Blogosaurus Vex

C. S. Lewis

August 8th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

I’ve been reading some C. S. Lewis lately (though I actually have never read the Narnia books!).  If you haven’t, you really owe it to yourself to do so; start with his autobiography Surprised by Joy.  His writing is incredibly beautiful, honest, and sometimes hilarious.  I read A Grief Observed today and it is probably the most powerful piece about sadness and loss I have ever read.

Of course, he wrote a great deal about his faith, which was a central aspect of his adult life, but that’s nothing against the books.  I find the religious aspects of his books as beautiful and, in some ways, more intimate and powerful than anything else.  Husband has taken to calling me “Little Anglican” half in jest and half in fear that Mr. Lewis will convert me from the grave with his writings - but I don’t think he has anything to worry about.  I can tell the difference between longing to read more about Lewis’ emotional experiences and longing for his religious convictions; besides, after I got out of bed this morning I checked and - no - still an athiest.

In any case, his work can be enjoyed on many levels.  I imagine a Christian will have a greater sense of connection and understanding to these books than I do, but it doesn’t matter.  They are still wonderful.  You should still read them.

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What To Do About Homelessness In Vancouver: A Post By Request

July 12th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

As some of you know, my apartment is right on the teetering edge of the downtown east side, which apparently is Canada’s poorest postal code.  My block is actually the western border of the DTES on its southern tip: on my side of the block, you almost never see the down and outers.  But on the other side of my block, which puts you on Main Street, it’s all about the DTES residents.  There are single room occupancy hotels, slimy bars, a flourishing drug trade, everything. So I have had plenty of opportunities to see and think about homelesness and the cluster of problems that accompanies it.  I can’t talk about a solution to the problem without explaining something of how I understand why the problem exists, so that’s what this post will mainly be about.  What follows is highly summarized, but I hope to at least impart the flavour of this huge body of research.

First we need to decide how we define the homeless.  I actually include not just people sleeping on the streets but the people living in abject poverty in the shitty, rodent and bug infested single room occupancy hotels in the DTES.  They are barely a step above literal homelessness and seem to share a lot of the problems of the actual homeless: interpersonal, intrapersonal, substance abuse and dependence, and so on.  And, the people with an SRO can easily slide into homelessness.  There are probably some things that set the long term homeless folks apart, but I don’t know them, and they are all nearly equally filthy and miserable looking, so I think we can safely consider them as a group.

Developmental psychology and the psychology of trauma have a lot to teach us about why people born in the DTES are so very, very fucked right from birth.  We can begin at the basic level of biology with the physical health of the mother and whether she uses substances including alcohol (which can be devastating to the fetus, at thresholds which are currently uncertain). I don’t know a lot about this side of things other than to say if your very physical self is compromised early because your fetal vessel was unhealthy, that’s bad.  And ask yourself, what does it say for the mother’s ability to mother, considering that her poor health represents basic failures to perform self care skills and make realistic choices in furtherance of an superordinate goal (the developing fetus’s health)?  This is a social issue also, as ill health and drug use are linked to poverty and exploitation in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

So our first real problem is that we begin with damaged adults.  This is where damaged children come from.  Contrary to what the post-Freudian apologists would have us believe, parenting actually has a great deal to do with how kids turn out.  It’s not everything, but it’s huge, massive, enormously important.  (This is one reason I am scared to be a parent - there’s a lot to fuck up!)  Indigent people don’t come from nowhere.  In Canada, where we are not torn by civil war or invasion, we have to look to psychology and sociology to tell us where we get these people.  I know next to nothing about sociology so I will restrict myself mainly to psychology.

(Please note that we here at BV are not in the business of blaming victims.  For every bad parent in the DTES there is surely a tragic and devastating story of trauma and loss to explain it.  But that doesn’t change the reality of the situation, which is, in this example, bad mothering.  The baby doesn’t care if mother is inadequate out of malice or inability.  Good intentions do not raise up healthy children, good acts do.)

We move next to infant care and attachment - and attachment in this case doesn’t mean the fuzzy, bonding experience, but rather the evolutionarily crucial set of behaviours whereby the infant can rely on a sensitive and appropriate response from the primary caregiver when he experiences pain, sickness, or fear.  If the primary caregiver, usually the mother, is unable to selflessly and sensitively respond to her infant’s distressing needs (for alleviance of distress due to hunger and other bodily needs, comfort when ill or in pain, and reassurance when afraid), he may develop an insecure or disorganized attachment by the time he is one year old.  Disorganized attachment in particular predicts very poor social and emotional/interpersonal outcomes, a finding which is stable across the lifespan.  Poor attachment style has a very high rate of intergenerational transmission; disorganized babies become disorganizing parents who have disorganized infants of their own.  (Disorganized refers to the behaviours the infant manifests when his attachment system is activated by fear or pain - he wants to approach the mother because she is his source of comfort, but she is also a source of fear and pain, so he does not know what do to.  He has no systematic, organized method of approach to her, and because of the conflicting emotions toward her will behave very strangely at the time of activation.)

Learning theory is instructive here too.  Children learn through a variety of methods: One example is operant conditioning, where rewards and punishment are used to shape behaviour.  Returning to our damaged parent, what sorts of lessons will she impart to her child through reward?  It may be that her own needs are so pressing that she cannot set them aside and, without conscious intention, she teaches her child that he will be rewarded when he takes care of Mommy’s needs rather than his own.  She may punish him for developmentally appropriate behaviours because she herself didn’t have good parenting and doesn’t know what it looks like, what healthy childhood looks like.  Mother passes on lessons she has learned because she literally has nothing else to give.  And now these lessons belong to the child.

Children also imitate people who are important to them.  This is a very deep, unconscious internalization.  When they imitate they aren’t acting, they’re taking in, assimilating, and then replicating what they learn.  Children also internalize important people’s roles as a sort of template which informs later interactions with people in that role.  They will grow up and respond to people in those roles as if they fit the internal template (whether they do or not).  If as a child I learn that fathers are violent and capricious and untrustworthy, I may react with inapprorpriate terror and suspicion to male authority figures in adulthood.  When children grow up in a household with severely damaged adults (such as the kind that populate the DTES), what they internalize can be dire indeed.

Psychodynamically, we can talk about ego defenses that are adaptive during childhood becoming entrenched and part of the personality, but then it turns out they aren’t so adaptive during adulthood.  Dissociating during childhood sexual abuse is a survival skill - dissociating during a stressful job interview is not.  But how do you jettison the defense, which by its very nature is unconscious so you don’t know you’re using it?

Recall our internal template of the violent father: it may be that though the adult experiences authority figures as terrifying, he cannot tolerate that powerful and frightening emotion and so defends against it, maybe by devaluing.  So the terror is hidden (but still present) and all we see is someone who reacts to authority figures (like employers, doctors, and social workers) with great disdain and arrogance.  He looks like a major jackass who, in defiance of all logic, defeats himself seemingly out of pure spite.  But the truth is that really, deep inside, what you’re dealing with is a terrified child.  Think of a time in your life, if you have one, when you experienced true terror.  Could you have logicked your way into behaving differently than you did at that time?  Why would expect differently from our hypothetical adult?

What we’re talking about is the entire field of psychology: nature and genesis of personality, self capacities of all sorts, and I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: I have a sense of what sorts of backgrounds lead to homelessness, which is nothing if not a significant failure to get along in this modern world.  If you are long term homeless, you probably don’t have skills the rest of us do, such as getting along interpersonally in an adaptive manner.  This failure alerts us to the existence of significant trauma in the person’s background, probably going back to infancy.  Like good parenting, healthy interactions don’t spring from the void; much of how we interact and conceive of others comes from our earliest years.  And we have to overlay society-level problems like the incredible difficulty individuals face when trying to escape poverty and its attendant evils.  Combine social oppression with deep psychological damage and you get the downtown east side.

As for how to solve the problem, I have no good ideas.  It’s such a huge problem.  It requires massive social change but that is merely necessary, not sufficient.  We still have a legion of people carrying elephants of intrapsychic damage and that won’t just go away when they get a safe apartment, healthy food, a job, and access to services.

Also, consider that the more “normal” segments of our society regularly produce individuals who cannot cope successfully and move to the DTES, or places like it, and fall into that lifestyle (which can include homelessness).  There don’t seem to be a lot of kids down there, but the supply of adults doesn’t run out.  This tells us that the problem doesn’t spring just from the DTES itself - even if we rounded up all the people there and dropped them into the ocean, more would take their place.  The trick ending of this entry is that the damaged and damaging parents in question might be your next door neighbour.  Their damage might have such a form that they are able to get along to a degree in so-called “normal” life - maybe they have a job, a spouse, a mortgage.  But the damage sits in other places psychically and will likely be passed in some form to their child.  Perhaps the child won’t have quite the same suite of coping mechanisms they do, and he or she will end up sliding through substance dependence into homelessness.

And how do we fix that?

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Random Bits

July 7th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

Did you know terracotta pots are not waterproof?  And that neither is the paint on our windowsill?  And that when the water from the plant leaks through the terracotta pot onto the windowsill paint it will bubble and peel up?  And that we just rent here?

Hilarious!

In other news, I have decided that all my life’s problems would be solved if only we moved to the country.  What I really need is a vegetable patch, a big wild yard, and a long driveway that leads to a lonely road.  If only I had these three things (okay, plus a dog and a cat and reliable high speed internet) I would be happy.  If I lived in the country, I would like doing dishes.

If I lived in the country my husband would be unemployed and we’d starve.

My friend just applied for and has a good shot at getting a job in very rural BC.  Rural like, the only commerce in the community is a trading post.  Ha ha, just kidding.  Actually they have a post office, a butcher, and a little food store.  The town has less then one hundred people in it.  They are in the middle of absolutely nowhere and have to fence in their school yard to keep cougars from carrying off the children.  I am dying of jealousy because this is just the sort of place I’d want to live, if I had my druthers.  Well, maybe a tad bigger so there’s a proper grocery store.  But maybe not!  Maybe tiny would be awesome!

But it’s impossible.  Husband’s job literally can only be done in a handful of major urban cities.  When I graduate mine will be similar - you can’t make a living as a therapist in a tiny town.  We are tied to the city.  Which I hate.  It’s so busy and everything is a hassle here.  I want to check out of it all.

Is it too late to try and cultivate the skills of a novelist?

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Home Again

July 5th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

So we just got home after much travel and much crankiness on my part when Husband had the audacity to delay my access to dinner tonight by a whole three minutes (he stopped to pick up our mail).  I am positively thrilled to be back in my own place and intend to just roll around on the carpet for the rest of the night from the sheer joy of it all.

Speaking of sheer joy, the wedding we attended went off without a hitch! It was a simply wonderful event - good ceremony, fantastic party, and of course, the bride and groom looked incredibly happy.  It was a very happy occasion and we were lucky to be there.  Many heartfelt congratulations to Esan and his new wife!

A fuller report shall be created once the crankiness wears off a bit more.  At the moment all I have patience for is a tub and some reading before bed.  In fact I can’t remember much about Newfoundland at all right now.  I will leave you with just this one shot though:

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Swimming

June 11th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

Husband and I have been swimming every day this week.  He’s not a strong swimmer, so he asked me to help him improve.  I’m not a strong swimmer either, but I love being in the water and I can do the basics of a few strokes, I can tread water forever, and so on.  So we’ve been flailing around together in the pool, and this has lead to several observations.

1. I love swimming!  I’ve lived in this building two years and until this week, have been in the pool probably four times.  I can’t believe I haven’t been enjoying the pool more!  There are few feelings that I find as purely enjoyable as being in the water.  I’m relaxed and invigorated at the same time.

2. I am impressed, yet again, by my husband’s ability to tackle a problem and kick its ass.  Husband is the most focused, hard working person I know.  He decided he’s going to get good at swimming, and dammit, he will!  In three days he has achieved what it took me years to do as a kid in swimming lessons.  I am proud of him and can’t wait to see where he goes next.

3. It’s fantastic to have something to do together that doesn’t involve ignoring each other.  We do a lot of mutual semi-ignoring, typically reading together.  We often read together, sitting on the couch or at least in the same room - we’ll read each other snippets of our book or article, discuss briefly, and return to reading.  So swimming, where you really can’t take your book, is a great place for us to have time together.  We are focused on the exercise too, but there are lots of opportunities to smooch and laugh, and of course there are the hot tub breaks where we chat about whatever.  I can’t tell you how warm and fuzzy I feel inside about this.

4. My brain is happier after a swim.  When we get upstairs from our swim, we hop in the shower to de-chlorinate, and then boom, I am so fresh and energized and ready to learn and think.  It really helps me to have these exercise breaks (we’ve been swimming thirty to sixty minutes).  I get restless when I sit on the couch too long, and getting off my ass is a good thing.  Now that we don’t watch TV any more I spend virtually all my time reading, and my brain gets weary after a time.  I need a clearing of the mental cobwebs.  I haven’t had this salutary effect from my trips to the gym to see my trainer but I think that’s because he works me so hard I have nothing left at all.  I like that for different reasons.

5. I still look squodgy in a bathing suit, but no longer feel self conscious about it.  I sit on the edge of the hot tub and let my stomach flab just hang out, and I don’t care about it at all.  This has never happened before!  I can’t explain it but it is very liberating.  I’ve spent my entire remembered life feeling embarrassed about my belly fat and now, it’s just gone.  I may finally be coming to peace with my body.  It probably helps that I’m getting slowly thinner and fitter though.

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MRI I

June 7th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

Okay.  I am home and alive.  A fuller report, including the tale of the head cage, will come at a later time.  For now, let me say that though I had a constant undercurrent of anxiety, the drugs did their work and I was mellow yellow for most of it.  Maybe too mellow… I actually experienced some hallucinations probably related to hypnagogic sleep.  It was pretty fuckin’ weird.

But I’m pretty discombobulated at the moment.  You know.  I’m all slow and slurry and drunk-like.  My body feel physiologically disorganized.  Typing is hard, man!

So I’m going to bed now to sleep off this sedative haze.  Should sleep like a log because I am fucking stoned.

p.s.: I love you man!

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On The Agenda

June 7th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

The agenda for today includes the following items:

1. Read in the tub.  After a time away, I am back reading Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights. This is the book that I earlier lauded as being a beautiful specimen of well argued logic, written by a philosopher, which you can deeply appreciate even if you reject the arguments.  Though I’m not sure how you’d reject them, it’s pretty tightly argued.

2. Eat grapes.  I have already had my toast and jam, and after the tub will enjoy a midmorning snack of fruit and soymilk.  Yum!

3. Test drive a car.  Husband and I are in a process of looking for a sedan to buy.  We’re not in any hurry - the timeline is a year to a year and a half.  But we’re slowly researching vehicles, looking for good value in used cars.  Both of us abhor the idea of buying brand new - what you’re paying for is the pride of an unused vehicle, which we both find wasteful.  Why not buy a good car that’s a couple of years old, when the virginal glow and price inflation is off the car?  Any car worth buying will still be near perfect at age two or three, but the price will be much better than showroom.  In our case, we’ll probably end up buying something more than a couple of years old, because our budget is pretty limited.   We’re trying to find a way to keep the Sprite car, which was Husband’s gift to himself when he finished professional school.  While we won’t be able to keep two cars on the road at the same time, we may be able to work out an alternating insurance plan where we drive the Sprite car when the weather is good, and the sedan when it’s bad, or in the case of pregnancy and infants, neither of which will fit in a two seater sports car.

Anyway, we have our eye on a particular car and we’re going to give it a spin today, to get a sense if we do indeed like the year and make and model of the car as well as we think we do, based only on internet research.

4. Read chapter five of a boring text on addictions for school tomorrow.  I already printed out the paper due tomorrow and did the other reading last night, so I’m in good shape for school.

5. Eat lunch - smoky chipotle chili with beans and zucchini over brown rice for me, and some of a leftover Spanish rice and beans dish with olives and peppers for Husband, since he had his share of the chili yesterday.

6. Make dinner: lemony cous cous with broccoli (calcium!) and an as-yet unselected side dish.

7. Take sedatives.

8. Get three and a half hour MRI.

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Marriage Part II: We Eat Meat

May 10th, 2008 by Blogosaurus

When last we spoke, I had just met my future husband but, curses, he was poised to slip through my fingers.  Who lives in Halifax, anyway?  It’s such a stupid city.  And so inconvenient when your new infatuation lives there but you didn’t exchange numbers or other contact information on the night you met.

I was reduced to scheming.  As I recall it, it took about twenty minutes of wheedling to get Puck (the mutual friend) to agree to arrange another meeting with this mystery man and, as a testament to the fact that I used to absolutely love meat, the second meeting was scheduled to take place at a Brazilian barbecue restaurant.  It was to be another mid-scale social gathering.  I didn’t want it to be obvious that the real purpose of the event was further scoping out and flirting, so others had to be invited.  Puck dutifully arranged this, with much harassing of me in the process.  Only your good friends can truly make you suffer, and this was a golden opportunity.  Suffering was experienced.

But nevermind that, on to the important stuff: what to wear, and how throughly to groom?  Do you ever imagine in advance how things will go?  Rehearse what you might say, what they might say?  I do.  And, back when I was a crazy single lady, I used to run through the upcoming evening’s events to determine how much leg needed to be shaved, if you catch my meaning.  I’m an optimist so I did the whole works.  In a worst case scenario, my cats might enjoy my very carefully de-haired and lotions limbs.  But of course one mustn’t look like one is trying too hard, so a balance was sought between “casual frumpy” (my usual uniform) and “date night,” which would have blown the whole works.  You can’t pretend it’s a happy accident that you’re meeting again if you’re in fancy dress.

Oh the machinations!

And then the disaster: we arrive at the restaurant, the fellow is looking most intriguing (I remember him in a South Park t-shirt for this night too, though it seems unlikely he’d not change clothes), and jesus suffering fuck, I end up sitting at the entirely opposite end of the table from him.  With about five people between us along one side of the table.  Aargh!  You know how that goes… you hover, trying to see where the object of your affections will sit so you can conveniently sit next to them, but somehow as the crowd shifts and you waffle with anxious indecision, and all the close seats end up taken - meanwhiel, you’re four metres away sitting next to your cousin.  Not that I don’t love my cousins.  But it’s hardly a consolation when you’re all infatuated with someone else.  All that carefully arranged hair-doing, for nothing!  We’ll never exchange another word and he’ll end up going home with the waitress!

Glum with the apparent failure of my plot to win over the handsome stranger, I was forced to console myself with enormous servings of meat.  Samba serves chicken wrapped in bacon, and it’s at least as tasty as it sounds.  (Meat wrapped in meat!  Yum!)  I spent the dinner waving over the waiters with skewers of meat and gorging, ensuring a lack of bowel movements for at least three days (back before I discovered fiber, I measured my meals not in calories but days-without-pooping), not to mention the weight gain that I was still seriously fighting.  It’s hard to remain depressed when you have eight kinds of meat to choose from, but yeah, I managed it.

Nonetheless I survived the dinner, and afterwards the whole gang moved to a pub (Doolin’s).  Here, joy of joys, I managed to orchestrate sitting directly across the table from Him.  Swoon!  Okay: mission accomplished.  The single, unaccounted for flaw?  My social anxiety.  I’d been so focused on attaining physical proximity that I forgot to preplan things to say, or to drink enough at dinner, so we talked about the first topic I blurted out, which for some reason was safe injection sites as part of a harm reduction model.  Which I guess isn’t very enticing or thrilling for a potential mate, but what can you do?  Sometimes you choke and end up talking politics.  While withering inside.  Do normal people talk about these things with hot, intense men they just met?  Doubtful!  Gah!

But finally the night ended, and once again, we managed to not exchange any contact information.  I know it might sound strange to say, considering how often I profess my nervousness around others, but I never have really had any problems meeting men or asking for their numbers.  But for some reason, I totally choked that night.  And I drove home alone, numberless, anguished.  I knew he was leaving for Halifax the next day, so everything was totally blown.

Or was it?

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Miscellany & Philosophy

April 21st, 2008 by Blogosaurus

I try not to drive in the city because it really sucks. But today I was forced into it because I had to take Husband’s laundry in to the drycleaner, and since I’ve procrastinated on it, there were about forty dress shirts to be lugged. It turns out forty dress shirts weigh about eighty pounds. You wouldn’t think it’s possible but it is!  So there was no way I was going to lug all that stuff on the skytrain.  But the laundry must be done, so I needed the car solution.  And that’s life as me in this marriage.

Boy, didn’t that opening sound just painfully domestic/sexist? Disclaimer: my husband doesn’t oppress me. Not even a smidge. We decided early on that we didn’t want to argue about household stuff, which is what happens when people share chores. So we divided up the household labour. Also, Husband has a good paying professional job which he works full time at, and I’m a student who is currently qualified only for jobs that pay as well in a month as what he makes in two days. And finally, I get contentment and satisfaction from keeping house, including cooking and cleaning. Combine these three premises and you get an inescapable, logical conclusion: Husband goes to work and brings home the bacon (but not literally), and I stay home and do the household work. Somehow our carefully thought out and discussed division of labour resulted in a thoroughly fifties style living arrangement. Except I’m in school and he doesn’t call me “toots.”

I’ve probably explained all that before but anyway, here it is again.

Point being, that I managed to do my errands in under an hour, which included a stop downtown and one in east Van, plus coming home after and two different parking lots. It’s a miracle! I’m tickled pink, frankly!

Now I’m off to walk to the local bank and get papers for rolling our coins. Husband offloads his change every night when he gets home from work, and it collects in a pair of plastic tubs on the kitchen counter (one for loonies and toonies, one for the smaller change). I pilfer from the bigger change liberally but finally the volume outstripped my ability to spend it and it’s time to roll it all up.

Okay.  So this isn’t an exciting post.  But I like it, because it’s like the parts of my life that I like best: relaxed, low key, content.  I see it like this: there are exciting and wild times in all our lives, but if that’s your only source of joy you’re in trouble.  Taking a sense of fulfillment from the every day mundane things ensures you will never run out of sustenance.  So here’s me, enjoying my mild day.  I feel great!

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Brain is Pudding

December 15th, 2007 by Blogosaurus

My holiday fully, 100% commences this morning.  Oh what shall I do!  As if there was any doubt… I’m going to hunt around for crime dramas on TV and clean my house.  I’m one of those people who can’t function in a mess.  My apartment is not bad, but I’ll feel great once it’s spotless, so that’s the first order of business.  By the way, I just thought I’d mention that though I am a serious crime drama fan, I hate CSI and refuse to watch it unless there is absolutely nothing else on and I’m engaged in a task that prohibits reading.  It’s just one long series of snarky quips, which is so irritating - and anyway the logic and arguments of the show aren’t even all that good.  Don’t be fooled by the special effects - this show is the pits.

But anyway!  Last night was fun.  Husband and I drove through rush hour in the rain to make it to my dad’s for tree decorating, which was a really nice time.  We ordered pizza (the usual: green pepper, mushroom and feta) and played christmas music (my favourite track: Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey. No really.).  It was a warm and cozy family experience that has me thinking BABIES!  I notice lately I have been scheming the advent of babies in my life.  We even have names picked out.  I know, that’s really not excusable.  For all we know my ovaries are a scorched and salted wasteland.  But you know, I come from fertile people.  (Ha ha!)  Lord do I have babies on the brain.  Recently I had to shop for toys and baby clothes for our nieces and good gravy, being in all that baby stuff is like a drug.  It’s mainlining babies!  Smoking pure baby!  Injectible baby!

See what babies do to your brain?  They turn it to pudding!

Help me!

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