Daily Archives: June 22, 2014

Art and Culture, Writing

Keep Working

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Summer                                                                   Summer Moon

When the student is ready. This writing stuff is hard. At least for me. I’ve been collecting rejections (which, believe it or not, is an advance) and wondering whether it makes any sense to keep at it.

Then, I ran into Megan Hogan again.  Megan, a red-headed sprite of a museum guard, andMegan I started exchanging personal stories about the artist’s life three years ago. She’s trained as a portrait and fine artist and works at her art when she’s not reminding two young ladies who came into the museum while I was talking with her that they could not bring their non-fat, decaf cinnamon mochas into the museum.

“Yes, when I just got out of art school, I went around to galleries, trying to get in and kept getting rejection after rejection.” Megan has a friendly, warm smile, but with this story she shook her head, bemused, not smiling.

“I know,” I said, “and it’s hard not to take it personally, after all they’re rejecting your work. Your work. I know you’re supposed to let it go and keep on, but I start to doubt my own judgment.”

“I know,” she said, “I know.”

Her lesson, the lesson I took from Megan on Saturday, was the old one, one I need to relearn quite often it seems. Keep working. Whether for an audience or not for an audience. Whether the owl comic she’s working on right now will be worth the four-color print run or not. Whether the people at the comic convention, when offered a chance to buy her comics, say, “Meh.” Keep working.

“In the end,” I said, “We have to please ourselves.” She smiled. My teacher. This day. Did I mention Megan is in her late twenties? Age is no barrier to self-awareness.

 

 

Colorado, The Move

Arts and Crafts Moving Tips

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Summer                                                            Summer Moon

William Morris has proved helpful as I make decisions about what to move to Colorado and what we want to sell or donate. His principle, have nothing in your home which is not beautiful or useful, sound on its own in my opinion (and one I’ve honored in the breach for the most part), makes wonderful sense when sorting through, say, crystal.

If it’s elegant, graceful, clean, it goes in a box with green tape. If it was bought in a momentary enthusiasm or received as a well intended gift, red tape. Or, yellow, if we keep it for a possible garage sale. Prints, photographs, paintings will get sorted in the same way. DVD’s and books, too, for that matter. Furniture? Yes. Kitchenware? You bet. Gardening tools? Yep. Beautiful? Green tape. Nice? Red tape.

There is a category, though, that Morris doesn’t address that also has its green tape items. That groundhog headpiece that belonged to Dad? Beautiful? No. Useful? No. Memorable? Outta the park. Yes, sentimentalism will have its own share of boxes, though they will be far fewer than in times past. And, if it were possible, even the sentimental things would be either beautiful or useful, too.

Family, Health

Jon

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Summer                                                             Summer Moon

Boy. Medicine. Trying to come to grips with Jon’s possible pulmonary hypertension. This is not a diagnosis you want. Even with advances, and they have been considerable, the fate of those with the disease have, to use Jon’s phrase, shortened horizons.

Just finished reading a 2006 article replete with medical shorthand, acronyms and formulas. I finally got it. This is a disease of the circulatory system of the lungs. Due to a variety of initial causes (and they are important in prognosis, but not diagnosis) the blood vessels in the lung become compromised, requiring increased pressure to push blood through them for its necessary oxygenation. The right ventricle of the heart pushes blood into the lung after it has been deoxygenated in its journey through the body. To produce the pressure required to pump the blood through the compromised lung circulatory system the right ventricle has to work harder (pump harder).

Due to the lung’s normally highly efficient circulatory system, the right ventricle has evolved a thinner wall than the left ventricle which pushes oxygenated blood through the body which requires greater pressure. As a result, when a diseased lung forces the thinner walled right ventricle to push harder, it eventually widens under the pressure, which makes its pumping less efficient, which makes it work even harder, which increases the dilation until the left ventricle becomes involved as the widened right impinges on it. This process defines the phrase vicious cycle. Then, at some point, the heart itself cannot produce enough pressure to effectively circulate the blood and heart failure ensues.

Treatment regimens are complex, only a few aimed at the actual problem, the circulatory system of the lungs, and all of those drastic. The advanced therapies (I don’t understand this use of the term.) are all symptomatic, that is, they reduce the load on the right ventricle by dilating blood vessels and improving circulation within the lungs, for example, but they don’t go to the problem itself and therefore ultimately prove inadequate.

So much about survival depends on etiology and we don’t know that in Jon’s case. Yet. Nor do we know to a medical certainty that he has the disease. An echocardiogram on July 1st will provide more information though catheterization of the right ventricle to determine it’s health is the final diagnostic step.

We’ll proceed as a family, figuring out what we can do for each other.