My Stomach Bug (OH gosh is it a bug...a real bug?)

Belly Pains: Is it in my head, our heads, ok then, whose head?

I hate self-diagnosis stuff on the internet because one always end up the in weird, hypochondria-tic world of the web, worrying about stomach ulcers the size of hands, parasites with teeth, two-headed babies, and tree man visiting (I always end up in You Tube watching tree man's struggle to drink out of a cup). I'm just one more click away from discovering I've been abducted, and some Prometheus alien is harboring inside me. 

So, I've been struggling with a stomach ache for about a week. I've since had an ultrasound on my gallbladder to check for stones, have been given some medicine for pain, and have talked to a psychotherapist for the obvious reasons that maybe it's in my head. Nothing has helped and no answers have come, so I've decided I'm nuts and only people on the internet can help because that always makes things better and the internet never lies.

I wonder when "stuff" starts to really be in our heads? This could be a moment that happens suddenly or sharply, such as when we think there is one more step to the staircase, but the foot lunges awkwardly to the ground because there is, in fact, no more steps to take. Or, could the saying, "it's in your head," really take a lot longer, a gradual process of becoming ill upstairs (not down). For example, what we are afraid of most, like getting cancer, tumors, and other maladies, could really manifest in some sort of alternative reality, where we are sick and dying and there is no cure; theoretically this reality only exists in our heads. I'm not undermining anyone who has these terrible illnesses, but what if we all are sick because we THINK we are sick, even though we are completely fine according to everyone else? 

This is my case; I have created a world of  gastrointestinal illness, and subsequently have been treating myself as though I do indeed have gallstones,  a parasite (good Lord), or a ruptured ulcer that is getting infected as we speak and is a precursor to stomach cancer, which is the most painful of all cancers according to some guy's post on Live Heath Chat room 201. What can I do to prevent getting more ill? It's a handicap at this point, too, and I will probably need a tag for my car.

It's pretty hard to go around sick in the head, exhausting in fact, because no one understands that not only am I sick mentally, but in this alternative reality I have created (World 2), I am physically incapable of getting out of bed (even though I just went grocery shopping in World 1) ---it's that bad. Does anyone feel sorry for me yet?

There is nothing worse than feeling bad and finding a discussion group online where everyone is commiserating about their trial and tribulations. Some folks even list all the surgeries they've had, where underneath their esquire, there's usually a quote from Gandhi or Maya Angelou (or someone else who has truly has suffered).

Here's what I've seen:

"I have a terrible stomach pain for three months. I've had four CT scans, three ultrasounds, and still no one can find anything wrong with me."

John Burge

Appendectomy '04

L4/L5 Laminectomy '07

Revision L4/L5 Laminectomy 07 (never left the hospital because I liked the jello)

Lumpectomy (yes, I'm a dude) '09

Vasectomy '10 (just on a whim)

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”  [how ironic]

― Maya Angelou

We have emerged as a new society, especially on the internet, where attaching our maladies to our names becomes a label of importance, significance, and dubious gallantry. Man, it's not cool to have so many surgeries. Do you think some it is in your head? Hmm. Maybe I should go back to the doctor for my belly ache, and even though he thinks I'm fine, my head and the internet tells me differently.

Losing Miranda

published in The Nomad

Losing Miranda by Paula M. Bolado

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't! -The Tempest, Shakespeare

It is Tuesday.

The evening steadily took the light,

dragging its hours to her bed.

Her mind sluggish, and her face—

She once was beautiful but now left with sunken eyes,

deep like a hollow lost ship

where the dripping of leaking water

fills over the heads of the few souls

who have been sacrificed by wild waters.

Those who sought the soft rays—

rays breaching the cold pitch of her eyes—

only became lost again.

In fetus pose, she nurses the bellowing moan

deep inside her womb,

while her boy is sleeping in the next room making

child-like grunts and noises children do,

where he has to sleep with his lamp shining

against the horrors of his youth.

To her it is luminescent, shining, and painful

along her own bedside where she sleeps,

always on the right side.

Tenderly, she reaches to the frozen side of the bed

where nothing lies but cotton folds like razor blades.

The night gathers an orchestra of crickets and frogs

all shouting obscenities at her.

She lies back into the chronic ache and black pool of memory,

letting the malicious water slam against her vessel.

The Black Raven beats against the hull before he swoops down upon her chest

picking, scratching, tearing—

the remains of the day.

Away went the prayers to her Father,

the noise drones, and she slowly drifts,

steadily toward a shape in the dark,

molded by gray matter,

making sense as she draws near

seeing something, feeling something

like a touch, or a stroke, felt between two lovers entangled

under a woven congregation of lustrous stars, vows, and a baby’s cry.

Awakened by the sound, the electricity is out!

Her son is alone in his room.

Miranda wonders where the angels went.

Sinking into the night, being brave in her vessel,

Wednesday approaches.

Creativity Developed in the Classroom

My thoughts on creativity in the classroom and DON'T YAWN

Since I’m a literary person (at this moment in time, teaching college writing courses), I’m drawn to using analogies and metaphors in developing creativity in the classroom. As a mechanism for divergent thinking, using metaphors and analogies allow for old ideas to be transferred into new ideas, new insights, and new perspectives, which are gained from borrowing and synthesizing information, allowing for originality to emerge. It sounds like a paradox: to borrow old ideas in order to form original ideas. My belief is further reinforced by the notion of pulling ideas, merging them with others, and creating vastly different perspectives. I think that retelling a story (something seen) through art, literature, film, writing, etc., is exactly creative. The whole idea that "everything has been done" is true to some degree, but the personal perspective will always allow deviation from the original story. Unless you are copying a master painting, for technique, it certainly won't be celebrated as original, but it still takes creativity to accomplish such a task. A painter of the past used unique paint strokes to achieve certain degrees of light, and the copying artist has to also figure out the maneuver to achieve the same result.

What if instead of painting dancing ballerinas, using the same Impressionist movements on canvas Degas captured with his works, we painted dancing pandas? How would pandas dance together? Would they bump around with their fatness and be less graceful, then let’s say, thirteen year old girls? Would the paint strokes be more chaotic and anxious, as opposed to Degas delicate, graceful strokes and soft colors? We have to mimic, copy, mold, create, in order to evolve to become original. 

It is pretty fantastic to think that just by watching chickens squeeze through fences, the idea for the cotton gin was developed, or comparing how a germ enters a body to the conquest of Mexico could help kids draw relationships; basically, relating dissimilar things and drawing conclusions by analogous comparisons. This allows the student to think in individual terms (synectics).  I read this somewhere: “Making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange." There is so much liberation at play for the child, and for the teacher, when students are able to think abstractly!

 When using visual images, direct analogies allow for literary gems to emerge in the students thought process. For example, referring to a pencil as “tired and worn out from the day,” according to my son after answering a question about how a pencil feels (if it could feel), allows the visual to emerge that the pencil has been picked up, chewed on, drawn with, erased with, stories written with, math problems solved with, and many other things the life of a pencil goes through during the day.  We generally call attributing human feelings to non-animate things or animals as anthropomorphism, but supporting empathetic identifications with living or nonliving things, helps kids with providing the basis for discussions, writing projects, art activities, or design projects. Additionally, any other problem solving or problem finding exercises are supported by using analogies.  

Kids love to draw, they love humor, and allowing them to access prior knowledge on stories, will help them with original ideas.  Adults do it all the time! I just saw a movie trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on television.

It is a shame that so many of our classrooms are operating under constant threats of tests and grades centered on controlling extrinsic motivation. In the past, when I taught at-risk youth, I used extrinsic motivation to control behavioral problems with my students. I would give tickets out to each student for their best behavior for the day. They would sign the back of the ticket and I would put it into an envelope. At the end of the week, I would draw a couple lucky names, and whoever had the most tickets in the envelope, the greater the chance their name would be drawn. They would win gift cards, gag gifts, candy, whatever. This worked for a while, until the ones who never got tickets became increasingly more hostile. I wasn’t good at dealing with these particular individuals as a first-year teacher, but damned if I tried my best. As far as creativity goes, when they drew something or wrote something amazing (even the kids who made bad choices), I put their work up on the board, and it stayed there for a long time. Peers would go up to see what they’ve done. Just by having their peers say "wow" or "cool" was enough of an award for their creativity.

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose: intrinsic motivators for corporations, based on Dan Pink’s evaluation supporting creativity.  We know how well this works with kids, and have seen this work well with huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Zynga, and Zappos, so why aren’t many other businesses adapting this philosophy? I look at it like Bain Capital and standardized tests: only the winners (the successors) are the small majority, while the rest of us get taken to the bank, are left picking up the pieces, and are trying to figure out what went wrong.

Spider Shock

     A giant brown spider left its molting hanging outside the back door, which was adjacent to the refrigerator. Every time Travis opened the fridge, he could not stop but glance at what was a seemingly unnatural occurrence in nature. He tried opening and slamming the back door to see if its exoskeleton would gently slip into the wind toward the woods. But each time he slammed the door, the giant thing hung more closely to the window. He decided to toss a cup of water into the direction, thinking maybe it would slip down, but as soon as the water hit the glass, eight cold, hairy legs fell down upon his arm. The owner of the carcus  faced him with eight beady eyes before latching onto his skin. Everything went black for a few seconds, as he questioned what just happened. A needle began traveling up his arm, cutting through his tissues--cold, sharp, spreading. He had never seen this North Carolina woods spider with big brown hunches and silvery course hairs. What kind of spider molts?
     Regaining his senses while releasing some profanity, Travis flung the spider right into the kitchen where it landed into the sink. He desperately used the sink water sprayer until it flattened into the drain. He tore six paper towels and courageously pushed them into the drain hoping to scoop or scrape the damn thing away; a twisted mess of brown and black goo dismissed for its intrusion.  Life for that spider met him at all three stages.  Travis fell to the floor to fetal pose, his arm stiff, his neck freezing each second. Make that four stages.

video and tanning salon attack cat

Recently, I came upon a large black and white cat lounging in tanning salon (slash) video store. Not only was I astonished by the sheer size of the beast,  but within a second of spreading it's three-foot frame over a video shelf containing screwball comedies such as Meatballs and Weekend at Bernies, the cat sprang to its feet as an unsuspecting dog and owner had just walked inside. Little did they know before coming in the store, with the intent of renting a romance, the terror that actually awaited them. With claws pronated and razor teeth gleaming, it flung itself on the dog like a killer whale lunges after a giant walrus. Videos went flying, cups of tanning lotion whished and sprayed in the air, Meatballs leaped from the shelf and into the garbage can, and the owner became entangled in the horror and gore-- an amazing discovery channel event one might never have the chance to witness again. The dog survived, and the cat lives on-- elongated over video shelves containing raspberry movies such as: Gigli, Catwoman, and Birdemic: Shock and Terror.

*Waffle House Smoking Vignette (*when you could smoke there)

     The thing about a Waffle House in Western North Carolina is that the smoking section is the entire House. People in the bar area smoke as they eat, dangling their legs over rubberpad stools while hunched over waffles and eggs. Near the bathrooms folks like to be more isolated so they smoke alone, turning and rustling pages of the local paper. Beside my booth to the left there is a family of smokers, eating, and making gray faces as smoke engulfs their waffles. The three-year old, curious like taking a first sip of beer, reaches toward the cigarette dangling out of grandma's mouth. She doesn't notice the cigarette is gone because she is intensely looking out the large windows to the mountains of long ago. The little one holds the cigarette and attempts to bring the butt to his lips, but then turns it the wrong way where the red cherry flickers before his eyes. The mother notices and grabs the cigarette. She says no, no, to the child. Grandma wakes up from the 40's and asks where her Winston went.
     The people who work at a Waffle House are incredible multitaskers. A man can pour waffle mix into the maker, shuffle a couple sausages with his other hand holding a fork, and smoke a Marlboro with an ash-tail as long as his gnarled pinky. A waiter can deliver eggs faster than she delivers coffee, then leaves you hanging for your hash browns. “They’re on the grill and will be up in a sec hon.” I look over to the gnarly pinky man with the plume of smoke rising above my hash browns. I’m less than anxious now to have them but my delicious buttery eggs and empty cup of coffee need company.
     “Can I get a refill of coffee?” I ask, thinking she will scurry to the half-full pots with red and black rims and come back apologizing.
     She looks at me and says, “I’m waiting on your hash browns first.” Then she retreats to the bathroom area and I don’t see her again for the rest of my meal. I wonder what I said wrong. What part of my requests sent her to the Waffle House bathroom. Is she crying? Is she hurt? Is she smoking? I wonder if I need to leave a tip, because I could use the cash. The cook delivers the hash browns, almost tossing them across the table like a frisbee full of grease. I ask another waiter for coffee. He complies with my request and even brings me a tall glass of water—full of ice, refreshing and wonderful, with little tiny ash particles floating above the icecubes.

"Smelly Cat" and "My Cat Moses Smokes Too Much"

This week, I took a piece from this blog about my cat Moses who smokes too much (see entry) and turned it into a poem for a class of students. I added my guitar to the poem and sang to them. I was like Pheobe from Friends singing "Smelly Cat" with four chords. But my song is called "My Cat Moses Smokes Too Much." It's much more of a heartwarming tale with a cat struggling with emphasema. Oh, and he also drinks.

We are currently working on a program for him, which is a difficult task because there aren't many open feline smokers out there willing to get help the way Moses seeks. He does need help and he knows it. We heard his cries just squeezing him real tight (with an endearing hug) until he meowed--and later scratched. We knew he was meowing a "yes" to treatment.

Anyway, the students enjoyed the poem. It was a great way to introduce myself as their teacher for the week and next fall. I feel comforted students now understand the real struggles cats face with nicotine addiction.