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Posts Tagged ‘TED Radio Hour’

To Trust or Not to Trust

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2016| Leave a Comment »

My brain has been news-free for a week, and look what happened! Hillary is slipping from the polls, and commentators/strategists/pundits have been making jokes about Trump “softening” on immigration. It’s enough to make me believe what the Flapper always said, the TV is a “boob box,” from the ancient meaning of boob, meaning  – a stupid person; fool; dunce. It would seem our intelligence is bound to diminish in relation to the number of hours we spend in front of a screen.

But the radio, now there’s something that can capture your imagination and leave you maybe just a bit smarter! On our nine and a half hour drive home from Nashville, Bob and I listened to a few podcasts from NPR’s TED Radio Hour. I was sad to leave my grandbabies, but it was great to share this mind-numbing drive with Bob; he could jockey my smart phone while I navigated my way between trucks in the left lane climbing the Smokey Mountains. The show about Trust was enlightening:

http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/406238794/trust-and-consequences

Restoring trust in government was one of the subjects it tackled. A former Prime Minister of Greece was the speaker, but look at what’s happening now in Brazil. In case you were too busy watching the Olympics to notice what was going on behind the scenes, and I don’t mean Ryan Lochte’s little fib, the democratically elected first woman president in Latin America, Dilma Rousseff, is fighting for her political life. By tomorrow, we will know if her congress has voted to impeach her on grounds that she concealed the growing fiscal deficit – ie, she lost their trust somewhere along the way. Because in fact, there is NO evidence she did any such thing.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37217633

…senators blamed her for the tanking economy and accused her of concealing the growing fiscal deficit as she sought re-election. They also questioned how she could not have been aware of the corruption at state-run oil giant Petrobras, when for years she chaired its board of directors.
The revelations about corruption at Petrobras, in which members of Ms Rousseff’s Workers’ Party as well as business executives and influential members of other parties have been implicated, have played a crucial role in undermining the government’s credibility.

Trust is a basic human need. If we can’t trust in the unconditional love of a parent, for instance, we might grow up to be a frightened, anxious human being. Jack Welch, the former CEO of one of our biggest corporations, GE, once said that Trust is THE absolute in business. The last part of TED’s podcast had to do with trust within a marriage, “How Can Couples Rebuild Trust After an Affair?” Now this could apply to both political candidates, as well as the latest Weiner scandal.

Psychotherapist Esther Perel wrote a book titled “Mating in Captivity.” She specializes in marriage counseling, and insists that couples can grow stronger after an affair, if they are willing to do the work. “Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so has the taboo against it.” She tells us that it is the only commandment in the Bible repeated twice!

Perel defines an affair as a secretive relationship, an emotional connection, a sexual alchemy – Proust said it’s our imagination that is responsible for love. So Jimmy Carter was right when he thought lusting in his heart was a sin, right? And sexting a la Weiner, with his toddler asleep in the bed next to him, is an even bigger, corporal sin. In 1998 President Bill was impeached for a casual affair with an intern, one in which he tried stupidly to define sex. But the evidence Congress used to prove their point was that he lied under oath to a federal grand jury.

Maybe before our country considers electing Trump, we should investigate his previous affairs, and see if he tells us the truth. Maybe we should put every single member of Congress, men and women, in a grand jury room and grill them for hours about their sexual peccadillos! Trump wants America to be great again, to close our borders and while we’re at it, how about a Senator Joseph McCarthy-like witch hunt for sexual transgressors?

Am I kidding? Of course. The problem is, nobody knows when Trump is kidding. And that’s the kind of lack of trust, of dishonesty, one might expect from a sociopath. Not a President. Hillary may parse her words, but when they come out, I believe her.

This little guy trusts the adults in his life not to start up this tractor, but he always wants us to vacuum!  IMG_5103

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The Penultimate

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on December 13, 2015| 2 Comments »

Today is the next to the last day of Hannukah! How is this possible? I haven’t made latkes yet, or baked dreidel cookies. Times like these make me think about time; like why is the trip driving home always faster than the trip going to a place. It was the exact same amount of miles, it just seems faster.

Anyway, welcome to the seventh installment of Ada’s Yiddishisms. This one is about time, in a way:

Farshlepteh krenk

A drawn-out illness, neverending…

My niece told me about a TED Radio Hour podcast about adaptation, so yesterday I listened to it while I went through some motions at the gym. This I do on a regular basis so as to avoid a farshlepteh krenk. http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/455904076/adaptation

It was fascinating, and since I now have to put prednisone drops in my eye every four hours, my ears perked up at this story. A boy was born with cancer of his retinas (stay with me now) so that by the age of 13 months he had to have both eyes removed. He was blind and the first thing he did in the NICU after surgery was climb out of his crib and explore his room!

His TED point was that his parents never treated him as if he was special. They let him grow like a normal boy and explore his world. And so he naturally adapted to the darkness in the same way bats get along flying at night, echolocation – “…the sonarlike system used by dolphins, bats, and other animals to detect and locate objects by emitting usually high-pitched sounds that reflect off the object and return to the animal’s ears or other sensory receptors.”

In other words, he naturally adapted as an infant by clicking his tongue.

What does this have to do with a neverending illness you might ask? It made me think that some parents might immediately do everything in their power to shield that blind baby, to try and make his world carefree. They would emit sympathy from others, he would be labeled, classified and codified.

Some parents create a sickly child, where there is none.

Still, this month is the neverending season of joy, right? If you happen to be going through something hard right now, just remember that December can amplify those feelings. And that it is only one month, 31 days. And we are halfway there. And the second half goes faster!

Let’s hope you don’t come down with an illness, even a short one, over the Holidays, but if you do these two Jewish doctors will be working on Christmas day. L’Chaim!

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The Creative Impulse

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on October 20, 2015| 2 Comments »

While I was driving home from Isle of Palms, I put Bob in charge of playing podcasts. Like most things Bob, he had an opinion. He’s not one to listen to doom and gloom, and so I was prepared for an upbeat playlist. When I heard my favorite singer/songwriter, Sting, start to talk, well I just had to listen! It was the TED Radio Hour and the subject was “The Source of Creativity.” http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/351538855/the-source-of-creativity

If you live now, or have ever lived with a creative person, you know the drill. They are dreamers, they are never lonely, they find meaning in ordinary things. When the Rocker was little, his fingers were always moving, tapping out an inner beat. Once he held the guitar, it became a part of him and followed him everywhere. The music that was in his head finally had an outlet – it could flow.

Sting talked about taking risks, about not being afraid to fail, and how children are just naturally this way until growing up sucks that courage, the creative impulse, out of us. I remember seeing awards on a bulletin board in our elementary school, mostly for being “quiet,” mostly to girls, and I had a premonition. Would my son flourish here? He was always moving, he loved to make noise!

Early hours spent delivering milk with his father gave Sting the solitude to dream about a life outside of his working class English suburb. He spent decades making music, a most prolific artist, until he felt the music die within him. For two years he didn’t write another song. To get his creative drive back, he returned to his childhood, and wrote an opera. You have to listen to the podcast.

So we can all still tap into that reservoir of creativity. Elizabeth Gilbert likened it to a moving walkway in an airport – we trudge along pulling our baggage behind us, and every now and then a walkway appears and it becomes much easier to write. That analogy resonated with me. I always had a deadline, so I needed to sit myself down and sharpen my keyboard. But sometimes, time would stand still, and something else took over my fingers. As if the picture, the words were in my head and my ability to write them down was effortless…I didn’t worry about grammar, or spelling. My inner editor was turned off.

Which is interesting because when Dr Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins who runs the Music Cognition Lab,  studied the brains of jazz musicians in an MRI scanner – yes, while they played a keyboard – he found that the self-expressive,  creative parts of the brain light up and are on fire only when the pre-frontal cortex, the self-monitoring, critical part of our brain shuts down. That ability to disconnect is what gave us Bach! So we all have to be willing to fail in order to create, which is exactly what Sting said…

When the Love Bug started to sing “Let it Go” at the beach, I immediately had to download the song so that I could learn the words (I know I’m a bit late on this one parents) and we could improvise a dance to the tune. Because there is nothing better than channeling your inner child to rev up the creative impulse. Nothing.

Here is our talented artist, finally allowed to give her baby brother a bottle, and thinking of her next project!

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Take Your Medicine

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , on April 17, 2015| 4 Comments »

What do you do when you’re sick? Take to your bed and yell for “Mommy,” or ignore it and go about your business? Well when you’re married to an Emergency Physician, and you’ve given birth to another, your response to an illness pretty much doesn’t matter. After all, you are NOT dying, so it’s not a true emergency – like say, anaphylaxsis, septecemia, or a gun shot wound to the belly.

It’s only a virus. Antibiotics won’t help. In fact, my doctors rant about how other doctors overprescribe antibiotics, which is why we are in a drug-resistant pickle. You’ll be better in a few days. So you’d best go about your business; take Tylenol every four hours, force fluids and try to rest. Because as Daniel Tiger says, “Rest is Best.”

When I was young and caught a cold, Nell would rub my chest with Vick’s. Then she’d wrap some sort of gauze around me and tuck me into bed. In hindsight, she grew up when a small splinter could turn into an infection and kill you. Penicillin wasn’t invented until just before I was born. Growing up in the first half of the twentieth century meant you were isolated when you were sick, people took a cold seriously. As Adelaide would say in her Lament, a person can develop a cold, or La Grippe, La post-nasal drip…with the wheezes, and the sneezes, and the sinuses really a pip!
In other words,

Just from worrying whether the wedding is on or off,
A person can develop a cough.
You can feed her all day with the Vitamin A and the Bromo fizz,
But the medicine never get’s anywhere near where the trouble is.
If she’s getting a kind of a name for herself, and the name ain’t his,
A person can develop a cough.
Read more at http://www.songlyrics.com/actors-broadway/guys-and-dolls

But I digress. Back to the 50s, once an illness had passed, Nell would make me an eggnog. I know, sounds disgusting, but it was so good. Guess she didn’t know about salmonella in raw eggs? Oh and to keep me healthy, she would shove a teaspoon of cod liver oil into my mouth every morning, followed by a chaser of orange juice. It took me many years to like the taste of orange juice.

Still, this spring cold is a bad one, it starts off deceptively simple enough – a headache followed by a runny nose. You are lulled into thinking you’ll be fine by the third day. Then your larynx closes up and you can barely croak, a fever sets in and after awhile your eyes get all gucky. If you have children in preschool, or you have a spouse that is routinely seeing infectious disease every day they go to work, then it’s likely you’ll catch  it. In other words, “You can spray her wherever you figure the streptococci lurk,
You can give her a shot for whatever she’s got, but it just won’t work.” The cough will linger, you’ll want your Mommy, and someone to bring you chicken soup.

On my way home I listened to the TED Radio Hour “Believers and Doubters.” http://www.npr.org/2013/11/18/245949211/believers-and-doubters

And I thought about the time I nearly died from septicemia after a miscarriage. Lying in a hospital bed in the Berkshires, I prayed the rosary with my Polish room mate because she asked me if I would in broken English. I found her beads in her bag, and the words came back, they flowed through me like a salve. It was like being wrapped in a warm blanket and tucked into bed.    CLR in Bathrobe

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