The dog whisperer

Second sight. Is it from our understanding of animals?

A fox ran across my lawn this morning. She thinks she lives here, and I will not dissuade her. Is this where cats evolved from? Her legs mix back and forth so quickly I can hardly see how she moves. The quick brown fox indeed [jumps over the lazy zebra/dog or some such typing exercise].

I need more time with animals. Not so easy when my allergist forbids most interesting pets. Have you read Temple Grandin and her autism and her relationship with animals? That will have to be another post but let me say I totally get her perspective. I don't think I'm autistic---who knows maybe I am it would CERTAINLY explain a lot---but I understand the feeling of being overwhelmed by input from the world, retreat to save one's sanity, and the elemental goodness of relating to young children and animals.

My children persuaded me to keep the anoles they had in science class, requiring little except for weekly trips to the pet store to buy live crickets for food. The poor crickets! And so each week I would be there, again, wondering in amazement at the things we do because we love our children.

On my daily forest sanity walks I see birds, squirrels, ducks, geese, and swans every day. Yes in fact I DO know how lucky I am. I feel my Cherokee ancestry when I communicate with animals. And I hope to see my beloved deer. They know the sound of my voice, and swish their tails in response to hand gestures I make to mimic their flattened ears when they are happy. They feel safe around me. If only I could feel safe around other, larger creatures.

These larger creatures, humans, can be scary to those of us who do not easily read nor understand social cues. I have to have the rules spelled out for me. In new social situations I feel that I am swimming in the deep end and have forgotten how to swim. That covers a great deal of my high anxiety around the day at the Libby trial. My mind is advanced but those brain cells came out of the social adaptability center, wherever it is. Talk about working in the yellow zone, this was all the way to red.

So why, then, would I reply in the affirmative to an invitation to meet complete strangers over a lasanga dinner for our county Democratic party? Using a cattle prod my rational mind, I remembered that I promised our local state rep that I would become more involved with the local party. His car was parked in front of mine at the last election [Webb!!] so I viewed it as a sign and introduced myself.

On today's cattle prod-induced voluntary walk, I encountered my neighbor who has taken in a shelter dog who was abused. I also am a sponsor of a little dog named Bingo who was found wandering the streets and starving. I wish he could live with me but the allergies.... So my neighbor was only too glad to hear what was going on in my life, and it occurred to me how lucky I am to have a dog whisperer living next door.

Thank you God for putting such people in my life. I NEED THEM as one needs water.
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Knowledge is delicious

This morning I was having fun researching the proposed skyscraper for St. Petersburg, Russia, the first building over a few stories in the entire city. For Gazprom, it would be in the shape of a natural gas flame, and blue, and astonishingly tall compared with the rest of the city. Architectural and aesthetic battles are ongoing.

While looking up the proposed location, I discovered the Google map showing where it was. This program is not new but I've not been able to find very much in St. Petersburg before. It was all fuzzy, no resolution possible, so they said. I have to believe we have long had the capacity to see quite clearly from sky to ground there.

So hey! Let's look up the children's hospital, there it is! I felt like waving hi or something. Then looked up the city center and my colleagues' apartment buildings.

That was great, what about on the home front. I switched it from Map to Satellite and headed on over to North America. Now we see what the astronauts and cosmonauts see: land with no stripes and words on it. I was astonished how much I think of our country with the state lines and labeled cities on it. Even around Washington it took me a while to find familiar territory.

Zooming in and out gave a very different sense of perspective of how close things were to each other. I kept wanting to switch to Map, to get boundaries and names, but resisted as an experiment. Finally I found chez egregious, and traced the path of my forest sanity walks. It was different that I had supposed.

And so does our perspective vary on other matters, life, politics, creativity. I am experimenting with different levels of perspective in these areas, somewhat uncharted terrority.

I feel that I am looking in Satellite view, and would like to find familiar places with Map. But this time I must draw my own maps.

My ADD interferes with my OCD

True quote from my best friend. We were discussing the joys of being both ADD and OCD when she came up with this gold. Need to think about the implications.

May I ramble on a bit? All right, you say, and in fact necessary to identify a post as being uniquely mine. Not kind of unique, sort of unique, nearly unique, [uniquer--per egSon] thank you lovely children who know this pet peeve. It is either one of a kind or not. Unique or not unique. /rant.

As to rambling, you might think this was the very sign of me posting, rather like looseheadprop's spelling errors at firedoglake. It's how we know it is her speaking.

This lovely friend came over today, as every Friday, to help in whatever way I needed for the Russian Medical Fund work. Today the agenda was to keep the president from quitting. Again. But rather seriously this time.

According to my friend, there are still children who will die without our help, and no one will take my place if I quit [what is WRONG with this world], and I probably am strong enough to keep doing this work. Gratuitous swear word inserted here. I apparently continue to have the obligation and the opportunity to save lives if only I will keep going. So be it. But I hope it's worth the cost.

We operated on a child from Tadzhikistan, who came to us from another center that will remain nameless to protect the guilty. The parents SOLD THEIR HOUSE to pay for his first surgery at the other institution, and they nearly killed him. They at least had the conscience to send him on to us. We did his repair, undoing their strange cutting and pasting, and now he has a chance at a normal life.

I watched the re-do surgery and sat with the mother, who was understandably hysterical, as her son came from surgery to the ICU. I explained to her that the surgery went well, was perfectly normal, yet her son would look strange being under anaesthesia and with tubes sticking into him. We spoke in Russian, which was her second language and mine. Yet as mothers we communicated at a higher level. She trusted me since I too had children.

That's the good news. The bad news: there are people in the city where I work who are actively trying to shut down our program, which saves the lives of 350 children a year.

Why? To bring a trickle of federal money toward their own program, so they can have a small and weak program that kills more patients than they save. They want to expand their own program at the cost of killing ours.

Can you hear my response? Their inability to see beyond themselves is evil.

Yet at some level I am sympathetic. It is always hard to see beyond oneself, or beyond one's own organization. But in this case, for them to succeed, children will die. I WILL RESIST.

My alcohol counselor is unhappy. Better I should withdraw from this struggle and work on my own sanity. What is morally right here?

I have already decided to withdraw from the issue of war and peace between the United States and Iraq/Iran/et cetera, for the benefit aof my sanity. Must I leave my work of 10+ years as well?