Habits, Tics and Verbal Twitches

People have habits, both in behaviour and in speech (yes, more about words today). Adolescents – and an unfortunate amount of young adults – say like way more often than necessary. Overhearing conversations on the street or in foodcourts where a third of the words is like can drive a person to distraction and dangerously close to performing a language intervention. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fantasized about grabbing the girl – because it’s almost always a girl – giving her a good shake and a gift certificate to a dictionary.

When I first moved to Toronto, it took me a long time to learn that when people of the North American persuasion said “hi, how are you?” they didn’t actually want to know how I was, causing me to overshare the details of my health and well-being for longer that I'm comfortable remembering. Only if the exchange goes like this

X: Hi, how are you?
Me: I’m fine thanks, how are you?
X: Doing well. How are you?

do they really want to know how I’m doing. It’s very confusing. But I think this one’s pretty universal to North America.

Nations also have habits. Tics, even. For Canadians, it’s apologizing. It’s ubiquitous to the point of being pandemical (is that a word? It is now). Wherever you go, you will hear the phrase "I'm sorry" an awful lot and it is so ingrained that if you bump into someone, the bumper and bumpee will both blurt out “I’m sorry”. I imagine it has a lot to do with the reputation of Canadians as being terribly polite.

In Denmark, it's all about the thank you. I was reminded of this the other day when a friend in not so many words told me to quit expressing gratitude quite so much, but it is as ingrained in me as the I'm sorry has become. In the old country, if someone invites you to dinner, you would naturally say thank you if this is done by telephone or call to give your RSVP if the invitation is in writing.

As an aside, can I just have a rant for a moment? It's about the RSVP. It appears to be a foreign concept on this side of the pond. Or rather, responding to the request. It can be noted on anything from an invitation to a children's birthday party, a regular party (obviously, more informal) and all the way up to a wedding and people will blithely ignore calling you to let you know if they're coming, leaving you up the creek in terms of loot bags, party snacks and/or wedding favours and if they do say there'll come, but develop some reason not to, they won't call you to let you know that, either. Drives me ‘round the bend.

Where was I? Right. The Danish person in question has just thanked their friend for the invitation to dinner. Then you show up on the designated day, carrying flowers or bottle of wine and thank the host again. After dinner, you thank them for delightful meal, when you leave, you say thank you for a lovely evening and then you call the next day and thank them all over again. This is probably as confusing for immigrants to Denmark as the how are yous was for me.

Your thoughts? Any regional verbal twitches you want to share?

Forgiveness

This week's HealthCentral post ponders philosophically:

"To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that prisoner was you
- Lewis B. Smedes

I used to think of myself as a brain in a jar, my body some other being that I had nothing to do with. Who I was could be found in my personality and my intellect, but not in my physical being. It was how I had learned to cope with a body that from childhood had been highly committed to sending me messages of pain, a body that couldn't more often than it could. So I made it irrelevant to how I defined myself, separated me from it and although I did my best to ignore my body altogether, the truth is, I hated it."

The rest is here.

Happy Canada Day!

Machinations

A long time ago - back when the hills were mountains - I was in graduate school, studying for my Masters in social work. There were classes in theory, classes about research methodology, classes to teach us community development, others that taught counseling skills and one of the common themes were client empowerment, the contract both parties agreed to at the start of the process - I started in clinical, before I switched to policy development, but come to think of it, that contract occurs in all levels of social work, whether it be clinical, community development or policy development. As a social worker, you are an agent of change regardless of where you work and you make a contract with the client to help guide them through to the desired change. And somewhere in my first year, when we were talking about this process, I came up with a theory of my own.

Which is summed up as follows: as a social worker, you manipulate the client (individual, community, organization) to achieve the desired change. And that's when my teacher and I engaged in about an hour’s worth of vigorous debate while the rest of the class looked on rather stupefied. Because the person teaching the class did not like my theory at all, in fact, this person got completely and utterly stuck on the term I was using, insisting that what you as a social worker did was to guide, to encourage, to empower. Yes, I said. To manipulate. Forget about the usual negative connotations of the term, take a step back and look at it. If someone contracts with you to help them through a change process, they are in effect contracting with you to be manipulated to achieve that change.

Manipulate: to handle, manage, or use, esp. with skill, in some process of treatment or performance

No. Definitely not. There was no manipulation whatsoever and I was on crack for thinking it. To which the rest of the class nodded sagely, looked at me as if I'd grown an extra head and I decided to keep said theory myself for the duration of my university career. Turned out that graduate school was more about parroting existing dogma than thinking outside the box.

If I go to a therapist or social worker with the problem that I want to change and which I have been unsuccessful in changing myself, I am asking them to take me out of my comfort zone and help me change the way I think or act and you can call that empowerment, guidance or manipulation, but as long as there is a contract between client and change agent, it's ethical practice. Getting hung up in the definition of a word that is most often used… well. The term little minds is flitting about in my brain, but that's probably arrogant.

Maybe ir's the word geek in me?

Random June

From The Harlot’s Twitter feed, the US launches drone planes to “stem the flow of drugs, migrants and terrorists” and although I agree with Steph’s “really??” statement, what captured me was this quote: “"Essentially, we're supplying high-grade marijuana through this one small rural county of 50,000 people, thanks to the border, to all of the northeast," said Derek Champagne, district attorney of Franklin County, N.Y., and head of the area's border and narcotics task force.” Well, if the DA of Franklin Country’s doing it, why are they monitoring us?

The latest random thing found in my travels around the neighbourhood that have made me apoplectic. A Banana Slicer. Which costs $6 in the kitchen store over at the Market and is it just me or is that completely ridiculous? USE A KNIFE! By the time you get this contraption out of the drawer, squeeze the banana through (and never mind that not all bananas are this exact shape) and wash it again - just imagine getting all those little slats free of bananas slime - you could have sliced five bananas with a paring knife. Fer fuckssake…

From mor, a link to the Newseum. Put your mouse on a city and the newspaper headlines pop up. If you double click, the page gets larger and apparently, if you click in the right place (I'm still a little iffy on where that is) you can read the entire paper on some of them. It's a wonder I'm getting any work done… Mor also sent me a link to an impromptu concert in the atrium of the Mayo Clinic. I want to be like that when I'm 90.

A random collection within a random post: a cat with aspirations to become a boxer. I've just discovered the Engrish department of the LOL collection and given that tortured English translations are one of the surefire ways to get me giggling, whatever time I didn't spend in the Newseum got spent here. When I was complaining about the cold, JudithNYC sent me a link to this nose warmer, which I think is a brilliant idea and Carrie posted a link to a chocolate anus which is so wrong it's right. Almost. And while we are in the nether regions, remember the awesome Durex commercial? Turns out it has outtakes.

More generous contributions from other people include Trevor sending me an article about how scientists have discovered the ingredients in witch repelling brew and a new way to resolve disputes in baseball which doesn't quite qualify as a brawl. DavidG was positively prolific in the past month, sending another great article about multiculturalism, art made from old tapes and film, my favourite saying about fuzzy days ever - not only do I intend to print it out and place it prominently next to my desk, but have been using it liberally - and this one. About cattle combustion and I know it's not funny (oh yes, it is), but that bull in the upper right-hand corner with his legs straight up in the air started me laughing and when they got to the line about the hedgehog, I just lost it.

On New Year's Eve in Denmark (and apparently, also in Germany), it is tradition to gather in front of the television and watch Dinner for One. For a very long time after we moved to Canada, we felt there was something wrong with New Year's Eve because we were missing this. And now it's on YouTube - enjoy! And speaking of being homesick, it's just been Midsummer's Eve or Sankt Hans as is known in my own country and for a couple of days, I've been humming this song, by the quintessential Danish band Shubidua, celebrating Denmark and especially the night of the bonfires. Lots of lovely pictures of Denmark to make me and a few people I know even more homesick.

And lastly, got this link from Gill Stannard’s excellent newsletter – Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia) muses about the artistic process and the strange things we expect from artists. Thanks Gill – this one gave me lots to think about.

Not That I'm Biased

I've been thinking about bias. It all started with this article by David Gorski about the Oprah-fication of medicine (link fixed). Well, it started with the Newsweek article, followed by the other one and given that I've had loads of time to sit around and think while I attempted to heal this latest maiming of my body, I did some of that.

My own bias falls pretty squarely in the science orientation, but I like overthinking things (no, really?) and in the last several years, have found myself playing around with thoughts of faith, sort of straddling the divide between the two. One of the things I find very amusing when having a debate with someone who's very science-based about things like faith is to suggest that a belief in science is as much a matter of faith as is religion. And when they start talking about evidence, the presence of same in science and its absence from faith, I've countered with the suggestion that someone who believes in a deity sees evidence of a divine presence all around them. And now you know what headspace I'm in - pushed all the way out to the boundaries and trying to step over the line. Maybe it's the codeine?

I'm also very much in agreement with the two articles in terms of Oprah's responsibility when it comes to giving wingnuts a platform without an opposing view. It's not enough to claim that one's viewers are intelligent enough to do their own research, but on the other hand, Opera isn't news, Oprah's entertainment. And in a world where even the news isn't real news anymore, maybe it's not entirely Oprah's fault. But that's a post for another day.

I find it fascinating that Gorski's article - okay, so it's more of a rant - has much to say about Oprah's bias and yet, I got the sense that he's pretty oblivious to his own position having just as much bias. Aside from the "belief" in science, he has an obvious and almost virulent bias against homeopathy, lumping it into the same category as e.g., anecdotes being more important than clinical trials in determining efficacy of treatment, yet homeopathy is accepted by many as a legitimate form of treatment, e.g., in naturopathic medicine. He also sneers fairly effectively about the concept of qi (the energy flow along the meridians in the body), an integral part of Chinese medicine, including acupuncture. This it reminded me of when I was about 12 years old and in a rehab hospital where they were trying to get my RA under control (and failing). My mother would take me to acupuncture treatments on Monday mornings before she drove me back to the hospital after a weekend home and the doctors and nurses were very obvious about their disdain for this quackery. Despite the fact that I left the hospital every Friday afternoon in a wheelchair and on Monday mornings, would walk back into the ward. Thirty years later, acupuncture is an accepted practice, used by not just doctors of Chinese medicine, naturopathic doctors and chiropractors, but also physiotherapists and doctors educated in Western medicine. So I'm aware of the impact of time in changing perceptions about treatments, some making the shift from ridiculous snake oil to legitimate.

Aside from the fact that Gorski appears to be a little out of touch, he demonstrates the bias so clearly that it's obvious his brain is completely shuttered when it comes to anything but Western medicine. Except for him, it's not a bias. He's talking about The Truth and in the way the article’s written, it deserves the capital letters, as well as the label of bias. That doesn't mean that I don't think some of the theories mentioned in the article as examples of the nutbars who hold forth on Oprah are… well, shall we say they could benefit from a little bit of scientific objectivity. But that's also a post for another day.

The theme continued when I picked up The Not So Big Life again and was reading about how personal bias influences how we see and interact with the world. True enough. However, when the author went on to say "when we learn to see reality with true objectivity," I was again struck by this idea of objectivity is possible. Because I'm not sure that it is. Which finally gets me to my point and yes, I'm aware it took a while to get there - again, I suspect the codeine.

Our personal experiences, our histories, our culture, our families, our friends all colour how we see the world. To get really basic, I have a pair of pants that I think are turquoise, but others see as blue. If something as simple as the colour of my pants can create a divergent view of reality, what about the rest of the world? And although the goal in any scientific inquiry is to get rid of as much bias as possible, we all know that it is virtually impossible to get purely objective. Which, if you do push it all the way out to the outer boundaries and step over the line, quite possibly means that there is no ultimate Truth, only opinions.

And now that I've made my brain hurt, I'm going to spend the day in the park with a book.

Ripples