Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Mr. Wolf is Huffing and Puffing and Well — You Know the Rest

My life has never been the same since first meeting Mr. Wolf more than a decade ago.

Sadly, he became so fond of me that he decided to move in without an invitation, and I have been woefully unable to evict him since, despite my very best efforts.

I have Lupus, which I refer to as “Mr. Wolf,” because lupus is the Latin word for wolf, and boy has he been snapping his big teeth at me of late.

I have the most serious form of the disease, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (pronounced: er-uh-thee-muh-toe-sus), also called SLE, which is an autoimmune disease. As such, it is characterized by a malfunction of the immune system. In these types of diseases, the immune system cannot distinguish between the body’s own cells and tissues and that of ‘foreign’ matter. So, rather than simply producing antibodies to attack invading viruses, bacteria or other similar foreign substances, my immune system creates auto-antibodies that attack my body’s own cells and/or tissues.

Like the last of the Three Little Pigs, I've learned long ago to build my house's foundation soundly against his attacks. I have built it upon the concepts of spirituality (Wicca), love (bisexual), hard work, honesty and a willingness to play (the last has been the hardest part for me.) Nonetheless, the truth is that my house is about to come down around my ears.

The past few months have been bleak. Mr. Wolf has been feasting virtually at will — and sister, does he have a lot of will. During the current onslaught, I went to the doctor and was told what I already knew — Mr. Wolf is coming closer and closer to achieving his goal.

Last year, I had a horrible realization: I can no longer remember what it felt like to be well. Oh, I have memories of being very active, unabashedly athletic and whole, but they are no longer sense memories. It’s as if that part of my life was so insubstantial that it has been absorbed into the unreality of dream.

When I was first diagnosed more than 15 years ago, I was consumed with knowing why my own body was trying to destroy me. At first, I found myself looking deeply into the mirror: Who was this stranger that had taken over my body? And, even more importantly, how could I ever learn to live with her?

I fell into a deep-as-the-deepest ravine depression. There was nothing left of the person I once was. Nothing, absolutely nothing, remained. Or so I thought then. I had been wrong. Very wrong. A tiny, itty-bitty, bright even luminous speck of something had survived.

Was it my soul? I still don’t know, but I think so. I also came to believe it was the divine spark of creation housed within all beings; that indescribable “something” that connects us all to each other regardless of race, gender, age, creed, religion or geography. Whatever it was, I felt it. Visceral.

But for the past few months, nothing. It had been a long process, but I had finally begun to believe again that I had a body, that I was a woman, not simply a lump of flesh that temporarily housed my brain until my ever-approaching death. Unfortunately, almost imperceptibly, I had become a “thing” again.

I had thought that once I had found my “soul,” that knowledge — that sense of self, would be mine forever. It has been sobering indeed to realize that self-knowledge, even hard-fought, can be forgotten in the face of relentless disease and worsening disability. So, once again I stood on the very brink. I had managed to take a step back once before, but did I have the ability, or even the will, to do it again?

For days, I once again stared at the pill bottle, my “stash” I had hoarded for years that would bring on the ultimate darkness. If I gave in to its seduction and the sweet oblivion it promised, I would finally rest. And, I was so very, very tired.

I thought back, what had I done before? What was it that had caused me to give a damn whether I met the next dawn? Slowly, I remembered – it was that little zing of life. That shooting feeling that you are, indeed, alive. Even muted by illness it was still there, still calling me unceasingly back from suicide: Sensation.

I sighed and put the pill bottle away— again. I know now that I will not improve, or may never even stabilize again. The truce, the peaceful co-existence, the political accord that I had hammered out with him before is gone.

I must once again work to reclaim my body, make her a part of me again. Integration in a literal sense. I have been kind, nurturing, drawing her back — but that is no longer enough.

Before, it was my honest sexuality that was the key. I had worked to feel arousal again, slowly, gradually working to feel even a nano flash of sexual interest. Once I had done that, I almost immediately remembered the long-lost feeling of my “soul.”

When I was having sex, I was no longer disabled. The pain that has always been Mr. Wolf’s hallmark transcended into pleasure. Touch and intimacy has been my link to the divine for as long as I can remember. In those moments, I was my true self again. Not a disabled person on her way out, but a living, vibrant woman who was put on this planet for some purpose beyond my finite understanding.

It seems significant that I have to relearn this simple message yet again — but this time without my usual coping mechanism. My sexuality continues to elude me now, so I have to figure something else out. Perhaps I failed to appreciate that my real sense of self, my soul, cannot be wooed from the outside, but must be found within. Even though I had connected to her through my physical senses and the practice of a Divine sexuality, she is not really connected to my body at all. She exists in everything, in everyone. Even me — still.

Thus, I have decided to move forward knowing that my deterioration simply is. Mr. Wolf is real, and I can't pretend that he's just some euphemism I created to represent my disease. I need to find new ways to hang on, to continue breathing. I was given the gift of life, and it remains a gift still.

I also hereby re-dedicate my efforts to re-establish my intimate life. I want the most satisfying sex possible. For me, sex doesn’t just promote overall health, it has always meant the very breath of creation. Despite needing to learn a different way to remain connected, I refuse to give up hope that physical intimacy is lost to me now.

— The Curator

Saturday, May 14, 2011

A 'Broken Heart' May Mean Physical — Not Only Emotional Pain

The brain's shared pain network illustrates the link between body and mind, and it may help explain how emotional ups or downs affect health too, a new study finds.

Across cultures and language divides, people talk about the sting of social rejection as if it were a physical pain. We feel "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "crushed" when a loved one fails us, "heartache" or "heartbroken" when spurned by a lover.

There's a reason for that linguistic conflation, says a growing community of pain researchers: In our brains too, physical and social pain share much the same neural circuitry. In many ways, in fact, your brain may scarcely make a distinction between a verbal and physical insult.

So the well-worn parental reassurance that "sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you" is false, these scientists say. And they have the pictures to prove it.

University of Kentucky psychologist Nathan DeWall, a researcher in this young field, says the pain of social exclusion assaults each of us on average about once a day. "It's a big deal," he adds, one that's often unrecognized by friends and colleagues and is downplayed by the emotionally wounded themselves.

But when it comes to the human brain, evolution has been economical in allocating resources to the problem, DeWall adds. "Instead of creating an entirely new system to respond to social hurt, evolution piggybacked the system for emotional pain onto that for physical pain," he says.

New research offered further evidence of pain's shared circuitry in the brain. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, established that two regions of the brain previously known only to process the sensation of physical pain come alive when a person gazes upon a photograph of a former lover and ponders the feelings of rejection that came with being jilted by that person.

"These results give new meaning to the idea that social rejection 'hurts,'" wrote the authors.

The dual role of the brain's pain network offers a powerful example of the connection between body and mind, and may help explain how emotional distress can make us sick and human kindness sustains us in health. And it may yet shed light on an enduring medical mystery: why depression, a sort of emotional pain disorder, coexists so often in patients who also have chronic or neuropathic pain disorders.

At the same time, the overlap underscores the profound importance of social connection as an evolutionary imperative, key to our survival as individuals and a society.

"Physical pain obviously serves a purpose: It's uncomfortable and distressing, but it's a signal that something's wrong, that we need to take action to fix it," says UCLA psychologist Naomi Eisenberger. "I think we can say the same about social pain: It motivates us to reconnect socially and avoid social rejection in the future."

In 2002, Eisenberger was a graduate student at UCLA, using brain scans to see how the human brain responds to social rejection. Her office-mate and fellow psychology graduate student, Johanna Jarcho, was studying human pain perception and was using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, in her own work.

"We noticed that there was so much overlap between our scans," Eisenberger says.

The resulting study, showing what Eisenberger called a "common neural alarm system for physical and social pain," was published in 2004 and has spawned a welter of research exploring the bonds that tie social pain and physical pain together.

Among them, two studies have provided new insights on the connection. One, published in August 2009, showed that sensitivity to both kinds of pain may be strongly influenced by genetics. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Eisenberger and two UCLA colleagues reported that research subjects who carried a rare variant of a single gene known to increase pain sensitivity also were acutely vulnerable to feelings of rejection.

In December 2009, another pair of experiments, published in the journal Psychological Science, offered a "novel insight" on the link between social and physical pain. One found that daily doses of an over-the-counter painkiller — acetaminophen — made research participants less sensitive to daily social slights than their peers taking dummy pills. In the second, subjects in a brain scanner played a virtual game of "catch" in which their presumed playmates progressively excluded them from the game. Compared with subjects taking the placebo pills, those taking the painkiller exhibited less brain activation in those circuits that respond to both physical and social pain, even though they still reported feelings of hurt.

Study co-author DeWall of the University of Kentucky stresses that the findings do not make a case for taking Tylenol to soothe feelings of loneliness or hurt. That was done to demonstrate that in processing pain, the brain appears primed to respond — or not to respond, when an analgesic is present — pretty much the same to social pain as it does to physical pain.

It's a point that the University of Toronto's Geoff MacDonald, another of this field's pioneering researchers, knows well. MacDonald and his colleagues have shown that the trajectory of hurt feelings in the wake of a social insult looks very much like the body's response to physical injury: Initially, a surge of stress hormones is released, readying the body to flee or stand and fight. During this phase, the injured often report feeling numb and, despite broken bones or a shattered skull, can walk and talk. After this surge of energy dissipates, the sensation of pain generally sets in.

In MacDonald's experiments, subjects also report feelings of numbness in the immediate wake of social rejection. For several minutes, they are less, not more, sensitive to feelings of social pain. But as the initial shock of the insult passes, subjects describe powerful feelings of hurt — even when the social slight they have endured may seem minor.

This parallel, says MacDonald, suggests that piggybacking the brain circuits for social pain onto ones for physical pain was not merely an accident of evolutionary thrift: It's useful. It helps us to focus on the essential task of binding up torn social fabric, of nurturing our relationships with others after the immediate threat of expulsion from the group has passed. It has helped make us the uniquely social creatures that we are.

"This lingering sense of pain draws our attention to the experience," MacDonald says. "We ask, 'Why did it happen this way? What was it about my behavior, or their behavior, that caused the breach, and how might I behave differently next time?' And that's very functional."

— The Curator

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Eat, Drink and be Merry, for on May 21 We Die!

OK, so what's with this end of the world stuff, anyway?

Most people have heard the “theory” that the world is going to end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar, but recently billboards have started popping up across the country "revealing" the world’s literal last day will be on May 21 this year, allegedly based on the Hebrew Calendar.

Christian Evangelical Radio host Harold Camping and his followers have calculated this date CERTAIN of Christ's "Second Coming" (something that Born Again and other Evangelical Christians refer to as, 'The Rapture') after using a series of insanely complicated and suspiciously bogus calculations.

"It's going to be a horror story that we absolutely cannot conceive of. Millions of people will die on that day and everyday thereafter," Camping said.

According to Camping, who is the founder of the Family Radio Network, Judgment Day will begin with earthquakes — at 6 p.m. local time.

Camping's followers have been traveling around the world, spreading the word about the forthcoming day. "We see people that give us the thumb. They say, 'Thumbs up.' We also see people that, unfortunately, give us the other finger," said one devotee, Darryl Keats.

Camping's doomsday scenario has given the late-night talk show hosts grist for their comedy mills, but sadly a lot of regular people have admitted to being terrified as the date fast approaches, according to recent news accounts.

Look, I'm not a Christian anymore, but if it makes those of you who are feel any better, here are two New Testament verses apropos, from the King James version:

"For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh," (Matthew, Chapter 25, verse 13); and, "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come," (Matthew, Chapter 24, verse 42.)

Let's talk a bit here about death. As an anonymous philosophical wit once observed, "None of us is getting out of here alive."

It is vital that we come to grips with the very reality of the very real end of our lives — whether it's in two weeks or two decades, or longer.

As readers of this space know, I have Lupus, S.E., a worsening auto-immune disease that will eventually kill me if nothing else does. Since I learned my diagnosis, I have become progressively sicker, and just last week found out that I am deteriorating at quite a disgusting pace.

I was pretty bummed, but I do know the real truth; that it doesn't matter how many days or years you live, but what you do with them. (Brother, I certainly am filled with cliches today!) I don't mean how much money you make, or how "important" you are, but how many people you've touched, and how many people you've allowed into your heart.

As a sex-positive, bisexual Wiccan, I believe that life and its many pleasures are to be thoroughly explored and enjoyed; that our physical couplings should be as frequent and fun as possible, but also sometimes seen as sacred; and that the divine exists within each and every being on this wonderfully diverse and rich planet.

My faith isn't based on fear, threats, and always looking toward an uncertain hereafter, but rather what we've done in the here-and-now.

So, if the gig is up for the whole of Mother Earth, why not celebrate the life you've had every day until then, and if it's not, why not celebrate every day after?

Meanwhile, the Florida Atheists and Secular Humanists have posted their own billboard advertising a recruitment party at Tiki Bar on May 21. "The upcoming rapture that's predicted for May 21 obviously is nonsense," said Ken Loukinen of the Florida Atheists. "We're just drawing attention, poking a little fun."

Mainstream Evangelical Christians have avoided the topic despite Camping's insistence that Judgment Day is soon to come. "This is not something where there's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance it might happen. It is going to happen," said Camping.

Oh yes, quite an important uh...end note: Camping’s findings should be taken with tons and tons of salt, as people have been predicting the end of the world, unsuccessfully of course, since 1260. Camping himself “miscalculated” in 1994. In 1860 there was even a “Great Disappointment” when people were warned about the Second Coming. Much more recently, who can forget the doomsayers who predicted the end of the world at the change of the millennium, the so-called Y2K disaster that turned out to be just another glorious day!

— The Curator

Monday, May 9, 2011

Cheating Women Increase the Day After Mother's Day

Did you know that the day after Mother's Day an online dating site for married people looking to cheat on their spouses reports a mammoth upsurge if new female memberships?

Did you know that there even was a site solely devoted to connecting wannabe cheaters, regardless of their sexuality! I know I sure didn't.

So, in case you were under some rock like me, here's a bit about the company, before I get into their stats.

The website is called "Ashley Madison" although its founder, CEO and president is a man. (The photograph at top of this post is from their website.)

The website proudly proclaims, "Affairs Guaranteed," while their oh-so classy (yeah, right) Trade Mark is, "Life is short. Have an affair."

Good grief!

Here's a welcoming letter from its president, Noel Biderman, who is depicted above:

"Welcome to AshleyMadison.com,

I'm Noel Biderman, President of The Ashley Madison Agency and creator of this website.

Ashley Madison is the world's largest dating service of its kind catering to men and women who are currently in relationships but are looking for more. More than five million of you have joined our service, so rest assured, you are not alone.

I am so confident that our service is right for you, that if you become a full member today, I will Guarantee you an Affair to Remember!

That's right! Purchase an Affair Guarantee Package Affair Guarantee Package and experience an affair to remember or I will give you your money back.

For 9 years now, Ashley Madison has been connecting millions of people from all over the United States, Canada, and the UK in an effort to increase the likelihood of a successful Affair. We believe we have truly perfected what it is that you need to start on this journey.

Our website is 100% secure, completely anonymous and now with the Affair Guarantee Package, absolutely risk free. So start now and change your life today!

Should you have any questions or comments about our new Affair Guarantee Program or wish to tell us about a successful Affair resulting from the use of Ashley Madison, please feel free to email me directly. I look forward to hearing from you."

Here's their message about the guarantee:

"Under the Ashley Madison.com Affair Guarantee Program, (the "Affair Guarantee Program" or the "Program") if you don't find someone within the initial 3 months after purchasing the "Affair Guarantee" Membership Package, we'll refund you $249, being the amount you paid for participating in the Program."

OK, so now that you know about the infamous online dating site, here's what they say about the Monday after Mother’s Day: First-time female memberships soar. In fact, they say it’s their second busiest day of the year. (The day after the Valentine’s Day is the first.)

On a typical Monday, Ashley Madison claims that it averages between 2,500 and 3,000 new female memberships. (I find that number difficult to believe.)

However, in 2009, more than 24,000 new women signed up the day after Mother’s Day; last year, there were over 30,000 new post-Mother’s Day sign ups – 31,427 to be exact; and they expect today to be a red-letter day! Keep in mind these numbers cannot be independently verified.

According to the website's statistics, 67 percent of those new female sign-ups identified themselves as stay-at-home-moms. But, more than two-thirds of these women said they had been considering an affair before Mother’s Day.

What pushed these women over the edge on Mother's Day to actively pursue having an affair by signing up to search for a willing sex partner with which to cheat?

Biderman was more than happy to offer his theory as to why post-Mother’s Day female sign-ups traditionally soar.

“On Mother’s Day women in general expect to be celebrated by their partners. However, for many already suffering from a lack of appreciation, this day represents a continuation of neglect and disappointment,” Biderman offers.

He basically reiterates already-published relationship research to note that women have affairs for different reasons than men, saying, “Whereas men are usually looking for sex, women tend to seek attention that they're not getting at home. This lack of attention often makes them feel undesirable — and feeds their need for validation.”

Self-reporting surveys published in the past do indicate that men tend to cheat for sexual reasons, while women cheat primarily because of emotional dissatisfaction.

A woman who feels ignored, neglected, unappreciated, devalued, or taken for granted is more inclined to give serious consideration to cheating on her mate, according to women who have been surveyed by relationship researchers.

Mother’s Day is one of the few times of the year when a woman with children expects to receive some type of acknowledgment or special attention – especially from her mate. If that day falls short of her expectations, for many women, it may just be the last straw, Biderman suggests.

Biderman said he and his staff are expecting the usual onslaught of new female members representing disillusioned mothers who have decided to sign up to become a cheater today. How proud they must be!

As for Biderman? I'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank!

— The Curator