Flying from Houston to Cleveland

So, in the previous post, I was mentioning coming upon some clouds -- these are them, above some straggling canyons.

Ahh, the beauty of erosion!

I studied the landscape, the many water towers, the school bus yard, etc. but thought the scene was a bit boring for photographing. Then again, that may have something to do with the fact that in Mukilteo there had been perhaps one day of clouds/rain since July, and it's been blazing hot and dazzling for such a while. Hooray for droughts!

Right away, I had to get to another United dock, and would you know it, it was all the way on the other side of the airport and I didn't have the longest time to get there! Luckily, they had this:

Which way are we gonna go?

Hi, people in the other shuttle!

Back inside again:

Once again, I didn't see much that was spectacular until I got up above the clouds and saw a most delicious-looking ripple.

When I got away from that cloud, I saw these tasty-looking rivers, and thought; this must be what Caladan looks like!

No I didn't.

And look at this cute lil' ol' power plant! Couldn't you just pinch it?

Resistance to pollution is futile!

Lehrk, ehrmagehrd, it's anerther Yehr-Erf-Erh! Alehrens!

This one's shiny!

The clouds began to look like fields full of pink and blue cotton candy, just out there waiting to be harvested with a really big wooden fork.

Either that, or it looks like particularly appetizing fiberglass insulation.

Eventually, the metal tube began heading for a hole in the clouds known as Cleveland.

They poke a hole every now and again.

Ah, the orange-pink glow of sodium street lamps! Took me a few minutes to figure out why some of them appeared to be twinkling:

Finally, it hit me -- I blame the trees!

 

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

That was nearly fun enough to get me through the tremendously long time I had to wait just to get off the plane. I made a few phone calls and text messages, and my mom and grandma were waiting long before I even had room to get out of my row.

Luckily, I was the only one lugging my luggage and so didn't have to wait for anyone else to do that.

The three of us went to a restaurant, where I had crepes and was hilariously awkward. You had to be there. My mom wasn't feeling well at the moment to be hilarious, and my grandma brought her own tea bag, but I was the only one really trying to be funny.
` When we got back to her house in Medina, it was just the way I'd remembered it all those years ago. I tried to do a little tour of the photomagraphs around her house, but in the intrests of the Flickr Time Limit, I rushed it a bit.

Then I got a shot of the shelves in the living room, also with photos and some knicknacks -- because pictures of pictures are just that awesome!

Didn't have time for much else, though, went to bed at 9:30 Ohio Time (which is 6:30 Washington Time) and woke up 13 hours later. What all had changed about the world in that time? Find out next time!

Flying From Seattle to Houston

October 7, 2012:

Before five in the morning, I was already stuffing previously-selected clothing into my camping backpack which Dilly playfully swatted, climbed up on, and fell down off of, just as she had done in July -- although less small and cute this time.
` Gem of a man that he is, Lou Ryan was helping me along, drove me to the airport, and kissed me goodbye. With only a mocha cappuccino protein drink in my stomach, I made jokes about smuggling parakeets in my pants and still managed to walk right through the backscatter X-ray scanner.
` I wondered to myself if they had scanned me anyway, and if so, was my hot bod appreciated?

I spent my time texting Brian and Rob about what was going on in the airport, the cloud of starlings billowing up on the side of the building, etc. By the time we got to boarding, the sun was just rising above the trees:

Or was it... aliens?

The United staff were actually looking for volunteers to get off the plane in exchange for round trip tickets to anywhere the airline flies. Despite this good deal, I did not perceive that anyone took up the offer.

At last, I made it into the metal tube, which then hurtled itself into the air:

Wheee!!

Picturesque prelude to my vacation Back East

Whatever the noise is that was driving me crazy (see last post), it's subsided enough that I've been able to put together another photo post, as well as continue writing fiction. Yes, I've been branching out quite a bit!

Before I get started on the photos from my recent trip, I have some more lovely picturesque subjects such as the busy beachside, three skittish cats, and bees knocking one another over to get at one of my neighbor's passion flowers:

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The beginning of October brought bright, crisp mornings with glistening spider webs and ivy flowers budding like pale green mutant jacks:

It's too late, they've already populated the world.

They aren't the only thing of interest near the deck, besides the bald patch in the grass marking where the chicken coop had been torn down for no reason at all. More visually interesting, however, are the kiwis that will never ripen, hanging like so many fuzzy aborted fetuses:

Thanks, single-pane aluminum windows!

As you may guess, I have a bunch of posts to write, and many drafts there's many drafts waiting in the archives over the past couple of months. I'm not able to probably won't be finishing any of them for a while, much less getting a writing job, until a house nearby is finished being built, or whatever this noise is. It's loud all day and I have to stay here for Lou Ryan's sake, as his mom just died and all.

Well, I've spent about a half hour struggling to write just this far. That's enough aggravation for today. I'm going to I'm going to do something productive, away from the house.

Edit: I've just taken a two-hour walk in the rain to find the source of the noise. It is either downhill to the west or downhill to the east, and it's echoing from uphill. I can't tell what it is at all, other than that it sounds a bit like a lawnmower and it's the only sound I can hear with my earplugs in.
` Not so much because of its volume, but that's just the frequency that can get thru my earplugs better than other frequencies. Like when I was on the plane, the engines were so loud I couldn't hear what other people were saying around me until I put on my earplugs, which blocked out the higher-pitched sounds of the engines.

Awesome news and sad news:

Awesome news first: Just spent a week "back east" in Ohio and West Virginia, complete with beautiful fall foliage, and got to visit relatives I really like, as well as my grandmother, for whom I feel so sorry due to her neurotic anxiety. During that time, Brianade went missing for one day, so that was also a bit exciting.
` The day after I got home, I also survived a most colorful adventure on a most gloomy day -- as the three-month drought seems to be over -- transporting a project motorcycle in the rain.

Now the sad news: Lou Ryan's mother's brain just died. She only has a breathing reflex, because during a medical procedure, about a pint of blood got loose in her head and drowned her brilliant neural network.

 

She was a great mother, math professor, and beginning shooter.

This is especially bad, since she was also helping us to buy the house, for which we just had to tear down the chicken coop for no reason in order to placate those blasted landlords and their lies.
` Just as we thought that ordeal was over (and it just happened to be an ordeal), we're wondering if we'll be able to keep the house after all.

As for me, I've been looking for writing jobs and have been straightening up my office, as I had rearranged the furniture before leaving on my trip. My office looks better than it ever has, despite still being a small bit messy.
` I was also just getting back into one of my Great Courses, which I had bought last Christmas -- and no sooner did I get 15 minutes in, then Lou came into my quasi-mess and parked himself for a half hour, until I was too sleepy to continue with the video lecture (as I'm still on Eastern Standard Time).

While this kind of interruption happens often, he was mostly talking about the consequences of his mother dying and all, so I didn't think it was right to ask him to give me my space this time. This paid off, too, as he came up with a good idea:
` Since she is technically still "alive", Lou's now telling his lawyer brother (who's at the hospital in California) to sign up as her guardian so that he can disperse her money tax-free before her heart stops.

Her name was Charlene, but I called her "MathMom", because she was always there over the phone to help get me through my college math classes. On her most recent visit this past June, she bought us our gray fluffball, Dilly, as well as the sandals that I wore to The Amazing Meeting.
` You can hear and sort-of see her in this video where Dilly indulges in falling backwards off of a piece of furniture (that's not me giggling, BTW):

 

I didn't know Charlene extremely well, but I can say she was very nice and patient and cool, much like my own mom, whom I was just visiting and feel all the more fortunate to have. She also did much to protect her sons from their crazy and abusive dad, who is still alive and spiteful for no real reason.

` Two of the things Crazy Dad did was pretend to pay Lou's college loan and instead let it lapse so that Lou's credit would suffer, and also didn't forward the letter to Lou about the six-figure job waiting for him after college.

` Thanks to him and a bunch of other cheating bastards, Lou is still struggling to make ends meet, and wouldn't even have this house if it weren't for his mom. And so, if it were Lou's dad that had died, we wouldn't be in this mess, nor would we even be sad.

Why is it that the best people seem to die before the asshats? Here's to Charlene, one of the best people I've ever met!

Nine years of numbness reversed with hypnosis

As I've mentioned in a previous post, hypnosis has been instrumental in helping me to overcome a dismaying numbness that my mind had created. And yet, how many people actually understand what hypnosis is? After all, some people seem to think it's just a way to make someone your zombie slave, while others say it's only an act.
` Of course, psychologists generally consider hypnosis to be a tool that can be used to change a person's perceptions, and which has a number of therapeutic and research applications. In this article I will cover only a few relevant hypnosis phenomena.

I had no real understanding of hypnosis until 2001, when I read a Scientific American article on the subject.  It explained that, while the Greek hypnos does mean 'sleep', one must contrarily be highly focused and alert in order to experience hypnosis. Although relaxation is commonly associated with hypnosis, I also learned that it can be induced while vigorously pedaling a stationary bike.
` The article covered some of the famous landmark experiments, such as blocking out the pain of plunging one's hand into a bucket of icewater. Part of it even covered the staff writers being hypnotized and made to experience such things as their hand seeming to 'levitate' by itself, and even the hallucination of a fly buzzing by one's ear.

Notably, at that point in time I was already recovering from a lifetime of post-traumatic stress disorder, and had thought that life could only get better from there. That all changed about two years later, when I experienced an even more traumatic incident than I could have imagined to be possible.
` After a long and astonishingly shocking ordeal, I couldn't remember who I was or even what I used to be like. Unfortunately, I had been wrongly prescribed several drugs, one of which caused my flashbacks to become increasingly vivid and more easily triggered, among other extremely terrifying, frustrating and embarrassing effects.

The panic attacks were soon joined by the alien feeling of "numb spots", one of them on my tongue where it touches the roof of my mouth. These spots would start out small, then spread, then slowly shrink again. One day, mental images of the terror were triggered so strongly that these spots expanded and multiplied, spreading from my fingers to my toes, and even my eyeballs.
` My neurologist advised that I was probably just hyperventilating, and that recovery was as simple as breathing into a paper bag. As it wasn't, I went to the emergency room, where precisely nothing was found to be wrong, other than these bizarre complaints.

Inevitably, I turned to The Mental Health Community For Poor People, where I was told that such experiencing of flashbacks meant that I was undeserving of treatment. I was shut out of therapists' offices when it was time for my appointment, was made to sing campfire songs with schizophrenics, and dozens of other surreal situations.
` This institutional abuse continued long after I'd moved to the West Coast and found myself thoroughly combing a mental hospital crowded with pungent hobos in the hopes that one of the jaded employees could or would help me.
` There, I could spend ten minutes telling someone about how some medication was so incredibly damaging to me, only to be shocked by the immediate response of, "Let me write you a prescription" for the exact same drug. Of course, if I didn't take it, that only meant I was too insane to know better.

For many years, I futilely complained about this absurd dance, yet some people told me to let these hack interns do the thinking and observing for me. Some others, however, encouraged me to escape this labyrinthine Morton's Fork.
` After all, a friend of mine told me that she had developed the same symptoms from a traumatic event and eventually recovered from them when she was sure that she was "ready to feel again." Therefore, it must be possible to recover from such a thing, right?
` By 2007, it was becoming clear to me that psychology classes and books had been far more useful to my well-being than talking to someone who thinks that 'being objective' means ignoring their subject. I was already doing most of my own mental health improvement, but would that be enough to resolve this particular difficulty? Was there any way at all?

A pivotal moment in class was learning of a malady called conversion disorder -- as in a "conversion" of anxiety into a bizarre deficit such as numbness, deafness, blindness, fits, paralysis, etc. Although it could last for years, I was relieved to know that it could be reversed with such treatments as explaining what causes the symptoms.
` Doubts kept nagging me about this, as I had already believed that an unconscious unwillingness to feel had caused this deficit all along, and five years had not been long enough to resolve it. Then again, I was still living in fairly stressful conditions, so perhaps the anxiety was staving off my courage to face this difficulty.

I didn't know it yet, but that class also taught me a potential solution -- and now we are back to hypnosis. This text is actually based on my abbreviated notes from a class lecture on the subject:

Hypnosis is when your attention is highly focused and you allow someone else to guide you through some inner experience. It can help to alter one's perception to the point that one can have surgery under hypnosis and not feel pain. [More on that shortly.]

When subjects are hypnotized to see the color on a pattern 'drain away', the color-processing areas of their brains 'turn off', and they report that the color has gone away. When they are given a suggestion to see color on a black-and-white version of the pattern, those areas of the brain activate despite having no color to process. [See Kosslyn 2000].

From this and other examples, I learned that hypnotism was powerful enough to alter one's subjective experience dramatically, and had made a connection between it and my condition. I might have actually pursued this line of thinking if I hadn't spent most of my college years living in continually overwhelming "survival situations" (which is why I don't recommend living in run-down conditions with assorted whack-jobs...).
` It wouldn't be until my return from The Amaz!ng Meeting 2012, after the insanity (and police visits) had a chance to drain away from my life, that I met an actual hypnotherapist. His entire job is to help people change their less-than-useful perceptions and various bad habits, or, as he puts it, "telling them to just stop doing that."

I had long assumed that a seemingly unconscious decision to not feel is actually a bad habit, so if that was my issue, he might know how to help. Then again, if this was just a habit, then why couldn't I seem to just stop doing that after almost nine years?

Rebecca Watson on evolutionary psychology and... rape culture?

August 9th was the day that I finally regained (whatever that means) the sensation in various of my bodily parts (...whatever that means) after blocking it out (whatever... never mind).

What do I mean, here?

I mean that Rob Schryvers, master hypnotist (whatever *that* means) is really cool. Go bug him and be swept away in his hypnotic patter of doom. And by doom, I mean, see how cool this parrot is?

He's cooler than that. Really.

The next day, whilst carpooling to a Skeptic's meetup at Piecora's Pizza, Rob pointed out a freakishly-muscled man walking down Pine Street -- it was apparently UK champion bodybuilder Dorian Yates! He's an unusual sight here, although not exactly out of place on a sidewalk where half the people we saw looked very L, G, B or T.
` At this event would be the only Skeptic's Guide to the Universe Rogue that I hadn't met -- the very snarky Rebecca Watson. (Let's not forget Perry, the one I can't meet, who used to have the best bird vs. monkey debates with her!)

She's normally more brightly-colored and in-focus, but perhaps that was just the medication?

We were motioned to Piecora's front entrance by diners seated behind a set of sealed doors, and found the Skeptic's meetup in the back, by another sealed door. (Little did I know, we would be trapped, foreverrrr... or not.)
` Rebecca was standing by a table of Skepchick swag, greeting folks as they came in, so I introduced myself and told her that "Evan says 'Hi.'"

He did actually tell me to say that. And she actually seemed to think that was funny.

I didn't loiter too long, in fear of saying something stupid, so I went on into the sizeable, table-filled room that appeared to once have been an entire shop. Yes, we were meeting there specifically because she drew in such a large audience!
` In between stuffing my face with delishus salad and pizza, I got to brag about how last month's Skeptic Meetup cool hypnotist headliner helped me to control the level of sensation in my fingertips that I had been not-feeling for nine years. Can't let that stuff stay that way, you know?

This meeting was particularly interesting and quotable, but unfortunately, I had left my blogging notebook in a different bag o'stuff, and didn't find any other paper. Instead, I shall use both my memory and Case's description of what was on for that night from the Meetup website: