NaNoWriMo Concluded!

I did it, I really, truly did it! I am so proud of myself, even if what I wrote is pure drivel, it's ten whole days and 50,000 words of drivel later and I wrote it all in big chunks without thinking too long and hard. I had an extremely basic idea when I started and just ran with it. It is so rewardijng to have finished a long story even though it may never see the light of day. Viva la creativity! Now off to London for a long weekend and a wedding.

Thanksgiving, NaNoWriMo, work and family

All three currently consuming my time. I am working right now, and when I'm not, I'm doing time pacing to see how many words I can type in a given timespan to get more nanowrimo accomplished. I'm over 25,000 words today and so proud of myself since I started late! After working tonight I'm actually off for Thanksgiving for the first time in over a decade and I'll get to watch the Macy's Day Parade which was one of the high points of my Thanksgiving holiday, that and the little taste of Mogen-David wine (the only kind allowed in Mississippi when I was growing up) Mom always allowed us on Thanksgiving (and since my brother and sisters hated it, I got all their samples, too!) Also, I plan to start decorating the house for Christmas, try and get ahead on my Nanowrimo for the weekend and fly off on Friday to visit my nephew, his wife and their new baby girl, Jade, my foster granddaughter!

NaNoWriMo, part deux

Not NOT writing, just spent 5500 words on nanowrimo (in less than four hours) trying to make up for my lack of an early start. It really is empowering to just get the words on a page, without looking up to see the typos, without worrying that what you are putting down has a plot, without wondering if anyone will read it and nominate you for the Nobel Prize or even whether the damned thing will ever see a printed page. How about just writing? Just writing is good, and this is a journey I've been promising myself this year, and i'm on it. Can't believe that the gods were kind enough last night to leave the ED mostly empty so that I could get that many words on paper. I've had writer's cramp from a pen before, but my fingers and joints are feeling this stient now. Ahh, jubilation -- I'm a quarter of the way through!

Yesterday's Meltdown

Phewww, had a meltdown yesterday at work. Cried all night. Think my BP's up. need to remember Epictetus, "Of things, some are in our power, and others are not." from "Enchiridium."

Politicised

I hadn't meant to become so politicised, but having a baby sister who is an activist and whose intelligence challenges your own and who make you think forces you to reexamine old arguments you've made, excuses that you've made to yourself in the past that saved you having to consider that the other person might just be right. At least as right as you are, maybe even, that you are wrong or misinformed or just ignorant. (A hard admission when one believes one-self congenitally honest and open-minded.)

Rwanda is the center of my reading at the moment and what happened there in the 90's. Phillip Gourevitch's book of essays/history was assigned for our reading this month by a woman who always gives the impression of a Gen X slacker with nothing more serious on her attractive mind than what boy she'll take to bed next in our little flying community. The book is called "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow we will be killed with our Families." It's a mouthful of a title and so full of questions (and not bottled, prepackaged answers) that I'm reading it straight through, but having to stop frequently to breath and think and question myself and consider. I am fascinated (and maybe the sentence only functions within the context of the book) by his statement, "Power consists in the ablity to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happpen."
"Power consists in the ablity to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happpen."
Putting aside the triviality of what I'm about to say, but that's what advertisers (of cigarettes, etc.) do all the time. They retell our stories of ourselves to us so that we feel we will be truer to ourselves if we smoke Malboros or wear Vickie's Secret underwear or wear clothes that look like what Brad Pitt wears.

It's also about the bigger political stories. Male historians would allow for the occassinal exceptional woman -- Queen Elizabeth I -- but those were deemed rare and, in general, we were not expected to be wise or strong or athletic or stubborn or militant, or sexual, briliant, or inventive, or diplomatic, or skilled, or hilarious, or any of the other things we are learning we are and can be. We (the established culture) pretty up what the mostly white population did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas when we invaded their country and we try to tell African Americans that "it" wasn't so bad. Well, the truth is, "it" was so bad. "It" was so bad that people died rather than live like that. But we don't want to feel shame nowadays for something that happened before we were born, never mind the reverberations it carries for them today, so we tell them their story in our way until they believe it, or we kill enough of them off that they can't argue. Especially we kill off the uppity niggers and the Native Americans who try to tell us their version of events, their concept of what really 'went down' at Wounded Knee. They are too dangerous to Our stor; we can't allow them to speak because it puts us and our vision of our noble culture on shakey ground. We pooh-pooh the attempted revision of what we have come to accept as doctrine because it would feel dangerous, uncertain to question the version of events that we've been raised to believe is true, that is the groundwork of our "great" nation. I'm happy to live here, but then, I'm white.

Which brings me back to the book on Rwanda. It has raised questions about what we should and could do in a genocide. And what the president I thought was "okay" didn't do. He helped the Yugoslavians, after a time, but the Africans (and what is it about Africa that always reduces us to paralyzed shame and impotence?) were left to be slaughtered because it was too difficult and too far off for us culturally, and identity wise to bother to sort out who was shooting whom over what. And what about the Sudan? Too black, too mish-mashed politically to know that bad things are happening to a whole mass of people? Is it just because they are people of color, or is it because they seem so far removed from us and because we carry such guilt as to feel bereft of hope to even try to sort out what it means, what we can do. It doesn't help that the passionate advocates are only heard when things deteriorate to the point of needing outside help. We never hear of the Kashmiris until it is time for a war, we choose to hope it will go away.

I'm not done with this topic. Thank you baby sister.

My sister travels to New Orleans

My sister, a poet and activist, and an all around fine person travelled to New Orleans earlier this month, to see what help she could provide. Like everyone in this family she has opinions, but she backs them up with action. Bless her and her vision and hr strength. She has granted me permission to cite her blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/badsis/

Busy and flying

It seems since the beginning of August I've been on the go, and it doesn't look to stop for several months. August in SD, then work, the trip to Biloxi after Katrina, then work, two trips in the last three weeks, one to Philly to visit a sister and attend a flying friend's wedding, then another to Orlando for a conference. In between I work, tomorrow is a class, and that's why when, yesterday, I had a chance to fly, I took it.

It was worth it, thought the air was not smooth and I spent the entire hour scratching on the ridge with a dozen (or two) others, near-missing each other since no one was high, and the conditions were borderline. Finally, when I felt myself break out in a sweat from low blood sugar (forgot to eat before launching) I decided I was a threat to aviation and went out to land about 7p. People flew until sunset, and, I suspect, after -- a full moon rose just as the sun went down behind the neighboring ridge.

Quotes

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them. ~Edward Roscoe Murrow, 31 December 1955

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon. ~George Aiken


What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature. ~Voltaire

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. ~Franklin Thomas

I am an invisible man.... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. ~Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, 1952

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand. ~William Penn

If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race. ~Bill Cosby

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State. ~Edward Abbey

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness. ~Author Unknown

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. ~Mark Twain

Malice drinks one-half of its own poison. ~Seneca

all of these and more at www.quotegarden.com

Vintage Champagne and making love to the sky

Flying for two hours on Saturday the 17th was like flying in vintage champagne -- smooth, mellow, golden, bubbly. Silent and cool, but not cold. Handfuls of us scattered along the ridge, the sun at a low angle over Sand Mountain, us like dozens of butterflies, dancing and bobbing on the waves of the winds. And there was no need to fight this air. It carried us , gentle, like a well-trained horse who you shifted only by the shift of your weight. If you wanted t go 'there' you had only to think it and with fingertip pressure on the bar you were softly, smoothly 'there.' I felt the air and the glider talking to each other and I listened and we three, we flew.

Like the best days on the sloapes when your body and board and the snow have a conversation with no conscious component and you just are, sailing down the face of a mountain on a bed of white satin that welcomes the little track you leave on her face. Like lovers.

Part 4 of Biloxi and Katrina

[This is a continuation of my previous post which I have been editing for the last week. Decided to go ahead and post under a different heading since the other was getting so long. Thus, if you wish to read what preceded this you'll have to go to the prior post. OK, legalese finished...]

The night was stagnant, and we got fewer patients in after midnight. Yes, some of them had the hopeless look, especially the elderly, but most of them were just looking for some help, none of them expected miracles of us. Unlike New Orleans, a large city, this is place was all about neighbors. Yes, southerners carry guns, and one had even posted the local motto on their battered housefront, "You loot, we shoot." But, they weren't really shooting at anybody. The people banded together, naturally, neighbors with an intact roof offered protection. Anyone with a grill cooked out for their friends. They pooled their gasoline to make inland forays for supplies. They bought ice as soon as roads opened, and guarded each others houses. They looked after their elderly neighbors, trying to keep them hydrated and cool in the heat. They fished out what was left of their lives from the wreckage, and they didn't sit around waiting on someone to show up to help. They never had trusted the federal government anyway, something about a war 140 years ago...

The DMAT team was great -- enthusiastic and willing and game. The pharmacy they set up dispensed need drugs, no questions asked. Antibiotics, insulin, BP meds lost in the rising water, needles, syringes, tetanus vaccine, asthma meds -- anything on their rather generous fomulary list was free to the survivors. I don't even think they asked for insurance cards. Wouldn't have done any good, mostly people didn't even have ID. We even gave out Benadryl, ibuprofen, children's Tylenol. All the little things you might pick up for yourself at a pharmacy had ot be provided -- the pharmacy we're in as bad a shape as most other buildings.

The DMAT team also took the load off the ED, seeing the mildly injured, or the worried who just wanted a tetanus booster, or helping those who really didn't know where to go get directions to the nearest shelters. They processed over 400 patients a day, dealing with the needs of two-thirds or more of them, only sending the truly ill in to us in the ED.

And among the ED staff were other types of volunteers. People like Cam and the respiratory tech and myself who had just taken into our heads to drive down after the endless pictures of people struggling with no help from the very ones we paid to provide for this sort of situation. Others, came by way of temp agencies, but came with the full knowledge that they'd have to deal with the heat, lack of facilities, lack of back up or technology to which most of us had grown accustomed. They were no less to be thanked just because they had the foresight to do it with pay. No one could pay them enough to stand about in the miserable heat, listening to the heart-breaking stories, go unwashed for days, leave their much more comfortable jobs, be required to come up with endlessly creative ways around the failed technology. Some physicians had come at the urging of their colleagues who couldn't make it on their own but were willing to cover shifts for them if they would just go and 'help those people.' Their professional colleagues.

The church groups -- The Salvation Army, the Catholic Churches, the Evangelicals, the Baptists and Methodists -- organized themselves to deliver care within hours, and organized their people to help dispense the clothing and food and water sent down from the north. However else lost the people were, they knew if they could make it to one of the local churches they'd get help and shelter and food.

So, let me clear up my motivations. I was not noble; I came down because I was angry with the Federal Government and the News Agencies, and I was curious. I knew these people from childhood and just couldn't imagine my father's family standing about waiting on the Federal tit to come down out of the sky to supply them sustenance. I got tired of the version of events that CNN and Fox and every other network was feeding us, drowning us with nightly, daily, images that seemed to say we were helpless and it was hopeless. I had to go see for myself. Maybe that is the root of all travel writing, all journalism. To go and find your own version of events, your way of seeing them.

So, am I here to contradict those pictures? No, because I wasn't there at the same time or in the same place, but I do want others to know that the story is not over nor as damned fucked up as it looks on the 6pm news. We may not have saved that many starfish, but, at least I can say we tossed a few back in.**


** Refers to a story that circulates periodically through the internet about an adult walking along a beach after a terrible storm has washed up many sea creatures above the high water line. Many of them are clearly dead or dying as he saunters past them. Ahead he sees a small boy bending down every few feet and tossing something with all his strength into the water's edge. The adult walks up, curious, "What are you doing?"

The little boy looks up and says, "Saving the starfish before the sun gets too high."

The adult looks at the climbing sun and says, "It's useless, you can't save them all."

The little boy bends down and flings a starfish into the surf, "Maybe not, but I just saved that one." Then he walked on to the next.