Who do You Trust?

 “I just spent 90 minutes talking about authenticity dressed in an outfit I only wear to funerals.”—Brene’ Brown

That was today.

This was yesterday:

 “Trump isn’t crazy. We are.”--Allan Francis.

I had to laugh out loud when I read that. Not because it was ha ha funny, but because it was pathetic funny.

Trump has scared so many people that six dystopia classics have suddenly jumped to the top of Amazon’s top seller list. 

They are Orwell’s 1994 and Animal Farm, Huxley’s Brave New World, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Margaret Attwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Psychiatrist Allen Francis, twilight of american sanity (small letters his.) “A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” writes that “Being a world-class narcissist doesn’t make Trump mentally ill as many diagnosticians claim.  

It makes him even more fearsome because he isn’t. 

If he was we could excuse him, kick him out of the Presidency, or dismiss his blatant blow-hard tactics.

“Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”-- Freidrich Nietzche

Well, crumb, and here we are sitting right smack dab in the middle of it.

Perhaps that readers are turning to the classics will make us saner people.

Francis wrote the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. While other diagnosticians are correctly noting that the disorder’s defining features fit Trump like a glove (grandiose self-importance; preoccupations with being great; requiring constant admiration’ feeling entitled; lacking empathy; and being exploitive, envious and arrogant) still Francis maintains that it does not prove that he is mentally ill. 

Actually, it has gotten him fame, fortune, women and now political power.

That people call Trump crazy is to ignore a deeper social sickness.

Simply put, Trump isn’t insane, but our society is.

An individual can be dead wrong and not be crazy, but for a society to be dead wrong is scary.

Used to be the world was huge, the resources boundless and self-preservation necessary for personal survival. (Often they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from.) The survival instincts that worked for fifty thousand years now need to be redirected into a world that requires cooperation.

I don’t know what a big hairy dilemma looks like but I know he has horns for I am sitting on one.

Why would we elect a man so blatantly against the earth, global warming, woman, immigrants, ethnic differences, conserving resources, and world trade?

Throw out a phrase, “Make American Great Again,” and enough Americans believed it to elect Trump, not to mention that Hillary was demonized to the extent that even women didn’t trust her.

I think it was the Archie Bunker phenomenon (TV’s All in the Family). Archie began as a laughable bigoted buffoon, and he became popular. Perhaps people appreciate an individual who lets his thoughts spill out his mouth without censorship, and without any care about what others think. It is what they wish for themselves.

 It is a child that has never grown up.

Why we can't stay silent on social issues due to fear of criticism or getting it wrong.--Brené Brown,  BA, MA and PhD.

And then today happened.

As I listened to Brene’ Brown talking about “Belonging, Courage, and Constructive Conversations” on Marie Forleo’s show, I was reassured about the health of our society when nigh on to 40 million viewers showed up for her Ted Talk.

I am reassured when attendees in the thousands plunk down funds and go to a Tony Robbins event to confront their psychological, financial and spiritual issues.

Brown points out that we are hard-wired not to hurt each other for we are a social species.

But, to harm another first we need to dehumanize them.

When the president calls women, “pussy,” or “dogs,” it renders them subhuman.

On the flip side when we call him “a pig,” we are doing that as well.

This chips away at our soul.

It is a moral exclusion and at the core of every genocide.

If they are sub-human then we can justify eradicating them

People are hard to hate close up.

What is Trust?

Brown says there are 7 elements to trust, and these are observable and testable.

Her anarchism for those elements is BRAVING

B is for foundries, what’s ok, and what’s not ok.
R Reality. Say what you’ll do, and do what you say.
A Accountability
V the vault. Think of the cone of silence. It is a safe place where trust is shared. Sometimes we “talk out of school” to make a connection. However, we are telling stories that are not ours to tell.
I Integrity, choose what’s right over Fun, Fast, and Easy. People don’t do discomfort well. We have become a society of fun, fast and easy. 
Both Brown and Forleo said that the important things they achieved in life were not easy.
N Non-judgement
G Generosity. Assume positive intent. In the absence of data, it is human nature make up stories. We can run a long narrative of how they did us wrong when we aren’t facing them head on. (Remember it is hard to hate someone close up.)


The earth still laughs in Flowers.

This Gerbera Daisy from my porch wintered over. I was surprised to see its little green sprout in the planter box, and so I tenderly watered it, and look what I got. 

I have high hopes for it as winter is coming on. 

Perhaps we, too, can winter over.


 From my daughter’s trainer:
“Avoid realistic goals.”
“With realistic goals, you will settle. Instead set realistic time frames.”

I like that man.

5 Good Reasons to Drink Coffee

I began drinking coffee when I was 18 years old out of desperation.

I was then a dental assistant, and we worked from 8 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. our lunch break.

 I was starving.

So I began drinking coffee mid-morning.

We used Cremora in those days.

I tried it with the creamer, didn’t particularly like it. Tried sugar, liked it less, but gradually found it palatable with the creamer without the sugar.

One day, the second dentist I worked for piled a heap of dental plaster (same color as Cremora) into my cup of coffee and stuck a sign in it, “Cream gone bad.”

I tried to get back at him later by partially blowing up a weather balloon he had bought, and stuffed it in the closet so when he opened the door to get his smock, he would be met with a floppy pile of escaping rubber.

It partially backfired on me, for when I came back from lunch, he was working on a patient in his dress shirt. He asked me to get the pen out of his pocket, and, chuckling under his breath, sent me to face the balloon.

However, I knew it was there and squeezed past the rubber, found the pen and took it to him.

Well, you know he had encountered the balloon earlier.

I wish I had seen it.

Okay, I was talking about coffee.

I have gone through thinking the caffeine wasn’t good for me, so I drank it decaffeinated.  When I read that the chemical used to decaffeinate was worse than the caffeine, so I tried steam-decaffeinated. Thinking that dairy wasn’t that good for me, I tried soy lattes.

I stopped drinking coffee when I was pregnant, which is probably a good idea, and if the mother is breastfeeding, the baby has to process the caffeine.

If a breast feeding mother isn’t careful about spacing her caffeine intake and her breastfeeding sessions it can lead to a caffeine build up in the baby's system. To give you an idea of how long it takes, the half-life of caffeine for a newborn baby is about 3-4 days, compared to 2.5 hours for a six-month-old. For an adult, it's about an hour and a half.

Now, not pregnant, not breastfeeding, and knowing that fat is a necessary ingredient to any diet,  I can pour on the cream, and chug down the coffee. 

I love it with half and half, hot or iced, especially iced.

And when I heard that coffee is good for us, I began drinking it in earnest.

Got my computer, got my coffee. I’m set.

And now not only can I drink it guilt free, but I find it is healthy.

1.     Studies say drinking coffee will make you live longer.

More than 35 studies have been done covering more than 2 million people that indicate coffee directly influences what Public Health Nutrition calls “all-cause mortality.”

Those in the study that drank 3 to 5 cups a day saw more benefits than those that drank 1 cup a day.

Brace yourself.

2.     Current studies on coffee have deemed it a “health elixir” that not only protects the heart but also lowers the risk of several cancers as well as the risk of Parkinson’s disease.

Coffee lipids act as a safeguard against some malignant cells by modulating the detoxifying enzymes. According to #About.com, men who drank six cups of coffee a day reduced their chances of developing type-2 diabetes by half, and women who drank the same amount cut their risk by 30 percent.

3.     Coffee is super-concentrated with flavonoids, an antioxidant compound well-known for its antiviral, anti-allergic, anti-platelet, anti-inflammatory, and antitumor benefits.

4.     Drinking coffee may be a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The study found that caffeine treatments in mice led to a lowering of the levels of Abeta, an abnormal protein believed to be responsible for #Alzheimer’s. Not only did this treat Alzheimer’s, but it also seemed to lower the chances of developing it at all. Additional studies have continued this line of research into how coffee might influence Alzheimer’s in humans and, while the jury is still out, positive evidence is accumulating.

5.     Because it enhances blood flow to the brain, coffee is a rapid mood enhancer. It helps us think, keeps us alert and promotes a sense of wellbeing.

Totality

What Are The Chances?

When you live about 40 miles south of the path of the Solar Eclipse’s Totality, it makes sense to drive a little north.

And so, that’s what we did.

On Saturday husband and I scouted parking places for the upcoming event on Monday. $100.00 parking places? Nope. Crowds of 10,000, no again.

We found numerous places close by the Corvallis Municipal Airport, and in the path of almost 2 minutes of totality.

On Monday as we were in route up highway 99—it was between 8 and 9 in the morning and not crowded-- my daughter, son-in-law and grandson ahead of us called to say they found a place within close range of the airport, a beautiful spot by trees, on grass, and with shade. Perfect--except for one thing.

It was on private land.

The owner gave permission though, and it was there we met our family all prepared with an ice chest of food. Other people, to the owner's dismay, joined us, and all were respectful and left not a scrap.

Below is a picture of the sun through a hole in a paper place projected on a white board. This is the concept of a pin-hole camera.

The pilot of a light plane, his trail like chalk on a board, outlined the sun. 

Husband dear was intrigued at finding a Mylar balloon floating high above our heads, and apparently three vultures did too, for three were circling.

Dum de dum dum.

My naked eye couldn’t see the balloon, guess his vision is better. I could see the vultures though, I wonder if they thought they were coming to a barbeque.

The dark moon—invisible to us until it began its sojourn across the sun’s face began as a bite, a crescent, a half, a three-quarters.

Husband dear set up a small telescope and this is a picture taken with my phone/camera peeking through the lens.

The dogs didn’t want anything to do with this event, and hid out in the vehicles. I wish they could tell us what they were seeing or feeling.

I, too, felt off-kilter, a bit dizzy, but I thought perhaps it was because I was looking up so much. Don’t know. Sometimes we doubt our feelings. One reason people have so few other-worldly experiences.

Eerie dim-darkness enveloped the countryside.We watched as the moon crept across the face of Ra, and then El Whamo.

We ripped off our glasses. And there it was, the corona.

Glorious.

Awesome.

The temperature dropped 20 degrees. It was unsettling to feel how vulnerable we are, drop a shade over the sun, and the result is immediate—darkness and cold.  A star, thinking it was night, blinked. Whoops it wasn’t night. A minute and 50 some seconds later a crescent of Ra appeared. Put on glasses!

We toasted good old Ra’s  return with a glass of champagne.

Later on that day at a garden shop, I read “Our sun is the only one known to grow vegetables.”

In the town of Corvallis a woman came up to us and asked how the dogs fared. She and her family drove up from Oakland California. She said it was probably her only opportunity to witness such an event. Her husband said maybe it would make him a better man, but he wasn’t noticing that happening. I said it was accumulative, and would happen over time.

I feel that the eclipse was a pause for the earth. Maybe we gave her a breather.  Just think, mother earth had a moment to collect her wits while some estimated 7 million people stopped whatever racket they were doing, driving, yammering, computer punching, and looked up.

What are the chances of seeing a total eclipse? 

This was the first total eclipse to occur completely bisecting the U.S. since our founding fathers declared us a country.

The moon’s orbit takes it directly in between the earth and the sun every 18 months or so, however, this one was unique for it darkened populated areas, and not in the middle of the ocean or a desert or some ice encrusted continent.

What are the chances that from our perspective the sun and the moon are exactly the same size?

The moon is 1/400^th the size of the sun and it is 400 times closer to us. 

Eventually total eclipses will be no more, for the moon is moving away from us at the rate of 1 ½ inches per year. Rats. I don't like that idea. The last total eclipse will be about 620 million years from now. 

The corona, the gas jacket around the sun, is millions of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun, which is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Scientists don't fully understand why. One explanation offered by NASA  is that the gas collects “heat bombs” that fly off the sun into that gaseous layer where they explode giving off heat.  The corona extends far into space, and affects solar winds. Eclipses give scientists an opportunity to see, and thus to study, the corona.