Sylvia Plath and sleep apnea

Awesome woman she was, melancholy in the good old-fashioned way.
Well okay, crazy then if you must be picky about it.
Yes, she was a wonder. Wonderful stuff she wrote.
When Sylvia Plath decided to end her life with the gas pipe,
she left out milk and bread. For whom?
A question left unanswered still.

Oh Sylvia, when you were coming into your death
did you smell the stink of vinegar and did the bees'
roaring cut off your hearing?
If you still lived today, what meds would be prescribed for you?
How many weeks in between shrink visits for you?
Would they send you off to a day treatment sort of program?
A partial hospitalization thing? Or a "clubhouse?"
Would the professionals mutter against your writings during their staffings?
Would they claim that your writing was part of your sickness?

Benedryl makes me hyper.
Some folks use Seroquel for insomnia.
"Might you have sleep apnea?" I ask people when they talk about insomnia,
"That can mess up sleeping too."

Might I be obsessed with asking random people if they have sleep apnea?
I want the world to get a c-pap machine and to have some real sleep like I get now.
But the world does not have sleep apnea.
And the news mediacs continue to dole out poisoned sugar drinks to the masses.
I swear politicians do not get enough sleep.
Again, the world does not have sleep apnea.
Too bad I think.
Yeah. At least that woulda been a relatively painless fix.

I might be content to leave the practice of medicine to the practitioners if I was convinced that they don't want us to be in their mass guinea pig parade.
Instead, I compulsively read Medscape articles
hoping for more clue-by-fours.

Pills and c-pap for a manageable life.
For me, better than the alternative.

Sylvia Plath thought that she was living in a fishbowl and folks were looking in.
Some say that is a mark of craziness. I rather think there is an element of truth in the most bizarre delusion.
And hers was rather tame.

I've rambled enough.
Here's to better days and a kinder gentler reality.

radical sapphoq

CYBER-SAFETY 101 1/14/07

Friends don't let friends use Micro$oft though sometimes there is good info to be found there. One such example is found here at: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidpred.mspx

Many of us who blog, post on boards, join e-groups forget that there are basic safety rules and we violate them without thinking. How many of us post our birthdates on our blogs? Town we live in? School we attend? Name of company we work at?
Other folks are doing that too.
Sooner or later, we may be instant messaging with others we have met during our internet pursuits.
We are too casual. We think nothing of these things. And it may be that some of the threats have been exaggerated.
Some stats may be inaccurate, yet the bottom line is when someone we know becomes a victim, the stats lose their meaning.

We may have teens who have been sucked up into blogging and websites and e-groups and boards and on-line gaming and instant messaging as well.
That sympathetic teen blogging "friend" or "buddy" in an e-group for teens looking for support and direction may not have their best interests at heart.

Do we know who they are communicating with? Do we know who we are communicating with?
Witness Yahoo 360 blogs where the ease of getting a yahoo ID can translate into many phoney identities. Nowadays we can be any name, age, or location that we choose to be.

Here and here are some basic safety rules that parents can implement for their children and teens. Actually, those rules would be pretty good for us adults to follow too.

People, are we following the basics of internet safety?
And parents, have you taught your children the basics of internet safety?

Parents, you should be actively monitoring what your children are doing on-line. On e-groups all over the net, there are teens and supposed teens who have posted their names, age, gender, and locations. Would your teen reveal similar information in an introductory post to an e-group?

Parents, you should be actively monitoring what your children are doing on-line.
Bullying is no longer restricted to the schoolyard. Adults can and do bully other adults on the internet on posting boards, e-groups, and in the on-line gamerooms. They can bully other adults via e-mails and blog comments. Adults can bully children and teens. Children and teens can bully each other. Although sometimes people can have conflict which is not bullying, conflict can escalate into bullying or other anti-social behavior. There are also individuals who delight in generating conflict on-line in newsgroups, e-groups, and anywhere that people electronically gather. Educate your teen on internet trolls and how to deal with them. Teach your teen that feeding trolls only encourages them further. Trolls may evolve into full-blown cyber-stalkers.

Parents, you should be actively monitoring what your children are doing on-line. Anyone can be a victim of a cyber-stalker. The Instant Messenger buddy who insists upon knowing why your teen wasn't on-line at the usual time, the blogging acquaintance who investigates your teen [and family] and then publishes personal info on-line [like your phone number] or shows up unannounced at school or job are exhibiting some of the characteristics of cyberstalkers. The religious guru who is running your teen's e-group may be a cult in the making and the malcontent who bombards your teen's e-mail account with threats of legal action may be a bully. The cyber-stalker will invade your teen's life by showing up at your front door or consistently at the electronic gameroom or teen chat.

There is a heap of information on-line about remaining safe in cyber-space.
Here are some ideas gathered from those places:

Be the parent.
Set guidelines and rules for internet usage.
Put the computer in a family room.
Remain in that room when your children are on-line.
Monitor their e-mail.
Monitor their blogs.
Talk about keeping private information private, fighting, bullying, cyber-stalking, and trolling.
Teach them conflict resolution skills.
Show them how to disengage from any internet contact that feels uncomfortable to them.
Tell them: no phone calls, no presents, no photos.
Forbid them to meet any of their on-line acquaintances in person ever-- unless you are present and the meeting takes place in public.
Pay attention to any personality changes or behavior changes in your child. They may indicate a problem that needs looking into.

Those suggestions apply to all of us of all ages.
Be safe, and play safer,
radical sapphoq

NATIONAL SECURITY VS. PRIVACY 12/11/06

Ralph Mroz wrote an interesting column on distinguishing between criminal threats vs. terrorism threats; and the obligation of any government to keep its' citizens physically safe. His article included several interesting ideas in relationship to the fourth amendment. The lectures which Mroz attended at the police academy where he trained made some important distinctions and outlined the operating premises based upon those distinctions:

"I realized that these lectures were about what constitutes a free society...and what constitutes a totalitarian one. I realized that the limits on what the state-that is, a police officer-is allowed to do on the street every day determines whether we live in a free society or an oppressive one.

If the state can stop you from freely going about your business whimsically, it is a short line from there to dictatorship. If the state can search your person or belongings at will, we are well down the road to an totalitarian government."

The lectures discussed the differences between probable cause, reasonable suspicions, and getting a "hunch" or feeling that something is hinky. The role and oversight of courts in how a police officer can reasonably respond was also presented.

Mroz went on to contribute his own gems of wisdom to the present debate over how much power the government has in terms of detaining suspected terrorists vs. the expectations of privacy that the common citizen has. Our government has to consider how to uphold the standards of safety that we have become used to as a society. The real question should not be: Is the government empowered to act in certain intrusive fashions considering the serious level of harm that several individuals can now cause to an average group of citizens? The average citizen can take some measures to keep safe from the average criminal via burglar alarms, guns, pepper spray, neighborhood watch programs etc. The average citizen or even a large group of average citizens can not do much to protect themselves from suicide bombings. Thus the government, mandated by its duty to protect average citizens, has to take extraordinary measures in these extraordinary times. Because the terrorists have weapons at their disposal that we cannot defend against with our guns nor with even the average standard-issue police officer's gun, we then become responsible to ensure that our government continues to use its' power to keep us safe and alive.

radical sapphoq