurt.

Controlling parents have different levels of sensitivity when it comes to feeling hurt. In fact, a focus group in a research study showed that parents that were sensitive to feeling hurt by their children actually used more forms of psychological control on their children. Mothers tend to have increased emotional outbreaks while fathers tend to become withdrawn.

What are the types of assumptions that controlling parents who are sensitive to being hurt make when interacting with people?

• They expect to be hurt upon the initial interaction with their children.
• Often, they have biased opinions and immediately interpret interactions with their children as rejecting and devaluing.
• They are prone to hostile feelings and have defensive aggressive responses.
• They overreact with negative emotions.

Perfectionism and Psychological Control

Perfectionism goes hand in hand with control freaks. Have you suspected your controlling parent of being a perfectionist in the past? More than likely. Two types of perfectionism exist – adaptive and maladaptive.

Adaptive Perfectionism

When a person’s character resembles adaptive perfectionism, they set and endorse high personal standards that are unrelated to negative outcomes.

Maladaptive Perfectionism

Negative self-evaluations that arise from rigid and inflexible adherence to personal standards defines maladaptive perfectionists. Such people commonly have depression and anxiety as a result of their stringent personal rules.

Research has demonstrated a strong link between maladaptive perfectionism and psychologically controlling parents. In more detail, parents with this behavior:

• Have overly critical self-evaluations and high standards to which they hold themselves and others.
• Project their own high standards onto their children.
• Disapprove of children who are unable to meet those high standards.
• React in a critical or rejecting manner if their children are not able to meet the projected standards.
• Use intrusive, critical, and authoritarian methods of parenting.
• Use more psychologically controlling methods compared to parents that are not perfectionists.
• Lack empathy to be attuned to their children’s needs.
• Extend any wishes and norms that they themselves are unable to achieve onto their children.

Being a caregiver for a perfectionist isn’t an impossible task. In fact, it can become routine since you’ll know exactly how your parent prefers things to be done. When a parent is a maladaptive perfectionist, they may meet you with unreasonable anger if one thing isn’t done exactly to their wishes. Unproductive and exhausting disputes often follow.

The underlying issue for maladaptive perfectionism in controlling parents revolves around anxiety. When things don’t go as planned among controlling parents, their anxiety levels grow. Think of an implosion.

Rather than communicating their needs, controlling parents quietly judge and push their stringent rules onto you as a caregiver. As their anxieties reach a limit, they will inevitably resort to psychologically controlling methods.

A controlling parent’s anxiety levels fall back down once they have their way. This is a repeated cycle that occurs commonly among controlling parents and their children.

How to Deal with Controlling Parents?

What are the solutions?

Journal Your Controlling Parent’s Behaviors

Investigative work needs to be done. Take some time to reflect on past behaviors that you’ve come across with your controlling parent. Write all of these down and categorize them in themes.

Give yourself a couple of weeks and up to one month to journal more behaviors that you can add on to the list. Using other family members that are also assisting in the care of your controlling parent may help generate more ideas and also help with your own biases.

Sample journal entry:

My mother will not change her diet despite recommendations from her doctors. She’s supposed to be on a low sodium diet and a diabetic diet but she continues to eat whatever she wants. Every time I tell her that she needs to change her diet, she ignores me, breaks down and cries, or begins guilting me that she has raised me her whole life and this is how I repay her.

Themes: Resistance to change, unreasonable and erratic emotional responses, and guilt.

Develop Solutions to Themes

Once you’ve identified common themes and controlling behaviors from your parent, your next step is to develop one or more solutions for each scenario.

Again, going over these solutions with other family members in the care of your controlling parent is useful. It helps to rehearse your solutions and responses out loud. Rehearsing out loud allows you to feel more confident and prepared when it’s time to have a discussion with your parent.

Solutions should include:

• Direct evidence of their past behaviors.
  • Acknowledging and recognizing the purpose of their behaviors.
  • Letting the parent know that you’re on their side and looking out for their best interests.
  • Provide objective evidence of what may happen if they continue with their controlling behaviors and share your personal feelings about the matter.

Presenting Solutions

When you personally feel ready to provide your solutions to your controlling parent, it should be at a time when your parent is most calm. You don’t want to bombard them with immediate attacks as it may further cause defensiveness. The mood should feel conversational rather than confrontational.

Example: Having a cup of coffee in the morning or doing a light activity together that you both enjoy.

“Hey mom, I wanted to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a little while. I’ve put a lot of thought into it. Before I tell you, I want to let you know that I care about you and your health. I know each time I bring this up, I feel like I get some push back from you, and I want to know why. How do you feel when I bring up this topic? What about it feels uncomfortable?

“It concerns your diet and the recommendation from the doctor. I get scared each time you don’t follow the recommendations from your doctor. It scares me that you’ll have another readmission to the hospital again. The last time it happened, it really terrified me, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Take a Stand and Draw Boundaries

The truth is, most controlling parents will not respond to your solutions as planned. Most will resort immediately to psychologically controlling behaviors instead.

Controlling parents have been conditioned to respond with manipulative and coercive behaviors from the beginning or have actually learned from their parents.

Rather than becoming mentally abused by your parents, boundaries of your caregiving assistance need to be drawn and made aware to your controlling parent. Professional help may also be needed.

• Talk to your parent’s primary provider and voice your concerns to them. A referral can be made for a psych consult.
• If seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist is out of the question, a community social worker can also assist with developing solutions to assist in the care for your controlling parent. Controlling parents will often follow the recommendations from a healthcare professional and adhere to the plan.
• Referrals for home health occupational therapy, physical therapy, nursing, and social work are great resources if discharging from the hospital. If your parent’s insurance covers home health after their discharge, the home health professionals can assist you in dealing with your parent’s controlling behaviors.

Koob Moua

Koob Moua, OTR/L, has a doctoral degree in occupational therapy. He works in a hospital setting to help people return to their lives after experiencing severe physical trauma, disability, or a new medical diagnosis through rehabilitation. On his free time, he advocates for his profession by publishing academic journals focusing on self-management of chronic diseases.