I Feel Bad About My Neck

I feel bad about my neck…and my jaw and my temple and my shoulder. So bad that I have a physical therapist who periodically tries to ease my upper right quadrant into peaceful submission.  I’ve had several appointments with her and recently she started pressing the idea that maybe, just maybe, there were things I could do that would prevent my body parts from freezing up in pain. 

According to Miss Smarty Pants, plopping my MacBook Air on my desktop and hunching over it for four to five hours a day is not good for my aforementioned neck, jaw, shoulder, etc. A big word was bandied about: ergonomics. Somehow I (aren’t I the victim here?) was partially responsible for my pain.  Well, I never!

Did you know that your head is ten percent of your body weight? Every time you bend your head forward it’s like you’re dangling a sack of potatoes out front and using the rest of your body as a counterweight.  Since I often have the brain function of a ten-pound sack of potatoes this seems like an apt analogy to what I’m doing to myself.

The physical therapist gave me homework: get myself a platform to raise my computer screen up to eye level and a wireless keyboard to replace the one on the computer. With this new set-up I will become an ergonomic poster child! Using my laptop and my bad-for-me posture, I looked at platforms and keyboards online.  Then I called the Apple store and discovered that their prices were actually cheaper.  My sore jaw almost dropped to the ground. 

I drove over to the Apple store and it was, as usual, packed with energetic customers trying to buy the latest technology, little old lady customers getting lessons in using the latest technology, and much less excited customers trying to get their broken technology to work again. And there were nearly as many sales staff, all dressed in Godawful blue tee shirts, engaged in conversation with the myriad customers.  It was hard to blaze a path though all the people. If the economy is in the toilet, you would never know it from the interior of an Apple store. 

One hundred and thirty dollars later I had my assembly-required computer stand, a wireless keyboard, and instructions on setting up Blue Tooth.  It was just after I set them up and I tried to click on an onscreen option that I realized I had to reach up to use the mouse pad in the center of the computer keyboard.  My head was no longer doing its sack-of-potatoes imitation but my hand was now doing its two-year-old-trying-to-get-a-cookie-off-the-table imitation.   Seems I also need a new mouse. 

The Poetry Feedback Loop

Besides being a blogger, I happen to be a poet. 

In January, I graduated from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in writing.  After two intensive years of reading and writing poetry, I suddenly found myself able to read whatever I wanted, from the trashy to the sublime.  I immediately embarked on four months of reading novels and nonfiction.  I read a lot of great books like Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and a lot of above-average-quite-good-not-at-all-sorry-I-read-'em books like Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel and The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.  

But I didn't pick up one single volume of poetry in my four-month post-graduation extravaganza of reading. And guess what? I didn't write much poetry either, or at least not much decent poetry.  I even took the April poem-a-day challenge but my poems were decidedly uninspired.  

And of course my pea brain wanted to write good or even great poetry and said pea brain knew it was missing something but it couldn't quite settle on what that something might be. Chocolate? Sunshine? Puppies? Oh, (palm hitting forehead) poetry!!

Now I'm easing my way back in--I just finished reading my contributor's copy (see how I slipped that in?) of The Cancer Poetry Project 2, an anthology that features poems by cancer patients and the people who love them.  Next up is Reverse Rapture by Dara Weir, a book with more parentheses than are found in entire libraries. Then I'll turn to my shelves of unread poetry books and choose whatever calls to me, whether its David Trinidad or Tess Gallagher, Thomas Lux or Rita Dove, Jack Gilbert or Eduardo C. Corral.

I can't help but wonder if there's a metaphor embedded here; that what we take in is also what we put out; that we, as an American people, are taking in way too much of the wrong stuff—crap TV, fear, anger, corruption. The paradox is that we need to put more goodness out into the world—more friendship, considered thought, hard work for justice—in  order to then get it back, but that does seem to be the state of things, doesn't it?  Slap me before I start singing Kumbaya.  

And now, to Dara Weir. 

Time For A Change

I just hit send on another petition for a left wing position. I have probably signed at least sixty petitions so far this year and it's only April.  This is the equivalent of attending twenty demonstrations, isn't it?  Okay, maybe only ten demonstrations.  Well, if you include all the drive time, maybe one very short demonstration at which I have all the coffee I want, can adjust the temperature to my liking, occasionally check what else is going on on Facebook, and go get a snack from the refrigerator.

Do you receive all these requests to 'Sign the Petition' like I do? The rate at which petitions hit my Facebook feed and my inbox is accelerating; I'm up to eight or nine a day on FB and another five or six through email. And I cyber-sign them.  I type my name, address, and email into the little boxes provided, or, if the petition comes from an organization I have a history with, the boxes are already filled with my information and all I have to do is hit 'Sign the Petition' and it's done.  Why don't I feel like I've actually taken a stand on anything?  Maybe because this is just too darn easy. And not the least bit threatening.

Do you think the petitions have any effect on politicians?   Are they running around the halls of Congress shouting to one another "Don't anger the 'clickers! Vote the wrong way and a thousand angry people hit send.  It's horrifying!"  I don't think so. They have pages and support staff that read all their email, so they probably only get a daily tally. And they know no one is actually going to show up and get in their faces.

Like Barack Obama, I used to be a community organizer.  I spent five years of my youth knocking on doors on the near west side of Cleveland and asking people to come to meetings and demonstrations, to meet their neighbors, to see that they weren't alone, to feel the strength in numbers. In high school and college, I volunteered for United Farm Workers.  I picketed grocery and liquor stores, handing out flyers that asked customers to boycott the stores until the owners stopped purchasing products produced with scab labor.  I took other stands too, and took action. I was active and involved and out in the community asking other people to participate too.  What happened to me?

I'll turn 60 years old this year.  I think I think I'm just too old and too tired.  But of course that's ridiculous.  How old and tired were the greats, Pete Seeger, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez?   Compared to them, I'm in diapers.

I'm wondering what happened to all of you, too.  Have you seen the demonstrations in Europe?  They really know how to throw a demonstration over there.  Hundreds of thousands of people fill the streets. Over here we get five lonely looking people with signs asking the rest of us to honk if we support them.  I'd be embarrassed to join them. The last demonstration I attended was one opposing our impending invasion of Iraq. Now, that was a damned impressive demonstration.  It was also ten years ago.

As the vote for stricter gun control failed Wednesday, an issue I feel strongly about, I was disappointed, and considering the state of the Republic party in the US, not very surprised. I was also ashamed. I had hit send on a few gun control petitions but I hadn't put myself out there, hadn't called Democrats in other districts, hadn't done any of the hard work that needs to be done. And a lot of you hadn't either. It's time for us 'older' folks to get off our duffs and take back our country. If we won't do it to prevent our children from being shot and killed, what will we do it for?