Diane

[Diane]

I just wrote a damn novella about my daughters’ half-brother, of whom I am not the mother. He’s a heroin addict. He’s got the whole sorry mess going on – homelessness, infections in injection sites, a baby, girlfriend on methodone, multiple arrests, etc., etc.

I don’t have an answer, really. I just lost my compassion when it negatively affected my kids. Last winter I picked him up in Boston when he got discharged from the hospital. He had developed septicemia from an infected injection site. We tried to find a shelter but he wouldn’t go. We dropped him off at a sad corner on a bitterly cold night, knowing he would be sleeping outside.  Apparently he’s doing better now. Would I take him in? I doubt it. Would I take his baby if it needed to be done? Absolutely. (Baby’s mother takes good care of him even though she lives in a shelter and has to go to methodone clinic every day.)

I have difficulty not judging him because of all the damage he’s done, and because I had a substance misuse problem myself a long time ago.  He will not change until he has a re-alignment of his fundamental understanding of how he fits into the universe. That’s basically what has to happen. That’s the point I got to before I stopped.

I applaud your kindness to your sister, especially since she is working on changing her life.  Please don’t let her take you down with her if she goes off the rails. It’s brutal to say but at some point one’s own survival instinct should take over.

[Diane]

Seeing and reading about all the sexual assault in the news got me going too. Not in a huge way, but it was on my mind more. I usually don’t think much about it but it’s hard to avoid these days.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Tom. Chemistry can happen with the wrong people. Sometimes the attraction is strong because the other person is exactly wrong for somebody.  I don’t understand it but I know it has been true in my life.

I believe my life has been enough of a dumpster fire I’m qualified to say the following: At the risk of sounding preachy I have to say it’s never good when one’s description of a person, especially one with whom an intimate relationship is likely, contains the phrase “He just got out of prison…”.

 

 

 

[Diane]

My response to having been abused and assaulted as a teenager and young adult went through several phases. The main one was denial.  As time passes I gain a clearer understanding of what happened. Strangely, I have some gifts from having been wronged so egregiously. I think the following attitude may have balanced on the edge of sanity and insanity at times, but at some point I internalized the spirit of “The best revenge is living well.”

When Donald Trump “won” I felt re-traumatized, as did many others. I was crushed that he can seemingly get away with anything. I’m not staying in that spot though. To Hell with him! To Hell with all of them.

Arch said to me once, “It must be tough, being glass and steel at the same time.”  For any of you who didn’t know Arch, that was the kind of thing he was wont to say. It rang true – he saw me as I am. I have been disregarded, used and abused in ways from which some people never recover. I’m fragile yet unwavering, transparent and knowable but with a tempered core.

I forget this sometimes and feel like a victim again, powerless, angry and confused. Thank you Belle, for reminding me. Donald Trump will inevitably be brought down, either as a result of resistance against him or by the force that ultimately equalizes all – time.

[Diane]

Belle, I know from my own experience some of what you are going through. The local school district could not handle my son from first grade on, really, despite trying everything they had. He ended up going to a school for behaviorally challenged boys – run by an order of Italian monks, no less! I was not happy about this development, obviously. He was there for three years, during which they helped me get my son back. I will be forever grateful to these kind, gentle, understanding people. Now that he is in 8th grade and is back in the local school district, he is like most other awkward, moody 14 year olds. He is a good kid. People at the school understand him better now, and they are bending over backwards to help him.

Part of this is because of how bad it got before he left the public school system. In the beginning of 4th grade, the principal of the school, let’s call him Principal Little Big Man, was trying to use some bullshit behavioral psychology to get my son to do what he wanted. My son was shutting down and begging him to stop. He didn’t, so Finn, my son, kicked the Principal in the head. Little Big Man got fired, and my son went to this end-of-the-line-before -juvenile-justice-system school. My son is not a criminal – he doesn’t go around kicking people in the head for fun, or at all. It was extremely misguided handling of someone with his issues. HE managed to get himself out of the regular school and it was the best thing that could have happened.

I realize your son and mine may not have the same issues, and our situations can be different, but please know you are not alone and it can get better.

 

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Diane.

[Diane]

I was chased by a rogue Fronkey once – it was quite amusing. I wouldn’t have cared much but with that giant sticky tongue and long legs it almost got me.  Or do they have froggy legs and donkey ears? Wait… are Fronkeys frogs and monkeys? If they are I have no idea what was chasing me. It’s a good thing I don’t do drugs any more.

[Diane]

Did you see the latest?

I am comforted by knowing in time an asteroid will collide catastrophically with the Earth, or the supervolcano below Yellowstone will explode and kill most of us slowly – and then, eventually, Sol will go all supernova on our dim-witted descendants.

All traces of either humanity or pre-intergalactic-travel homo sapiens will vanish. The elements making up Trump and all of his ilk will have long since been recycled into, one can hope, some kind of opalescent and inert rock.

Have a lovely day!

 

[Diane]

Belle Rose wrote:

So no matter how you slice it – if you “believe” in God or you don’t, we are all deciding that based on our subjective opinions. Atheists just want to look like they have some sort of elite knowledge of the subject but really – NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE. So therefore all we ALL have is our subjective evidence based on OUR personal life knowledge and experiences.

I do not want to look like I have some elite knowledge of the subject, and I resent that statement. I simply do not believe in any god. That is a statement about me and nobody else. It does not state either explicitly or implicitly whether I think I know more than anybody else about the subject.

I agree that this lack of beliefs comes from my subjective experiences. No events so far in my life have incontrovertibly convinced me there is a god. Every time I come on here I read something you’ve said about how nobody can say what evidence would suffice to make us believe. How would I know what would be, having apparently never experienced it? I believe your point might be that for some of us there is nothing that would cause us to believe because we don’t want to believe. Am I right? Am I even close?

Whatever your response is – here I am, still without belief in a deity. I know I could allow myself to indoctrinate myself so I would believe, but that still doesn’t mean any deity exists. It only means I would have changed my mind about whether or not one exists. You can say the focus on semantics is childish but I think clarification of exactly what we are talking about is vital. I have had people (Christians) make many assumptions about me based on the single fact that I don’t believe in their god. I know I’ve been guilty of making similar assumptions – I try to not do it.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by Diane.

[Diane]

Oh boy. You’ve gone and done it now, Davis.

[Diane]

@ Simon – Wanting is different than expecting. I have been told many times I’m being proud, resistant, rebellious, etc., for declining to devote my life to examining this evidence (more than I’ve already examined it, which is more than it deserves IMHO). I have heard some version of this thought – If you don’t believe, it’s because you have not sought God enough, or the right way, or with the right intentions, or with the right guidance, while wearing the correct underwear – whatever. The circular thinking is dizzying. So, in order to put in enough effort to satisfy these Christians, I would have to study the Bible, pray, talk with other Christians, etc., until I arrived at some state of belief.  That’s the difficulty with politely looking at the evidence to say we’ve been fair to Christianity – in my experience it’s never enough to satisfy Christians trying to convert me.

[Diane]

What I want to know is why do some Christians expect atheists to examine the Christians’ purported evidence? Then, when we don’t go out of our way to study said evidence, we are accused of choosing to not believe in God! I didn’t believe in God before, and I still don’t. I guess there’s a choice in there somewhere, but it wasn’t to NOT believe. My choice is to not allow myself to become indoctrinated. It’s not that I don’t want to believe in the Abrahamic God – I don’t believe in any god. Sometimes I’d like to have some faith but I think I’d just be fooling myself or letting others fool me. Simply, if something happened that proved God existed TO ME, I’d believe. Having faith, or belief without proof, is different than knowing.

Belle, you talk of tired old arguments – how tired do you think atheists are of rehashing whether or not a god exists? Some of us truly don’t care.  Atheists do not believe in a god – it’s what we do. Granted, I am joining in this discussion willingly, but many Christians have pushed their beliefs in my direction, unasked for, when I was just being myself. It’s the pushing that bolsters my identity as an atheist. As my recent experience with a certain Christian demonstrated to me, brainwashing can work.

What he was doing was taking non-proofs, presenting them as evidence, and telling me over and over until it almost began to make sense. I fully own my participation in this strange dance – I am not a victim. It led me back to this site though, needing a reality check.

[Diane]

I feel the need to clarify a point. When I hear “Nobody is doing anything” I cringe because millions of people are indeed doing whatever they legally can to stop this madness. It is the Republican Party which is allowing this to continue. They can stop Trump TODAY, yet they will let Trump continue until their prospects for re-election dwindle enough. I am furious about this but I can’t live in a rage. I am not a person of faith but somehow I think in a general sense, karma’s a BITCH.  See why I need to stay in the present moment? I share your outrage, Belle. I’m just stubborn and defiant enough to live the best life I can and help others to do the same. Living well really is the best revenge. Ok, back to my happy place….   Breathe in… Breathe out..  (I just watched footage of the goings-on on Charlottesville and read a tweet that said “Only 8 months into the Trump Presidency we are on the brink of nuclear war and Nazis are in streets of an American city. Seems about right.”) I am simultaneously crushed and comforted. Crushed by the hatred and fear – comforted by the tsunami of pushback against it. What’s happening is awful but it is not going unanswered.

[Diane]

Thanks Belle. I and many others didn’t vote for him. I accept no blame for him and the asshats in Congress who are supporting him. I marched in Boston for the Women’s March, and in Concord NH during the March for Science. I have sat with members of my community to send post cards to our congressional delegation about specific issues. I have called my Senators and Representatives about multiple issues. I vote – these are legal,   and ostensibly helpful strategies. I worry about what will happen, and I keep resisting.  There are millions of people doing more than I am – to say nobody’s talking about what’s going on is absurd. The Republican Congress is complicit in their silence and shameful tolerance of an illicit President. I wish there was a Hell so they could all rot in it.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Diane.

[Diane]

Thanks, Strega!

[Diane]

My question, and that of others on this thread and all around the world, is What now? What do I do right now? Do I call my representatives and tell them I’d like to not have a nuclear war? Do I gather my offspring and some MREs in the basement, light candles and await our doom? Do I give water to my livestock, or my family?  Should I stay or should I go? I have to have some kind of workable balance between sensibly living my life/not being in a constant state of alarm, and being aware of the town/state/world/planet/galaxy around me, knowing that the inevitable and hideous end will come soon.

I don’t have an all-purpose answer. What I can tell you (and myself) is this strange story:

I am an occupational therapist. I worked on a skilled nursing facility, providing therapy to mostly elderly, sick folks. I was working with a patient who had Lewy-body dementia and Parkinson’s disease, which is an unfortunate and unpleasant combination. She was a lovely lady who had some paranoia, hallucinations, confusion, and difficulty with mobility.

I am easily distracted by nature and become more so when I feel pressured to get more done that I can do in the allotted time but this day my patient had 100% of my attention. She needed to use the bathroom so I helped her to walk across the room with her walker. When she got close to the toilet, she got stuck. She turned around in a half-circle and got stuck again. She said, “Tell me a toilet joke. Maybe that will help.” I replied, “I don’t know any toilet jokes but I know one with the word ‘ass’ in it. Will that do?”

She said it would be good so I went on, “A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office with a duck on his head. The psychiatrist says, ‘Oh dear. How may I help you?’ ” The duck said, “I’m alright but can you get this guy off my ass?”

The lady started laughing, finished turning around, sat down on the toilet, enjoyed a deep belly guffaw, and died.  She literally expired right in front of me from a pulmonary embolism. What does this have to do with North Korea or WWIII, you ask? Nothing. Not a thing.

I had a few minutes of unusual (for me) ability to be fully present in the moment and changed the course of a woman’s death. She would have died anyway right at that moment. I am grateful I was focused on her in her last few minutes of life. Her family was comforted that she died laughing.

When I have enough presence of mind, or lack of presence of mind in fact, to remember how important those few minutes were, I think about how I might choose to live. To the degree I can be present in individual moments, I can affect change. I can have enough clarity to identify which issue I’d like to call my Representative or Senator about today. I can choose to try to drag my 14-year-old out of his den upstairs and join the rest of the species. Etcetera, etc.

This is not a lesson for anybody but myself. When I read about the dreaded future and horrible present, and leave the present moment to speculate, I start to hyperventilate. I lose the capacity to focus my behavior into anything that will affect positive change.  My blood pressure goes up – I probably shorten my life just a little.

So if when someone says the world is ending the first action I might take is to think of the woman’s laughter and the gifts it gave. Peace

[Diane]

@ Simon – I should have clarified the dream was one I had a long time ago. This person is interpreting it now, according to his beliefs. When I had the dream I didn’t give it any particular meaning. I was a little amused by the babies growing on sticks and a little disturbed by the ladies in French maid outfits. I have apparently watched too many Adam Sandler movies.

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