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Parritz, R. H., & Troy, M.F. (2014) Disorders of childhood: Development and psychopathology (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Rochester Fringe//color schemes are found in nature

Rochester Fringe Festival was the goal, and we got caught up in typing. Well, yesterday, we did both.

A few friends and I drove to Rochester to support our college's super-secretive extra-extraordinary Guerrilla Poets. They call themselves guerrillas because they constant disseminate poetry throughout campus. Check the library bathroom; deepen your mind as you do your business.

Guerrilla's exhibit consisted of poetry, as always, and everywhere: as magnets attached to boards painted with magnetic paint and inviting you to manipulate them; as lines chalked on pavement and encouraging you to write each word then step back and read it all at once; and as pages on tables, offering a good read as you sit.

Here's the Guerrilla event page, and a few photos:

Guerrilla Art at Fringe

Okay, supportive post, we love Guerrilla at Geneseo. Without further adieu, get caught up in this typewriter. Filming him type was majestic. And look at how beautifully the colors complement one another! Color schemes just happen, I tell you:

For more videos like this (I am constantly making them I have no reason not to), check out my Instagram.

And to make videos like this, check out the video-making app Splice.

publicity//\\poems

I haven't been posting as regularly.

Let me see where we can start.

The year is starting up again, and as the publicist for my college's Poet's Society, I promote our organization cautiously. How does one publicize poetry? Isn't PR and poetry a laughable combination?

The best thing I could think of – to avoid boisterously advertising a sometimes quiet but chronically inspired group – was to present images in the backgrounds of our voices.

And I'll end this post with a favorite poem of mine:

Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you

without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not

even know I was looking how would I 

have known you when I saw you as I did

time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself

entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing

no more than I did and only when I 

began to think of losing you did I 

recognize you when you were already 

part memory part distance remaining 

mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

P.S. This poem tends to be under the name of W.S. Merwin, but I first came across it under the name of Osip Mandelstam. Through all the midday afternoons this poem has followed me, through the nights I have followed it, I no longer wish to know the author. 

fear//make.french.toast

It is finals week here in college world! What an in to a discussion of FEAR.

I've been thinking about FEAR because I feel it, I'd say, 95% of the time, at least a little bit. A sense of FEAR seems to be perpetually looming. Both its presence and its absence come in waves. The FEAR waves just permeate less suddenly, and for longer.

hello i am either FEAR or no FEAR!!!!!!!!!

In the past two days, FEAR has turned from a feeling to an explicit thought. FEAR has ceased soaking the background of my consciousness and is now dripping in a puddle of its own pee downstage. FEAR is wet; like liquid, it pours. And recently, FEAR has been soaking up the spotlight–and is able to be seen through, for now. 

Flows of FEAR are usually followed by an ebb; now they are consciously monitored, analyzed, deliberated. Part of this temporary change, I think, was inspired by Liz Garbus' documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? I had heard about the flick for a while, and decided to see for myself what all the speculation was about. I am not going to make the space here for the discussion that her life and legacy deserve, but I recommend that you watch the doc. 

FEAR is also centerstage, downstage to Garbus' investigation into the musician's life and career. It is often humbling to remember that FEAR affects most people, even those who seem to have no reason to fear anything at all.

Maybe that's the relationship! I thought. Maybe it's as direct as that:

freedom = no FEAR. 

The absence of FEAR leads to freedom; freedom is only experienced in the absence of FEAR.

In appreciation of the human ability to THINK about THOUGHTS, I wrote a little thing:

what I could do if I had no fear!

how would i do it?:

extract the amygdala there are two and they are almonds but especially on the right

side 

rip it out 

with the fear of anaphylaxis from the one allergic

to tree nuts.

FEAR ancestors who were fearful lived by skirting

situations and saying 'that does not seem safe' while hiding

in caves.

but we are safe! we are safe in piles of laundry

still with this fear of having

nothing to put it into nothing

to promise a ripping out of.

it comes to malaise

I BECOME the cave.

think about my strange position!:

I am not the one seeking shelter;

I am not the predator;

I am the cave!

just standing and people

may visit. looking

for something.

i may see threat growing 

from the outside!

but i am standing

and i do not know how big I am.

I'm hoping to turn this stream of consciousness into a poem, but I believe that streams of consciousness are poems, too. 

This blog helps me face fear. By writing, I challenge fear with words. Every time I sit down to write a post, my syntax is shaking; I'm afraid that my points can't be articulated due to some inherent incapacity to communicate. 

But this is communicating.

I would like to think that the feeling will go away, that this will all get easier. Maybe for things to 'get easier', I will need to look straight through FEAR; maybe FEAR will go away when I look straight through it; maybe staring through what I don't want to even THINK about leads to freedom. 

If that 5% of the time that I don't feel FEAR is freedom, I could quantify its existence by assessing if, somehow, the FEAR waves begin to ebb 6%, 10%, 50% of the time.

If I could have that, half of my life, no fear.

If you are soaking in fear, try soaking bread instead. Ready for french toast, love?

VEGAN FRENCH TOAST RECIPE. 

IN CAPITALIZED COURIER TYPEFACE.

LET ME TELL YOU,IT ALL BEGINS WITH A BANANA IN SOYMILK AND FEAR.

this recipe does, anyway.

VEGAN FRENCH TOAST ON A SUNDAY.

INGREDIENTS: 

-2 slices of hard, stale bread that you were about to throw away before you saw this. (I used wimpy bread. I should have used hard, stale bread. There's where the name comes from, after all: pain perdu, or "lost bread".)

-1 nanner (banana yeh)

-1 cup soymilk or whatevermilk.

-cinnamon, vanilla extract, and nutmeg to taste.

PROCEDURE: 

1.) Pour whatever walk of milk you have in a blender or food processor. I used a nutribullet and am lucky to have one.

2.) Tear your nanner in 3 or 4 pieces and drop them in that lovely pool of whatevermilk. I feel like "tear" is not apt for describing what I advise you do to the banana.

3.) Sprinkle cinnamon and nutmeg in there, too.

4.) Blend all that up in your handy machine.

hah! get it? handy?

5.) Pour that mixture into a bowl and dip your (not wimpy) bread into it.

 

+

wimpy bread from Wegmans.

=

6.) Pour oil or butter in a pan. Remember to keep it vegan if you want to keep this recipe vegan. Vegetable oil, canola oil, and butter are good alternatives to animal products.

have no fear! the wimpy bread soaked it up already!

my hippocratic oath//presidential valentines

Notes from the notebook of yours truly:

Neuropsych, 1/31/2016

Clinical and Lesion Studies: Relating Brain Damage to Abnormal Behavior:

Clinical and lesion studies focus on identifying brain effects (specifically, brain lesion effects) on behavior. 

Clinical studies look at cases in humans, do not inflict harm; lesion studies look at cases in animals after manipulating brain tissue.

            
Notable Clinical studies: Medical Observations

                        (e.g., Hippocrates, Galen, Broca, Wernicke)

Hippocrates (460-380 BC) believed the “brain hypothesis” – that the organ that influences all senses and movement is in fact the brain.

-He was one of the first to deny epilepsy as proof of demonic possession.

-Hippocrates was also the first to note that the brain processes information and controls the body contralaterally.

Learning about "key" historical figures is like testing your faith in iconography. When individuals are wrapped in accolades, deemed the harbingers of some great and no-longer-to-be-questioned discovery, I wonder: was Hippocrates, a Greek physician, “father of medicine,” really the FIRST, or the ONLY ONE, to think these things?

Probably none of which was written by him??!?!

I tend to need some insight beyond this computer's Apple dictionary to define my own understanding. PBS is a good, corroborating source:

While Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, lived in the early 5th century B.C., the famous oath that bears his name emerged a century later. No one knows who first penned it.

Often I'm afraid that what I learn is lying to me. Sometimes the syllabus seems to gloss over, simplify things indefinitely. I hear and see that these people did these things and are these things and webbed some sophisticated finding into society's modern network of knowledge. 

But I find it difficult to think that someone was the sole "discoverer" of anything. And when every textbook tells you so, it's like doubting your own birth certificate as proof of your existence.

We really just need a face, someone to look to; a body to wear the cape of some concept. Because if we said this was just "Medicine's Oath," what possible version of ourselves would be available to believe in?

Valentine's day is bordered by Presidential birthdays.

Coincidence??!?!?!

(this person loves iconography)