The Mandelbear's Musings

After toasting to "our next adventure" in the Delta sky lounge at SeaTac, N explained that we were between adventures -- buying our new house, shipping our belongings, and packing for our flight marked the end of our previous adventure. The next will begin when we move in to SchildHavn later this week. In the mean time we are in liminal space. I find it particularly appropriate that my current reading is "On Fairy Stories" by J. R. R. Tokkien.

Internet here on the plane is flaky. The passenger "entertainment" system crashed, and it took them half an hour to reboot it. Apparently this is standard. My assumption is that they've gone over to the dark $ide. The food here in "business" class, OTOH, is excellent.

Packing up was frantic -- I hadn't left myself nearly enough time. Several errands disn't get run, and in the confusion I left most of my stock of masks behind. Among other things. Well, G and m will be coming in another four weeks or so, and we're working on the assumption that we'll be able to come back occasionally for visits. "Leaf by Niggle" is also appropriate.

A large part of the problem with packing was second-thinking my luggage decisions. In the end I wound up putting my sling bag into my pacsafe (?) tote. The tote's bigger. The question is whether I'm going to have to carry my carry-on as a backpack. Should probably have used the small Travelpro as my carry-on, but it really depends on whether we're going to be taking rail to the hotel. Which I don't know yet. Hope not, because my main suitcase weighs over 50 lbs (up from 39 when I checked it yesterday). That way madness lies.

A glass of wine and a light lunch in the Delta sky lounge went a long way toward helping me unwind. As did the excellent food in 'business" (let's just call it what it is -- First) class. A glass of something alcoholic on the plane is a large part of my travel ritual, and has been ever since I started college at Carleton. The drinking age in the air back there wa 18; I don't know whether it still is.

Unlike the food, the "bed" that the seat attempts to turn into is the most uncomfortable damned contraption I've ever failed to sleep in. It would have helped if the seat belt was adjustable. Why in blazes would they make a seatbelt that can't be adjusted? And I may have eaten a little too much. The idea of being able to overeat in a plane is still somewhat bizarre.

... Posting from our hotel, Cove Centrum/Passage Den Haag. Now that I've unpacked a machine with usable posting software. The new (ad)venture starts with the next post.

The obvious next question is "What am I doing in this handbasket?" I think I'll leave that for the next post.

Right now, the answer to "where am I going?" is Den Haag (The Hague) in The Netherlands. The First of October. This may not come as a total surprise to the very few people I hold regular conversations with, nor to anyone who's been following this blog for the last few years, though in the latter case I wouldn't blame you for missing it.

I'm going with my family of choice -- N, G, and N's oldest kid, m. N told me that, shortly before she died, Colleen had asked her to take care of me. She had a point -- statistically one's chances of dying go way up after the death of a spouse. Followed closely by, among other things, death of a parent (Mom died in 2019) and retirement (2017). (My kids think we're crazy, BTW. In my darker moments I tend to agree with them.)

The last time N and I were in the Netherlands was back in July, getting j set up in his apartment -- he just started his first year at University of Leiden. Toward the end of that trip we connected with a real estate agent N had recently started working with, and visited a few houses for sale in the Hague. One had a perfect location, but it was a wreck. The one we put an offer on was this one. We, or rather our Dutch real estate agent, got the keys yesterday (as I write this). (That link will also give you our new address.)

We started planning this crazyness eight years ago, when the Orange Menace won the presidential election. We were within an inch of moving to Vermont and planning an escape to Canada, but were foiled by N's ex, who wanted to stay close to their kids and didn't want to move at that time (for good reasons, it must be said). Said kids are now both over 18, j (the younger) is out of high school (and see above), and in the mean time a close friend of N's who had moved to Amsterdam a few years ago told us about a bit of diplomatic hackery called (appropriately) the DAFT.

The Dutch-American Friendship Treaty

... makes it easier for US Entrepreneurs to open businesses in The Netherlands. It lowers the amount of needed investment capital from €27,000 to €4,500, frees US Entrepreneurs from the points-based test, and removes the benefit to Dutch national interests requirement. The residency permit is good for two years, after which it can be renewed for five years. The treaty is valid for all US citizens who are opening a business in the Netherlands or its territories. (Wikipedia)

Add to that the facts that the Dutch speak more English than anyone else on the continent, are incredibly queer-friendly, and know better than anyone else how to deal with floods and rising seas. After all, as they say, “God created the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands”"

I have already spent over two weeks writing this; I'm going to post it now. The movers are almost done packing up the house, and we'll meet them at the storage unit after lunch. Until later...

Edited to fix metadata screwed up by a superfluous blank line

... so I had a zoom call with my Spiritual Health advisor, EG, this morning. Right at the end of our last conversation, she asked me to talk about my "spiritual beliefs and practices" next (i.e. this) time. Which, for a second-generation atheist (albeit one with an Ashkenazi Jewish cultural background, Reformed Druidical leanings, and a life-long interest in fantasy and folklore) was very interesting question. What do I believe, really?

Here's what I came up with.

• If there is a "supreme being", it can be nothing less than the entire universe. By definition.
• The universe inspires awe and is worthy of respect. It's okay to call that worship -- the universe doesn't mind. Is looking up at the night sky a spiritual practice? Something close to that.
• Nature -- the Earth and the living beings on it, is also worthy of awe and respect. Personifying it doesn't hurt and can be very useful as long as I remember what I'm doing and don't take it too seriously. (I name computers, vehicles, and musical instruments too.) I usually call it the Earth Mother.
• Prayers and rituals don't affect the universe -- nobody's listening. But they do affect me and the people I share them with, so sometimes I do rituals (mostly by invitation) or pray (usually either to the Earth Mother, or to Bast).
• Sometimes I meditate -- not too often these days. Maybe I should get back to it.
• I try (and succeed more often than not) to write a gratitude post every Thursday. My target is at least five items.
• What happens to my consciousness after I die is unknowable. Hopefully nothing, or at least not very long, because eternity is a very long time. But memories live on, and so do songs. Being kind to people makes the memories good ones. (Never anger a bard -- they are not subtle and people remember funny songs.)
• Just because there probably isn't an afterlife, that doesn't mean I can't write about one. There's a lot of healing in stories. I write memorial posts for the ones I've lost. (My wife swore that she saw a ghost on our back stairs, and I've been visited by invisible cats a few times.)
• Talking to dead people, cats, stuffed animals, and rubber ducks is harmless and often very useful. Sometimes they answer -- detachment and dissociation are valuable tools.
• We don't know everything. Or much of anything, really. Mystery is good for the soul (whatever that is -- probably needs another post).

edit: 0428 to fix broken link

Fred Hutch takes a "whole person" kind of approach to patient care, which isn't something I've experienced before. My "care team" currently includes three oncologists, a social worker, a "patient navigator", an "integrative medicine" specialist, and (added only this week) an accupuncturist and a chaplain. I would never have thought of looking for help with "Spiritual Health -- they came looking for me based on some of my answers on the mental health section of one of their many questionaires, but from the brief conversation I had on Monday it sounds as though it will probably be better for me than most of the previous counseling I've had. It's a strange feeling, and a strange position for an atheistic Reformed Druid to be in, but there you have it.

Physically I seem to be doing better this week, as my shrinking prostate releases its grip on my urethra, and my current mix of laxatives deals with my arse. It's all still annoying -- I'm nowhere near being back to the way I was, say, a year ago, but I'll take whatever slight improvement I can get. And today I got a referral to a physiatrist specializing in pelvic floor rehab. (I only encountered the term "physiatrist" a few months ago, but apparently the term dates back to 1938. TIL!)

This is turning out to be a long, strange trip indeed.

I started writing this post in early 2016, after having ghosted my 50th high school reunion in the September of 2015. My notes from back then were

not clear what I was avoiding: needs further analysis. In general, I wasn't really sane at that time. [I was starting to burn out, though I didn't know it at the time.]

The original plan was for me to go to the reunion, then go with the whole family to Mom's birthday party. Somewhere in there I panicked over finances, and let it slide until I ran out of time.

I was also avoiding (a) the unfamiliar transportation situation around the reunion, and (b) the known problems with Colleen on a long air trip. I went to Mom's party by myself.

When it came time to make arrangements for Mom's party, the original plan had been completely forgotten -- I only discovered my notes for that after the fact.

I went to my 50-year college reunion in 2019, partly because of not having gone to the HS reunion. But this year, I skipped the (roughly) 50-year reunion of Columbae (the co-op I lived in my last couple of years of grad school), and went to OVFF the following week. This weekend as I write this. You'd think I would have learned.

The logistical considerations were different this year -- instead of worrying about flying with Colleen, I was worrying about the cats. But if I'd had any damned sense I would have gone to the reunion, letting G care for Ticia, and boarded all four cats to give me an uninterrupted long weekend on Whidbey. Which would have been useful. And I would have been able to schedule medical appointments a week earlier. (Of course, at the time I didn't know that I was going to need that many medical appointments.)

I realized a couple of weeks ago that one common factor was travel arrangements. I've almost always either had people to travel with, or at least a convention to wind up at, in a known hotel, so most of my arrangements were predetermined. And conventions are usually at airport hotels, so I've rarely had to rent a car. I can do all that stuff, and have done all that stuff, but when I'm depressed and obsessing over it I tend not to think clearly, and apparently it's really easy for me to procrastinate until it's precisely too late for anything but the default decision. Which is invariably wrong.

I had a similar problem back in 2017 with the total solar eclipse -- by the time I realized that I really needed to make reservations, it was too late. (Though even the 95% we had in Freeland was pretty impressive.) I wonder what I'll do about the one next year. There's still time. OTOH the best seeing will be in Texas.

And I wonder what I'll do about my 55th college reunion, which is next year. And a few months before that, Consonance, in the Bay Area. Maybe I should practice a little before then?

Meanwhile, here I am at OVFF. And I'll have a pretty good time! (Whether I actually do any singing in open filk circle is an open question -- so far I haven't.) But I've missed seeing another group of people I'll probably never have a chance to see again. It seems my bucket list has a hole in it. (Cue "There's a Hole in the Bucket", which may explain some things.)

I should post this before tomorrow. Which is only 14 minutes away.

Anxiety, grief, procrastination, pessimism, depression, and despair. It hasn't been a totally bad week, but between the above and the ongoing Nazi assault on trans people, it's been heading in that direction. It's worth noting that my son R is trans.

I am still not making enough progress on cleaning up the house for sale. Grieving probably has a lot to do with that -- at least it's the excuse I'm using to keep myself from... I don't know what. Thinking about it. If I'd gotten off my arse a year ago, my current pace would probably have been good enough. It says something about the problem, though, that I found spending an hour pruning blackberry vines preferable to making a couple of phone calls. Asking for help has always been a problem for me.

The high point of the week was Tuesday, which started with a support group meeting via zoom, and ended with the first meeting of my audio recording class at Earwig Studio via North Seattle College.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I Got (some) Things Done -- exercises every day, and singing every day except Tuesday and yesterday. Tuesday I took Desti and Ticia to the vet, which definitely counts as a Thing. So does the walk I took yesterday morning. Nevertheless there's a lot more that I'm not doing, which is worrisome.

Some of the exercises (from my PT appointment Friday before last) started hurting my knees last Sunday, so I've been doing far fewer of those, and appear to be recovering. Which is more than I can say for my mental health. I think it's only slightly about losing Colleen -- I can deal with that. It's mostly anticipatory grief over having to sell the house on Whidbey Island, and for the impending death of American democracy at the hands of the Repugnant Party and their Supreme Kangaroo Court.

I've had several grief/anxiety/whatever attacks over the last week -- the one this morning was the worst. It had me curled up in bed shaking for over an hour; breathing exercises and cat cuddles, but... I'm probably still not completely over it.

In the links, The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It (more detail Friday). And if you need several hours of pleasant rabbit-holing, there's the Complete Catalogue of the Painting of Johannes Vermeer.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Still there in the twilight my Amethyst Rose
Will be blooming untarnished by tears. -- "For Amy"

I wrote that song twenty years ago yesterday. A year ago, my post was mainly about Colleen, who had died less than a month before. (Her song is Eyes Like the Morning.) (Is anyone reading this new since last year? Or the year before? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. If you are, you may want to either skip this, or do some catching up.) Whatever. Onward....

I'm having a lot of trouble getting things done. A lot of that is just plain lazyness, but a lot is also denial. I can handle Colleen's death, sort of. What I'm having real trouble with is the prospect of moving. The house is a bit of a wreck, there's too much Stuff (that I don't know what to do with), and the yard is an absolute disaster. I need to call a plumber, find someone to clear the yard, take the cats to a vet, hire movers, ... and somehow downsize from about 1500 square feet (2000 if you count the garage full of boxes) to under 200. I'm probably going to have to throw money at someone to organize an estate sale for that. Maybe a senior relocation specialist?

And my left hip has been giving me trouble all week. Piriformis, probably. It was significantly worse last night, though it seems to have responded pretty well to naproxen. I'm still going to skip the yardwork I'd planned for today, because ouch!

I'm blathering. It's not as if I started writing this with a plan or anything...

Colleen and I spent fifty years surrounding ourselves with beautiful things. I don't know what's going to become of them now. Or of me, for that matter.

And because it's hauntingly relevant, here's a video of Joni Mitchell singing “Big Yellow Taxi” Live at Newport Folk Festival a week ago last Sunday. I think I'm going to stop here. I think I'd intended to add a fantasy bit, but maybe another day. That's okay, Daddy. Mommy and I will still be here whenever you need us.

Colleen died one year ago today. By an odd but wellcome coincidence, my grief support group meets the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, so there's that. (It runs from 10:00 to 11:30; I will probably post this sometime in the afternoon. I started writing this post two days ago, so please ignore any temporal confusion or calendrical parallax.)

My life seems to have been torn in half -- in part literally, shuttling back and forth between the houses in Freeland and Seattle. But also metaphorically, because so much of it revolved around Colleen. That includes nearly all of my social life.

I haven't gotten anything done in the last year. I've been reading, as usual, taking refuge in group theory and other rabbit-holes, but I'm just now getting back into singing regularly, and as for sorting and packing,... Actually, I've never sold anything on Craig's List or anywhere else online, and things that I could easily get wrong worry me. My daughter, E, is coming up to the house week after next to help with the sorting.

I've had plenty of support, mostly low-key, which I think is what I needed. Need. I haven't been left alone for more than a day or so, which is probably what I've needed even though it's not what I would have asked for. And I have the cats, who are also taking care of me in their own way. And a grief support group that meets via zoom on the second and fourth Thursday of eacy month, so they/we met this morning. There's also a Facebook group.

I don't actually know much about support, either asking for it, getting it, or giving it. Which makes being in a peer support group kind of problematic? Basicaly I'm faking it.

It's like object-oriented programming -- if a simulation is good enough, you can use it in place of the thing you're simulating. Or as Alan Kay famously said about Smalltalk, "If it quacks like a duck and it waddles like a duck, you can't tell that it isn't a duck." I just have to hope I'm waddling well enough.

Aside: the next post will be a signal boost for the James Webb Space Telescope's first images, released earlier this morning. A day that starts with that much beauty and wonder can't be all bad. And after that a boost for this morning's GoingSideways post.

I know -- it's actually Tuesday. Because I have trouble keeping track.

I should change my userpic to a waffle for this one. I won't (though I waffled about that, too). I'm waffling about several things:

Changing doctors. -- Now that I'm mostly living in Seattle (with intent to move almost completely in a few months), I need a new PCP. Fortunately UW has only a limited number that are taking new patients, are based nearby, and list a specialty in geriatric medicine. That doesn't keep me from waffling, because it's a big step, I haven't done it recently, and I worry about getting it wrong somehow.

Moving. -- Getting my stuff moved, getting rid of what I don't need, and getting the house and yard in decent shape. The yard is a disaster -- it's been neglected for five years -- and the whole place is probably going to have to be repainted. All of that will mean hiring people, which is a huge problem for me. N may be able to help, but mostly it's on me. Which means I'm going to waffle.

Finding a cat gate for my new digs. -- My "apartment" in Seattle is a studio apartment -- it's a converted garage where the only separate room is the bathroom. It has double doors, though one half locks in place and I don't normally use it. ... And starting in a month or so it will have cats. (There's a bar counter with a sink and cooking equipment, but it's only enclosed on three sides. Desti is still spry enough to be fond of jumping onto counters.) So I'm looking for something that I can use to keep Ticia and Desti away from the door. Basically something that I can arrange in a rough semicircle that will enclose enough space to open the door, set down a suitcase, and step away from the door far enough that I can close it.

There are actually quite a few maybe good enough possibilities, but when you add wanting it to be high enough that Desti can't jump over it, with narrow enough openings that she can't squeeze through it, the problem becomes more complicated. (Though I'm pretty good at getting through a door without letting cats escape, so I don't need to keep her out completely as long as I can slow her down enough that I can get in and evict her from the entry space for long enough to re-open the door long enough to bring in a suitcase or a box.)

One of the big problems is that it's difficult to find out important things like the spacing between bars and the width of the door, and impossible to search on them. (It's usually possible to find out the height, which is only marginally enough in the ones I've found.)

I may also decide to put a similar enclosure outside just in case -- the requirements for that are somewhat weaker and there are more possibilities that might work. These tend to be made of wire -- several reviews complain about sharp ends, but they'd work for the (hopefully very short) time it would take me to re-capture a cat.

Upgrading GoingSideways.blog. -- This is really the big one, because the page builder (WPBakery) we got from the designers is just about the worst ones possible for upgrading -- there's a whole lot of lock-in because it does layout in the worst way imaginable, and differently from the way modern themes do it. Also, the theme (Woodmark) is extremely limiting in what it allows me to channge, and the designers appear to have hacked on it and put the pieces in obscure places rather than doing things right. We didn't know what we needed when we hired them, but knowing that doesn't help much.

It's not helped by the fact that WordPress is changing over to a brand-new, hopefully simpler, editor (the Block Editor, AKA Gutenberg) that will let me completely get rid of WPBakery and the old theme -- as long as I can make the transition. Which neither of those ancient wrecks is designed to enable. It's also not helped by the fact that almost all of the customizability has to be specifically enabled by the theme, and they all enable a different subset. Block themes hopefully will let one get around that.

</rant>

At least I don't have my taxes to waffle about anymore -- I finished those on Sunday.

So this is my first Christmas without Colleen. I've already gotten through Halloween and Thanksgiving, but this is different. We stopped putting up a tree in the last few years, but we put out garlands and a few ornaments. I put a garland with lights around the TV last year -- never took it down because Colleen said she liked looking at it. It's also the first year in a long time without the traditional marzipan and glass of Scotch we put out "for Santa".

I'm spending the weekend down in Seattle with N and G. Normally I'd have driven up to the house on Whidbey, but I have an appointment on Monday and there's snow predicted for tonight and tomorrow, and I don't want to get stuck. I keep three days worth of extra meds in my suitcase.

It occurred to me a few days ago, looking at the tree in E's house, that I ought to go through the boxes of ornaments and take out the few with special memories attached. No idea what I'd do with them, but I don't want them -- or the memories -- to get lost. Another writing project.

I have several writing projects started, and I'm not making much progress on any of them. Grump. (And of course I just started this one today! Maybe it will give me some momentum.) And that's not counting my usual pair of New Year's posts. Which I've hardly thought about yet.

In spite of everything that's happened this last year, it seems to have gone by very quickly, and it feels as though I've gotten very little done.

As the title says, this was my first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Not the first time we were separated for Thanksgiving -- there have been several when she was in the hospital or otherwise too sick to travel. The first was 2008 -- she was in the hospital after having been diagnosed with Crohn's, and I spent the day driving down to LA from San Jose for Loscon with the kids. But she was part of our family's Thanksgiving even if she wasn't physically present at the table. It didn't feel anything like this year.

I'm not sure how to organize this. Let me start with the chronology. We started making Thanksgiving dinners together before we were married -- we had the two of us plus Colleen's mother, who couldn't cook worth a damn. Once we'd moved to San Jose the feast naturally moved with us, acquiring additional household members along the way. People brought appetizers or side dishes; we roasted the bird and made stuffing and Mom's cranberry relish.

After Colleen's mother died in 1999, we started going to Loscon for Thanksgiving weekend. That meant driving down to LA on Thanksgiving Day, stopping at Pea Soup Anderson's for dinner right around lunchtime. They did -- and probably still do -- a good job of it. When we moved up to Seattle in 2012, we went back to hosting it, in whatever house was biggest: N's rented place the first year, then at Rainbow's End, then in the Whidbey Island house.

So this year, down at Rest Stop with N's family and G doing most of the cooking, was just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Wrong? Different? Hollow? More hollow than the others, I think. Something huge that's missing. Which makes sense, I guess. (I note in passing that something making sense to me is not necessarily an indication that it will make sense in absolute terms, whatever that means, or to anyone else.)

This seemed when I started like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out. I was expecting it to be more about my mental state. But alexithymia.

Thanks to this post by @elf, we have a fascinating article: What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture? | Aeon Essays. Apparently recent research contradicts the widely-held theory -- the article calls it the Basic Emotion Theory -- that a small number of "basic emotions" are "hard-wired" by evolution, and that a person who is unable to recognize them in themself or other people is afflicted with a disorder called "Alexithymia", which translates roughly as "not having words for emotions". According to the Aeon article (from which all quotes in this post are taken unless otherwise noted),

The Basic Emotion Theory – also called the Universality Thesis by some of its critics – goes back to the 1960s, when the US psychologist Paul Ekman (who consulted on Inside Out) conducted studies with the Fore, an Indigenous society in Papua New Guinea. Ekman showed that the Fore could match photographs of faces with the emotional expressions they depicted – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid or surprised – with a fairly high degree of correctness.

But what if the experimental subjects were just making educated guesses in matching a limited number of faces to a similarly limited list of words for emotions?

In one experiment, published in 2016, just 7 per cent of Trobriander subjects correctly identified anger from posed photographs. The prototypical disgust face, in turn, was often seen as sad, angry or afraid. Only the smiling face was, by a slim majority of volunteers (58 per cent), matched to happiness. By contrast, a control group in Spain, shown the same photos, correctly identified the depicted emotions 93 per cent of the time, on average. In another study, Crivelli found that Trobrianders consistently ‘misread’ the paradigmatic fear face – eyes wide open, mouth gasping – deeming it angry and threatening. And when the standard forced-choice procedure was relaxed, about a fifth of the subjects insisted they didn’t know what emotion they were looking at when presented with a sad or a disgusted face. (In fact, in this study, the most common response to all but the happy face was not an emotion word at all but ‘gibulwa’, which roughly translates as a desire to avoid social interaction.)

So it seems that the way people identify emotions has a very strong cultural or linguistic component.

These differences can be startling. ‘I ask my American participants how they’re feeling,’ [Yulia Chentsova-Dutton] tells me. ‘I give them a list of emotions. They are done with that list in under a minute.’ With Chinese participants, the same task would take many minutes to complete. In Ghana, the experiment verged on ‘a disaster’. ‘My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: “Well, I understand all the words … but how am I supposed to know what I feel? … And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.’

There's this phenomenon called "Chinese somatisation". Research in the 1980s found that depressed Chinese patients did not experience the illness in the ‘correct’ way. Instead of the expected psychological symptoms, they reported various aches, lack of sleep and exhaustion, leading scholars and doctors to puzzle over the missing emotions.

The Aeon article ends with this delightful quotation from one of Chentsova-Dutton’s most recent papers (behind a pay-wall, alas!), which swaps terms like "alexlthymia" and "psychotherapy" with "lexithymia" and "somatotherapy", etc.

The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients often do not respond well to, and may grow frustrated by, traditional somatotherapies (see ‘Somatotherapy with the Garrulous Patient’, Rolyat, 1980). Although local epidemiological studies suggest that high levels of lexithymia are relatively rare, there are some intriguing cultural variations. Mounting evidence suggests that lexithymia is much more common in so-called ‘WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic] people’, who tend to live in societies where an independent model of self-construal predominates … Rather than aiming to treat lexithymia, WEIRD societies have developed many indigenous approaches that encourage patients with various health problems to talk at great length about their feelings.

I find this a very apt description of the way I have to think about myself in relation to other, "normal", people. And I love the acronym "WEIRD".

To finish up with, here are a few quotes about alexithymia and therapy:

From The Most Important Personality Trait You’ve Never Heard Of | Psychology Today: People high in alexithymia are poor candidates for psychotherapy, while at the same time having higher risk for a variety of psychological disorders. -- which I think explains a lot about my own experiences.

From Here's What Alexithymia Actually Is—and Why It Can Make Therapy Challenging | SELF, When you first enter therapy, it might be surprisingly difficult to answer the question, "How are you feeling?" Answering that question can be even more of a challenge if you deal with what is known as alexithymia... (That article goes on to call it a "disorder", of course.) Here's a paper that calls it a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, which is certainly closer to the way I tend to view it.

It's been a strange day. ( CW: death of loved ones )

I think "weird around the edges" might be a slight understatement, but I've never been all that good at assessing my own moods. Sometimes I feel as though I'm doing well simply to notice that I have moods. I don't think I need to go much farther down that particular rabbit-hole.

I originally wanted to write something curmudgeonly about the problems that the Book of Faces was having yesterday, but my brain seems to have taken a hike. Maybe tomorrow.

You may have noticed that this post is a little disjointed. Or maybe just weird around the edges.

Edit: add CW and cut tag. Need to be more careful, I think.

... so I've been thinking on and off about "Nancy" by Cordwainer Smith. (Go read it. I'll wait.) It still feels a lot like it did during her last few months, except that I can't call to tell her about... It's actually a very familiar feeling; Dad died back in 1999 and I still have to remind myself sometimes.

Some people like to try new things. I don't, usually -- left to my own devices I'll stay securely in my comfort zone. Colleen dragged me into a lot of things (our relationship, for example), most of which I ended up enjoying. So far I'm not enjoying widowhood.

There is a road, no simple highway Between the dawn, and the dark of night And if you go, no one may follow That path is for, your steps alone...

I never enjoyed downsizing and moving, either.

I suppose the proper term for the state of the bear at this point is "widowed". It's all completely surreal. Colleen was away -- in hospitals and rehab -- for all but three weeks between the end of March and the middle of July. I sort of got used to the way the house feels without her. If I don't think about it everything seems the same, until it isn't. Until something reminds me.

Usually it's wanting to tell her something, or ask her something. She's the one who kept track of all our social connections. Without her I'm adrift, in uncharted waters. I'm sure there are dozens of people I haven't contacted. Maybe hundreds. Many who I don't even know exist. Colleen knows; I should ask... Oh, right.

Emotionally,... Note that the combination of dysthymia with alexithymia makes that a little complicated, and very uncertain. I tend to figure out emotions by backtracking from the environment and physical effects. I mean, I know that I'm grieving, but it's hard to be more specific. I do know that I made it through this morning by curling up with a stuffy (the rhino, Cyrano; I have Colleen's platypus, Platy, down in Seattle) and whimpering, so I guess that says something. No outright crying, though I expected it. The rest of the time I've just been a little more down than usual.

Right now I'm mostly keeping busy by trying to organize things like drugs that need discarding; medical supplies, Desitin and baby wipes that can be donated; and so on. Need to track down some paperwork, too. I'm currently splitting my time between Whidbey and Seattle, so figuring what will go where is another thing. Keeping busy is good -- I can just do the thing and mostly not think too much about why I need to.

I really appreciate your comments and other messages of support. I don't think I have the energy to respond to most of them right now, but please know that the fact that you're thinking of us makes a huge difference, somehow. I'll see everything posted here, and most direct messages and mentions on LinkedIn, Discord, and that face place.

Colleen's memorial will be on Zoom starting at 3pm PDT, August 3^rd, two weeks from tomorrow. I'll post the meeting parameters closer to the day.

Where did Wednesday and Thursday go? It's been a long week... Oh.

I think I'm supposed to feel accomplished -- I had quite a few tasks to do today, including some unexpected ones, and I think I succeeded at almost all of them. So maybe I'm just out of spoons? Let's see:

• Contact contractors about making a smooth pad for Colleen to step on getting in and out of the car.
• Zoom meeting with (brother)Al and Mom's lawyer about her estate.
• Pick up some Desitin on the way up to see Colleen.
• (Not me, but Colleen had a good PT session. Also she'll be moving to another room now that she's out of the 2-week quarantine period I didn't realize was going on.)
• Colleen got a call from Swedish to schedule a follow-up upper endoscopy, but told them that we were planning to switch to UW.
• Called UW. They're booked out to June or July. Oops.
• Called Swedish back to schedule the endoscopy. It'll be in July (which is correct for a 3-month follow-up). No idea how much later it would have ended up if we'd gone with UW.
• Get callbacks from two of the contractors. One doesn't do that kind of work. Scheduled a meeting with the other... for tomorrow at 2pm. On Whidbey. After that, I need to get back to Seattle in time for dinner. (Which I just found out a minute ago. The day isn't over yet, apparently.)
• Find out that Whidbey Home Health is going out of business. They'll ask Prestige to refer Colleen to one of the other two agencies on the island.
• Stop at Freddie's on the way home to get berries and frozen veggies, and get a key duplicated.
• (As of a few minutes ago) hear from another contractor who I have to schedule. Eeek!

As I said... long week.

Bears do not like phones. I think it's mutual.

According to my phone's call log, I made 12 phone calls today, many of them to strangers (trying to find a notary, mostly without success). Several related to health care (not mine). I've gotten hardly anything else done today, and I'm clean out of mental spoons. And low on physical ones -- apparently stress is tiring.

I like receiving phone calls, if they're from people I know, but even if I know somebody very well, I have trouble picking up a phone and calling them. It's not something I'll do if I have an alternative. I can manage a business-related call if I have a script, but even there it's difficult.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8504 words in 19 posts this month (average 447/post)
    120 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

My penchant for leaving things to the last possible minute seems to be in full force this month. There are things -- mostly things that require making phone calls -- that have been hanging around for over a month. And then there's practicing for Saturday's concert. So what do I do? Read, mostly. DW and Discord and Slack (oh my!). And use the fact that Desti spent much of the day in my lap as an excuse to read rather than write, since it's hard to type with one hand stuck under a purring cat. And at least I'm not doomscrolling.

However, here I am, writing a semi-random stream-of-consciousness blog entry because I'm too lazy to actually think of something meaningful to write about. It does seem to get worse as I grow older. Since I don't have an actual job to structure my days around, I don't seem to have the motivation to do much of anything. (I've done a little system administration, but not very much. Puttering.)

My concert setlist has gradually been taking shape. When I ran through it Monday, it was well over an hour and a half, so I'm obviously going to have to do some cutting. That will have to include QV, because I really want to do Millennium's Dawn and two 12-minute songs in a 55-minute concert would be at least one too many. (I'm sure some you reading this might think it's two too many, but...)

Looking over last year's stats I see quite a few filler posts, mostly on Wednesdays. So that makes a good excuse, right?

NaBloPoMo stats:
   5827 words in 12 posts this month (average 485/post)
    286 words in 1 post today

It's been a long month so far this week, and last week, starting from Monday when Mom died, might have been even longer, but my memory doesn't go back that far at the moment.

Let's not even mention the impending electoral trainwreck; my blood pressure and sleep won't stand it. The thing that told me just how close to the edge I was getting was the way I fell apart yesterday when I couldn't get audio working for Colleen's video appointment with her nephrologist. (That, at least, went well, after they eventually resorted to calling her phone; her kidney function is up a little from her last appointment. She's seen a little improvement in her other medical issues as well.) But my mental state while trying to get the damned thing working was, actually, rather alarming.

Then after that, the water went out. Turned out, after calling the water company, that something has been leaking a lot, and running down to our down-hill neighbor's where it was noticed by a contractor. It's on our side of the meter, so I spent the next hour or so finding a plumber. Then poured myself a double shot of gin. Figure I earned it.

Internet and phone went out this morning. for an hour or so. Which I could handle, but it was just One More Thing, and I'm tired. The plumber came out this morning about an hour later, and went away again to fetch an excavator. The leak is underground, of course, flowing into our gravel-filled drainage ditch, around the house, and out down the hill somewhere. Maybe it'll get fixed today, but I'm not counting on it.

Apart from that, I haven't been getting much of anything done. I think I mentioned that in my last State-of-the-Bear. My mental state has definitely deteriorated since then; some of that no doubt was having to cancel singing lessons, and some is just not being able get out of the house or be with people. Which is kind of odd, because it's not all that different from the way things were in the Before Times.

Plus c'est la même chose? Not a whole lot of ça change this time.

In the course of researching mental health (or in my case the lack of it), I ran across this collection of 16 Powerful Songs About Mental Health To Make You Feel Less Alone. All but two of the artists were people I'd never heard of, and all but one of the songs.

But I really don't have much else to post about, since I haven't managed to write a single song this month. That makes me annoyed at myself and a little depressed -- see above.

Maybe next week...

This afternoon it occurred to me to wonder why I so often qualify my moods -- both here on DW, and offline if anyone asks me. I'll say "mostly okay", or "ok?", or occasionally even "unknown" -- I think I used that last week, actually. (*goes to check* No, it was "indeterminate", 8 days ago.) (I don't appear to have actually used "modified rapture" (the quote is from Nanki-Poo in The Mikado) as a blog mood, though I did use it as a title once.) Apparently bears try to be precise, even when they don't need to. (They also use nested parentheses from time to time, because LISP.)

I've been doing this for a long time.

Partly, it's because I seem to have a lot of trouble figuring out what my mood is at any given time, especially if it isn't anxious, angry, or depressed. "Okay" is sort of my "none of the above" category. And partly it's because I really don't know what emotions like love and joy are "supposed to" feel like, or in other words what the words mean to other people.

Maybe another way to say it is that I tend to think that I ought to understand something in order to write about it. But that's not entirely true. I write love songs, memorials, and things like QV and sometimes while I'm writing it seems that I'm just stringing words and images together in the only way that makes sense. And when I stumble across a line that makes me choke up with some emotion, I know that it's a good line but I can't necessarily identify the emotion it's evoking. I can write a blog post, and stick a mood label on it that seems like the right one for the content, without knowing what it means or what I actually did.

Does impostor syndrome apply to this use case? Probably.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  10844 words in 18 posts this month (average 602/post)
    344 words in 1 post today

Those of you who have been tracking my "done since" posts way too closely may recall that in the middle of June I signed up for online therapy on a site called 7cups.com (short for 7 Cups of Tea). Since then, in addition to chatting from time to time with my therapist, I've been spending a lot of time on the site, mostly in the fora (forums? I'll go with the Latin version).

Mostly, the site is there for free conversations with (slightly) trained volunteer listeners (I wrote about the value of such conversations back in July). Besides that and the fora there are two other features of the site that some people had come to rely on: the "feed" (sort of twitter-like), and group chats.

Right now there are two different kerfuffles in progress -- the feed (officially unsupported since sometime in May) was taken down with less than 24 hours notice, and access to group chat rooms was closed off to everyone who had fewer than a certain number of 1-1 chats with listeners. That was done with no notice at all. The people who relied on the feed and the group chats are understandably upset, and I've been spending quite a lot of time making comments on forum posts.

I have to mention at this point that I haven't found much use for the volunteer listeners -- I'm paying to talk to my therapist -- and I've dipped into the group chats on a few occasions and found them almost impossible to follow and mostly uninteresting. But... I've realized a couple of things:

One is that people like me who are there mainly for the paid therapy or the fora (or the now-defunct feeds) are very much second-class citizens. The hours I've spent with my therapist don't count toward the chat quota for getting into the group chatrooms, and the money I'm spending doesn't get me any of the (rather minor) features you get with a paid membership that costs a tenth as much. It's weird -- apparently the old adage that says "if you're getting it for free you're not the customer, you're the product" doesn't apply on 7cups.

The other is why I spend so much time on the fora: I'm being helpful: making comments with encouragement, sympathy, and occasional bits of wisdom. Which is what the Middle-Sized Bear always does. For some reason I found that surprising.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   4637 words in 8 posts this month (average 579/post)
    432 words in 1 post today

Please excuse me -- this is going to be a bit round-about, although I do expect to get to a point eventually. Not necessarily the point.

There are two different things going on. The first is that I recently joined a site called 7cups.com, where one can connect via (text)chat with an actual therapist, for an entirely reasonable monthly fee. N. suggested it partly because there are no therapists on the island who take Medicare, but mostly because she knows that I communicate better in text than I do in speech. (I also forget stuff if I don't write it down.)

I'm just getting started with this, trying to work on my anxiety and chronic depression. So naturally I needed to start with something of an infodump.

The second thing is that I've been finding myself trying to give various health-care providers (and their minions; I'm not sure how much of a clinic's or hospital's staff "provider" covers) a "quick" overview of Colleen's recent medical history. That's an infodump in its own right, and I was having trouble remembering what happened when.

Being a tool-using bear, I figured that the simplest way to do it, or at least to make a first cut, was by combining a couple of tagging conventions that I was already starting to use in my yyyy/mm.done files. You'll notice that they already sort properly by date. The problem is that when you grep for, say, "hospital", you get line numbers instead of day numbers.

I had already started putting (mmdd) at the front of entries that I figured I was going to want to know dates for, like hospital admission and discharge dates. I had also started using a new flag character, '/', for events involving Colleen. (I've been using '%' for myself for a long time.)

Now, it was a simple matter to

    grep ' / (' */*.done | wc -l
    141

That number there is the line count. Right. Of course those aren't all hospital admissions and discharges, and the record goes back to 2008. But still, that includes at least ten hospital stays since we moved to Seattle. And it doesn't include moving four times, being laid off twice, my job burnout, totaling my car, and everything going on in the rest of family. So.

That led to the following infodump on 7c, as slightly paraphrased in this week's to.do file:

Not sure how much detail I need to go into about what's been going on in my life, but 2012 and 2015-2018 were particularly stressful. We moved four times between 2012 and now, and C was hospitalized at least 10 times. I changed jobs three times, and retired. My cat died in 2015.

And then I added:

Looking back objectively, I think I have to admit that I'm in surprisingly good shape, considering.

And

I guess that means that I have to change the question under discussion from "how can I reduce my depression and anxiety?" to "how can I cope with stress?" So... improving my coping skills and self-care skills. And reducing procrastination, which is not just a (broken) coping mechanism but also one of the few sources of stress that's actually under my control.

N's reaction when I told her this was "I thought you'd already done that." It turns out that depression and anxiety are perfectly normal and expected reactions to that level of stress. I may need to work on self-awareness, too.

Bears can be a little slow sometimes.

nevermind

Today's word, "nevermind", is unusual in that it's part of the bear's self-talk (out loud -- the bear frequently talks to themself, and greatly appreciates the fact that bluetooth headsets make talking out loud to oneself socially acceptable). "Nevermind" is not expected to be heard by someone else, although it is spoken in the presence of someone else.

The approximate meaning is "I just asked or told you something. You obviously didn't hear it, but it wasn't important enough to be worth getting your attention and repeating. Never mind." It is generally spoken somewhat more quietly than whatever it was that induced the bear to say it. If heard by the other party, it is intended to assure them that they didn't miss anything important.

Understanding Ursine, the language of bears. Or at least of mandelbears. Or maybe just this mandelbear.