May. 6th, 2013

altarflame: (deluge)
If you'd like to see an overwhelmed, long winded ramble about WHAT I CAN DO DIFFERENTLY TO CHANGE MY LIFE, that is under the cut. It is not really something finished, with an ending. I wrote it almost 2 weeks ago and, as so often happens, writing it out and then reading what I'd written made a lot of answers very clear to me. Usually when this happens I just delete the entry without posting; this time though it was saved and when I went to update again, it was here. )




What I wanted to say today, was:
1.) I realized yesterday how huge the backlog of pictures I want to post is becoming, and then spent over an hour selecting, resizing and uploading almost 80 of them. There will be at least a couple of huge picture posts really soon :) I have some great stuff!

2.) Aaron and I have started a documentary unit study. It's micro learning in many senses - 3D printers! What is meth, anyway? Tibetan monks, gun control, Nikola Tesla - but the macro learning is what I'm more interested in, with this. We started with this big talk about how every documentary is made by a person or persons who have some kind of driving agenda, and the totally contradictory yet factual cases one can make for various things. For instance, a hypothetical "FIU is a totally green university" vs a hypothetical "FIU is a university that is destroying the environment"...both are highly defensible and could be made into a convincing hour long presentation. Neither are the whole truth, though. We're also doing a lot of talking about how documentary subjects overlap. They're often organized into groups that include things like, "science" even though technically, "drugs," "the environment," "nature," and "technology" are all also science. There is biography in politics, and politics in conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories in philosophy, and so on. I want to show him at least a couple of single-topic documentaries that are totally against each other. We're highlighting the ways dramatization can blur the truth or seem persuasive, and I'm asking him to try to see what he can learn from a given documentary as well as what questions he should ask about it's motivations, sourcing, and so on.

Aaaanyway, today he watched the hour long National Geographic special on the Bermuda Triangle (available on YouTube, not actually on that list I linked previously). He was extremely frustrated with how open ended it left the whole issue of WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THE SHIPS AND PLANES AND WHY ("the methane gas bubbles could happen anywhere, it's just a coincidence if they're happening there over and over!") but then he was like, "You know, Mom? It seems like anything 'supernatural' is just peoples' way of explaining things they don't understand yet." And I was like, "Welp. That's a pretty profound statement many other people have also made." Then we talked about that tribes from a movie a generation ago that incorporated found Coke bottles into their religious ceremonies and saw planes flying overhead as God, and he wanted to go back to this big conversation we had weeks ago about placebo and I was like LISTEN KID. I've got stuff to do. Your brain's gonna have to quietly explode in another room while I wash some dishes and figure out what's for dinner :p

I think it's a great supplemental thing for him, that is very very painless compared to, say, getting him up to grade level in math and forcing him to do creative writing. Both of which are deeply painful.




ETA: I've learned that the anti-anxiety med they gave me at the ER - Lorazepam, aka Ativan - is strongly contraindicated for dissociative disorder (which I have) as well as being seriously addictive. Meaning that, you know, maybe the ER nurses shouldn't be able to hand out and advise people on psychiatric medications? This chick sat with me telling me I needed to experience it, see how I felt, if it was something that could help me, she really sat down with me and talked it up for like 15 quiet one on one minutes - and I went home with a prescription for a whole bottle of it (that has just sat). *sigh* This is right on the heels of them trying to refer me out to a cosmetic dentist for the first lump on my wrist, and the year after they gave Aaron DTaP when I asked/signed for a tetanus shot only (an old nail went through his Croc, into his foot). Aaron has had three years of DTaP shots before without incident so for him this is not the end of the world, just a booster. For a kid like my nephew Brian, or Elise, who have had previous seizures, though, and not been vaccinated with DTaP because of it, it could be a big fucking deal to a parent. The fact that they injected a kid with two more things than the parent signed for is a huge liability factor and just another sign of their weird general carelessness :/ I'm starting to feel a burdensome responsibility to write them a letter laying a bunch of this crap out on the table.

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