Monday, August 31, 2020

The bird bath is a popular meeting place

A few days ago, it was the sparrows who were enjoying a communal bath in the birdbath in the garden. Today, it was a meeting place for many of the garden's honeybees who were eagerly drinking the water. It was a warm and dry day, so that was probably the explanation for why there were so many (at one point I counted up to sixteen bees sitting on the rim of the bath). I have never seen so many of them gathered at the 'drinking hole' before. They were buzzing to and fro, landing on the rim of the bath and then taking off again. A few of them ended up in the water, twirling about like whirligigs. If they don't get find their way out of the water quickly, they can drown. So I have helped them out a few times, offering a (gloved) finger or a stick for them to climb on. They grab on eagerly, and if they're not too waterlogged, they fly away fairly quickly, which always makes me happy. This is a video of the bees today in the garden. 




Saturday, August 29, 2020

Sparrows having a communal bird bath in the garden today

This is the second time I've seen the sparrows do this. The first time was about a month ago and I tried filming them but something didn't work out right and the videos I took were blank. Today I managed to shoot three short videos of them enjoying their bath, splashing around. When they're done, there are huge drops of water all over the place. They are an endless source of entertainment--I love watching them. 




Friday, August 28, 2020

Are we great yet?

Couldn't resist this, it's just so spot on. I thought Trump was supposed to be making America great again these past four years. What an epic failure that project turned out to be. Just take a look at today's America and ask yourself--are we great yet? Are we better off than we were four years ago? The answer is unequivocally NO.


Image may contain: text that says '50 BASICALLY THE KEY TAKEAWAY FROM THE RNC 15: "LOOK AT HOW TERRIBLE AMERICA IS RIGHT NOW! VOTE FOR FOUR MORE YEARS OF IT!"'

Sunday, August 23, 2020

Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump

I finished her book today; it's a quick and easy read, coming in at 211 pages. It's also a good book, with the best writing coming toward the end, in the last chapter and the epilogue. It is there you find her strongest psychological assessments of Donald Trump, and they are very interesting since she is educated as a clinical psychologist. Rather than my writing a review of the book, I encourage everyone to read it, as it is well-worth reading. I am including some quotes from the book (Fred is Donald Trump's father, Freddy is Mary's father and Donald's brother who died very young). The quotes speak for themselves.

  • “The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. At this point, we can’t evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”
  • “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.”
  • “Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country—from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act in order to take affordable health care away from millions of people, and enacting his racist Muslim ban—overwhelmed me.”
  • “Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough.”
  • “I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t. Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate.”
  • “The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.”
  • “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.”
  • “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became severely limited.”
  • “Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn’t a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn’t have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did. It wasn’t his inability to fix his oldest son that infuriated him, it was the fact that Freddy simply wasn’t what he wanted him to be. Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him.”
  • “With millions of lives at stake, he takes accusations about the federal government’s failure to provide ventilators personally, threatening to withhold funding and lifesaving equipment from states whose governors don’t pay sufficient homage to him. That doesn’t surprise me. The deafening silence in response to such a blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life or the consequences for one’s actions, on the other hand, fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.”
  • “Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage."



Friday, August 21, 2020

Reflections on Mary Trump's book and “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive"

I am reading Mary Trump's book Too Much and Never Enough. I can't say that it's an enjoyable book to read, that would be lying, but it is interesting in its own way--the tale of a dysfunctional family that created the man who is currently the 45th president of the USA. What strikes me about the Trump family is that lying about nearly everything plays a major role in their interactions with each other. Or if not directly lying, a blatant and total disregard for the truth staring them right in the face. It's hard to know where to start, and since I haven't yet finished the book, I'll wait until I do before posting a review. However, there are some things I can comment about already.

Mary Trump says her uncle Donald fits all of the criteria for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. If you have never had any contact with a true narcissist, consider yourself lucky. For those of you who have had the bad fortune to know one in your personal life, you have my sincere sympathy. I wrote a post about narcissistic personality disorder in October 2019; you can access it here:   https://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/2019/10/learning-about-narcissistic-personality.html

Narcissists are walking cyclones that will destroy your life if you let them (in). As I wrote in October 2019, "......steer clear of these types of people if you want your life to be in any way peaceful or happy, or if you want to prevent the destruction of your own life. Let the professionals deal with them. It is not worth the heartache involved to try and care about these people". 

I have not changed my mind, and Mary Trump's book merely reinforces my statement. How do you know you are in the presence of a narcissist? They lie. Even when confronted with the naked horrible truth about themselves or their life situations, they lie. They promote themselves shamelessly. They are all about self-aggrandizement. They think the world of themselves and very little of others (others are often stupid, lazy or cowards for not taking the risks they take). Conversations with them are all about them, never about you or your life. They demand loyalty but don't give it in return. When they are done with you, they will cut you out of their lives without a moment's notice. They are delusional for the most part, with some rare few moments of insight, that give you hope that they will perhaps seek help and get better. But they don't. They promise that they will though, but they don't. They may even work as therapists, which terrifies me even more. Because the operative word is terrified; they are scary people, cyclones as I said. Steer clear of them. When you are in their presence, all good fresh healthy air is sucked out of the room and replaced by an air of suffocation. An hour with a narcissist is more than enough for a lifetime. They live in their own worlds of insanity and drag you in and along for the wild ride, if you let them. Many of them are whip-smart and charming, and that's how they hook you. And once hooked, trust me, getting yourself unhooked will require a courage and a willpower that you never knew you had. My advice to anyone who is living with or has interactions with a narcissist--get out and get away.

The title of my post is “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive.” That's what Donald Trump's father used to say all the time, especially to his wife who was often in ill health. How comforting that must have been to hear. Essentially you say to another person, your illness is your fault because you didn't think positively enough. Imagine saying that to someone with cancer or any other terminal illness. I know younger people with cancer, and a few that have recently died of cancer. Not a one of them wished their illness on themselves. None of them is a negative person; in fact, the one person who died recently from brain cancer was a cheerful upbeat person with many friends who respected him highly. If 'thinking positively' had any real merit, the world would not be drowning in painkillers and addictions to painkillers that are killing thousands of people. It would not be drowning in the abuse of anti-depressants. 'Thinking positively' does not lead to sobriety, it is the humble willingness to admit that you have a problem and that you need help that lead to sobriety. You have to want to change your life. The Serenity Prayer says it best "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. The Serenity Prayer is the complete opposite of narcissism. Narcissists never really admit that they need help; you may think that they're asking for help, but ultimately you have misunderstood the situation. Because a few days later, everything's fine again, and your conversation with them about all that was 'wrong' has been forgotten, or perhaps never took place. “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive.” 

What a strange world we live in, a world that adulates and rewards the shallow thinkers, the con-men, the narcissists, the ruthless capitalists, the criminals, the 'do as I say, not as I do' people. Whenever one of them gets caught for his or her crimes, I rejoice. It's a start toward dismantling the hold that narcissists have on our society. Because if you think about it, the message of 'think positive' has morphed into 'think only of yourself'. Too much emphasis on self can only lead to the mess that surrounds us in the world. Too much emphasis on self has destroyed personal lives and relationships. I applaud Mary Trump; it probably took all of her courage to write the book. It must have been extremely hard to write about a family that probably terrifies her. She exposes the 'people of the lie'. And in that context, I can recommend M. Scott Peck's excellent book People of the Lie, if you want to learn more about how Peck defines evil and his confrontations with pathological liars and narcissists in his therapy practice. You gain valuable information, but not without a cost. That cost is the fear that you feel when you read about them, and the true fear when you know you have to deal with them. 


Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Black Pumas - Colors (Official Live Session)

Black Pumas - Fire (Official Live Session)

Black Pumas. They are described as 'an American psychedelic soul band based in Austin, Texas, led by singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada' (Wikipedia). Psychedelic soul--I like the sound of that. Wikipedia again: 'Psychedelic soul (sometimes called black rock or conflated with psychedelic funk) is a music genre that emerged in the late 1960s that saw black soul musicians embrace elements of psychedelic rock, including its production techniques, instrumentation, effects units (wah-wah pedal, phaser, etc.) and drug influences'. 

I really like both of the songs, Fire and Colors, that I'm posting today. Black Pumas is a relatively new band, but I wasn't aware of them until today. I heard the song Fire and loved it. And then I listened to Colors and loved that one too. This is the music I grew up with and loved. Listening to these songs takes me right back to that time. Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Undisputed Truth, Edwin Starr, and so many others wrote songs that fell under this genre. I liked psychedelic soul without knowing that this is what I was listening to.


 

Saturday, August 15, 2020

The importance of gardens and gardening

  • The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. --George Bernard Shaw
  • The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. --Alfred Austin
  • No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. --Thomas Jefferson
  • Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization. --Daniel Webster
  • Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. --May Sarton
  • How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. --Alexander Smith
  • Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade. --Rudyard Kipling
  • A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. --Liberty Hyde Bailey
  • To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. --William Blake
  • Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. --H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
  • A good garden may have some weeds. --Thomas Fuller
  • A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows. --Doug Larson
  • Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul. --Luther Burbank
  • Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. --May Sarton
  • It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else. --Viggo Mortensen
  • God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. --Francis Bacon
  • We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough? --Wendell Berry
  • When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited. --Ramakrishna


Monday, August 10, 2020

Kistefos museum in Jevnaker

One of our summer vacation day trips this year was a visit to the Kistefos museum in Jevnaker, about an hour's drive north and slightly west from Oslo. The drive itself takes you through some beautiful farmland, and on the day we made the trip, the weather was lovely. There is something about the combination of a blue sky, warm sun, and farmland that puts me in a good mood. I am reminded of when I lived in southern New Jersey in the mid-1980s; there was a lot of farmland all around the apartment complex where I lived, and during the summers, it was so relaxing to live there and to walk to the nearby farmer's market. But I'll save those memories for another post. 

Kistefos museum 'offers world-class architecture, industrial history, art exhibitions and an impressive sculpture park in scenic surroundings', as they state on their website: https://www.kistefosmuseum.com/ . It is well-worth visiting, and I plan on doing so again in the coming years. The Twist Gallery alone is worth the price of admission. After we spent the afternoon there, we drove further on to Oldemors Karjol, a very good restaurant for Norwegian food (https://hadelandcatering.no/meny-oldemors-karjol-2/).   

Here are some photos of Kistefos museum, the Twist Gallery, the outdoor sculptures, and the surrounding landscape: 

















Sunday, August 9, 2020

Remembering Debby

I sometimes go through old photos, looking at the life that was, thirty or forty years ago. I did that a few months ago and found a photo of myself and my friend Debby from the early 1980s, taken in the lab at PHRI where I worked at that time--my first full-time job in Manhattan. She had just gotten married and had moved to Manhattan with her husband; he was starting his medical residency and she was starting her doctoral work in the same lab where I worked as a research assistant. We hit it off almost immediately, and spent our free periods in the lab talking about life, careers, and relationships. I had just finished my master's degree and was interested in doing doctoral work, but as it turned out, that opportunity came much later in my life. I worked in that lab for three years and met some interesting people working at all sorts of jobs--technicians, academics, computer experts, cleaning ladies, and secretaries. I stayed in touch with Debby after I left the lab for a new position at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Our life paths diverged quite a bit after that, but we always stayed in touch. She called me on my birthday every year and we would spend an hour or two catching up on our lives. She had two children to take care of, a house to run, and in her later years she helped her husband with the business side of his medical practice and took care of her elderly mother.

Debby passed away this past Tuesday. She was sixty-four years old and had been sick for about four years with a rare disease called progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). PSP is a degenerative disease involving the gradual deterioration and death of specific volumes of the brain that control balance, movement, eye movement, and cognition. Loss of balance, falling, the inability to focus the eyes, and dementia are often the outcomes. There is no cure for PSP. Her condition progressed very quickly; I understood that the last time I saw her. Even though we did not see each other much during the past thirty years, I count her as one of my close friends. She was one of the kindest people I've ever known. I don't think I ever heard a mean word come out of her mouth. She gave up her research career to focus on her family. In her later years, she admitted to me that she missed the lab, and I think had she not gotten sick, that she would have gone back to work in the lab in some capacity. But she never got the chance. I am glad that I sent her the photo of the two of us a few months ago. I wrote that it reminded me of our good times together. We look happy and carefree in that photo, and that's how I want to remember her. 


Reflections on the pandemic

Pandemics seem to bring out the stranger and hitherto hidden sides of people. Visions of a dystopian world or even an apocalyptic one have created paranoia on the one hand and an intense need for control on the other. Some people walk around with a simmering rage, as seen in the many news stories of late about people who deliberately spit and cough on others or become violent toward others for either wearing a face mask or not wearing one. Others have sunk into a low-grade depression, convinced that nothing they do will make a difference one way or another. I’ve watched enough apocalyptic sci-fi movies to know that the word ‘control’ loses all meaning when mankind is faced with extinction of one sort or another. Or perhaps more aptly put, control becomes more about creating a kind of order in one’s life rather than trying to create order and control in society at large. Because the truth is that the idea of ‘control’ is an illusion in the best of times; chronic illness can wipe away that control over our own lives in no time. Just ask any patient with a chronic degenerative neurological disease, or terminal cancer. The diseases make the rules, patients don’t. We are lucky to live in well-ordered societies that function because there is a modicum of laws that keep it functioning, but it doesn’t take much to wipe a law-abiding society away. All you need is an emphasis on ‘me first’, ‘my rights’, ‘I am entitled to’, ‘my freedoms’ when the health authorities ask people to maintain social distancing, not travel, and to wear masks. The latter hasn’t occurred yet in Oslo, but it will, mark my words. The emphasis on ‘my freedoms trump your rules’ is paramount in our society. You just need to look around and witness the large numbers of young people who ignore the social distancing rules, who party and carry on as though there was no pandemic. Or the people you meet on the city sidewalks, mostly young but some old, who walk three abreast and don’t budge an inch as you pass. More often than not, it’s me who moves to the side to create distance between us. My best guesstimate is that two of ten people follow the suggested rules for social distancing. Even some of the elderly seem not to care about social distancing. One nice exception was a middle-aged couple that began to walk single-file when they saw me coming, and we acknowledged each other as we passed each other. It’s as though those who ‘get it’ are part of a secret club when we meet each other; we exchange knowing glances. Because we know that the rest of society doesn’t get it. I’ve watched and read enough apocalyptic sci-fi shows and books respectively to know that this is how the world really is. The majority of people carry on as though nothing has happened, or that what has happened doesn’t really affect them personally. Until it does. And by then it’s usually too late. If people could at least follow these simple rules, we could maintain some semblance of control—the idea of control in any case. The coronavirus doesn’t care about any of it; it will continue doing what viruses do, infecting hosts and making them sick, until it is stopped in one way or another.

I try to follow the advice given by the health authorities. I have purchased face masks in the event that we are asked to use them. Come autumn and winter, I will use them when I go grocery shopping or out to any crowded place. Right now it’s summer and I’m in my garden, alone for the most part. That God-given haven disappears in wintertime. I will continue to work from home, shop online, and grocery shop once a week. I am not sure what winter will be like in the psychological sense; every now and then I get inklings of what a world plagued by a long-term pandemic could really be like. I know there are a lot of mentally-fragile and anxious people in the world, and their needs cannot be ignored. I fear sometimes that the healthcare systems will be overwhelmed not only with virus sufferers but also with people who cannot cope with the current restricted life, especially if that type of life continues for another year or two. I don’t know the future, but I can imagine it. At present, a second coronavirus wave is building in Europe and no one knows how deadly that could be. Without a vaccine, I cannot see how we are going to get past this pandemic. Until that time, we can keep the virus in check by abiding by the rules laid out for us by the health authorities. One can hope that we have learned something from the first coronavirus wave.   


Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Some links to useful articles about the coronavirus

For those of you who might want more in-depth information and reporting about the coronavirus pandemic, these links to articles in The Atlantic will prove useful. 


I've included the list of articles to give you an idea of what they are about. I've read a few of them already and they are well-written and informative. 

The Atlantic’s guide to understanding COVID-19

The world we live in

 A little humor to brighten your day from one of my favorite comic strips-- Non Sequitur .......