Great article on why we curse by Steven Pinker: What the F***?
Only thing he neglects to talk about is swearing at other drivers. Which of course, I never do. I discuss their decisions with them.
Really, I never curse in general. Especially on this blog.
This is going to be scattered. Oh well.
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So sometime in August an email was sent to a Boulder-local list I’m on from someone I didn’t know, a friend of a friend, offering a free first appointment for acupuncture at her school for Chinese medicine. On an impulse I responded. I’d never done acupuncture; figured I might as well check it out.
Turns out her school, the Institute of Taoist Education, is renowned enough to draw students from across the country and is apparently a little unusual in its approach. And it’s way the hell out in Louisville, of all places. (I know: my Boulder snob is showing.) Their philosophy is to treat the person as a whole rather than to narrowly target specific symptoms. The needling is, for the most part, a very quick in and out technique, not the kind you generally see depicted, where you have needles sticking out of your body for 20 minutes.
Which is good, because a second or two is PLENTY. Holy crap, when she hits the point, I can effing tell. It’s at the very least a little tingly and at best (worst?) intensely … intense. It’s not quite pain, per se, as in “hey, someone’s sticking a needle in your leg!” It’s more of a sense of fire or electricity. Occasionally there’s a sense of warmth or maybe, you might say, searing magma running towards my fingers and toes. Sometimes she will miss and there will be either nothing—slight pressure where the needle went in—or else the shallow, immediate recoil of “hey, someone’s STICKING A NEEDLE in your leg!” Which is quite different from the deeper burning/electric thing. She and I can both tell when she’s hit the point and when she’s missed it.
So I’m always a little apprehensive when I’m going in to the clinic. “Wait,” some part of me says. “You’re about the go lie down in a gown and underwear and let some chick stick needles into you. Pardon my french … but what the fuck?”
But, after a treatment, I am noticeably relaxed. I feel a little light-headed, stoned, or maybe “empty” … it’s similar to the feeling of being “table stoned” I get after a good massage, but subtler, emptier. Kind of an afterglow. I feel a little more fluid, a little less contracted. Qi unblocked and so on.
That in itself is nice, but it goes away by the next morning. I’ve been more impressed with the long-term effects, which seem to be genuinely positive. Coincidentally with my impulsive decision to check out acupuncture, September was tough for me emotionally. My student practitioner and her supervisors at the clinic definitely jumped on that and worked to address it. I do think the treatments have been helpful, though it’s hard to really attribute causality directly; I mean, time heals all wounds, and so on. More palpably convincing was a treatment of two weeks ago, when they addressed my chronic knee and back problems, which had lately been bothering me a lot. That was an heavy-duty treatment, with I think something like 20 points needled. They did the holistic thing and also, I think, worked on those physical symptoms. (Dude. I was sooo baked that afternoon.)
Sure enough, within a day or so I experienced a noticeable improvement in my knee and back issues. Neat!
At any rate, I keep going back. I seem to be susceptible to it,* sense that it provides positive support, and I don’t feel much desire to mentally atomize the whys and hows. It is currently worth the time and money for me, but your mileage my vary.
I’ve been having a redraw problem on Safari 2. The only solution I’d found so far that worked for me (found here) is to resize the window by 1 pixel and then resize it back. “Not pretty, but it works.”
This is also working for me:
awesomeness = 0;
safari2ForceRedraw = function() {
if (awesomeness++ % 2) {
jQuery('body').css('background', 'url(blank.gif) repeat');
}
else {
jQuery('body').css('background', 'url(blank2.gif) repeat');
}
}
Basically set the body (or some smaller element if you can get away with it) background to a copy of itself. I used jQuery but I’m guessing it’s not a critical part of this working.
It is critically important that you name the toggle variable “awesomeness.” ‘Cause that’s what Safari 2 is. And there’s more of it every time you call the function.