Thriving Despite the Pandemic: 6 Tips for Daily Life

Hello Spring! And hello to all of you. Here is another helpful post to help you enjoy and prosper even as the pandemic stays with us. Thank you once again, April Meyers for putting this blog post together. -Sandy

Many life-altering moments have happened, thanks to the coronavirus. The pandemic and the accompanying recession have had a significant impact, but whatever challenges you’re facing, there are solutions to help you overcome. Check out these six strategies for thriving despite pandemic conditions, put together by April Meyers of www.mindbodyhealthsolution.com and presented by Sandy Parsons.

1. Approach Career Changes from a Healthy Perspective

Getting let go from a job may feel like the end of the world. Similarly, starting on a new professional path can also feel daunting, especially if you’re navigating the world of telecommuting. But the good news is that millions of other workers are in the same boat. Even with a gap on your resume, you’ll find that a positive, can-do attitude goes a long way toward securing and succeeding in whatever field you find yourself in. Work on building your remote work skills and keep an eye out for potential opportunities while making ends meet.

Alternatively, if you’ve ever had entrepreneurial dreams, now could be a great time to pursue them, and you could even run your business from home. You’d be in good company — of the 30 million small businesses in the United States, about half of them are home-based. Think about your passions and skill sets along with what opportunities exist in the market. Are you knowledgeable about a subject that would make a great podcast where you could charge for advertising? Could you consult other businesses based on your career background? Are you a skilled artisan? Any of these are viable options for earning income. Whatever path you choose, it’s wise to create an LLC, or limited liability company, to protect your personal assets and enjoy tax benefits in your new venture. The register LLC in Georgia process is relatively straightforward and requires minimal paperwork, and you can save time and money by using an online formation service rather than hiring a lawyer to establish your business entity.

2. Smooth Transitions with Set Routines

While returning home at the end of the day used to signal relaxation time, being home all day may now mean complete chaos at all hours. To streamline your family’s activities at home — from work to school to recreation — establish a routine for the entire household. Whether that means working in the evenings once your kids are offline or banishing technology before breakfast, set up a routine that works for your family.

3. Establish Guidelines for Daily Activities

With everyone circulating throughout the house, you’ll likely encounter arguments between siblings, messes in every room, and the occasional hangry teen rummaging through the fridge. Head off some of these issues by setting guidelines for your activities each day. Keeping family mealtimes, for example, avoids unhealthy snacking and affords everyone an opportunity for reconnection. Setting aside time for you and your partner alone can help you learn about your relationship. Therapy and counseling — whether individually or as a couple — can also help you move forward together.

4. Ease Tension with a Home Refresh

Being stuck at home with your family has likely resulted in meaningful connections and enjoyable moments. But it may also lead to complaints, arguments, and overly critical judgments, in some cases. To help welcome positivity back into your household, give it a refresh by nixing negative energy. Declutter each living area, do a deep-clean to banish germs, and circulate fresh air. You’ll soon find that your family notices the positive changes and responds in kind.

5. Give Yourself a Break

Though social distancing has thrown a wrench in your recreation opportunities, it also offers solutions to problems that busy families have often experienced. For one thing, grocery pickup and delivery have made life simpler for households that don’t have the time or patience for hours-long shopping trips. Give yourself permission to take the simpler route when it comes to things like grocery shopping and meal prep. While snacking on junk food isn’t a healthy habit, ordering contactless takeout every so often can be a welcome distraction from other challenges of pandemic living.

6. Keep Moving Wherever You Can

With many gyms closed and people aiming to stay six feet part, it may be challenging to stay active. At the same time, it’s more important than ever to fit exercise into your daily life. Physical activity helps you burn calories and stay fit, but it also helps eliminate stress, notes Verywell Mind. Whether you’re running up and down the stairs, setting up a home gym in your spare bedroom, or going for outdoor walks each day, any amount of activity is better than none.

There’s no magic solution for surviving the pandemic with your health, sanity, and bank account intact. But with these solutions, adapting to daily living despite COVID-19 restrictions and impacts is a bit easier.

Photo via Unsplash

Using Meditation to Manage COVID-19 Anxiety

Hello Again, it’s been awhile. I’ve been busy writing, although obviously not blogging! Fortunately, other people still are, and I’d liked to share with you a special post written for you by the lovely April Meyers of Mind Body Health Solution.

Image via Pexels

Using Meditation to Manage COVID-19 Anxiety

By

April Meyers

www.mindbodyhealthsolution.com

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on global mental health. A July 2020 KFF Tracking poll showed that more than half of Americans feel that COVID anxiety and stress has harmed their mental health. The most-reported effects include sleep disruptions, disordered eating or changes in appetite, more frequent temper flare-ups, and an increase in headaches and stomachaches. Added to health concerns are worries like job loss and social upheaval, while social isolation is another major stress contributor.

However, individuals are not powerless against these effects. Meditation, among other stress management techniques, can reduce the impact of stress and anxiety. To better understand what’s happening and how you can cope, read the following information:

How COVID is Contributing to Anxiety

Pandemic-related anxiety is based on several contributing factors. These are the most commonly reported:

● Contracting COVID: Many people are worried about becoming ill with the novel coronavirus. The concern may be for themselves, but it is more likely to be for a loved one.

● Disrupted schedules: Changes in routines and a lack of structure are unsettling for many individuals because they contribute to a feeling of things being out of control; Verywell Mind suggests trying to conform to a daily regimen to maintain a sense of normalcy.

● Social isolation: People are naturally social animals, and forced isolation is taking its toll on millions. A lack of social interaction is associated with increased loneliness, a predictor of worsening mental and physical health outcomes.

● Loss of income: Roughly 22 million American jobs were lost to the pandemic, and experts expect it to take years for the economy to recover. That's a lot of households worrying about paying for housing, food, and medical costs.

How Meditation Reduces Stress and Tension

When stress becomes too much to bear, the body and mind look for ways to leave it all behind. Much like the brief reprieve offered by mesmerizing stories and films, meditation offers a pathway to temporarily escape from worries. One of its advantages over some other escapism methods, however, is that it also affects the physiology of your body by lowering blood pressure and slowing the heart rate. Paired with yoga, it can also encourage better sleep habits, which is one of the main complaints of those affected by COVID anxiety.

The acceptance fostered through meditation opens the mind to new perspectives and gives you another way of looking at situations in a more positive light. The benefits of positivity are connected with improvements to both physical and emotional health. That helps explain why mindfulness-based therapy effectively manages depression and anxiety and helps to minimize relapse incidences among patients.

How You Can Maximize the Benefits of Your Mediation Practice

There are several ways to increase the health benefits of meditation. Creating a vibrant and refreshing space for your home meditation practice is an excellent place to start. Remove clutter from areas where you spend the most time. It causes distractions and chips away at your ability to stay focused and productive, both of which can contribute to increased stress levels. Having a clean and organized home also reduces risks associated with illness, which are significant contributors to COVID anxiety.

Open the windows to let some fresh air in when you meditate, too. This has multiple purposes. First, the fresh air is good for your health. It helps encourage a connection with nature that can speed healing. It also leads to better sleep habits, an area where stress is likely to strike. There are also COVID-specific benefits. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends opening windows to reduce the number of virus particles in indoor air and cut down on rates of disease transmission.

You might also add some houseplants to help keep the air in your space cleaner and provide bonus stress reduction, and at least keep your curtains open when you can’t open the windows. Natural light is a simple and effective mood-booster.

Mindful meditation offers a natural healing modality that can help reduce stress and anxiety. At the same time, it promotes positive changes to physical and emotional wellbeing. A few small changes in your home, such as decluttering and letting in fresh air, can help foster a sense of calm to facilitate your meditation practice.

For more helpful, insightful and inspirational reading material, connect with April or Sandy.

The 2019 Reevesolution Wrapup

My New Years Resolution for 2019 was to watch every Keanu Reeves movie. Here’s how it went.

Every year I try to make a New Years resolution that is fun but also kind of a challenge. In 2019 my NYE was to watch every  Keanu Reeves movie. When I made this resolution it was only because I don’t watch a lot of movies anymore (my daily schedule isn’t conducive to blocking out two hours of time) and I had noticed I hadn’t seen any Keanu Reeves movies in almost a decade. The Matrix and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure are in my top echelon of all time movies, so I would say I was a fan, but maybe not a super fan.

I wasn’t prepared for this to be The Year of Keanu, the #Keanusance (#Keanaissance?), or even that the already long list was going to grow by at least four movies. Not that I’m complaining. It was fun to follow along with the fans and get swept up in the Keanu-ness.  2019 was a rankle, wrapped in a misery, inside an egomania, so watching these movies and checking them off gave me a much-needed bit of escapism.

I used IMDB, and printed out a list. Because putting that little check mark as you go is a big part of the fun of achieving a goal in steps. To make myself more accountable, I tweeted every time I watched a movie under the hashtag #Reevesolution and #KeanuReeves. 

So how did I do? I had to give up on watching the TV shows, some of which were no longer accessible, and because I didn’t have time to watch several episodes or even a season. There were also a couple other random entries of not-movies that I couldn’t find. And sadly, there were 3 movies, all from 1991 or earlier, which I couldn’t find anywhere. Letting Go, Act of Vengeance, and Providence. But as far as any movie available that I could see, I did. From a cursory count that’s 75 items, including movies, short movies, and documentaries.

Here’s what I discovered.

The most obvious thing is that Keanu Reeves has been in a lot of different kind of movies, and exemplified a lot of different types of character. His range covers everything from sinister criminal (The Watcher, The Gift), to romantic lead (The Lake House, Sweet November); from dumb knave (Ted E. Logan, ) to doctor (To the Bone, Something’s Gotta Give); from football (The Replacements) to physicist (Chain Reaction); Heartbreaking (Permanent Record), and heartthrob (too many to list); cartoon (ToyStory 4) to comedy (Always Be My Maybe)  to cat (Keanu) and dog (Freaked); from divine (Little Buddha) to devilish (The Devil’s Advocate); from dimwit (The Prince of Pennsylvannia, I Love You to Death) to detective (Point Break, Street Kings). 

Keanu’s most compelling role is the one he is basically Aristotle’s ideal of: The reluctant hero, the everyman savior, transcendent yet relatable. The Matrix, Constantine, Speed, John Wick, 47 Ronin. Nobody does the flawed and failing, drawn-from-the-trenches-to-become-the-hero-we-all-need than Keanu Reeves. Nobody.

He’s a director and documentarian and ostensibly has more than a passing interest in the behind-the-scenes aspect of film.

There are several lesser known movies where he is listed, but actually either appears only in a single scene or as footage with Dogstar. I wonder if this is a kindness bestowed on burgeoning moviemakers, lending his star power to help them out.

What will come as no surprise to his fanbase, he is a very talented actor. While it is true Keanu has been in some bad movies (The Bad Batch, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) and played some characters he wasn’t particularly suited for (Dangerous Liaisons) I wouldn’t say his acting was less a problem than the material.

There are some subtle trends in his oeuvre. Keanu is often billed as a science fiction action hero, and of that there can be no doubt. Within that he’s got some major philosophical tread. Gibson’s cyberpunk Johnny Mnemonic, PKDs A Scanner Darkly, and the John Wick series, which are rich explorations of augmented and blurred reality, as well as the nature of reality in The Matrix and the individual’s mastery over reality in Little Buddha.

Another thing that seemed to stand out is that despite being an action hero and having a good portion of his career be in the dark ages, he has a much higher than average ratio of movies with strong female actors, characters, and directors. In fact, one might think he actually chose movies with this basic criteria. I could be completely wrong and it may be a coincidence or the agent’s choice, I don’t know. But I know this. Katheryn Bigelow, director of Point Break, in 1991. Sandra Bullock in Speed, Glenn Close in Dangerous Liasions, Cate Blanchett in The Gift, Carrie Ann Moss in The Matrix, Qing Ye in Man of Tai Chi, Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing, Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give, Rebecca Miller, director, Robin Wright in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Ali Wong in Always Be My Maybe, Halle Barry in John Wick 3. So maybe it’s a coincidence that he’s in all these movies with strong female leads, but a happy one for me, as I’m no fan of fridged girlfriends, female furniture or women in general who lack agency.

My favorites didn’t change, but I found a few new movies that I enjoyed, and a few I liked better than I expected to. Ultra-violent, punchy-kicky is generally not for me, but John Wick had a lot more world and character building to offer.  The Private Lives of Pippa Lee made something poignant about being on the fringe of acceptable. Freaked revived my youthful nostalgia of stupid funny. And the cynically unromantic Destination Wedding had the funniest sex scene ever.

I’m looking forward to more Keanu in 2020 and beyond.

My Astronomy

 One person looks at the moon and sees a tilted sliver, a crescent on its side, and thinks, a child’s smile on a swing. Another might look and say, at apogee the declination is toward the ecliptic. But there are universalities in our thinking, too, when we look into the sky. Children think the full moon and the sun are the same size. They do not realize how significant this observation is. The coincidence of size and distance have made it possible to study the cosmos and allowed humans to witness a scrap of awareness of our movement through space.

Once when I was so young the memory is shadowy, the teacher told our class that it was going to get dark for a few minutes. We were allowed to put our pencils down, but we were not to talk or take this phenomenon as an opportunity to act unruly. The moon was going to block out the sun. I wanted to see it. I wanted to walk outside and look. This was not allowed. The teacher assured us that other opportunities would arise.

In 1994 I was taking an astronomy class at Georgia State University. We were lucky, our professor told us, because a solar eclipse was occurring during our semester and he would show us how to make a box telescope so we could experience it on our own, without a telescope. On May 10, 1994, I was at home, alone, except for my four year old son. I had learned my basic astronomy and biology, and a visiting historian had told our class that Galileo had gone blind from looking at the sun. I made my paper telescope. I watched the shadowy reflection on the ground. I wanted to take a picture. At that time I only had a cheap, second hand 35 mm film camera, but I needed to see where to point the lens. So I looked up, I felt the photons bouncing in. The moon and the sun together, burning into my retina, imprinted on my brain. There are worse things one could do to one’s body. Standing on the patio of my duplex, alone. Nobody was nearby, all the normal sounds were of people looking forward and back, not up. I thought in those moments, here I am witnessing this amazing thing, this recognition of a human moving through the cosmos, and everyone around me is oblivious.

I saw other things when I took my astronomy class. Georgia State was too near downtown Atlanta for viewing the night sky so we were sent to the suburbs. I went to the Fernbank Science Center. The helpful astronomer turned the dome while I made notes for class. I saw Orion with his belt and bow. I had seen the smudge in front of him, but now saw it resolved into stars. The seven sisters, the Pleiades, forever chased by the hunter turned into doves by their mother to escape the jealous Orion. I remember thinking, I will always remember this. If I’m out and its dark I look for Orion and the sisters, which is visible for a good part of the year right above my house. Like a grounding image to meditate on, it reassures me.

In 2016 I went to Tahiti for my fiftieth birthday. I lay on my back outside my hut in Moorea and looked for Orion. I found it but I was unsure of what I was seeing. The stars were there, in their usual brightness and orientation to each other, but they were not organized in the manner I was used to. Half the world away the images are upside down and inverted.

One other thing linked my astronomy class to my trip so many years later. I had to mount my personal camera on the telescope at Agnes Scott College to take pictures of the moon, and from those images identify certain features, the larger mares and craters. It seemed to me, then, an amazing feat that my cheap, overused camera and my feeble, eclipse-branded retinas could accomplish such a feat, even with a 30-inch reflecting telescope. I thought about that again, when I was in Bora Bora and my husband took pictures of a supermoon with a digital camera, which showed so much definition I would have aced that assignment.

In 1997, my family walked out of our house and down the streets of our subdivision, looking up through pines for the Hale-Bopp comet, said to be visible with the naked eye. I feared it would not be true, or an exaggeration by too-exuberant sky watchers. Or it would be nothing more than a dot, like another star. But we found it, an odd spread of expanding orange and blue. We were not disappointed and every evening for weeks we said to each other “Where’s the comet?” and we’d congratulate whoever for spotting it and marvel and nod until finally by the end of the summer it was so commonplace that we were like yes, so what, that’s just that shooting star we see every night.

A year before the masses got eclipse fever, I had my totality viewing spot picked out for the 2017 solar eclipse. I was not going to be told to sit in my desk or stay inside this time. I was scheduled to work that day, but traded my shift so that I could drive to Rabun’s Gap, GA. From my house I would have been at 97% totality, and for most things in life that’s a good enough percentage. But not for a total solar eclipse. I heard some people talking about the eclipse a few days later, and they were saying they didn’t understand what the big deal was. I asked them to explain. Turns out, they were in the 98% zone and so while they thought what they were seeing was ‘close enough’ they did not realize what a strange mental, physical, and psychological experience it is to be in totality.  I also had that very special eyewear, ordered from Amazon prime and vetted by no less than three official agencies, so I was sure not to suffer any further damage. I was not alone, either, and thousands of people paused with me, looking upward, forgetting, at 2:38 PM, for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, earthly concerns. We were given a chance to recognize the existence of us within the cosmos, close and beyond.

Help for the Vegan Curious

This is Veganuary.

https://veganuary.com/us/

It happens every year, so if you’re not ready to take the plunge you have a whole year to get ready for next Veganuary. Whatever or whenever, know that there are plenty of ways to make the transition from eating animals to eating plants. In general you don’t need a website or a book or a special education to prepare vegan foods. For example, not too long ago someone on social media wondered what vegetarians ate on Thanksgiving. The answer, if you think about it, is pretty easy. Everything but the turkey is vegetarian (provided things like drippings and bacon aren’t used in the prep.)

Sometimes I want to experiment or I want to try a new spice or I got some weird vegetable at the farmer’s market. To the internets I go and I’ve never failed to find a recipe to match my quest. For that you need nothing more than your own personal google.

If you were raised to think of meat as being the MEAL, and everything else decorations, then it might take some tinkering to get your palate readjusted. My favorite food used to be Popeyes fried chicken. You can still have things like fried breading, or pot pie, or tetrazzini... but don't make the mistake I made. In my early days of googling and experimenting I discovered an unfortunate truth about the relationship between what something looks like and what something tastes like. For example there are any number of methods to make a version of cheesecake looks exactly like a cheesecake, and yet what it tastes like is…not cheesecake.

But no need to lose heart, because the breadth of vegan choices is unlimited, and there are industrious people hard at work finding combinations and methods that will provide a humane yet delicious solution to every gastronomic puzzle. You might not be able to eat fried chicken skin, but there are vegan analogs that are both delicious and healthful. Here are my three top go-to sites when I want a vegan version of something I already enjoyed eating, or when I want something fancier that also tastes good.

1.    OH SHE GLOWS

http://ohsheglows.com/

Angelia Liddon has been doing this a long time now. She’s perfected a lot of recipes, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Plus her dishes are healthy and don’t call for chemicals.

My favorites are the Pink Power Detox Smoothie (I feel so good after drinking this and it tastes sooooo good)

http://ohsheglows.com/2013/09/03/introducing-vegan-glow-pink-power-detox-smoothie-recipe/

and these very versatile summer rolls

http://ohsheglows.com/2012/07/20/veggie-summer-rolls-with-spicy-peanut-lime-sauce-two-ways/

2.   VEGAN SANDRA

http://www.vegansandra.com/

Sandra Vungi lives in Estonia and has several cookbooks and a cooking show.  What do people in Estonia eat? Food. My favorite, in fact my all-time favorite vegan recipe, is her vegetable and dumpling soup

http://www.vegansandra.com/2015/01/easy-vegetable-and-dumpling-soup.html

She has a video so you can follow the steps but it so simple and you probably already have the ingredients in your pantry right now. So many delicious combinations, so many choices, plus it’s fun to read her blog.

3.   FAT FREE VEGAN

http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/

Don’t let the title put you off. Not every recipe is fat free, and there are plenty of variations. Susan Voisin has a treasure trove of all kinds of recipes, many of them super simple, but that you might not have tried yet. I thought baked tofu might require some special thumbscrew-torture-looking tofu press, but nope, it’s so easy and only has two ingredients. Plus, you know, tasty.

http://fatfreevegan.com/blog/2010/02/25/baked-tofu/

      There are gravies and sauces galore, plus tons of stuff to give you ideas for whatever you crave.

As a bonus, check out

https://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/

and

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-food/vegan-sources-of-protein/ for inspiration of all kinds that are all kinds of kind.

And finally, for those who don't want to cook and don't want to give up burgers, you might be pleasantly surprised by the vegan hamburger at https://burgerfi.com/

The bottom line is that vegan food isn’t any stranger than any other food. We have to eat to live and most of us do it every day, so it ought to be something we enjoy and also doesn’t make us feel bad. I mean that in both the physical and mental way. If you’re happy with your diet and your diet is keeping you healthy then fine, but if you are one of the growing number of people who are wondering if there is a way to have your (vegan) cake and eat it too, then maybe checking out one or two of these sites will give you more options to expand your dietary repertoire.

The Goodness I Found in 2017

Like many people, 2017 reached epic proportions of suckage for me. There was the global stuff, like politics and healthcare, and misogyny. There was all the typical stuff, like getting older faster than you are getting wiser, or having to deal with hypothetical burdens made real. My 2017 had surprises in all kinds of sizes and shapes, pretty much ensuring a fresh struggle for every single day. One thing that happened that was verybad, on a personal level, was that Sheila, my beloved fifteen-year-old cat developed a large red sore on the back of her right leg. At first it seemed like it was a scrape, maybe from jumping against something, or a scratch from one of the other cats that she licked and made worse. The vet assured that it was nothing and prescribed the usual. She got a piece of tape and took some cell samples, in case.

The next thing I know there was bad news and worse news. Sheila had a mast cell tumor and not only one. There were other smaller tumors at three other places on her body, including her ear. There was talk of it metastasizing, spread to internal organs. One vet mentioned, as if early bluntness might soften the inevitable, amputating her leg. I googled and binged, you bet I did. But the information was sparse, especially for cats. Plenty of information for dogs, but even then, it wasn't circumstantial. The hierarchy of medical care seems to follow humans to dogs, recent studies for cats, and somewhere far far down the list are all other beings which a human might love enough to pay for medical care. The first thing that had to be done was to perform blood tests, ultrasounds, scans, to make sure she was healthy enough in other ways and to make sure her heart was strong enough to survive surgery. She wasn't a young cat, and at least one vet mentioned care that extended for no more than one year, since it was perhaps within her natural life span anyway. I did not accept that, I could not. Not with my heart or my head. At that point she was still, in my mind, a spry kitten with a cute little mew who curled up next to me each night and purred me to sleep.

We decided, the vet and I, that the best course was to perform surgery right away, to excise all four tumors. The top half of her ear would have to be removed, but the other three places, the back of the arm, the inguinal (belly) and shoulder were superficial skin lesions. My vet, my wonderful vet, would perform the surgery herself. She was careful to remind me that with the multiple lesions, removing them was not a guarantee. With mast cell tumors more is bad. One to three means reoccurrence is low, more than four is a whole new unknown category.  I'm happy to say Sheila did well with her surgery. She came home the same day, pink skin puckered with stitches and slightly lopsided, but she was alive and home. 

Unfortunately, though my vet was very thorough, she was not able to get clean margins on the inguinal site and the larger, back of her arm site. I decided to take her to a veterinary oncologist. I realized soon after that first visit that this is where I should have taken her the moment I learned that my cat had cancer. It wasn't exactly the first time I'd heard the advice either. A surgeon once advised me that if you ever need to see a doctor, go to a specialist. I've heard it elsewhere too, and for some things, not for all things, you'll have to use your judgment on which things. But when the resolution matters, go to a specialist.

Not amused at the comparisons to poodles.

This vet made sure to answer all my questions. After multiple visits to the internet, and being the inquisitive and curious person I am, I had plenty. I am firm believer in acquiring as much information as you can when you are trying to make a decision about something. We decided that the best course was to have the oncological veterinary surgeon look at her, and if possible have another surgery to get clean margins. Which we did and I was surprised, because my chubby cat was running out of excess flesh to pull from. But she came through that surgery with fine too. Still, the pathology came back with dirty margins. They were microscopic, sure, but everybody knows how insidious cancer is.

Amazingly, though, there wasn't just one, option for treatment, there was a multitude. I got to spend another long conversation with my vet, discussing which option would be the best. We opted for a chemotherapeutic drug called CCNU. I'd heard of this kind of drug years ago, when it had been touted in Time magazine as the end of cancer. The drug then was called Gleevec, and it only worked on certain cancers, but for those that it did, it had few side effects and was as simple as taking a pill. I don't know much more about it than that, but I will say that a surprising bonus for cat owners is that cats tolerate it so well you might not even know they were taking it. 

So December 28, 2017 was Sheila's last chemo treatment. She's as spry and adorable as she was the day before she had a sore on her side. In a year that has seen so many surprisingly bad things, things that were, in general worse than you thought they were going to be (I'm talking mostly about personal things but it's been true in the wider world as well) this was a spot of brightness. It occurred to me that twenty years ago the only option would have been to euthanize her.

I got into bed on the last night of Sheila’s chemo, picked up the novel I’d been reading. Like every other night Sheila hopped up and walked around me, rubbed her face on my book and settled into the crook of my arm and began to purr. It was so normal, our habit playing like every other night before it for years on end. But here I paused and let at let the appreciation that I was here now, that she was here with me. That there existed smart and talented people in the world that had made it so.

So here is the goodness I found in 2017, and it’s not just mine, it can be yours, too. Things can be good in spite of the odds, no matter the status quo, even when you think you know whatever you knew. 

Wisdom doesn't go away; it wends a path for others to follow. Some things get better, some things will always get better.

Book Review: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle

Most of the tenets of this book I agreed with. The main reason I gave it two stars (out of five) is because of the question and answer format, which had a condescending and pedantic tone. Who is the questioner supposed to represent, the reader? Nuh-uh. The advice, though, is sound, but there are far better resources, even some free ones online, that can give you the same experience without the faux-Socratic bleating.

Tolle gets it wrong when he uses nature and animal analogies. Animals and insects, plants and trees actually have a very fine-tuned sense of time and some of them are better timekeepers than humans. In fact, nature is a constant reminder of what Tolle calls clock time. And while I'm debunking I have to say that, sadly yes, I have known a cat that could not relax. 

Whenever I read a book like this I try to find some aspect or lesson that I can take from it. And for this book I think it is that we do become quite infatuated with the dramas we create for ourselves, and even when those stories no longer exist yet are actively destroying our lives, we cling to them, because we believe they are our identity. Recognizing this can go a long way to releasing the burden of a bad past informing a bleak future. 

As an added note, in all fairness. This book was published in 1997, before mindfulness became mainstream. If this was the first, or only, book on the subject I had ever read, I would probably have given it a higher rating.

GOOD TO KNOW FRIDAY #2

Water is your enemy.

If you want to roast, bake, or fry something, and you want it to be crispy, you need the surface of the food to be dry. Why? Because wet things produce steam when heated. Steam turns the item soft and porous allowing more absorption, becomes then becomes softer. So after washing your vegetables, or tofu, or meat, don’t skip the step of patting them dry first. This is true if you are using a batter as well. Even though the batter is wet, most combinations of batter ingredients are designed to prevent the steam problem.

GOOD TO KNOW FRIDAY

This is a twofer.

You’ve probably heard that oats are good for you. Consuming oatmeal has a laundry list of health benefits. When applied topically, it can improve your complexion. Oats contain compounds which stimulate fibroblasts (the cells that provide structure for skin) and is a rich source of ferulic acid. If you google ferulic acid, you will see that many luxury beauty services will be happy to sell it to you for a tad more than the cost of breakfast.

Here’s a way to use the same serving of oats inside and out. Take a cup of steel cut oats and put them in a bowl and cover them with water. Let them soak overnight. Soaking makes grains easier to digest and shortens the cooking time. In the morning, drain the oat water into a container and rinse the oats. You can cook the oats according to the usual rules, although the cooking time will be reduced because of their overnight ‘sprouting’. 

Using your fingers or a cotton ball wipe the oat water over your face and let it sink in, for at least fifteen minutes or overnight. You don’t necessarily need to wash it off, but if you want to all you need is a damp cloth or a splash of tepid water to remove. You can save the rest and use it each day for the next few days. You can also add it to your bath or use it as a pretreatment before washing your hair.

The Soundtrack to You And Me And Mars

Yesterday my short story, You and Me and Mars, came out on

http://lunastationquarterly.com/

I started writing this story a long time ago, over seventeen years, but I can still summon every essence of that story by a method that isn’t discussed much but is an invaluable tool to many writers. I have a musical index.

If the subject ever comes up, most writers will tell you that music is indispensable to them. Some writers need a background sound to block out the usual sounds of mundane reality. It’s often just music, classical or drum sounds or even weird experimental stuff. Writers tend to not listen to actual songs while they are writing, since the lyrics can be distracting, although I’ve known a few who do not mind lyrics, so long as it is distracting from spoken voices. Although I have heard of at least one person who listened to talk radio as they wrote. Sometimes sounds that sound like words but aren’t differentiable into meaning will do the trick, like metal or Nirvana. My personal choice is silence. I’d write in a stone temple on an island filled with mute animals wearing cotton mittens if I could. But music definitely has its place in my writing.

For every story I write, I develop a playlist of songs that encapsulate scenes, atmosphere, theme or emotion. Not every song stays in the playlist as the story evolves. Sometimes I’ll hear a discarded song in some random context and I’ll think, “Oh yeah, that was the song when my protagonist was going to use x to conquer y. Ah nostalgia.” Of course no one would have a clue to what I was talking about, but if you’re a writer who uses music to keep track of the emotional content of your story, you have an idea of what I’m talking about.

This story, being one of the first stories I wrote, has a long soundtrack. But here are the songs that most define it as it evolved, and the ones that upon hearing can instantly transport me into this story’s world:

“Run to the Water” by Live. This song is the theme song, the song that, if it were a true soundtrack, would be the intro and outro. Every beat of this story is contained in this song. In fact, if you put this song on repeat and read the story, you’d find the theme echoed in every refrain. The speaker was burnt to the core, but not broken.  (I have no idea what the writer of this song meant, but it will never mean anything but the successful transformation of Mars by a single human to me)

When the speaker becomes part of the mission, and especially when she is contemplating their purpose, during the takeoff:

“Is It Like Today?” by World Party.

“Don’t Give Up On Us Baby” by David Soul is the song that encompasses the speaker’s literal and metaphorical increasing distance from the person she is addressing in the story, which echoes the shift from romantic love to heroic love to familial as she realizes none of those could be possibly be returned.

The speaker’s try/fail attempts to release the drones has “Rock Me Gently” by Andy Kim playing in the background.

This song is longer than the scene it accompanies but “Walk On” by U2 expresses the idea of taking a leap forward without assurance, knowing that even though you don’t have to do it, if you do, there is no going back.

“Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen is pretty obvious, the joy of exploring a new world and the memory of exploring a first love.

“Flood” by Jars of Clay for the storm and “SOS” by ABBA for the try/fail sequence in which the captain dies.

“If You Only Knew” by Shinedown followed the speaker’s try/fail cycle of sickness and adaptation and learning to terraform the planet on her own, as well as initiating the transition from the singular to the plural you.

Sometimes I would listen to “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac when I wanted to get in touch with the loneliness that the speaker felt as the decades passed. This would also define the transition when the singular ‘you’ transforms to the plural ‘you’ of humanity that she is preparing the world for.

There are a lot of versions of this song, and I think I have all of them in my music library, but “Feeling Good” by Muse is the one I listened to as I thought about the speaker’s discovery of the body of water.

I had a few others I listened to over the years, but as the story evolved, they didn’t fit as well, and so I no longer visualize elements of this story when I hear them.

So rest easy, baby. Rest easy. And recognize it all as light and rainbows, smashed to smithereens. And be happy. Because maybe somebody's out there, building a paradise for you, on the off chance you might make it there someday.

You and Me and Mars on Luna Station Quarterly

Did you know that there is a website devoted to women writing science fiction? Well there is and it's filled with awesome stories. And this week you can even find a story by me there. Check it out!

http://lunastationquarterly.com/story/you-and-me-and-mars/

The Socially Awkward Guide to WorldCon75

Around 1993 I went to my first Science Fiction convention at the crumbling Castlegate Hotel in Atlanta. My sister and I would stroll the dealers room arm in arm looking for VHS copies of Red Dwarf, which was impossible to find in the US. We graduated to Dragon Con and enjoyed many years of discovering new and fun things, until that became an insurmountable, unwieldy labyrinth. I don't have my sister anymore, so navigating a con alone is like having one eye shut and flailing. I did have my writing friends, Gary and Mike and Jenn. (You may not know Jenn yet, but you will soon. Her epic fantasy, The Ruin of Kings, is set to hit big soon.)

Of course, I couldn't tag along with them everywhere, they had their own stuff to do, so I struck out on my own.

It was my first time visiting Helsinki, and my first big trip traveling alone. I know from previous trips the first order of business is to figure out the transit system. The station names are Finnish street names. Umlaut-laden multi-syllable consonant-heavy words. Of course if you don't read Finnish they also show the names in Swedish, which looks nothing like  Finnish, or English. 

When you ride the ride the trams or the trains you are to press when your stop is next. If nobody presses their button the tram driver doesn't stop. This may be an imperfect system. Or maybe the driver was annoyed that, due to my anxiety over missing my stop, I kept mashing my stop button repeatedly. LIke I am groot repeatedly. My bad, HSL.

Lyrics: This one's for the lonely The ones that seek and find Only to be let down Time after time This one's for the torn down The experts at the fall Come on friends get up now You're not alone at all And this part was for her This part was for her This part was for her Does she remember?

I did better when walking. Once I got into the groove of getting around, I popped in my earbuds and let this song be my soundrack, security,  and courage.

Down Bulevardi I went and through the Esplanadi, passing statues and fountains. Some serious, men with big mallets and bears, but also seals spitting at mermaids.  In Finland, wearing a bear is a fashion statement, especially if you're a Finnish muse. I wonder what you would wear if you're a vegetarian muse? 

Wearing a bear, as one does, in Finland. JL Runeberg statue

I stopped at a cafe that reminded me of Bioshock Infinite...

cafe on the Esplanadi, Helsinki

...and had a blue cheese bagel, a special cake to celebrate Finland's 100th year, and a cappucino with a foam heart. At the water's edge I bought a paper bag filled with a liter of strawberries while I waited to meet up with some other writers to catch the ferry to Suomenlinna, the sea fortress.

Back at the Messukeskos Convention center, I roamed around and saw these kickass girls. I loved how they were walking along all normal but as soon as I asked to take their picture they immediately formed up into their character's ideal stance:

I ran into the inimitable Alasdair Stuart from http://escapepod.org/ which was a huge deal for me. He hosted the episode of Escape Pod my short story, Joolie and Irdl, was featured on, but even before that I loved listening to his enthusiastic introductions on the podcast. Even though I was very nervous about approaching someone I didn't know and bothering them, you can see from the picture that he is as nice in person as he sounds on the podcast.

Gary and I spent some time in lines and had a great conversation about lines (or if you're all fancy-like you can call them queues) and Finnnish culture and politics and people and buckets, and how to signal to your seatmate you want to exit the train without actually speaking to them (begin putting on your gloves, examine your transfer ticket, etc). In general, Finnish people don't smile at strangers, or at least, they are not as gregarious as Americans, but no stereotype is true all the time. This girl is the antithesis to socially awkward and was one of my favorite people I met in Helsinki.

Effie Sieberg, Trailer Park panel

Mikko Rauhala and Benjamin C. Kinney, Superintelligence panel

I went to some panels, but it was tricky to manage. So many people showed up you had to get in line early. Eventually the organizers began moving things to larger rooms. I did manage to go to a few panels. Benjamin C. Kinney at the Superintelligence Panel. Tom Crosshill moderated almost all of the panels I went to. I particularly enjoyed this little incident during the Superintelligence panel. After the panelists have discussed the topics the floor is opened to questions and the moderator usually repeats the question using the mic so that everyone can hear what is being asked. There was this one particular commenter who had a surprisingly loud and resonant voice - so much so that the entire audience did a collective startle take. Not missing a beat and dry as can be, Crosshill said, "I will now repeat the question in case someone did not hear it." Who knows what the panel's response was, since the audience was doubled over in laughter.

Standing in line and sitting in panels is the easy part. One problem I had (have), is that if I recognize someone but don't 'know' them, I get kind of tunnel vision directed a few centimeters to their left or right, like they're a sun I can't look directly at, and if I'm close enough to interact with them I start to imagine I might say something stupid. I usually overcome this by a) becoming very interested in my phone b) retreating, or c) saying something even more stupid. Case in point:  There was a person that I had been IM'ing with prior to the convention and had wanted to meet in person. I did see them peripherally here and there. They had told me the various panels and meetings they would be attending, but the opportunity to engage in conversation never arose. Finally, on the last morning, I was eating in a cafe and I saw them, at a table amongst a group of other people I recognized. Normally I wouldn't disturb someone while they are eating, but I said, self, be bold, this is the last day, you won't have another chance. So I summoned my courage and went over and introduced myself. This person, gently, mentioned that they were in a meeting. A meeting I knew about because they had told me about it prior to the convention. Some part of my brain was calculating time zones and matching up dates to events,  but what came out of my mouth was somehow questioning why this person was at this meeting. They graciously and politely explained what what they were doing why they were there, while all the other members of the meeting waited.

So yeah. That happened.

I slunk away like Charlie Brown. I wanted to go home and hide in a book. But I was at a convention, in Helsinki, and it wouldn't do to go to the airport an entire day early. I circled the dealers room, head down, stared at my phone, and decided to go get in a line for a panel. It was way early, but at least I know I can't screw up standing in a line.

There were already three people leaning against the wall by the door to the Tomorrows Cool SF Physics panel when I arrived. This was the last day and people had learned to show up early to something they really wanted to see. A man came up at the same time as I, and we both stared at the poster, phones in hand, pondering if the update on the wall was the same as the update in the app. Deciding it must be, I settled at one end of the waiting people and the man smiled and went to the other. Soon a staff person came up and handed the man the end-of-the-line sign.

Evidently I can screw up standing in a line.

I moved into the spot after the man, who looked every bit Plato's ideal of a Finnish person, except for his everpresent American-style smile, and held out my hand for the sign. It wasn't long before someone else joined the line and I relegated the sign to him. We three, the Finn, me and an Englishman, struck up a conversation, and the cloud of mortification of the morning's foibles dissipated at least for the time being. 

By the end of the day I was mostly okay, and Gary and I joined Mike and Jenn at the lobby of the Holiday Inn. George RR Martin happened along and that is where the (semi infamous?) photo was taken. He didn't really tell me how ASOIAF ended. What he said was that the Mars company and Finland had reached a deal where the peanuts in Snickers bars were being replaced by salted licorice. 

So, all in all, it is possible for the socially awkard to survive a worldcon. Now you know that if you ever happen to recognize me at an event and I fail to engage you like a proper human, it isn't that I'm anti-social, or rude, or even clueless. It's only a mild terror of engaging other people.

Brief Musing On Time and Entropy

My physics education was so long ago it was practically in the dark ages. Cold fusion was going to be a reality within five years.  That's probably not much of a grounding epoch, since people are still saying that. Suffice it to say it was a long time ago. Most of what I remember is a fever dream of strange possibilities that got even stranger the deeper you delved into them. Like Alice, I came out of the looking glass and settled upon more mundane pursuits, but a few things stuck with me over the years.

One thing, which we learned early on, was that our equations gave us two answers for time. Forward time and Negative time. We were taught to discard the negative one, usually with some hand-waving, and certainly for Newtonian physics, it's all fine and good. But I always liked the possiblity of the negative time solution. It was like a secret we got to keep, that even though we didn't use it, nothing in the math prevented it from being true. If you've ever had an event in your life that you wanted, more than anything, to go back in change, you'll understand why I write the other time solution, if not on paper, then at least in the back of my mind, where I occasionally take it out and ponder it. It's not a unique idea.

https://smile.amazon.com/Time-Traveler-Scientists-Personal-Mission-ebook/dp/B001T4ZHRC/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1498655618&sr=8-6&keywords=time+traveler

The thing I detested most, the thing I found most disturbing was entropy. Without any math you can describe it like this. Entropy is a measure of disorder of a system. Entropy never decreases. The universe is a system and will eventually reach a point of disorder so that nothing more can be accomplished. This is known as the heat death of the universe. I distinctly remember working out the proof on an exam, and sitting in my chair, my lap covered in eraser crumbs and graphite, thinking, no, I don't accept this. My math was right. I had followed the rules and surely would get the points for showing my work. But it bothered me. To think of all the effort, all the striving, all of our endeavoring to make order of the chaos, and it's all going in the opposite direction whether we like it or not. 

Some may not be surprised that the thing I love the most (that time is malleable) and the thing I hate the most (that nothing productive will result from the striking of time's arrow) are intimately connected. It can be said that entropy defines the arrow of time. But what if something were amiss, something that deflated the pomposity of entropy while giving a little credence to the malleability of time? What it time isn't as sticky as we've been led to believe? What if we have yet to discover what lies in the shadow we cast while we face ever forward?

Making plans

You make plans; good ones, too. And the universe laughs.

The best I can do right now is try to balance all the things that are in front of me. I know that you are doing the same, and I wish the best in your endeavors. 

I'll have more words after February is done.

Image courtesy of Michael Grab at Gravity Glue

A Man and a Puppy in Moorea

Due to one of those time glitches of scheduling travel within travel, Hunter and I spent about three hours in an open air restaurant waiting for the ferry to take us from Tahiti to Moorea. It wasn't the lush view of the mountain or the sun glittering on the lagoon, but at least it had comfortable tables and the breeze was cool. I watched the people passing through, ordering lunch or snacks or Hinano beer. A tall man with sunglasses and a puppy ordered a beer and sat toward the back alone. I might not have noticed him at all if it hadn't been for the puppy. It looked like baby pit bull, its belly resting against the palm of the man's hand, and it observed the world with the stoic gaze from its blue eyes.

I watched other people, birds, played imaginary tetris with containers. At one point Hunter tapped me and indicated that I look at something over my shoulder. It was the same man holding the puppy near the railing as if showing it something below. When I turned back to Hunter he was holding his hand on his chest, his eyes wide with shock. "I only wanted you to see the puppy. If I would have known he was going to hold it over the railing I wouldn't have made you look."

Moorea from the ferry

He was mostly joking, the puppy hadn't been dangled, and soon the man went back to his seat, and later he took his empty beer back to the counter and walked away. I was surprised later, at least an hour, that he was still there. I wondered if he was waiting, like us, for the ferry. I'd assumed he was a local and as such he might have known that the ferry had a limited schedule on Sundays. Eventually I lost track of him again, as we purchased our tickets and boarded the ferry with cars and mopeds, families counting suitcases, a group of teenage girls from some kind of sporting event, excited to order the swirls of pale chocolate and vanilla soft serve and french fries from the snack bar in the middle of the ferry. Eventually we escaped the din of the dining section and went to the front where we watched the lush tree covered atoll approach.

We debarked into a chaotic port and waited for mini tractors to unload the pallets of luggage from the yawning belly of the ferry. People around us chatted in French and Polynesian but eventually we found transportation to the Intercontinental Resort: the local bus. It was sparsely crowded, but the seats were small enough that Hunter and I could not sit near each other and keep our luggage, too. I wedged my suitcase into the aisle seat and clamored over it, ready to see what I might see out my bus window.

But as I was settling who did I see sitting opposite me alone on the bus but the same man with the puppy from the ferry restaurant. He did not smile at me or in any way acknowledge my presence, even though we'd sat within a few meters of each other for literally hours and I'd given the puppy plenty of glances. He didn't acknowledge the puppy resting against his chest either, except the occasional brushing whups on its nose as he moved it from one arm to the other.  I began to wonder what kind of culture this was, in regard to animals. Everyone I'd met so far had been warm and friendly to...other people. For all I knew this was some kind of dog-fighting initiation. For all I knew the puppy could be this man's lunch. 

I turned my attention to the window. Moorea is not a big island and the local bus gave me a chance to see plenty of locals gathering at the beaches and walking from house to house. I could smell the dinners from the ahi ma'a, the way of cooking food long and slow in banana leaves in an underground oven. There were dogs too, untethered and at ease, ears bouncing and tails making slow circles as they maneuvered from yard to yard. It rained softly, and I saw one of those rare sights no camera could justice, a rainbow over the mountain. It put it me in mind of my long dead sister, who had saved pictures of rainbows and painted them.

The bus had stopped and there was movement, but I was lost in my own thoughts and wasn't paying much attention. We were at a village. Outside my window a girl with long black hair straddled a bicycle. I couldn't see her face, but her posture was that of a young person, and she held out her hands in reception. I couldn't tell if she was happy or sad, but I could see the face of the man handing her the puppy.

I knew that face. The man at the ferry restaurant had been a stranger to me, but in his expression now he was as familiar as my own face in the mirror. I didn't know if the girl was his wife or his daughter or girlfriend, but I knew her happiness was reflected in the joy in his face as he held out the puppy to her, and I knew that man's heart, then, like I know my own. 

When you travel you think you’re getting away from it all. But you can’t get away, not really, because wherever you go, you take yourself with you, and that includes all your habits and judgments and predisposed states of mind. What you can do though, is see humanity through the lens of another culture, and that alone makes the trip worthwhile.

Where I Get My Protein

The single most common question vegetarians and vegans get is "Where do you get your protein?" There is an obvious answer, and as with most things regarding food that answer is scattered, smothered, covered and chunked with everything from boring science to outright propaganda. The short answer is that they get their protein from the food they eat, because all food is made up of some combination of three things: protein, fat, and carbohydrate. 

A related question is usually along the lines of, "So you have to eat weird spongy bricks floating in water, or mushy beans all the time?" Nope. Fruits and vegetables have protein. Broccoli, spinach, peanuts, figs, sunflower seeds, potatoes, strawberries, corn, avocado, peppers, barley, cabbage, and any plant you can name all have protein. A person who only eats plants (fruits and vegetables), can get enough protein without even thinking about it. Still not convinced? Have you ever seen a bull? Over two thousand pounds of muscle and bone, and it all came from plants.

 But, like an omnivore, a vegetarian who eats junk food will be unhealthy.  "What's an omnivore?" or, more disturbingly, but sadly not more uncommon, is the follow up question, "You still eat chicken, right?" 

So, here's a list of diets and their definitions. 

Look into my eyes

Carnivore:  Eats animals almost exclusively. Cows, pigs, chickens, fish, sheep, snails, crickets. If you want a cheat sheet, you can remember the basic tenet that if it has eyes it's meat, but that's not foolproof. Best to go back to the tree of life classification systems from your Kings Play Chess On Fine Green Sand high school biology to really understand what an 'animal' is. Fun fact: some animals, like cats, are obligate carnivores, meaning they couldn't survive on a vegetarian diet even if they wanted to. 

Omnivore: Eats a combination of animals and plants. This would seem to be the diet with the widest range of food choices, but oddly, in my personal experience and my observations of what other people eat, most omnivores are really carnivores with the exception of small amounts of potatoes (french fries) and corn (breading) added. Fun fact from The Omnivore's Dilemma: Chicken McNuggets contain more corn than chicken.

too pretty to eat

Pescetarian: Eats plants, but also fish. Sometimes wrongly classified as a type of vegetarian, hence the combination of pesce- meaning fish, and -tarian, as if to imply vegetarianism, but, no. Fish are animals. Possibly the mistake came from the pre-Nemo era, when fish were not considered cute enough to be animals. 

Now things get murky, and the eye-rolling, defensiveness, name-calling and fear-mongering really begin. Introducing the VEGETARIANS!

Lacto-ovo Vegetarians: As sexy as the name is you'd think it was going to be special. Nope, eats plants, but also eats dairy products and eggs. You can subdivide these categories further into lacto only or ovo only, but the division is usually based on allergies or taste preference.

cluck and moo

eggplant flower

Whole Food Plant Based Vegetarians WFPB: Eats plants. No dairy or eggs. This category is sometimes further restricted by allowing no oil (no means no. No coconut, no olive, no fun). The focus of the WFPB diet is on foods that are minimally processed. The diet is designed for health and the components of the diet have been vetted by numerous scientific studies. It is a de facto vegan diet, but it should be distinguished from the practice of veganism, which encompasses more than nutrition, as described below.

An animal sitting on a plant.

Vegan: Often considered the strictest diet, although it's not a diet at all, but a lifestyle choice. (However, if you are just comparing the diet aspect, WFPB-no-oil has more limited choices than a vegan diet. Example: oreos) The basis of veganism is to completely avoid consumption or use of any product derived from an animal. Vegans don't eat any animal products, including honey (bee slave labor). Vegans don't wear leather or silk coats or shoes, they don't take medications that are suspended in gelatin (derived from hoofs), or from continuously impregnated mares (Premarin-a portmanteau word coming from 'pregnant' and 'mare').  Veganism has strong ethical underpinnings.  Vegans see all living things as part of a balanced ecosystem, and make choices that benefit or at least do minimal harm to that connected system. If you'd like a more comprehensive and helpful guide to becoming vegan, check out Tully Zander's site: http://www.vegansfirst.com/

Lucas Cranach the Elder painting of A and E with an apple. The original fruitarians.

Fruitarian: Eats only fruit (which includes seeds). This is a real thing, or so I am told, I have never actually met one. Fruitarians can be further restricted by eating only fruit or seeds that 'fall' from a plant. But before you fall off your paleo horse from laughing consider this fun fact: Dental studies of early hominids have shown that our ancestors ate a primarily fruitarian diet, making it a more accurate definition of a paleo diet than the reducing diet of the same name that is in vogue these days.

How I Discovered Mindfulness

When I was very young I would sometimes, for no reason at all, be overcome by an anticipatory bliss, a punch in the solar plexus that feels like hunger and satisfaction shaking hands, and think to myself, “I wonder what’s going to happen next.”

Occasionally a wonderful thing did follow, like a present or a story, or the opportunity to touch a turtle shell. But everyone knows the cause and effect of anticipating a thing and then getting it. What I’m talking about here is a subtler experience, where the result of the anticipation didn’t impact how or why or when it happened. It was merely a state my mind tended to enter apropos of nothing.

As I got older, the time between those hopeful sparks grew until they faded completely. I regained the ability when I began to think about and write science fiction, where my imagination created possibilities that outpaced reality, or skipped over to a world where the most debilitating issues still plagued humanity. But it was a deliberate kind of optimism, squeezed from my orchard of life’s-not-fair lemons. In daily life, I learned not to ask what might happen next, and I learned the hard way to never make the assertion, “It can’t possibly get any worse.” I muddled through, though, head down and shoulders hunched, until a cornucopia of very bad things happened in a proportionally very short amount of time. Some of those things didn’t stop happening, either, and still continue to this day. I became very cautious, slow to dip a toe into the unknown, preferring an ‘evil that you know’ kind of stance. I became very still and cautious, the modern day equivalent of buttressing myself against the monsters lurking beyond the horizon. But even tiptoeing past the monsters, coated in invisibility spray, isn’t enough to stave off the possibility that there is no set amount of bad things that can happen to a person. My invisibility spray would be washed away in the rain, or I’d sneeze and be back at square one, fighting a tidal wave with a sword, drowning no matter how hard or fast I parried.

Finally, too exhausted to go on, I threw off all my armor, all those little tricks and incantations against doom. I would only concentrate on the next minute. There were many terrible things all around that minute, before and after, but I was only going to focus on what was contained in the space and time within which I presently existed. Now, I am only brushing my teeth. Now for this minute I am only going to chew and swallow. Now I will open this door. And so, minute by minute, I swam out of the abyss. Eventually I hit a smooth patch and I was able to visit the realm of ordinary people once again. 

Because I didn’t want to be dragged into those depths again, I began to take steps to fortify my mind’s fortress. I started walking, outside, in parks and around water whenever possible. I started reading about mindfulness and yoga and happiness and life hacks. I made lists and goals and even managed to take back some time that modern life was siphoning off me by the jugful. I discovered, of course, that what I had been doing as a life-saving measure was already a foundation for an entire way of existing, and had been in practice for thousands of years.

So here's what I discovered, and it's a momentous thing. It's the secret to life. More specifically, it's the secret to filling the vessel of time that will take the shape of your life with meaning.  So, here it is: Mindfulness is an awareness of the content of the present instant you are in. That doesn't seem like a big deal, and you probably experienced mindfulness when you read that sentence. So why isn't everyone doing it all the time if it's so great? Well, mindfulness is difficult to maintain beyond a few seconds. If you don't believe me, try and do nothing but be aware of your surroundings for sixty seconds, without having a thought about the future or the past. Mindfulness is so slippery that an entire discipline has been developed around it, which you might know by the name meditation.

Meditation, sadly, is a loaded word in our culture. Somehow people associate it with religion or hippie political movements or incense-waving woo-woo. But meditation in its simplest form is the practice of mindfulness for a set amount of time. This regular practice will increase the amount and quality of mindfulness. Meditation teaches you how to be mindful, but the end goal is mindfulness. Not to be too alliterative, but the more mindfulness one's minutes are, the more meaningful one's life becomes. No one, not even the oldest, stillest, up-on-the-highest-mountain-peak monk is mindful all the time. It's merely a state that you can enter at will, and anyone can do it, at any time. And once you get into that habit, you'll find yourself asking yourself, with all the anticipatory bliss that lies within you, "I wonder what's going to happen now."

If you're interested in investigating mindfulness meditation, check out David Cain's blog http://www.raptitude.com/, where he has several ebooks about how to meditate, and a month-long class for beginners called Camp Calm.

How To Know if You Are a Writer

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” -Thomas Mann

"Writers write." -Anonymous

We are all writers. If you are reading this, then you have written something in your life, because writing is simply putting symbols together into strings of comprehensible meaning. You already know that you can write, little-w write. You want to know if you are a Writer. Big-W. But as the above quotes demonstrate, it isn’t an easy question to answer, and no pithy quip will do. Anyone who has story inside them and wondered if it should come out has pondered this conundrum. Am I a Writer? Should I be Writing? How do I know if I have what it takes?

Some of us began our writing journey with this idea: Being a writer is a momentous responsibility. It should be heralded by a visitation from someone who knows the deal, a tap on your shoulder to say, “It’s time.” That was me, most of my youth. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I kept waiting for the guru with the lamp to light my path so the words could find their way out. It never happened. I had to turn the damn lamp on myself.

Or you may know that an outward sign is silly, that a writer’s quest begins within. But you have responsibilities. You have a job, and bills, and maybe people who depend on you. How do you balance all the demands of life and a writing career? There's already a shortage of time in your day.

You might even be one of the lucky ones: You’ve given yourself permission to write and you’ve got a story and the bills are getting paid, independent of your contribution. But you're still at a loss. How does the story get from me to the that sacred unicorn known as the ‘reader’? Or you might have other issues. In fact, if you’re human, you have other issues. Your parents want you to be a doctor, not a writer. You don’t have thumbs. You're dyslexic. Jupiter isn’t in Aphrodite until next century. Whatever the excuse you're using to keep the story inside, I promise, can be surmounted.

Welp. I’m here to tell you how you can answer all those questions, and more. Here’s a test to determine if you are a Big-W writer. You don’t need to purchase anything and you don’t need any special materials. You will need something to physically write on. Pen and paper or a digital medium with the capacity for saving your work so that you can see it at some point in the future. The one thing you will need in abundance you can’t purchase, and that thing is patience. Fortunately, patience is an unlimited commodity once you’ve trained yourself in it. The test takes time, I won’t lie, but you will have the time for it. No matter how busy your schedule is, the big W test adapts to you.

Okay, ready to begin? The exercises should be done in order. If it isn’t expressed, you can do more than one in a day or you can skip days in between, but try not to let the slack time between steps stretch longer than a week or two.

Step one:

This one is easy and you probably already know what it is. Today you are going to write. You can write anything you want, but you must devote yourself to the task for at least fifteen minutes. That’s it. If you can’t think of anything to write, try googling writing prompts, but don’t include the searching part in your fifteen minutes.

Step two:

Today you are going to write again. You can continue whatever you were writing from step one or write something completely new. This time you can write for as long as you want, but you must write at least 350 words.

Step three:

Today you are going to create an outline for a complete but short story. You can use the components of the prior days or something new, it can even be that an abbreviated version of your magnum opus. An outline should include the following elements: A sentence describing the beginning, one for the middle and one for the end. The names of the characters. The thing that changes. You can spend as long as you like on it, but if it feels too uncomfortable to come up with an idea, you may add an explosion.

Step four:

Write the story from your outline in step three. The story can be the novel you have dreamed of writing, but try to only include the bare bones, the most important parts. If you feel like you can’t write this story within a week, that’s okay. Take the last day to add a few sentences to sum up the parts you didn’t get to for cohesion.

Step five:

Put that story away. You are not allowed to look at it again until I tell you to. Instead write something new. Decide whether you liked the timed writing or the word limit and let that guide you. Remember to set a goal, the minimum being either x minutes or y words.

Step six:

Repeat step five, but using the schedule of your life for how often. Keep doing this for one to three months, until you have a finished story or chapter or a completed vignette or essay. You can also try writing with friends, timed sprints, dictating and transcribing, doodling your scenes, or imitating the style of your favorite author.

Step seven:

Today you aren’t going to write. Today you are going to read what you’ve written. If you can, try reading it out loud. Not to judge it, but to ask these questions: Did the character/status quo change? Was a conflict resolved? If you can’t answer those questions, then think about how you can add those things to what you’ve written, or how you can add a section which includes those things. Don’t write the changes or additions this time. Only add notes to yourself for how you will do that.

Step eight:

Write the changes from step seven. Allow at least one day but no longer than one week to elapse between step seven and eight.

Step nine:

Read what you’ve written and change anything you’re not happy with, but make sure that at least one 24-hour period has elapsed between step eight and step nine. Make sure that the finished product is legible and as free from typos as you can make it. If it isn’t a complete story, at the least try to have a self-contained segment.

Step ten:

Prepare yourself. This is the point where many get tripped up. It may be the hardest step of all, but it’s crucial that you not skip it. You must let someone else read this thing you have written. It can be a writing group, another writer, a friend, or an anonymous (or not) online venue, or a teacher or mentor. However, it should absolutely not be your mother, spouse or offspring.

A note on step ten: Step ten is really the divider between little w and big W, and step ten won’t mean anything if you can’t do step eleven.

Step eleven:

Whatever the response the reader gives, say thank you and nothing else. It doesn’t matter if you don’t agree or don’t understand, or if they don’t give the amount of feedback you’d like. Step eleven is about gratitude, not fulfillment.

If they’ve given you written notes you can go over them at your leisure and consider whether to make any changes based on the critique. However, it is your story and ultimately only you get to decide how it is told.

Step twelve:

Today is a special day, and it’s one that you must prepare for. Today you are going to devote entirely to writing, so make sure you clear your schedule, make arrangements for an unencumbered day off of work and inform your family members that you will not be available for at least eight hours. Ideally, this step would be accomplished in a closed room with no other people around, so if you can swing getting a hotel room or the use of a friend’s empty vacation home for the day then do it. Don’t set up anywhere where people who normally expect things from you are. Go to a library or a coffee shop at least, but try to go somewhere where you can spend at least eight hours uninterrupted. Once you’re settled in, turn off your phone, turn off all access to email, google, texts. That’s right, no internet. No distractions.  Today is an entire day of you and your writing.

Write, scribble, outline, or brainstorm, for a minimum of 45 minutes, but don’t write to exhaustion. Take a break for no longer than fifteen minutes. You may check your phone if you must but only if you can limit yourself to fifteen minutes. Once you’re satisfied the world has not crumbled without your thumb’s exertion, turn everything off again, and start writing for another session of 45 minutes to an hour. Take a good long break at some point for a meal. But try to complete seven 45-minute sessions of writing.

Marathon writing, like marathon anything, is hard. Don’t expect to come out of your first one with a gold medal. But don’t surprised if you end up with a real sense of accomplishment, either.

Step thirteen:

So now you have a veritable treasure trove of material from the blood sweat and tears of step twelve.

Put it away.

Remember that story I made you hide from yourself in step five? Today you’re going to take out this cooled manuscript that you haven’t thought about in months and read it. Do you think it’s pretty good? Do you think it needs a tweak? How would you feel if someone else read it? Now ask those questions about what you wrote in step twelve.

Finally, think about this. What is a Writer? What have you become? You’ve probably figured out by now that some version of these steps is how writers become Writers. Every published work you’ve ever read encompasses one or some combination of the above steps. Pick the one that works for you and go with it, until it doesn’t and then try another. Continue forever.

One final thought:  If you don’t know the answer you can always go back to step one and go through it again, because there is only one limiting factor to being a Writer, and that is whether or not you do it.

Enter Sandy's mind

This is my blog. It's going to be about the things I'm interested in. In case you are worried about the consequences of some radical quantum of information entering your mind from mine, here's a short list of things I will probably blog about:

Writing: I write fiction. I'm particularly interested in the craft of writing, and the various paths to publication. On this blog I will be mostly writing about the creative process of writing and getting published.

Reading: I read a lot and books are something I like to talk about. I read as varied and widely as I possible can.

Philosophy: I am very curious about all that exists and the intersection between reality, nonreality, and my mind.

Food: I like to eat. I've been a vegetarian for over a year, and I'm exploring veganism. 

Mindfulness: I've been exploring this topic long before I knew this was what it was called. I'm fascinated with the study of getting better as I get older, and I'm patiently waiting for the world to catch up to the utopia I've been expecting for over forty years.

Other miscellaneous interests: Cats, humor, television shows, music, yoga, and video games.

Things that I'm not interested in: Politics and religion, in so far that they are used for shock value. That goes for things that are controversial for the sake of getting attention and subjects that cannot be discussed rationally.