Learning the Ropes

I'm dipping a tentative toe into the blog world with these first few words. I have not always tagged behind people, so this is really rather different for me. However, it's only one part not having the know-how & equal parts wondering if I have anything to say that might be of interest to anyone else besides myself. But then, I guess that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things because primarily, I'm doing this for one person anyway, & that's myself. If I can help anyone along the way, that's a bonus. As I peek in & read other blogs I see it all comes down to that end anyway, so here goes! It's cheaper than going into therapy & we really want to stay away from those drugs now, right? Or hey! Worse..."natural supplements". They aren't even regulated. Ephedrine...or Ephedra is a supplement & not considered a drug.

As I ponder & contemplate the things that have occurred to me the last five years, I realized I needed a place that I could lay it all out to examine & analyze it's nuances. So many times when something medically immense has taken place in a person's life, we don't know how to deal with it. Because it's brand new & because it's not usually something we get the chance to practice on, we so often flounder & get it wrong. We are also 'directed' on how to deal with it by others who have no clue how to deal with it themselves, yet feel that they are because they have that medical degree & are armed with all kinds of text books & journals.
Or because they love you, they feel they're expert advisers for you. Right up front I have to say, until you've worn the moccasins, (as the saying goes) stick to suggesting, but don't try to tell me how I feel - or should feel. I already know that. And it's not even close to the way you might imagine.

Five years ago I had an aneurysm. It ruptured. And it was heavy duty! Pre to that, I had been an extremely active person; I ran daily, biked & hiked weekends, climbed mountains twice a year...or as often as I could get to them.


I ate healthy & stayed fit in my own complete home gym. I didn't smoke & rarely drank but for special occasions such as weddings or the holidays. There never seemed to be enough time in my days for the things I wanted to do, but I crammed as much as possible into every 24 hours & loved it that way!
My life was generally full & not complicated with health issues of any kind.

Then May 29th 2001 arrived. I found I wasn't as energetic as I wanted to be in prepping for a busy Memorial weekend. I needed something to keep me going without lagging. I knew with all the things we had planned, that I needed an energy boost. So I bought some Metabolife to balance my metabolism. Yessirree! I was going to get it done. Much the same way Steve Bechler must have felt that day in 2003 as he was getting ready to pitch his game for the Baltimore Orioles. Steve was the 23 year old pitcher who wanted to combat fatigue & decided to try Metabolife to revitalize himself. But like Steve, that wasn't in my future either.

I say "like" Steve, but not quite because Steve died.

At that time, Metabolife contained the Big E. For those who still haven't heard about this wonder herb, that's Ephedrine. The herb that people are trying to get put back on store shelves because they want to 'look good'. Gambling with their own lives for vanity. Russian Roulette for the buff body. All of which could be viewed very prettily laid out in a casket.

I took my first little pill in the morning of that first day, another in the afternoon & pill three before bed. I was feeling pretty good about all this; I was doing something healthy for myself & doing it "naturally" & not paying out money for prescription drugs.
So! In the morning, I took my fourth pill & went outside to do a little gardening. That was the last thing I remember until I 'woke up' in hospital seven weeks later totally paralyzed on the left side. My good fortune & what probably saved my life was that I had two doctors living right next door to me & they were tending their garden as well, when I hit the ground. They made an immediate evaluation & had me medi-vaced to the hospital downtown in eight minutes.

That was to be the first day of my second life. The one where you find out you're incredibly more resilient than you ever thought possible; the one where you find out through sheer determination that you can amaze yourself as well as the medical world. The one where, if you look at things as a challenge instead of a disability, they are surmountable. And the one where you find out who your friends are & sadder, just how very weak your family structure is. Those people who 'love you' were all of a sudden way too busy to call or lend a hand. The ones who will 'try to get around' or if they find the time, they will pick up that item you're needing but can't get yourself. Have they always been that self-involved or have you just been too self-involved yourself to notice? New life; new questions.

Counter that however, with those you never noticed in your life before. They come forward & quietly sustain you as you plod along in your new life. Supportive, helpful, not just given to lip service as surprisingly, family members only seem to manage. These quiet friends are there to bring you out of the hospital for the day & take you for long drives & to a wheelchair-friendly restaurant for lunch. They run the little errands for you that your loved ones are (sic) too busy to run & they sit & listen as you try to figure out what happened in your life literally overnight.

I am learning so many valuable lessons in my second life. Some I wish I hadn't ever needed to learn; others I am eternally grateful for learning. As Maya Angelou so eloquently stated:
"Courage allows the successful woman to fail & learn powerful lessons from the failure...so that in the end, she really hasn't failed at all!"

At any rate...bear with me here...I'm still learning. Now there's this blog thing! ~*wink*~

This is Your Brain on Music – the science of human obsession

It is funny how I initially came upon this book. Myself, along with a group of friends were sitting around talking one afternoon about how we eventually all seem to get stuck or trapped in our own generations music.I immediately thought about myself and questioned if there was perhaps a piece of generational gene that I’d not inherited, because I had definitely not stayed with my generations’ music. As new music is released I have moved along with it and embraced it. Perhaps it was because, for most of my life I have been a musician.

Or maybe it was because I could hear the recycled riffs and shared melody from past compositions that bridged the music from the past to the present. But it was that thought that led me to Googling the question “Why do we love our own generations’ music best?”And that search eventually led me to this book.

This is Your Brain on Music is pretty hard book to argue. Written by multi-hatted Daniel Levitin, you have to accept that the man knows where he’s coming from. Among the non-music related things he’s worked at professionally are a diverse and somewhat eclectic list of jobs. He worked as an automobile mechanic and as a graphic designer - a typographer, a chauffeur, product manager, data analyst, dishwasher, computer operator, television repairman, fry cook, standup comedian, door-to-door salesman, camp counselor and wood stove salesman.

Then in his thirties he returned to school and studied cognitive psychology/cognitive science, first at Stanford University (he received his B.A. in 1992 with honors and highest university distinction) and then the University of Oregon where he received his M.Sc. (1993) and Ph.D. (1996). He completed post-doctoral fellowships at Paul Allen's Silicon Valley think-tank Interval Research, at the Stanford University Medical School, and at the University of California, Berkeley.

He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Dartmouth College and Oregon Health Sciences University. As a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in music perception and cognition, he is credited with fundamentally changing the way that scientists think about auditory memory, showing that long-term memory preserves many of the details of perceptual experience that previous theorists regarded as lost during the encoding process, and with drawing attention to the role of cerebellum in music listening, including tracking the beat and distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar music.

He has worked with the likes of the Grateful Dead, Santana, Steely Dan, Chris Isaak, Joe Satriani – just the beginnings of a very lengthy list of musicians. He has won awards from the Sundance Film Festival and Venice Film Festivals, and returning to university in the 70’s.

On the sound effects side of things he worked at A Broun Sound in San Rafael, California, building speaker cabinets for The Grateful Dead, for whom he later worked as a consulting record producer. He was invited and became one of the golden ears used in the first Dolby AC audio compression tests, a precursor to mp3 audio compression.

I know one of the first things out of people’s mouths is to wonder how dry this book is. Admittedly, the first part is a bit, but it’s by no means something that would put you to sleep. Not by a long shot.

Daniel writes in the introduction:

“By better understanding what music is and where it comes from, we may be able to better understand our motives, fears, desires, memories and even communication in the broadest sense. Is music listening more along the lines of eating when you’re hungry, and thus satisfying an urge? Or is it more like seeing a beautiful sunset or getting a backrub, which triggers sensory pleasure systems in the brain? Why do people seem to get stuck in their musical tastes as they grow older and cease experimenting with new music? This is the story of how brains and music evolved --- what music can teach us about the brain, what the brain can teach us about music, and what both can teach us about ourselves”

You will find that Daniel can tell a very good story. He imparts many in this book and you begin to wish you could have been a fly on a lot of walls during some of the times he tells about. You also come to understand yourself a little better and understand about things such as ear worms, that which makes songs stick in our heads for much too long sometimes. He tells about finger snapping and toe tapping and how they differ from each other. And he tells about meeting and working with John R Pierce who had also been noted for his work while serving as vice president of research at Bell Labs in New Jersey. He relates how Pierce asks him to explain rock and roll music to him, something Pierce had never paid attention to and didn’t understand.

Pierce requested that Levitin come up with six rock and roll songs that he felt would capture the essence of rock and roll. No easy feat! Levitin’s offerings were

1. “Long Tall Sally” – Little Richard
2. “Roll Over Beethoven” – The Beatles
3. “All along the Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix
4. “Wonderful Tonight” – Eric Clapton
5. “Little Red Corvette” – Prince
6. “Anarchy in the U.K.” - the Sex Pistols.

This list alone has you going over in your head which six songs would you have picked? And if any one of yours is among the ones he picked?

This book surprised me because I thought I’d pretty much had a full understanding of the impact music had on my brain. But he opened whole new thoughts about that by bringing a scientific perspective to it. I caution that this book does not read like a text book, but it does talk about research on how the brain processes music and discusses things like pitch, timbre, rhythm, loudness and harmony and how they affect the human body.

If you have any interest in music whatsoever, I think this should be a book on your MUST READ list.

There will be a parade...

Pittsburgh once again celebrated her champions with a parade yesterday at noon, three days after the Penguins won Game 7 of the Stanley Cup against the Detroit Red Wings. Yes, there was that crowd of 27,565 welcoming them home from Detroit with the Cup, but the turnout for the parade well exceeded the projected 350,000. Pretty darn good for a predominantly football manically-minded city like Pittsburgh.

It’s funny but when you’re a sports fan, isn't everything is measured by big events instead of the usual hours, days, weeks and months? This victory parade also followed another such moment – the Steelers victory over the Arizona Cardinals in February of this year brought the Super Bowl championship title back to the 'Burgh as well. Now the Penguins, after a long 17-year wait, have brought the Stanley Cup back. How are the Pirates doing? Anyone know? Will this be a trifecta kind of year for that fair city, or will it only extend to the black and golds?

I can’t concern myself with any of that though, not in any large way at least. Yes, I love the city and wish everything good for it. But I am a hockey fan. Not a sports fan, but a hockey fan. My joy comes from the knowledge that my Penguins, my team in my adopted hometown have defied the odds and won the Stanley Cup.

What happened to the inevitable Wings win? The win everyone, sports gurus and hardcore fans included, said was going to happen? Absolutely no question in anyone’s mind. The Wings have experience on their side. They have premium players – not just two beginners, but many Olympic caliber star players. How could a Penguins team that was still too young and lacking in experience ever win the Cup? One year in the playoffs wasn’t going to serve them well enough. No, the Wings would come out of game seven with back to back Cup wins.

So then how come that young team was hoisting the Cup after game seven? Because they had some secret weapons, that’s why. One, they lost a player (Marian Hossa) who may have cost them the win, since he ended up playing for Detroit. And two, they got rid of a coach that was disliked and replaced him with one who actually cared about the team as a whole and not just one player. Dan Bylsma got a chance to prove he had the strength and spirit to propel this young team to the Cup. He did not disappoint. He put together a blueprint for a win which the team trusted and followed. These Penguins are more relentless than they are dramatic or resourceful. The genius of their plan is its simplicity.

That's something the Penguins gained firsthand knowledge of a year ago against the Red Wings.

Sensing an opportunity to capture the Stanley Cup qualified as one of those. Dan Bylsma dug deep into his inspirational repertoire while trying to capture the spirit of the thing.

As has been his habit before games, Bylsma scribbled a famous quote onto the grease board in the Penguins' dressing room Friday afternoon at Joe Louis Arena. Although movie quotes had often been a popular choice — recall the recent reliance upon "winners want the ball" from "The Replacements" — Bylsma chose the occasion of Game 7 against the Red Wings to revisit Penguins history.

When the players arrived this day in search of the franchise's third Stanley Cup, they were greeted by a declaration from the coach who had delivered their first.

"It's A Great Day For Hockey — Badger Bob Johnson."

For those who ventured to say a Penguins win may only be possible because of ‘the two-headed monster’ Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, well, there was contribution from both, as expected. In fact, Evgeni Malkin won the Conn Smythe Trophy for MVP in the series.

But the unexpected winning goals came from equally unexpected players. Maxime Talbot with his ever present "heart on his sleeve" play and Rob Scuderi picking up the slack much of the series for a wandering Marc-Andre Fleury. Perhaps the Pens should have signed Scuderi as backup goalie instead of Mathieu Garon.

This all sounds so very like some scripted story out of Hollywood but it is the real deal.

These entire playoffs have been so much more than their hype, really. Pens. vs Flyers was supposed to be a bloodbath. Pens vs. Caps, too, had people talking about Crosby and Malkin's supporting cast not being enough to fend off the Alex Ovechkin and Alex Semin. Pens vs. Canes in the Eastern Conference finals saw the Staal brawl catchphrase pick up speed, but it ran it’s course and died a quiet death with the Penguins win over them. Then came the rematch.

The Wings with newly acquired ‘traitor’ Marian Hossa who left the Penguins to be on a Stanley Cup winning team… and for less money. Had Hossa stayed with the Penguins for more money, he may have won the Cup with them. Don’t think that didn’t make the Wings defeat just a bit sweeter for the Pens. But I say "may have won" because I'm not at all sure the Pens would have won with Hossa on their roster. His leaving allowed them to bring in the players who formed the team that won this championship.

"It's A Great Day For Hockey — Badger Bob Johnson."

And for the Penguins, these are the greatest days in hockey.

And as their fans lined the parade route today to thank them and cheer them, this hopefully will be the beginning of many more great days for a team that everyone said wasn't ready to win.