An Update on Emily

Emily the cat got her feeding tube removed Wednesday morning, leaving behind a round wound that the vet recommended we allow to heal in the open air. She has been reveling in the outdoors, rumors of the lurking neighborhood fox be damned, and seems pretty much back to her old demanding self with many requests for treats, entrance or exit through front or back doors, petting, and laptime - all this punctuated by luxurious naps on various beds and couches throughout the house. She is none the worse for wear after her ordeal except for furless patches on the side of her neck, belly, and one front ankle which all suffered various indignities during her medical treatment. I am very grateful for her recovery, and attempting to finish out administration of the "healthy liver" pills the vet recommended, with little cooperation from Emily herself. "A cat will do what it wants when it wants, and there's not a thing you can do about it." - Frank Perkins.

Mallory, Myth and What I Like

I strongly recommend a book called “Find Me” in a series by one of my favorite authors, Carol O’Connell. The focus of the book and series is a character of mythical proportions named Mallory (although her first name is Kathy she prefers just Mallory). Mallory works for the NYPD but is certainly one of its most unconventional members. She is the adopted daughter of the otherwise childless famed NYPD detective Louis Markowitz and his wife Helen. Lou rescued her at age nine from the New York City subway tunnels where she had been leading a mysterious and feral existence on her own since approximately age six.

Mallory is beautiful, brilliant, and savage. She follows her own code in the battle of good against evil and remains fiercely loyal to family and friends in her own way. After the deaths of Lou and Helen, Mallory is watched over by her father’s three friends, Riker (another hardcore NYPD detective), Charles Butler (a brilliant, wealthy psychologist who has the misfortune of having fallen in love with Mallory), and Dr. Slope, the NYC coroner. Mallory is not undamaged from her years of survival on the streets, but is indomitable in beating her father's friends at poker, trapping murderers and bad guys and succeeding at any other activity she decides is important.

Since I liked this novel so much I decided to itemize what I liked best. One day perhaps I’ll write a novel of my own with all of these elements. This novel has:

• An admirably strong female character repeatedly outsmarting, outwitting and out manipulating the men surrounding her, several of whom continue to love her despite herself.
• A noble quest—in this case a road trip across America down legendary Route 66 in search of two holy grails: finding a serial killer and finding Mallory’s roots (“Find me.”)
• A complex plot that never unfairly deceives the reader. I read it again to make sure; the only misdirection that happens is when various supporting characters, and the reader, jump to conclusions unsupported by logic.
• Excellent characterization, not only of Mallory herself but of her surrounding friends and foes, and even of the killer whose motivation and peculiar behavior ultimately become clear.

One character in the book, a psychiatrist who seems to know more about a child killer than he is telling, has this reaction on tangling with Mallory:

“…here before him was the living illustration of someone larger than life; her sense of presence did not recognize the boundaries of her body. Her eyes were cold, and so was her stance, arms folded against him….face set with grim suspicion, and this was merely what she allowed him to see…he could sense the tight control that checked her desire for expedient mayhem; she dwelt forever in that moment before the taut string snaps. He knew how truly dangerous she was, and she gave him hope…In this new century he had regained his faith in gods and monsters—and she was both.”

Oh, that I could pen a novel this good! Read it. And tell me what makes a great novel in your mind. Comments welcome.

House Cat

Emily the Cat has recently starred in a feline version of “House,” which makes her a “House Cat.” For the uninitiated, “House” is a television medical drama that my daughter and are in the habit of watching on DVD each Sunday night. Dr. Gregory House, the star of the show, is an irascible, irreverent yet brilliant diagnostician, obnoxious to patients, manipulative with friends, addicted to pain pills, lacking in people skills and obsessed with solving complex diagnostic puzzles at nearly any price. He is surrounded by beautiful, intelligent women who are inexplicably attracted to him, of course.

Each House episode involves desperate diagnostic measures, treatments that are stabs in the dark, fairly gruesome and graphic scenes of medical mayhem, patients being resurrected from near death with those round things they put on your heart that make you jerk up into the air, and at least one MRI, spinal tap and/or brain biopsy through a tiny hole drilled in the head.

I plunged into the somewhat less complex world of veterinary medicine the other day after Emily stopped eating, becoming even tinier than she already is in only a few days, and seeming close to death. Blood tests revealed high bilirubin, a sign that the liver isn’t functioning right. The doctor (an affable fellow with no resemblance to House) recommended a liver biopsy, which he unceremoniously extracted through a small puncture in Emily’s abdomen and sent off for tests. Meanwhile Emily had to stay in the hospital with a feeding tube to keep from starving to death while we waited for the lab results.

The results were better than feared—no cancer or hepatitis. Pancreatitis, already subsiding and treatable. But the feeding tube has to stay in for the time being, and with Emily coming home, it would be my job to fill the syringe with soupy brown (but nutritious) cat food and meds four times a day and squirt it into the little feeding tube protruding from the side of Emily’s neck like a perverted periscope.

Emily is understandably irritated by this invasion and periodically hides under a bed at feeding time. But so far we are getting along okay and I am hoping she will start eating on her own soon because I would be sadder than I can describe here to see her go. Stay tuned.

Loops, Part II

So, you say the problem is not that you have your own loop, but that Someone Else is in a loop? And it’s a continuous, repetitive, unproductive loop? And you’ve been listening to it for hour weeks months years? And it’s driving you absolutely batty? And you have no idea how to change the channel? Is that what’s bothering you, Bunky? If so, here’s another list.

Top 10 Ways to Get Somebody Else Out of a Continuous Loop

10. Smile (I can hear your face creaking), and write it down. Really look at what you’ve been hearing. Riff on it, dwell in the possibilities of it, evolve it, write a screenplay about it on which some editor will scribble “this could never happen in real life.” Laugh out loud at it, a deep belly laugh.
9. Utter the Serenity Prayer (oh wait, if you don’t pray, leave the “Lord” part out, but remember that drawing strength from somewhere outside of yourself is sometimes all you’ve got): Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
8. If you are both in the loop--on a “why-why-why-cycle built for two--” sometimes you can lead the way out by using the same techniques that work for your own individual loops – identification of the loop to begin with, distractions, inquiry into the validity of your thinking.
7. See the Serenity Prayer again, and consider the serenity part. Slow down and listen very carefully. What can you hear that you haven’t heard in this loop before? How can you hear it in a new way? In my father’s last days, I visited him in the hospital and slowly, slowly peeled an orange and handed him one segment at a time. In those brief moments I was there, in the now, no loops, only acceptance.
6. Hum along, and eventually learn the words. My son works in a restaurant that plays a sound track over and over again featuring Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison.” He can quit his job, or he can learn the words. Sometimes it makes sense to sing along.
5. Walk away from the loop. If a loop runs continuously in the forest where nobody hears, is it still a loop?
4. Change the subject—repeatedly--since a really good loopster knows a hundred ways to get back on the loop.
3. Shine a light on the loop. Be careful though; if you do this with judgment or anger you end up in your own loop. But I know that when my ever-patient partner finally, finally calls me on a loop of mine, I am probably in the mother of all loops and I try hard to take a detour.
2. Consider what it will be like in the absence of the loop and the person in it, and be grateful as hell that you are still hearing that voice which someday you may never hear again. Gratitude heals. Make a list of everything you are grateful for.
1. And the number one way to escape somebody else’s loop: stop focusing on somebody else’s loop and focus on breaking out of your own. Help yourself.

Comments welcome--any other ideas for breaking out of loops?

Loops

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about loops—defined particularly as circular repetitive thoughts in my head that cause anguish and prevent joy. In my case it is a loop-the-loop, really. The two loops are: 1) how can I keep the people I love happy and 2) how can I keep the people I love safe (read: alive). Yes, these are both noble thoughts in moderation, but the loop-the-loop comes in when I obsess on them. These people I love—they are all grownups now, so it is primarily (or solely) their job to keep themselves happy and safe. By the ways, sometimes the happy/safe goals are in conflict; just ask my 21-year-old rock-climbing devil-may-care son if you don’t understand this.

And so, I spend a lot of time in the loop-the-loop coming up with new schemes for keeping the people I love happy and safe. And many of these schemes are irrelevant, impractical, invasive, inconvenient, impossible, idiotic, irrational, ill-advised, or some other word beginning with “i.” So…here are the top ten ways to get out of an unproductive mental loop, or for the really unfortunate, a loop-the-loop:

Top 10 Ways to Escape a Loop

10. Switch to another line of thinking or get a new perspective. Change the subject. This is the basic principle behind “The Work” and “Feeling Good” or CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) – see previous blogs on this. However, make sure the new line of thinking is not another loop.
9. Argue with the loop. Counter the loop. Find the flaws. Another principle behind “The Work” and “CBT” – but be sure the argument does not itself become a new, even more obsessive loop.
8. Do something physically demanding that requires effort and concentration to stop the loop. Clean out the fridge. Dig up the dandelions.
7. Write the loop down, and keep writing about it until the pain of writer’s cramp distracts you from the loop and you start to see beyond it.
6. Do something mentally demanding that requires enough concentration to stop the loop. A timed game of Scrabble is one example – have I mentioned Scrabulous lately?
5. Have a conversation with someone else (but not about your loop!). Really listen to them, even if it is about their loop, for a while. But don’t try to fix them or their loop, especially if that tendency is part of your loop.
4. Read a really good book (for example, murder mysteries and the Harry Potter books work well for me).
3. See a really good movie, preferably one in which people are not dwelling unproductively on their loops (perhaps the latest Indiana Jones movie – Roger Ebert loved it).
2. Perform a random act of kindness for a stranger. Pay it forward.
1. And the number one way you can get out of your loop – be aware that you are in a loop to begin with (this is the hardest part). Hint: if people are telling you that you are in a loop or mentioning concepts like broken records when in conversation with you, this is a strong indication that you are in a loop.

Comments? What is your loop? What is your last act of random kindness? (If you can’t remember, it’s been too long.)

The Voice in the Head

I have been thinking a lot about a concept covered in Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” – the voice in the head. He tells the story of being on the subway on his way to work and observing a woman having a loud and angry conversation with a voice in her head. The woman is very agitated and upset, and looks down and off to the side into empty space as she continues a conversation along the lines of: “And then she said to me…so I said to her you are a liar how dare you accuse me of…when you are the one who has always taken advantage of me I trusted you and you betrayed my trust…”

Tolle mentions that later, as he is standing in the men’s room at work washing his hands, he thinks to himself, “I hope I don’t end up like her.” A man standing next to him looks briefly in his direction, and he realizes he has said these words out loud, he is already like her, that his mind is just as “incessantly active as hers,” and that really if she is mad, so are we all to some degree. Tolle says:

For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness…at that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud. It may have sounded insane, but it was the laughter of sanity, the laughter of the big-bellied Buddha. ‘Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.’ That’s what the laughter seemed to be saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and of the false, mind-made I. … Thinking is only a tiny aspect of the consciousness that we are.

This might have been part of what Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows is talking about in the song, “Perfect Blue Buildings,” repeating the phrase,

How am I gonna keep myself away from me
Keep myself away
How am I gonna keep myself away from me
Keep myself away...

It's an idea that many of the books I’ve been reading express in one way or another; the AA groups refer to it as “stinking thinking.” The meditation books describe techniques for cessation of thinking, for emptying the mind. My skill is slowly increasing at stepping outside of myself, noticing my thinking, and more importantly countering it when it is causing anxiety, grief, or my personal favorite: guilt.

A Passage to India

I had a surreal computing experience a few mornings ago. My Norton Internet Security software was having the same trouble it had once before where the “Live Update” feature automatically downloads all the appropriate updates including the latest virus definitions, but then can’t seem to recognize that it's done this, and insists on starting the process over and over again - while annoyingly warning me that I am “unprotected.”

Oh, yes, those of you have Macs are laughing smugly right now since you didn’t spent your Saturday morning trying to fix this problem (or another one I still have and am too lazy to fix where Micro$oft’s Auto Update keeps trying over and over again to update .Net on my PC each time I shut it down (all the more enfuriating when, as far as I can tell, I have no earthly need for .Net anyway).

I laugh out loud at Apples “Mac and PC” commercials on TV, where the Bill Gates look-alike is repeatedly embarrassed in front of the young and perplexed Mac character. A recent one has Bill in the cobra position on a yoga mat, working off his “stressful year with Vista” aided by a young and lovely yoga instructor who is gently banging a gong at each salient point, while “Mac” observes bemusedly on the sidelines. “Breathe out and expel all that Vista bad energy…”

Eventually the once serene yoga instructor becomes distraught over Vista’s negative impact on her Yoga studio billing software and bangs the gong so hard that it falls over in a loud clatter. Then she rises gracefully, as yoga instructors are able to do, and stomps off while Mac looks on, shaking his head. The PC bashing is well deserved – but I have a PC at work and I don’t really want to switch back and forth between two different operating systems each day. Anyway, I digress.

To solve the more pressing anti-virus software problem I went to Symantic’s website seeking help, and decided to try the real-time 7x24 tech support chat and PC Rescue feature. It wasn’t long before I was in chat mode with “Saravanan,” who I am 99% sure was working from India at what would have been about 10:00 pm local time there. After downloading some “PC Rescue” software, Saravanan took control of my PC with my queasily extended permission, and soon the mouse pointer was moving by itself in ghostly fashion on my screen, working to fix the problem. A reboot was required and then some registry magic, the running of an auto fix program and the restarting of a certain Windows service that had mysteriously been stopped – at which point the problem seemed to be fixed (and has not returned since). Saravanan said that if the problem recurred I should contact them and get an upgrade to the 2008 version.

This was the global economy in action for sure – somebody on the other side of the world fixed my PC. And somebody on the other side of the world is earning a good living doing that. There are many ways in which the Internet is a bane and a curse – but there are also many ways in which the Internet brings miracles into people’s lives. It’s a love-hate thing.