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Sandy Is Bad, But She Ain’t The End Of The World

It’s a bit before 6 a.m. as I write this, and the winds are picking up outside. An historic storm is coming up the coast, and the weather reports are pretty grim. If you’re prone to anxiety attacks, this is going to be a hard one to say the least.

But watch for the good to be found within the storm, because it will be there.

Mood music:

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I’ve written much about the basket case I used to become in the face of these storms. Rather than repeat it here, I’ll just direct you to the posts “For Parents With Kids Freaked About Frankenstorm” and “Fear, Anxiety and Storms: From Blizzard of ’78 to Frankenstorm.” For a slightly more humorous take on how I used to get in these storms, check out “Fear and Duct Tape.”

For the rest of this post, let’s focus on the brighter side of this storm. Yes, there is a brighter side:

–If you’re like me, you get to spend extra time with your family. The kids are home for the day and my office is closed, though I’ll try to get some work done before the power quits.

–If the power goes out (we’re assuming it will), there’s still plenty to do. There are board games to play with the kids. I’ll no doubt give my acoustic guitar a vigorous workout.

–People are often at their best in times like these, helping those who are in trouble and without food or shelter. I’ll never forget the family that let us and two other families stay with them for a week in the aftermath of the Blizzard of 1978, when my neighborhood was under several feet of ocean. I’ll also always remember how the White family took us in when a 2010 storm gave us an extended power outage. We always hear about the bad stuff in the news, but acts of kindness and generosity happen every day — especially during emergencies like this.

–In my current job I can stay home during a storm like this and I’m grateful for that. But I used to be a newspaper man, and when storms raged, I was required to be at work. This has me thinking of my old colleagues at The Eagle-Tribune. We should all be grateful for those who will risk their skin today to get out there and report what’s happening outside so everyone else can take precautions and be safe.

–They say this storm will be worse than anything we’ve seen in decades, and that can be cause for alarm. But remember that the media say that about at least two storms a year, and you’re still here. Don’t take this one lightly, but try to keep that wider perspective.

This day will be difficult. But like all difficult things, it too shall pass.

 

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Fear, Anxiety And Storms: From the Blizzard of ’78 to Sandy

Written in the hours before Superstorm Sandy hit. For those who get scared about the weather…

A lot of people are anxious over this “Frankenstorm” weather forecasters say could hit us early next week. They use words like “historic” and “unprecedented.” They draw comparisons to the “Perfect Storm” of 1991, saying this one could be worse.

It’s the type of verbiage that alarms people.

I feel for those who are freaked out right about now. Growing up in Coastal New England did plenty to feed my fear and anxiety over the years.

Mood music:

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My reaction to hurricanes and nor’easters has long been a source of family amusement. My sister Stacey loves to tell the story of how I ran through the house with duct tape as Hurricane Bob approached in 1991.

When people ask where this fear came from, I don’t have to think it over. It started with the Blizzard of 1978.

That storm started like any other for a second grader. I was thrilled that we got two feet of snow because it meant school was canceled. I remember my mother making us French toast that first morning. The toys we got for Christmas were still shiny and new, and I could play with them all day.

Then the ocean spilled into the street in front of my house and kept rising. I’d never seen anything like that before, and all my 7-year-old mind could do was picture the house floating away into the great unknown.

Then the pumping station down the street got flooded out and our basement, where the playroom and most of the toys were, filled with sewage.

The ocean ripped apart my neighborhood along the northern edge of Revere Beach that week. Houses were torn from their foundations. The wind tore the roofing off some of the pavilions lining the beach, and schoolmates had to stay in hotels for a year or more while their homes were rebuilt.

Every winter since then, every nor’easter riding up the coast fills me with anxiety. The TV news doesn’t help. Impending storms are more often than not pitched as the coming apocalypse.

From the late 1970s straight through the 1990s, I’d shake from weather reports mentioning the Blizzard of ’78 with each new storm. As a young adult, I developed a pattern of throwing a blanket over my head and going to sleep. That’s exactly what I did in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria grazed us and, at age 21 in August 1991, when New England took a direct blow from Hurricane Bob.

In more recent years, I’ve been a lot less anxious about stormy weather. Some of that is because I don’t live on the coast anymore. Some of it is because I’ve gotten much better control of my anxiety. When Hurricane Irene came through here last year, I was calm and even drove around a bit.

But I remember how I used to feel.

So if you know some people who are freaked out by Hurricane Sandy right now, don’t make fun of them. Weather-based anxiety is serious business, and ridicule can make things worse.

reverehome

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Political Rants on Facebook Are Annoying, But…

A lot of people have complained about all the ugly political comments and memes coming from their Facebook friends from the left and right. Some days it gets to me, too. But I’m going to take a moment to defend the practice.

Mood music:

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There are some comments I have no patience for, like when people resort to outright name calling. I unfriended one guy recently for telling another of my friends to “get his head out of his colon” during one political spat. I can’t even remember the topic. What mattered was that the guy was being an asshole. He resorted to all kinds of name calling because my other, more conservative friend dared question a liberal principle.

I unfriended another guy for constant right-wing propaganda. It seemed like he had no other purpose in life than to attack anyone who didn’t share his Republican values.

For those keeping score, no one side or point of gets a free pass.

But extreme cases aside, I don’t think the political posts are such a horrible thing. A vigorous political debate is healthy. It’s American. And it’s more important than ever to discuss the day’s issues. A lot of my conservative friends are annoying my liberal friends by continuing to harp on the terrorist attack in Libya that left one of our ambassadors dead. They have just as much right to question what happened as my liberal friends do to question why Republican candidates keep saying things like rape pregnancies are a gift from God.

Besides, these clashes are a lot more relevant and interesting than a lot of the other posts I see on Facebook every day, such as:

  • People who seek sympathy by constantly complaining about their jobs.
  • People who seek attention by constantly making statements that lack the context or detail we need to know what they’re talking about.
  • People who constantly post pictures of their food.
  • People who jam up the news feed with hundreds of memes about a zombie apocalypse.
  • People who slather the news feed with love notes to their significant others, including sexual details none of us really need — or want — to know about.

I could go on, but you get the picture. At least with politics, we’re talking about things that matter. Just keep it respectful, folks.

Facebook Flag

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Your Excuse Is Invalid

Like everyone else, I find it hard to motivate myself some days. Then I read tales and see photos of people doing big things despite big disadvantages. My own problems then seem microscopic, and I can move on.

Mood music:

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Today I’d like to thank three people for giving me a much-needed kick in the ass.  Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed and sorry for myself, I can look to them and see my excuses for personal adversity are invalid.

My aunt Robin, who is fighting breast cancer with grace and good humor:

Aunt Robin

Amandita Sullivan, one of my Facebook connections. I don’t know her personally, but I connected with her because she uses the social network to inspire people daily with her story of recovery after getting hit by two different cars inside of a week. She also devotes a lot of space to others who have bounced back from adversity:

Amandita Sullivan

And this guy, a friend of Amandita’s who lost two legs but not his lust for life:

Climbing mountains

Rock on, folks.

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A Little Souvenir From My Trip To Amityville

Last month, on the way to a security conference in NYC, I made a side trip to Amityville, Long Island, to take pictures of the so-called Amityville Horror house for a work-related slideshow. Today we launched it, and I wanted to share it with you here.

Happy Halloween: The Amityville Horror house, then and now
The real haunting of Amityville is by unwanted tourists. Here’s how the famous site has added security and privacy features over the years.

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I’m a Hot OCD Mess Today

I’m admittedly failing to control my worst OCD impulses this morning. I’m trying to assemble a slideshow for my work website and a vital application keeps crashing. It’s a busy day ahead, with blog posts to write and meetings to sit through, so this isn’t the best time for an app to fail me.

Mood music:

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I’ve heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. So for a half hour, I kept trying to restart the work app, getting the same result each time. When I finally slammed the mouse down in anger, making the screen go black for a moment, I realized that I had let my demon get the better of me.

So instead of following my insane impulses, I’m writing this post.

I’d probably be doing better at this had I not started to lose my grip yesterday. The blinders fell over my eyes sometime during the drive home, and I spent the rest of the day operating out of sync from everything around me. I went to bed angry about it and woke up that way. It was a perfect setup for trouble.

I don’t see this as a reversal of all the progress I’ve made in managing my OCD. This morning’s scenario used happen multiple times a day. Now there are much longer spaces between the bad episodes.

But when I have a bad episode, I have to be real about it.

I’ve said it before: OCD is a two-faced bitch. Some days it gives me the boost I need to get a lot done. I came into the office this morning expecting that flavor of OCD to show up and power me through slideshow-, blogging- and newsletter-making before 10 am, when I have two meetings in a row. Instead, the wrong OCD showed up.

It happens. I’m moving on and will do the best I can with this day. Chances are that it’ll turn out to be a pretty good day.

Time to try making it happen.

Face in the Wall

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I Wish Hard Rock Stations Had More Class

It’s not easy being a rock ’n’ roll fanatic some days, especially when it comes to the choices I have on the radio dial. Oh, don’t get me wrong: The Boston area has plenty of great stations, especially RadioBDC and Rock 101 in Southern New Hampshire.

But some radio stations, in the Boston market and beyond, that play my kind of music have to ruin it by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Mood music:

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It’s always been this way, of course, and once upon a time I didn’t mind. One of my local stations, WAAF, has cranked up a humor based on sexual crassness for as long as I can remember. Hell, this is the station that brought us shock jocks Opie and Anthony. They shocked Boston until April 1998 they told their listeners as an April Fools’ prank that Boston Mayor Tom Menino was killed in a car accident while transporting a young female Haitian prostitute. In more recent years, I’ve tuned in to hear women on the morning show being asked about the shape of their vaginas.

As a 20 year old, I loved this stuff. But somewhere along the way I grew up, and my radio stations didn’t. (The RadioBDC DJs, formerly of WFNX, have always been more mature in this regard.)

It’s a drag for two reasons:

  • I can’t listen when my kids are in the car, which is most of the time.
  • Thanks to the Internet and, more specifically, Facebook, I have to see a lot of meathead comments from WAAF and its followers. This morning, for example, WAAF posted these comments above pictures of the women they talk about:
    • “Here’s math teacher Iowa Ashley Nicole Anderson who allegedly had relationships with FOUR different students! Would you??”
    • “Here’s Mandy Caruso, the cosplayer dressed as “Black Cat” who was upset about being sexually harrassed at NY ComicCon.”

The comments to the latter post have a few mature comments, but most of them are abusive name-calling. One jerk calls her a “cumdumpster” and someone else asks, “What does she expect when she looks like that?” Forget that these women are human beings, prone to all the mistakes we’re all prone to. The woman in the latter case did nothing wrong. She was at a comic book convention and was in costume. That doesn’t give some asshat the right to ask about her cup size.

I’m no prude. I do come from Revere, after all, and have been known to swear like a sailor. When my sons let the bathroom humor flow, I admit I laugh inside even as I’m scolding them.

But there are lines I’ve decided not to cross anymore. I want my rock ’n’ roll delivered to me by DJs whose thinking and sense of humor are something above the Stone Age stuff.

I’ve unliked the WAAF Facebook page and don’t plan to listen to the station again anytime soon.

Thankfully, I have RadioBDC and, when I want to cut out all the talking, Spotify.

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I Was Tricked Into Yoga

I’ve long balked at the idea of doing yoga. Frankly, it always looked boring to me. It didn’t fit the tough-guy image I have of myself, either. Tough guys don’t do a bunch of poses. They lift heavy things. Yet here I am, doing yoga.

Thing is, I’m starting to appreciate and respect it.

Mood music:

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How did I reach this strange place? My therapist tricked me.

For years, he’s been trying to push yoga on me as a tool to reduce stress and get out of my head. For years, my response has been “no fucking way.”

I recently signed up for my therapist’s Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction class because for a guy trying to manage clinical OCD, you need as many tools as you can gather. I’ve gotten the upper hand over the more insidious byproducts of my OCD in recent years, particularly the fear, anxiety and inability to go about my day because of the worry spinning in my brain. Now I enjoy many of the things I once feared, including travel, and I’m able to truly live. But I still get stuck in my head, which is bad when someone’s trying to talk to you. So I signed up for the class.

My therapist didn’t mention there’d be yoga involved. The bastard.

I knew I’d been duped when I walked into the first class and saw yoga mats carefully placed in a circle. He finally sprung it on us at last week’s class, and last night we really got into it.

My first thought was that the beginner’s positions were a lot like the exercises I used to do for a bad back. My second thought was that the poses were a pretty strenuous workout. I didn’t expect to break a sweat, but I did. There was something satisfying about it.

I’m supposed to do this once a day as part of my homework. That’s going to be tough, given my schedule. But I’m sure there’s a way.

Erin has done a lot of yoga in the past but not much lately. Maybe I can get her to do it with me.

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be pondering this stuff now, I’d have laughed in their face. Actually, I did just that to my therapist.

You won’t find me wearing yoga pants, though. That would be gross.

Crazy Yoga Pose

Ouch.
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Lance Armstrong Was Robbed

I just saw a report that Lance Armstrong is stepping down as chairman of the Livestrong charity he built to inspire and empower cancer sufferers. It comes after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency reported “overwhelming evidence” that Armstrong engaged in doping while he was a professional cyclist.

Armstrong was robbed.

Mood music:

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Much has been made of doping in professional sports. Frankly, I couldn’t care less if athletes use steroids. So what? The media acts like it’s a new thing in professional sports, when the reality is that some form of drug enhancement has been going on in the profession longer than I’ve been alive. To be the athlete that inspires millions, you need a raw talent and drive that most people could only hope to have. Dope all you want. If you don’t have the talent and determination to begin with, you’re going nowhere.

Armstrong’s case is particularly sad. Here is a man who overcame testicular cancer that spread to his lungs and brain and then won the Tour de France seven times. He became a hero in the eyes of millions and that helped turn his Livestrong foundation into one of the biggest cancer-fighting charities in the country.

As far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t a hero because he won the Tour de France. He was a hero simply because he went the distance multiple times in that brutal competition. Had he come in 10th place, he still would have been a hero to me, because he overcame a deadly disease and showed sufferers everywhere that physical limitations need not stop them from living out their dreams.

People say steroids gave him an unfair advantage. I say the damage his body suffered from cancer put him at a huge disadvantage going in.

The doping controversy is bullshit. It was the creation of politicians that wanted something to grandstand over. Go ahead and disagree.

Some people I admire are fighting cancer right now, and because of the money raised by Livestrong they have better odds than they would have 10 or 15 years ago.

I agree with Forbes writer Chris Smith that it’s time to legalize steroids in professional sports. He writes:

If we really want to level the playing field, it may be time to head in the other direction: legalize performance enhancers.

Not only would the playing field suddenly be even for all players, it would be at a higher level. A huge part of watching sports is witnessing the very peak of human athletic ability, and legalizing performance enhancing drugs would only help athletes climb even higher. Steroids and doping will help pitchers to throw harder, home runs to go further, cyclists to charge for longer and sprinters to test the very limits of human speed. …

Detractors will argue that steroids and doping can pose health risks to the athletes involved, but athletes undertake serious health risks by simply walking onto the field or straddling a bike. Just last year, a media car ran Johnny Hoogerland off the road during the Tour de France, sending him headlong into barbed wire. Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann famously had his leg broken and career ended mid-game, and the devastating longterm effects of concussions are rapidly becoming apparent. Plus, if performance enhancers were made legal, then they could be safely distributed and regulated so that players aren’t forced to rely on shady back alley transactions for untested drugs.

We love to make heroes out of people who do big things. Unfortunately, we love to tear them down, too. Armstrong has done so much good for a lot of people. This whole affair is a shitty way to repay him.

Lance Armstrong

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Christian Brochure: “Being Gay Is Bad, Like Overeating”

Some days it’s not easy being a Christian soldier. When my comrades talk in a way that makes sense, it’s all well and good. But when they say stupid things, such as being gay is bad — like bullying and overeating — my faith is tested.

Mood music:

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Fortunately for me, I learned a long time ago not to base my faith on the social politics of mere mortals, including those with leadership positions in the Catholic Church and elsewhere. If a priest says something I find hateful and out of line or is run out of town for spending church funds on porn, I remember that we all fail every day, and that the most important thing is one’s relationship with Christ and Christ alone.

Today’s tirade comes after seeing a brochure from Mission: America’s Linda Harvey that lumps being gay with being a bully or a glutton. Harvey’s new guide on how to talk to kids about homosexuality states that, among other things, “it’s not right to tell someone that being homosexual is okay. The person may be feeling sad because of being bullied, but never try to make him or her feel better by saying ‘gay’ is okay.”

She builds on this ridiculousness by comparing homosexuality to overeating: “Kids who are overweight are sometimes bullied, too. And we might want to make that person feel better. But it would be a mistake to say that overeating is a good thing, right?”

One of the major tenets of Christianity I try — and often fail — to observe is to not judge others. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven,” says the Bible (Luke 6:37).

And yet, when it comes to the issue of homosexuality, all church leaders ever seem to do is pass judgement. They tell us that being gay is a lifestyle choice. They tell us that being gay is among the worst of all sins. I have several relatives who are gay, and I can tell you this: Not one of them woke up one morning and decided they’d be gay because it seemed like a cool lifestyle choice. Several gay friends and family fought their homosexuality, turning to drugs and suicide attempts. They eventually realized they are good people who have much to offer their fellow human beings. They pay their taxes, love their relatives, friends and community, and do God’s work every day in a variety of ways:

They help feed the poor.

They teach children to be kind to each other.

They take on jobs with massive responsibility and rise to the occasion.

They do things Jesus would approve of. They also do things Jesus would frown upon. But don’t we all? And Jesus still loves us all, no matter our failings.

I hope Harvey learns to stop judging people she doesn’t know. Telling children to judge others is un-Christian and contrary to what Harvey says she believes. Telling children it’s bad to be gay, even when it’s far beyond the individual’s control, is irresponsible. Telling them it’s OK to dislike a person because they aren’t like you is telling them it’s OK to judge people without having all the facts.

That’s the recipe from which a lot of bullying rises up.

PHOTO: Mission: America was founded in 1995 by Linda Harvey.