-
He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf
I am an obstetrician, and not a neuropsychiatrist, but I feel a definite uneasiness with the idea of messing with brains –especially from the inside. Talking at it, sure –maybe even tweaking it with medications- but it seems to me there is something… sacrosanct about its boundaries. Something akin to black-boxhood -or pregnant-wombhood, if you…
-
A Pound of Flesh?
I’m retired now, and my kids have long since passed the age when, even if I were so disposed, I would dare lay a hand on either them or their children. But of course I wouldn’t -parenting wasn’t like that in my family. I suspect I rarely hung out in the Goldilocks zone in…
-
The Idea of Ideal
Just when you think that you have a handle on what you’re supposed to look like, just when you’ve lost the weight, dyed your hair, and even forsworn relaxing at the beach on your days off, they up and change it on you. And the worst part: you don’t even know who ‘they’ are so…
-
Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good
When I was a child and began discovering myself in a mirror, I wondered about my nose. I thought it different from my friends -different from Teddy’s at any rate. He was my best friend and we went everywhere together. We had the same kind of jeans, and shared a similar taste in ice cream.…
-
Is there nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so?
Sometimes there are articles that set my head spinning. Or my mind. Ideas that I’d never thought of before. Ideas that make me rummage around deep inside, like I’m searching for a pencil, or my internal keyboard where I write the things I should remember. I often don’t, of course –remember them, I mean -how…
-
Is Seeing Believing?
Isn’t it interesting that some of us can look at a forest and miss the wind riffling through the leaves, while others see the moon as a ‘ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas’? What determines what we see? Does it have to relate to something we’ve seen before -patterns that we recognize? Is our apprehension…
-
Nobody in Particular
Why do we believe something? How do we know that we are right? When I was a child, I was certain that the Fleetwood television set my parents had just purchased, was the best. So was the make of our car -and our vacuum cleaner too, come to think of it. But why? Was it…
-
Full o’ th’ Milk of Human Kindness?
I used to drink a lot of milk when I was a child. It was 1950ies Winnipeg and milk was still delivered to the house in those clear glass bottles with the little bulge on top to hold the supernatant cream. I never much cared for the cream, but my mother always found a use…
-
Make not your thoughts your prison
What can we do with those who flout the laws of the land or openly disrespect the prevailing mores? The usual answer is to punish -to retribute, either by restricting the offender’s rights, or their freedom. And sometimes, depending on the crime, even ending their lives. Prisons have traditionally been the means to rid…