Boy: “I hate your stories”

Woman: “I know a story about a boy who hated my stories”

Letters From The Sky, Civil Twilight

* Admittedly, admission was free in terms of finance. I estimate its actual cost in lost time, which was slightly less than 109 minutes (as I fast-forwarded through some of the predictable romantic fluff)

Things I have learned:

1. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because one side of your mouth is at least semi-functional, that side can perform successfully the actions of the mouth as a whole. For example, drinking: it’s actually better to slip the liquids (and I do mean, slip) into the paralyzed side because you can actually seal the other side with the functioning lips. It’s so automatic to use the lips that work, I keep forgetting that limitations and liquids roll out the right side unchecked.
2. Vessels with spouts are the key, as they can funnel the liquid. But, if you’re a normal family, you probably have a paucity of available spouted vessels. On the other hand, we’re a Russo-American family with a) a former-baby/current-toddler with baby/toddler cups galore (though sippy cups are just not up to the job of your average thick meal-replacement shake) and b) a matriarch with a formerly-humorous-but-as-usual-devastatingly-on-it-obsession with plastic Chinese tea thermoses.
3. A significant portion of Bell’s Palsy sufferers experience heavy fatigue. I seem to be one, with a strange cycle of tiredness, usually with an onset of about 3:30pm — 4pm. It’s quite something, let me tell you, and not what I expected.
4. There is also an angle of this I am sure many of you would share, were you to be (or have you been) in similar predicaments… A thing I might express as the added psychological stress of being a burden to others. I think this is one of the most difficult things to deal with, since it alone can propel ‘the one who should be resting’ into moments of ‘semi-guilt-ridden activity’ which, I can only imagine, server to exacerbate the condition. It is a strange and gut-sinking thing to see yourself as a sort of deadweight eye of a storm, sort of like being a hunk of paralyzed lead dropped onto a pool tarp, pulling everything down into its heavy, distorting sink.

Image credit goes to: Yann Souetre from whom I borrowed without permission

Tillandsia ionantha is a bromeliad native to Central America that is classified as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union. This epiphyte is well adapted to its rather unique ecological niche, growing attached to the high branches of trees where it receives exposure to the sunlight that the canopy of trees shades from the forest floor below. The leaves of Tillandsia ionantha possess tiny grayish-colored scales called trichomes that both store water until it can be absorbed and act to reflect intense sunlight from the leaf surface, thereby preventing excessive water loss through transpiration.

Selaginellas are creeping or ascendant plants with simple, scale-like leaves on branching stems from which roots also arise. The plants are heterosporous (megaspores and microspores), and have structures called ligules, scale-like outgrowths near the base of the upper surface of each microphyll and sporophyll.
Unusually for the lycopods, each microphyll contains a branching vascular trace.

Ficus pumila (creeping fig or “climbing fig”) is a woody evergreen vine that is native to East Asia.
This plant requires the fig wasp Blastophaga pumilae for pollination, and is fed upon by larvae of the butterfly Marpesia petreus.

We had not been to the beach in a very very long time. Oh, there were reasons, even beyond our constant cries of “busy”-ness, but they all seems to dissolve into foolish caricatures today when we stood on the shore and watched the white-maned waves come crashing in.

There is a soft, unfocused haze that accompanies these ocean days, something that just registers on the visibility scale but is more like a vintage photo, a sort of summer softening that is, no doubt, a clouding of the atmosphere above the surf with microscopic moisture, but it makes your time there seem like an immediate memory.

So Lucian and I spent a good hour running along the beach and playing a sort of offensive/defensive line game where he would try to outmaneuver me so he might run headlong into the oncoming waves, and I would try to cut him off or, for those times he did slip past me with a head fake or other cleverness (like waiting for me to start texting a description of the stellar picture I wanted to send to Iryshka), catch him from behind with a valiant, stretching leap.

There was such a purity of pleasure, mingled with that specialized nostalgia not for things you actually experienced but for the belief you once had in the way such experiences would feel. I know that is confusing, so I will try to rework it: it felt like I was touching on the feelings I always thought I would feel when I came to California for my endless summer of warmth, love, and oceanic fun.

We have it so good here in California. It is a profound moment when you remember it, not idly but intensely. In a messy stream of days all choked with impatience and lost time, all blurred with fatigue and expectation, it is a gift to awaken (again) to the thought that everything might just be quite perfect.

But the “No” thing, it’s interesting, because it’s a power-word, and he tries to throw it around a lot, not as a command, but rather as a deconstruction. He wants to bleed it of its authority, and reduce it to the banal. Or so I think.

Summation of stun. That is the night. Broken into shards, unable to collect them together, but still able to get a glimpse of the whole form, an implication of what it was, what it could be. We’re zombies after 8pm. We can push, push, push, and get something out, but it is only recycled detritus of the day.

It’s getting hotter. I used to love the heat, used to love the humid vapor ghost that seemed to shadow me on summer days – but then again, those days were days free of labor, free of general responsibility. Small, wandering days, never really going too far but always loose and happy; hot days of sweat and blinding sun, cool nights of breezes, soft noises, and mosquitoes. Yes, I used to love the heat, back when my body was a net of cords underneath muscle and smooth skin, when sweat was like an ornament and not like a stain.

Now, the vultures of doubt circle over my intentions– small aspirations feebly kicking and crawling in an attempt to actually live. I push because I know that if I let them stop moving, they’re goners. So I write, trying to move into something from the pure stream of nothing I feel inside.

I am out of practice with myself. I think I was so afraid for a while that the self I was formerly communing with was not authentic, not real, simply a wishful and energetically-reinforced construct.

…for many investigative purposes, children are easily enough replaced by rats…

Yet this alchemy was so powerful that once he massaged that elastic between his little thumb and forefinger, all was forever lost.

“Unlike their more graceful cousins, the primitive frogs kept their back legs straight out after they jumped. So they don’t land on their feet. Instead, they do an ungainly belly flop, and then struggle to get to their feet and jump again.”

So it seems that there is more to it, then. If I think about it more, I can imagine that perhaps the neuro-muscular necessities are not linearly action-based… perhaps even that the ability (vision, musculature, nerve endings) to land is layered atop the ability to leap (think, more powerful legs that can push are likely to be able to cushion an impact); and/or that the ability to leap has a distinct survival advantage over the ability to land (on its own) and would be selected for, and assembled in that evolution-type way, prior to any landing gear.

Interesting in its own right; but it brings to mind a personal experience which I am now forced to re-evaluate:

Several years ago, on my first ski trip, Iryna took control and began to instruct me, for our first trip down the mountain. On our way to the lift, we covered balance, shuffling, and even how to ascend the hill with that sideways ski-crawl. Being a relative neophyte, I absorbed and didn’t think much beyond what she was teaching.

It wasn’t until we were coming close to the top of the mountain– while still on the lift — that I realized I didn’t really know how to ‘stop’. That is, I had no clue how to brake, decelerate, prevent forward motion, etc. I mentioned this to Iryna, and she tried to describe how it was done, but I was lost, and the top was approaching too fast. Sadly, when we got there, I was gently pushed into a sliding carom-shot into the poor child in front of me (he wasn’t proficient either, but that’s no reason to send a 200+ pound bearded man on a collision-course with him). I clipped him from behind, vainly trying to throw myself sideways but only succeeding in nailing him in the back of the legs and sending us into a tangled knot, directly in the path of skiers exiting the lift.

The awkward manifestation isn’t quite the point, however. Rather, I think now that Iryna was unwittingly (or not so unwittingly– she’s a very clever girl) recapitulating ontogeny by arming me with mobility before any type of deceleration, and much like the above-mentioned frogs I chose a type of belly-flop as my only recourse to stopping.

(Via Scientific American.)

Before I get into it, here’s the article:
The Willpower Paradox from Scientific American, July 2010

I might expand this later, but the operative ideas include:

1. the ‘before me’ would accomplish less by self-direction, more by exploration.
2. The negative of this was: things could end up half-assed, if I didn’t push to conclusion; and also, I took a lot of direction from exterior sources (especially insistent people and constructed, fantastical models (like, ‘rock star’)).
3. The ‘recent me’ has been trying the opposite — extensive planning, self-imposed deadlines, revisioning, etc. (which has been frustrating and disappointing, and leads to inner rebellions thru the cracks).
4. The ‘recent-recent me’ has been questioning this, and now (perhaps because I opened up myself to discovery) a flood of information and stimuli has swept in to help (like this article).

Now — the article isn’t conclusive. In fact, the experiment is a bit narrow, and some commenters point out some questions that I think are relevant…

But I still get fired up at the potential confirmation– and to wrap it up, I might talk about “Night Skiing” and how much we know by guessing.

Here’s the really good news: CIA director Leon Panetta says there are fewer than 100 Al-Qaeda combatants in Afghanistan. Here’s the utterly confusing news: The U.S has over 94,000 highly trained human beings in Afghanistan whose express purpose is to destroy Al-Qaeda. I bring this up as a prod to get you to question your own allotment of martial force, Gemini. You definitely need to make sure you have a lavish reserve of fighting spirit primed to serve your highest goals. Just make sure, please, that it’s pointed in the right direction