The New Post-Modernism: The Lyism Age

I hate this political campaigning season more than any other, which is saying a lot because I hate all political campaigning seasons. I've tried to stay out of the fray because it's all so icky. But, I would be wrong not to take a step forward, and not say something.

This season is particularly disturbing. The lying is so blatant, so in our faces, so justified, and so righteous that it’s truthful. Yes the truth is in the lying.

In listening to some of these unashamed lies, I can’t help but think—if you keep lying, then at some point, just through repetition, it becomes believable. This was a Hitler strategy, he said, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

In January, the Lyism age got a push start. Let’s take Mitt Romney. He said that his first name is Mitt. If you look at the facts, his first name is “Willard.” Hmmm wasn’t Willard a 1971 horror movie about rats?

It’s hard enough to weed out the facts from the propaganda in a political campaigning season, because everyone wants to be the winner. But when lying big becomes the right thing to do, we really are stepping into some kind of horror movie.

○ Cycles ○

The air in the Midwest has cycled into summer. It is saturated with heat and humidity, which seems to mirror the heaviness I feel most days here. The plains’ winds serve to blow the heat and dampness around, but never shoo it all away.

In about a month I will have lived in Nebraska for a year. It is also the time of year that will mark the third year of my sister’s passing. I still haven’t floated by the day without thinking of her. I do wonder when the time will come when I will look at the calendar and realize I hadn’t noticed that it was June 29^th. Not this year I suspect.

Right now, I am in the middle of the long summer session of my school program. My days are saturated with  homework. And those pesky insects I call bumps in the road that I find more than a nuisance. I still haven’t gotten used to this place that sets rules, then breaks them, and then throws you around in the pieces for awhile. At least I am not going to pieces. I am becoming someone other than the one who arrived here last year. 

During this season, I don’t have the sense of play, or the sense of humor I know I have inside me somewhere. I hope when the air isn’t weighing me down anymore, it will come back. I’m guessing it will, just as winter will.

Spring Cleaning

Spring Cleaning

The first week of Spring always meant “March 21^st.” My youngest sister’s birthday. So naturally, she has been occupying my thoughts. Every year when I get a new calendar, I wonder if I should stop marking her birthday in it. I don’t know if there is an answer other than whenever the time comes when I don’t note it.

The other thing that brings her to mind is my recent start of clinical training. So far, twice a week, I am in a hospital 8 ½ hours a day. Not visiting. I’m learning how to take pictures of and understand people’s hearts, and vascular systems.

It seems every time I enter a patient’s room, I remember the hospitals of our childhood. I can’t help but check the patients’ toes for unnecessary filth. I know this is an acute care medical facility with very high cleanliness standards and protocols, and not the state run institutions where the staff were thieves, and the fungus ran the place. I guess my point is childhood memories appear at the strangest times.

As I passed by families gathered in ICU, and others who were sound asleep on the couches outside the unit’s doors, I felt a twinge. A twinge of a complicated relief. I wasn’t the one who had to cry.

Culture Adjustment

It has been a disorienting couple weeks in Omaha. I’m still adjusting to the ways things are done here, the implicit signs and symbols of what is and isn’t allowed. And once again, I had to be told to be a good little lemming. I was feeling like a scolded child. So yesterday when UPS left a package slip in my door, I had a funny sensation. I felt like I had just found Wilson (remember Tom Hanks crying over his pet volleyball?).

When I went out to California for the winter break, I had rummaged through my storage unit looking for warm things—my heavy coat, sweatshirts, long-sleeves—anything. The temperature while I was out there on break was in the high 60’s, and sunny every day.  I was reminded of when I packed up these warm things in the middle of August. I had stuffed them in a crate that became a sturdy shelf for stacks of boxes. I wasn’t thinking about anything cold.

Finally, after messing up my balanced columns, I was able to get to what I wanted. But what I really wanted to do was close the metal door, and spend the night with my stuff. Yet, the contract I signed states, in big explicit print, that storage units are not places to sleep. It’s not allowed.

Because I couldn’t fit my old sweatshirts in my suitcase, I had them packed into another box, and had it mailed to Omaha. And weeks later, I held a dulled knife, and gingerly cut through the packing tape until I saw my pink sweatshirt and my green Antioch University sweatshirt. Tossing the knife, I picked up my warm clothes, and pressed them to my face. They smelled of California. I put on the pink one, and all during the evening I would bury my nose in my sleeve, and breathe in the scent while wishing it would never fade away. 

adVENTure

So far in my adventure, physics has become my gigantic boulder—a big red blood cell rolling down the hill (think of me as the stick figure, with stick figure arms pointing straight up running from that energized boulder).  I hear the word physics every day.

 I’m thinking physics is a subject like English grammar. Who cares if it’s potential energy or kinetic energy, just as who cares if it’s restrictive or nonrestrictive? It only matters in English when someone who is in hyper-grading mode gets perturbed about comma usage, and wants to use his or her new red pen to mark up papers. Kick ass content? No, that is not as important as whether or not the comma is there. His 12-year-old son John was hit by a car. Oh My God! There needs to be a comma after son and after John!

 This is how I am feeling about physics. The vessel with a bulge from an aortic aneurysm is ready to blow. Oh my God! Is that potential energy or kinetic energy? 

When an Adventure Earns its Name

Weather. Nebraska has some stormy nights. They aren’t dark though. The lightning is so bright, and so often, one could do the smallest of needle work at 3 am. The storms are anything but quiet. Rain drops turn into gigantic balls of hail. In California, a sound on a roof could be a squirrel or raccoon romping across; but, in Nebraska it is like a million squirrel and raccoon feet are pounding the rooftops in a meth induced frenzy.

These storms would wipe out California because the lightning strikes would set the whole state on fire in two seconds, which is my frame of reference having always lived there. At 3 am, my brain goes into fear mode until I am wide awake, wide-eyed, wondering how soon before we all go up in smoke. Then I laugh at myself. In Nebraska it isn’t the smoke and flames that will destroy, it’s the flying glass and hail that will rip you apart. So watching the storm by standing at the window is one very stupid thing to do. It’s better to find a corner clutching a change of clothes in case I would need to evacuate. I’m so much a California girl. Give me an earthquake any day.

And then after an hour or so, the storm is gone. The air is quiet, the skies are clear, the driveways are dried up. One would think it was all a very bad nightmare if it wasn’t for the tell-tale tree branches, and loosened stones scattered on the ground.

It’s trippy. I kind of would like to return to Cali about now; but, not yet. The adventure has only just officially started.

Road Trip

I had room in my car for my son. I figured he would ask where he could put his suitcase. He agreed to ride with me from California to Nebraska; so the least I could do was find a place for his tiny amount of stuff.  I couldn’t see well enough out the back window with everything in my car. I bit my nails knowing I had to make one more drop off at the storage unit before leaving town.

The trip was uneventful in the dramatic sense. We didn’t have any car trouble, no one thought to break into my car, we ate well, the weather was clear. The event for me was being with my son and having a good time. He never complained. His only request was that when we arrived in Laramie, Wyoming, we go to Pizza Hut.

We were going to stop there for the night, but eating our pizza, we decided to keep driving.  The town was desolate and depressed. The only color among the monochrome of tan dirt was an anachronism: a cowboy riding his horse on the sidewalks.  He wasn’t going to find any saloons though, only a Pizza Hut with kind waitresses, and a family or two enjoying their meal.