Snowy Days

Well, the Cincinnati area has set and/or broken a snow record. We have had 40 days of accumulating snow, according to official records. There's something Biblical in that, isn't there?

In many ways, it's been an apocalyptic winter. Definitely, it's been a record setter, in many ways and in many places. In Washington state, it has ended with a massive mudslide that has wiped out most of a community. They are still looking for the people, combing through homes and digging through slop, and the rain will mingle with the tears as too many are lost or left. I hope the winter is over for them, and I hope they get a miracle or two or twenty.
People have died of cold while inside their homes.
Whiteouts have taken lives on the highways.
Cabin fever has led to murders, assaults, and other insanity.

I hate this long cold winter. This is not the kind of historical time anyone (except maybe meteorologists) wants to live in.

But -- March is ending, and we have the proverbial wisdom of coming in like a lion going out like a lamb. I'm ready for some lamb, how about you?
Little lambs, and green grass, and blue skies with puffy white clouds, and fruit blossoms shedding a different kind of white on the ground.

I'm ready to put the cold and snowy days behind me, and look forward to the warm and colorful days ahead.

If it's really stopped snowing, and there is an end to the killing power of winter 2013-2014.
Too many have died.

Suicide -- Nature or Nurture?

Does suicide run in families?
Why might suicide run in families?

 

Some observers think that there may be a more accepting attitude in families where this has happened.Or that it is more tolerated as being something of a family trait.
This is what scientists call the 'nurture' effect. (Actually, I doubt scientists call it that among themselves, but it's the general population understanding of what scientists call it. They probably refer to it ad "Environmental Effects of X on Y")


There may be something to this. If the inevitability is accepted,does that make it acceptable?
If a child grows up being told how much he is just like the charming, entertaining Uncle Waldo -- such a card! -- will he grow up to be another Uncle Waldo?
What if, after the show is over and the lights have gone down, Uncle Waldo couldn't live with his image or his heartbreak -- if Uncle Waldo committed suicide, will Uncle Waldo's relative then get a free pass to do the unthinkable?

It may help the surviving family to think so. There may be an easing of grief and guilt by blaming it on family history.
Family history may be to blame that symptoms went unacknowledged.. The reason why no help was sought, because the story is more lively than the backstory. Because the entertainment has more 'body' than the ending.

But how much of that is Nature. Depression is a physically caused illness that affects the mind. Depression runs in families. So far as I know, specific genes have not been found, but there have been indications of gene markers, whatever they are.

I liken the nature of the disease depression to the disease diabetes.
If your family has a history of late 30/ early 40s young adults sinking into coma a coma, is it acceptable to shrug and say, "Oh well, he's just like Uncle Waldo"?
Of course not.
When the coma happens, or the despair -- it's time to look for medical answers. They do exist.
In the case of the diabetic, it's easily diagnosed and usually easily treated.
Depression is not as easy, but there are treatments and therapies. Just as the diabetic needs to adjust dosages and behaviors, so does the depressed patient.


But if the diagnosis and treatments can't be adjusted quickly enough, in either case, the  sufferer will die as a function of his disease.
Not because he is just like Uncle Waldo, but because he suffered from the same (genetically influenced) disease.

I suppose, like most things, it is a combination of the two effects. Not nature vs nurture, but nature&nurture. Plus individuality.

What I would like to do is to urge anyone with suicide as a family trend, is to learn and be alert to the signs of this disease (or any related illness). Don't watch and worry -- that would be enough to make a sane person crazy -- but be aware.

It's not just the family history -- it's the family future.

Back to the schoolroom

It's back to school time, and the news is out. All over the broadcasts are good schools, bad schools, charter schools, school levies, buses, teachers, backpack programs, and a lot of discussions. Most of the discussions are about costs.

Anyone who thinks free public schools are free hasn't gone to one for more than two generations. When I was a child, we had school fees every year  to pay for workbooks to go along with the textbooks. These workbooks were not and are not optional. There are more programs today than there used to be to help parents pay for them, but that's not the point.
The point is that free schools aren't free.

There's been discussion, too, about the school year. About the whole school year concept. The September-to-May concept is fairly recent .  School, in my lifetimes, started after Labor Day and ended by Memorial Day. Many things have happened to change that -- standardized Monday holidays, for one thing. Memorial Day isn't the 30th of May anymore.

The school year somehow changed into a certain number of days in school instead of a season of education. I have a lot to say about this ridiculous concept. My daughter had to make up absent days one year by going to school during her Christmas vacation. She didn't have to learn anything -- she wasn't making up tests, or reviewing chapters she missed due to her injury. She just had to have her butt in a seat at the school building, so they could have the requisite numbers of students on the minimum number of days.

Education is not the goal of school. Attendance is.

Some of this -- most of it -- is due to funding formulas. #of students, multiplied by # of days = $$$. Never mind the learning. No child can learn in 52 days, they absolutely need to have 53 days. It's the law.

It's the law.

Schooling should never have been made a matter of law.
Once it was a matter of law, it should have remained a matter of local law.
Not state.
Not Federal.
Not run by dollar dictators who want only a return on their investment.

To get that return, they turned to athletics. The games children play at recess for fun have become big business and are the secondary purpose of having school.
Again, if you think school athletics are about equal opportunity, you haven't been living in the real world. All sorts of personal gear and equipment have to be purchased. One year it was name brand shoes decided by the coach, because they were best and safest. Problem was, the shoes cost more than the monthly electric bill. Without the proper shoes, the students aren't allowed to play.

Doesn't sound very free or equal to me,and kids have always been pretty good at playing games without help. Just because the town council can get a cut of the gate and the state can run the concessions doesn't seem to me a sound educational platform.

It's back to school time.

At least we don't have to worry (too much) about what's required of us or our children. All we have to do is make sure they get there (Attendance) and encourage them to play games (Athletics.)

That's what school is all about.

Listen to the Folks.

The FDA has approved two new drugs for weight loss. They are supposed to work well with diet and exercise. Of course, this is NOT for the morbidly obese. If they are that fat, they had better have bariatric surgery before doing anything. (Ka-ching, Ka-ching! Anyone else hear that?)

Now, I had a couple of different reactions to this. According to my doctors and the doctors of everyone I know, the way to lose weight is "diet and exercise."Nothing else. Oh, if you have metabolism issues, they'll prescribe stuff to help with those, but you want to lose weight -- Diet and exercise. And if you don't lose weight, you aren't dieting or exercising. Never mind Tuesday's heat stroke or Friday's collapse -- if you aren't losing weight, you aren't exercising or dieting. Not even if your stomach is complaining loudly because of its emptiness.

There's a lot of things going on in obesity studies and research, and a lot of it is good. A drug or two that will kick start a dieter over a plateau isn't a bad thing. Bariatric surgery for someone who eats until too full is a good thing. It's not going to help much with someone who doesn't eat all that much to start with. Or a grazer.

Until doctors and nutritionists are able to look beyond this whole "Diet and Exercise" combo, they are not going to make any great inroads in battling the obesity "epidemic'.

The old folks had it right. Some folks are born to be fat. It's in their genes. No, that's not just an excuse. (There have been some intriguing research and discoveries into fat genes.) It's not a stereotype, either. Lately research is finding all sorts of things more prevalent among certain ethnicities, even when environment is not a factor.

Treat the genetic type, and how that body works, and you'll be abler to manage the weight.

One concern that's twinned with the obesity concern is that it is the cause or related to diabetes. There is a connection, but the scientists are so wrapped up in finding a cure (or ongoing treatments; much more profitable) that they are ignoring, once again, folk wisdom.

Diabetes is caused by lack of insulin, which the body (is supposed to) produce(s) in the pancreas. That has been the scientific wisdom for just shy of a century.

What if that's wrong?
What if, instead of producing insulin, the pancreas -- still very much a mystery organ -- stores it? What if, like the ovaries, the human body comes with a measured amount of insulin or the base ingredients to turn (stuff) into insulin? What if our modern refined diet is just using up a lifetime supply in a few years?

The old folk used to tell kids not to eat so many sweets or they'd end up with sugar in their blood.
Science came along and said that's silly, that's not how it works. So everyone eats refined sugars and uses up all their insulin and -- voila -- sugar in their blood at a young age.

Insulin is playing a role in the diet/exercise dilemma as well. No one is sure exactly how that all factors together, but they've discovered things like insulin resistance and glucose intolerance and gluco-this and glycemic-that. If they look, they'll probably be able to relate that to ethnic origins -- genetics.

If they look.

But they won't, or very few will. They'll continue to preach "Diet and Exercise" until they've killed all the people they haven't operated on. And maybe even those. Much easier to follow the party line, blame the patient, than take time to know the patient and actually help them.

The old folks had it right all along.
As usual.
That family is  usually fat, and if you eat too much sugar while you're young, you'll end up with sugar in your blood.

Listen to your parents and grandparents, if it's only in your memory. They knew your body and background before doctors knew anything.

Dark Shadows. (No, not mine.)

Spent the weekend browsing the old show. YouTube has quite a bit, if you have the patience to weed out the Johnny Depp- Tim Burton overwhelming publicity. YouTube has quite a few clips from the old show, including one with the very beginning. Fan club events and interviews, from then and a few from now.

I saw a few clips that might have been from the short run evening version with Ben Cross as Barnabas. I didn't look at those.

What I did not see anything of, is the two movies they made from the show: Dark Shadows and House of Dark Shadows. Not surprising. The movies were pretty bad. By the time the movies were made, the show had lost focus and was campy. Blood and guts and 'boos' and very little story. An adventure into variations of time travel and ghosts and vampires and werewolfs and anything else 'not normal'.  It created a lifelong interest in these things for me, led me to some good reading that led to better research that led to more reading that leads to more research.

Interesting the bizarre storylines were, and even educational. Entertaining they often were not.

Over time, everyone seems to have lost sight of the fact that Dark Shadows didn't start out as a vampire-and-werewolf chiller and thriller.

It started out as a Gothic Romance.

"My name is Victoria Winters.My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me.and link my past to my future."

Victoria Winters, you see, is an orphan. She has been pulled out of her orphanage to be a governess in a big old house by the sea. The residents of the house consist of an angry young boy, an angsty teenaged girl (and could anyone be more angsty than a teen in the late 60s?), the boy's drunken irresponsible father and the girl's mother who hasn't left the house for nearly twenty years.

Pure Gothic as far as genre goes. Nowadays cliched, but back then the genre was undergoing a revival. (Maybe as an outlet for all that built-up angst?)

It took Barnabas almost a year to appear. The first few months were dedicated to straight out mysterious events that had logical explanations. Then the supernatural began creeping in -- ghosts and premonitions and dreams.

Oh my lord, the Dream! I don't remember the details of the dream, but the storyline was that each person would have the dream, but each person added something to it. And when the next person had the dream, the last person who'd had it died. It was one of the most intricate and well developed plot arcs I have ever watched grow daily. Just seeing bits of it, and sometimes the actors, can give me thrill-chills because it was such a creepy story. (It was also a good way to kill off a bunch of characters that no longer fit, which as an author, I appreciate today and didn't realize then.)

The Barnabas-Josette- Jeremiah- Angelique story was well done as well. The ghost stepping out of her picture and opening her music box and waltzing through the big empty room. WOW! This story would be reworked over and over again throughout the show, but the first incarnation was damned good storytelling. So were a few of the others as Barnabas keeps going back to try and change the past, and Angelique or/and her cohorts follow to prevent him from doing so.

This is pretty much where the evening television remake started, and they didn't do a bad job with it. I would have continued watching. But too many people turned it off or turned away from it when it wasn't played for thrills or laughs. A common complaint was that there was too much sex.

Really? It was a soap opera. Or a Gothic Romance. Romance IS usually about sex, is it not? And exactly why was Angelique so obsessed with Barnabas? If it had just been for his money or his standing, his brother would have fit the bill just as well. No, she wanted Barnabas, and it wasn't so she'd have someone to talk to during meals.

So much good drama in there. Good plotlines, good story arcs.

It's a shame that it is being remembered as camp and memorialized for new generations as a comedy. although I don't mind the laughs. From what I've seen, they are mostly clever, if campy, laughs.

But I sure do wish they'd revive the "it was a dark and stormy night" genre of serials. The endings are so much more satisfactory than the endings to the current reality spooky shows.

Badly made by today's standards (and even their own) but entertaining and mysterious and fun.
I guess that's what most people remember -- the fun. 

Flow of Family Fun

My brother's wedding Saturday made me think of how we, as a family, handle the ebb and flow of these get-togethers. Summer means there will be a few, and maybe a few more.

I opted out of many family events because I wanted to avoid conflict with my dad, who is gone now. He and I were on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, and he was always outspoken about his beliefs. I don't think he ever meant to start any fuss and bother, he just wanted to convince everyone of how he believed.

Add to his firmness, the fact that he was deaf, and whether one agreed or disagreed, one had to shout and make prolonged eye contact to converse. I don't know how it works for others, but shouting, even over innocuous topics, ends up with me becoming angry. Shouting as a physical function, raises the blood pressure, which causes a flood of other reactions.

Anyway, because of the situation, I avoided. Didn't stop my girls from knowing their grandfather, did prevent them from seeing me act like a shrewish lunatic with him.

Now, I see my own daughter mirroring this behavior. Because of work and also because of some personal issues with family members, she has avoided the family get-togethers. No one wants to be involved in a fight, or to be the person everyone in the family fights with or becomes angry over the fighting.
Anyway, she has chosen to abstain from the possibility of conflict.

But she worries about her child not getting to know this side of her family, and the solution Tam reached was the same one I did. To allow the child to attend in the care of another family member. (In her case. me.)

Maybe it's wrong, but it seems to me the best solution. Not in every situation, not for every event, but in general it's a good thing. It acknowledges the importance of family, it keeps up traditions. even starts a new one -- tradition by proxy.

Like all families, we disagree. Sometimes we take sides against one another, and we'll talk to a third member about how stupid so-and-so is about whatever. We can be vicious or angry, or vicious and angry.
But when we get together as a group, we try to enjoy one another's company without conflict. We aren't perfect, sometimes a forbidden topic slips in and someone feels attacked.

We respect one another. We know we are available to each-and-every in at least some way. Making an effort to keep the young ones connected even when we can't teaches them, by example, that family IS important. The events that Family is Fun. No matter if it's you or they who are the stupid or wrong ones. Family IS.

As the worldly world whirls by, as weather wreaks havoc, as all our institutions are besieged, there can be no stronger message to leave our children.

Jeanieology

I've found a new way to spend my time and exercise my brain, while I hope for work and stave off health crises. Thanks to two of my sisters, I've been introduced to the addictive world of genealogy.


My sister Rita has long been the family switchboard. She knows who to call, how to inform, and when and where and why of multiple generations. It's one of the things she does.

My sister Jean is the Family Archivist. This is a job she sort of inherited, sort of fell into, and definitely made her own. If she can't tell you about the dead people in the family, probably no one knows. But Jean will try to find out. She's the one for the job. She knows who to ask for help and how to get others interested.

Between the two of them, I've been seduced into the pastime. They became my drug pushers, and Jean has become my supplier, and I need a regular fix.


Everyone grows up with family stories, hearing about odd aunts and whispered about cousins and disappearing uncles. Have you never wanted to solve those mysteries? Everyone has some vague nobility in their lineage, whether it be an Indian Princess, a German Baron, a gypsy queen. Wouldn't you like to find out the truth about that?
 The medical climate today almost insists that if you don't know about these people, you need to find out. Too much disease is being discovered as genetically linked. Too many character traits are being uncovered as symptoms of diseases, syndromes, etc. There is a social imperative to know where and who you came from.

Besides that, it's just plain fun.