for all city hall crossings. It might remind us of the limits of corporate-style authority.

via The Daily Dish

My son sent me the link. It is wonderfully apropos to the day. The thing is everyone who knows me knows I am no good at all at games. No interest. No talent.

from: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

There is a really good article in Wired about stress and its relationship to power by Jonah Lehrer in . The basic conclusion:

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

and

feelings of enjoyment — the ability to find meaning in our work, even if it’s stressful work — may counteract the toxic effects of glucocorticoids. These molecules might also explain why not every janitor dies of heart disease at a young age and why enjoyable forms of exercise are good for us.

and this particularly nice sentence

Chronic stress is like a slow-motion stroke.

Damn.

A pet peeve of mine is an organization that makes a push to produce more client-friendly information bulletins, pats itself on the back for being so culturally/politically/ethnically aware and then uses phrases like “an urge to defenestrate.” Imagine a leaflet speaking to a generally vocabulary-challenged client base and further that the whole point of that particular leaflet is to foster the sense of inclusivity of said clients. The manager responsible for the final version of the leaflet strikes out “want to jump” and replaces it with “urge to defenestrate.” Why? Because that’s the term in the policy that underpins the organization. Imagine further that in all the back-clapping or speaking like the common man, no one gets the deep irony, nor the underlying offensiveness.

The thing that strikes me is not that the average manager thinks they can use words effectively outside their personal comfort zone, and without any training or study, but rather that the average manager doesn’t really understand that there is anything outside their personal comfort zone. Those ones out there – those clients, or customers, or user group – they are viewed as assets. The only point of view is from the bowels of the organization. Even when the mission of the organization is to provide a service for that group, and being able to understand from the point of view of the served would be clearly valuable, managers often simply cannot do that. People become assets because the manager’s point of view is tied (seemingly irrevocably) to the heart of the organization. Having being nurtured on the policies and procedures that are the nerve pathways and circulation network of the corporate body, interaction with clients is moderated through them. The assumption (usually unconscious) is made that the client should come from the stand point too.

Of course it is understood that policies and procedures are critical to the success of the venture but the whole idea of management is (or should be) to steer a course between the needs of the people the organization exists to serve and the policies which limit and order what those interactions can be. So if you run a suicide prevention organization that targets people who largely come from the less educated portions of society, then just because your policy manual uses the term “defenestrate,” that doesn’t mean you should use it in the documentation that tries to convince your client base to believe that you want to include them, that you want them to feel included in the world that they wish to leave. If you are any kind of decent manager, then you need to give up the language of the manual and cling to its meaning: use “want to jump out your window?” If you don’t then you have proven that you value position above person.

Now it may be that you do value position over person. In fact, if you are a manger, that is probably because you do have that value set. Despite how you may imagine yourself, the fact is that to get to where you are you have probably had to maneuver past others who equally deserved what it is you seized. You have almost certainly ceased being friends with those who no longer match you in status. But whatever, right. You’re there. The thing is do you also want to do the job you landed? Do you want to serve your clients? Then you need to grow some empathy, even if it a learned response. Learn to let the manual go long enough to say “please don’t jump.”

A couple of nights ago I had a dream.  I have escaped from a prison along with a young man.  We are flying over the country side, no control, having been shot out of some sort of weapon. I can see the land streaming under me. We cross the coastal lands and I realize that the arc of our flight is going to dump us in the ocean. As the dream opens I see below me small farms and acreages with rusted-out cars, deep pockets of weeds next to broken wood sheds and other signs of poverty and I feel a sense of comfort from the place. I don’t know this land but I feel comfortable with its apparent freedoms, space and its silence.

As I fly past these coastal lands I see the ocean and below the surface a great many ovoid shapes that I know to be creatures. Whales probably. I get no sense in the dream that these are sharks or other killers but that they are dangerous simply because of our relative size. The fact that they may kill me after I drop amid them would be a matter of impersonal circumstance. I am stoic about this possible fate. This is not something I want but at least falling into the water is not necessarily fatal as falling to the earth would have been.

And then the young man and I are in the water and the point of view changes. I can no longer see the beings below, the water is dark, the grey-brown-green of the sea. I also cannot see the land. I cannot control what may happen in the sea. All I can do is swim. So I turn back toward the way I have just come and begin.

I have worked with dreams since I was a young girl and because it is such a long time, my working with them goes in great arcs.  At the nadir I obsess, write down every image, sensation, colour flare in my sleeping. I list all the elements, translate them into narrative. I compare the symbols to past dreams. Turn them into poems, drawings, song, movement. Interpret.

At the zenith of my psychological bow, I surface inside the dream and it stays with me, gently.  Like balm on sore hands the images remain mostly invisible but work nonetheless. Often – acknowledged but left alone – a friend that needs a period of respectful silence before speaking – the dream will resolve into meaning and present itself as something so obvious, so crystalline and ordered, that one wonders how something so obvious was necessary to be spoken.

But it is necessary and, from experience, there is another, and another, layer of insight that will present itself when the initial action of the dream has been played out in waking life. So for this one, the swim is what I am being called upon to do and once I reach sight of land, or landfall itself, the dream will reappear and I will understand more.

Welding dreams to waking life is an act of art. Interpretation always is. The world has no meaning intrinsic to it, at least not any meaning in the human sense of the word. Meaning as we know it is our creation. Yet despite this, a good meaning, one that works for us in our lives must be linked to the actual world. Meaninglessness has at least two components. One is the obvious fact that humans are the source of human meaning and so there is no outside resource by which we can ascertain the Truth. Humans are not interlocutors between heaven and earth. We are in a dyadic relationship with that which is our source. The earth and its patterns are sometimes the nadir and we the zenith and other times we are beneath our own feet.

The dream I had told me a few things. I am finally out of prison, but I am still not in control. I have been shot out of that terrible place and I am passing over that which was for me. In other words, my job is over and I am temporarily immersed in Rez war and politics. And this has dumped me back into the sea of feeling.

I am not an emotional person and there are whale-sized unresolved issues that swim in my unconscious. I am in pain a good deal and of late I have felt despair, and an understanding of how people wear out, how pain can cause even a strong woman to lie down to die. But here in the dream, despite my lack of personal control – my life’s lack of a apparent navigation device – my natural stubbornness has been restored. Often in my past, in a dangerous situation, my mind narrows, and my focus remains locked on getting to safety. This is the feeling I am left with in the dream. All those dangerous huge creatures below me – there is nothing I can do about that. I may be killed by the vasty size of that which I cannot control. This is true – but meaningless since it is not mine to write. All I can do is swim.

This is key in the dream but so too is direction. At the very end of the dream I am in the water beginning the swim to shore, resolute, fear harnessed to forward motion, but where exactly is shore? And what does it represent in waking life?

The question to be answered by subsequent acts of interpretation: Where in waking life does safety lay?

And what I would really like to know – can I stop being shot out of other people’s guns?

via Wimp.com

and play this

Every day the same dream

then tell me you didn’t jump.

(Thanks, James, for the link.)

The last few days have  been rather odd. I had an interview last week and it seems to have been the last moment in a rather long stretch of work-related hysteria. Well, hysteria isn’t really the right word, as it implies something about being female that I don’t really intend. Is there a word for the frenetic behavioural state that results – from and in – a confusion or misplacement of purpose that doesn’t imply a gendered response but only a human one?

I don’t know the results of the interview yet, and frankly, dear….

The thing is that I really don’t.  It’s as if the interview, at the tail end of a divisive, team-shattering process, has reset some sort of inner target in my head.

And that realization made me think about how I have been in these last 50 some odd years.

It’s as if  I have a free floating targeting device in my head.  For example: moving along, a good day at the university, driving a well-loved country road, my mind just floating. Then – blip – focus – as it notices the signs of deer – drive – float – blip – focus – the condition of the tulee in the pocket wetland – drive – float – blip – focus – new plants in the white farmhouse bed in a yard – drive, float and then these two young men. Focus. They are driving what is probably their mother’s car, decide to slow down on the road in front of me. I slow down. They go even slower. I am very close to them now and the driver turns his head to the passenger and grins. And slows even more. So I pull out to pass and he speeds up and pulls in front of me.

The target snaps in place. I back down behind him and then the grin again. What happens next is that I run them off the road. The flash of terror on the driver’s face was gratifying.

I feel the hormonal rush for a little while but the target just unmoors and goes back to floating. Waiting for the next environmental trigger.

It’s not just anger that triggers the lock but it is a useful feeling. I am going to court in the next week on behalf of a young, deaf, Native American girl to protect her from persons who do not have her best interests in mind.

I’ll drive days when I am locked onto some specific case or project.

I’ll get in my car at 10 PM to drive 8 hours to get a niece who feels at risk. I’ll  find out a friend is in need, drop everything, drive across country to help.

Not good things, not bad things, just the effect of the targeting thing in my head.

The problem is not the feelings or the targeting aspect of my mind, but that I have so little control over what they seem to lock onto – some things that do matter, things that don’t really matter, things better left alone.

Better for me, if I could say – “hey you, lock on there.” The things my mind finds of critical importance are sometimes really odd.

Imagine if I could control the lock-on, if I was as imp0rtant to me as that young girl?

Stars! I would be fierce in my own defense.

Radical thought.

From The Daily Dish

Neuroscientists are beginning to identify the specific deficits that define the psychopathic brain. The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for secreting aversive emotions, like fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. Aggression doesn’t make them nervous. Terror isn’t terrifying. (Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is activated when most people even think about committing a “moral transgression.”)

This emotional void means that psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences: They are four times as likely as other prisoners to commit another crime after being released. For a psychopath on parole, there is nothing inherently wrong with violence. Hurting someone else is just another way of getting what they want, a perfectly reasonable way to satisfy their desires. In other words, it is the absence of emotion–and not a lack of rationality–that makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible to them.

I think I am going to read Snakes in Suites: When Psychopaths Go to Work.

I also think I want to get a copy of Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. The results will be interesting regardless of their outcome.

So I after my largely sleepless night I went to work. Walking down the hill to the bus wasn’t bad, in fact it felt good to be out in the incredibly warm (for January) air. I could feel the tiredness buzzing in my head but I thought tea or coffee (or both) would help that. I vowed to take a pill if I had any problem sleeping that night.

I got through most of the day more or less without incident and if I’d stopped at the soup for lunch I would have probably been OK. But I didn’t. I ordered an egg salad sandwich as well, with lots of vegetables. I ate the soup and then half the sandwich and within minutes the abdominal pain started. Exhaustion proves to be some sort of vulnerability amplifier. The pain was mild, so I went back to work and threw away the other half of the sandwich. The pain grew a little as I worked, but I thought it might settle with nothing else added to my system.

Between the tiredness and the pain, I did not stay late. The minute my time was up I shuffled out to the train. The walk home was nothing like the walk down the hill in the morning. The weather was still lovely, a few spitting rain drops, the smell of damp earth — the world was fine, but every step increased the pain.

When I got home I went straight to bed and struggled with sleep, exhaustion, pain and nausea. By evening, with the aid of a sleeping pill and antinauseant, sleep managed to win the battle.

It’s 09:30 the next morning, and the pain is largely gone. Still, no food yet; I think I’ll try soup later, if the pain stays away. Definitely no sandwiches, nothing solid, nothing with fiber.

Exhaustion is such a powerful thing and sleep it’s only antidote, so if it doesn’t come, all is screwed.

So yesterday’s cartoons were partly correct. I did feel like a frazzled cat by the end of business, but the works below by Zhiwan Cheung are a bit more accurate. The first: how I felt by yesterday evening before sleep finally bore me down.

At the moment I feel more like this:

It’ll be interesting to see what happens by the end of the day. The thing about moving through extremes of delight and exhaustion is that life is certainly interesting.