Someone who auditioned for Biggest Loser once told me that just waiting in the line, he knew he had found his tribe. These overweight yet energetic, determined-to-change, extroverted spotlight-seekers were just like him, and it was revelatory to find hundreds of them in one place.

I find variations of my tribe often, mostly in folk-dancing groups. I also feel the urge to break into a new tribe though, and I think that is harder to do.

One way is to try new things, which I am sort of doing by working in an alternative medical office. I had already observed that the US conventional medicine model is not very successful in preventing disease, possibly because it does not even considering that a goal, but the full immersion definitely contains aspects that lead a STEM major to raise her eyebrows. Aside from eyebrow ascension, I am deploying my efforts toward excellent results for my new work-tribe.

I have made friends-for-life from work-tribes, but those groups are less reliable than life-tribes because they can dissipate rapidly. I found a new life-tribe by becoming a docent in marine science, an interest I hadn’t previously had time to pursue. I still don’t have time to immerse myself in it, but I do lots of things I couldn’t do before, like answer visitor questions on the wharf and contribute to iNaturalist.

Sometimes a current friend who intersects me in one tribe reveals a connection to another: friends here have introduced us to the music and celebration of rural Italy. Sometimes I create a tribe by following my own interests: I am always happy to meet a fellow nutrition geek. 

Tribe-seeking is part of us. I have read that it is innate for humans to practice loyalty over truth-telling, because social connections are paramount for our survival. I’m reading the Earth’s Children series by Jean Auel, which certainly imagines the source of social survival convincingly, but I hope that I won’t take tribalism quite that far.

A couple, friends of ours, who have lived in Santa Cruz for five years find that circumstances require them to return to their Berkshire home, which they have been renting. It’s a conclusion they resisted until it became inevitable, but now that they have decided, they are overflowing with excitement and anticipation. Their long list of things-to-look-forward-to has me wondering, Was moving a mistake? 

My husband is not wondering this. Temps in the 60s year round are better than cake for him, and the proximity of the ocean is the icing.

Coincidently, we decided to start watching an old show, Boston Legal–I know, seriously? Nothing better to do?–which opens with a montage of Boston scenes. This visual stimulus combined with our friends’ plans leads me to contemplate what I miss about living on the East Coast.

First are my friends. Despite Internet, phone, and planes, there are many I rarely reach out to, and I am certain some bonds are loosening. In my experience, even one visit goes a long way to re-spark connections, but between working and “required” travel, ie, relative visiting, I expect multiple years to elapse before my next visit. My last was in March of 2018.

On the positive side, most people in my age group experience accelerated time flow, so it may not seem like it has been so long when I finally go.

Next is Tanglewood, though when I experience it as a paying customer, as opposed to a grounds pass holder, I may like it less. Tanglewood is a place I dream about, a place where I have been very happy.

I miss the Concord Scout House, where I met my husband at a contra dance, and all the folk dancing activities of the year, including the Marlboro Morris Ale and NEFFA. There is a vaguely reminiscent shadow of the Ale here, but nothing even approaching the Festival. Contra dancing we can find, but with neither the scale nor the expertise of the Scout House version, it makes one wistful rather than sated. The terms women and men are also prohibited, having been replaced by gender-free bird names.

I wonder whether that change has happened in the East?

Brookline, where I lived most of my life, is of course on the list. I would like to just hang out in Griggs Park to find out if anyone I know shows up. Farther afield, I miss Fenway Park, even though we only went once a year at most, and Boston Symphony Hall/BSO, though Davies Symphony Hall/SFS is quite good.

A lot of what I miss is living in a city. We did not realize we were city folk since we lived in an enclave, but we did avail ourselves of the breadth and depth of city offerings, which is much harder to do from Santa Cruz. Though we try. Gas prices and all.

I spent many lovely hours at Nantasket beach, but it’s hard to miss a beach when you live on the California coast. On a whale watch Sunday, we saw one blue whale and one humpback whale, a mola mola, and a black-footed albatross. I am always very happy to be on a boat, miles out to sea.

Boston is a coastal city, but the ocean is a much stronger presence in this small town.

My husband and I may soon have an opportunity to do something we did a long time ago: play music for a Scottish Country Dance class. With that in mind, we were reminiscing recently about our former dance band. We agreed on three members, then he described a fourth I could not place. He said she was diminutive, played the whistle, was married to a dancer who had retired from government work, and later relocated to the West coast with her husband to work for a high tech firm.

At this point, an aside to my husband who usually reads my blog out of loyalty. I haven’t already forgotten the discussion, I changed some details to make the couple less identifiable. Though if many of our friends are like me, that won’t be at all needful.

Back to the main thread. I could not place this couple at all, so we decided to look at our wedding pictures, where they showed up early and often. The moment I saw them, I felt a flood of affection. Oh yes, I cried, they were very good friends! Yet still neither of us could come up with their names.

We proceeded through the wedding album and came up with an impressive number of names, though not 100%. I saw some people I did not remember having attended, and we both did not see some people we were pretty sure were there. The most startling takeaway for me was my visceral response to pictures of these people. My heart was telling me these were important people in my life, though my head had no idea why.

Another surprise was the nostalgia engendered by seeing the ones who have passed on. At least six did not survive the 29 years from then until now, and two of those died quite young. It was affecting to see them again, playing music, dancing, laughing, interacting.

I’m not a big fan of pictures. Even before humans felt the need to capture and share not only every sunset but also every chimichanga, I thought that taking a picture of something meant you were stepping away from it, not really experiencing it. Once you critique a landscape for light and composition, or a gathering for color and action, you step outside of it, at least mentally. That’s not bad, it’s just not I want for, say, my vacation. I don’t want to remember setting up the shot, I want to remember looking down on the condor or walking over the coals. 

Of course we weren’t taking pictures of our own wedding, but seeing those pictures made be appreciate their existence. I didn’t have those warm memories a few minutes before. Or rather, I suppose I had them, but I didn’t feel them, not until they were evoked by the images.

That doesn’t always work for me, actually. I’m somewhat disappointed by how little I remember of my sons’ childhoods. Sometimes the pictures illuminate the past for me, but just as often I think, What were we doing, and why?

How clever would I be were I to write a blog that was not a blog, but rather a placebo for a blog! More clever than I am, certainly. This is only a blog about placebos.

Most of us think of the placebo effect as a sort of brain illusion. In one example, a successful high-tech entrepreneur finds himself with debilitating pain and reduced mobility due to deteriorating lumbar vertebrae. Being a wealthy person, he seeks medical advice from leading researchers at globally prominent venues such as the Mayo Clinic, all of whom advice him to have some of his vertebrae fused. Instead, he embarks on a sort of luxury health vision quest, working with naturopathic healers to cure himself through diet, meditation, and various hands-on methods, and in time becomes both pain-free and active. Medical images of his lumbar spine, however, show no improvement whatsoever.

Mind over matter isn’t the whole story of placebos, though. Researchers studying Parkinson’s sufferers gave some of them drugs developed to boost dopamine, which is the main substance those persons lack, while others got a placebo; in some cases the latter were even told they were receiving a placebo. Nonetheless, the placebo-receivers’ brains produced significant amounts of dopamine, in some cases more than the brains of the medication-receivers. That is, a placebo produced a measurable physical response.

I read these and many other cases in The Magic Feather Effect by Melanie Warner. This book is an easy read, and there are plenty of startling cases. Unfortunately, the author is firmly grounded in conventional western medicine, and although she admits the pill-for-an-ill model might improve with a dollop of cause-seeking and a splash of patient-respect, her goal is clearly to enshrine the placebo effect in its rightful place, below everything that MDs do.

I prefer to believe that the placebo effect can be harnessed for use in actual life. One researcher whose actual job is to identify cases in which physical effects result from placebo-type actions as well as belief systems, has come to respect the positive attitude as a healer of note. He repeatedly finds that positive thinkers get better medical results than negative thinkers do from similar treatments.

This fellow had his faith tested by a painful bout of diverticulitis which was eventually cured by conventional medical interventions, including surgical techniques. Afterward, though, he found himself fearful of a recurrence, unable to stop visualizing a virulent regrowth in his own intestine. After several weeks of near constant worry, he finally snapped to the obvious: His own research predicted that, unless he could view the illness as an aberration in a healthy life, he was upping the odds of it recurring. Happily, he was able to forget about it, and years later has not experienced it again.

I’m working on a similar plan with my gimpy left foot. Nutrients, nature, and naps are all my body needs to self-heal, and I will be able to Morris dance again!

Well, maybe I need a slightly more inspirational goal.

A thunderstorm woke us this morning, a rare occurrence on Central Coast. My husband and I, who were raised in St. Louis and Houston respectively, then spent most of our adult lives in Boston, are thunderstorm-deficient, so we basked in the gloriousness.

The drama of thunderstorms resonates in my life lately, though more as a contrast to the cocoon in which I’ve been living than as a metaphor for truly dramatic events. I’m working mostly full time for someone else now, so I have hours and dress codes and all the things that most of you have managed for all of your lives, as I did for many decades, but not the most recent one. As a result, I can’t seem to figure out when to exercise, sleep, or go to the grocery. Not to mention blog.

When I do have free time, I either complete the most pressing task I have been ignoring, or I read. My reading has not actually been very effected by my working, which says something about my priorities. Whose priorities are these, anyway? They feel imposed by outside forces. It’s as if I am no longer the master of my fate, or at least my schedule.

Apparently I relied on habit more than I realized. For years I paid bills on Friday mornings, and the first week I was not able to do that, I just didn’t pay bills. Yipes. That’s the problem with exercise too, something I used to do when I first awoke. Trouble is, I can’t possibly arise early enough to exercise before work. Can I?

Perhaps it is a chance to create a shiny new self. Just as soon as I find the time.

My attention has been captured by news about items, many of them human body parts, we recently thought were useless, and now know otherwise. My favorite is “junk” DNA, because I called that one early. Despite my lowly status as a mere BS in biomedical engineering, throughout my adult life I have resolutely asserted that nature does not create waste, and we simply must not know what most of our DNA does. Since I spent most of my life in clinician-rife Brookline, this subjected me to disdain, incredulity, or ridicule from numerous MDs in social situations. Now junk DNA is called “noncoding” DNA–pretty much a sore loser name–and at least five serious functions have been identified, with more I am certain on the way. 

I’ve had similar thoughts about the appendix, so I was super happy when it turned out that it does something I very much appreciate: store a copy of our gut microbiome. I had wondered how our gut MB could be both so crucial to health and so easily disrupted by things we sometimes consume, so I was thrilled to learn it’s backed up.

I was an early victim of the mistaken notion that tonsils, a perimeter defense for our lungs and antibody producer for our throats,  provide no function, as well as of the way-wrong opinion that formula was just as healthy as breast milk. I like to imagine I would have been taller, smarter, allergy-free, and maybe even not-myopic without these early interventions.

It was the fifties. I do miss that income distribution.

I was recently advised to wear a 2 mm heel lift because I have a discrepancy of 6 mm, about a quarter inch, between the lengths of my legs. 70% of the population has a discrepancy of between 1 and 60 mm. When humans were mostly walking on beaches, trails, and rocks, a small difference didn’t matter, but it’s considered pathological now because we spend so much time on floors, sidewalks, and other essentially flat surfaces, so a discrepancy may affect our backs or posture. Does it, though? I haven’t noticed a problem, or a difference since I started wearing the lift.

I still walk barefoot on the sand. 

Eyebrows seem obviously placed to divert liquids that run down our faces around our eyes, but I recently read that people have more trouble identifying pictures of celebrities with their eyebrows removed than pictures with their eyes removed, so eyebrows may play a role in recognizing faces, especially those faces with unibrows.

All our teeth, including the Wise Ones, fit easily into our jaws until we adopted agriculture, which is also when our brains started shrinking. I believe as the cranium shrank, the jaw breadth shrank as well, though not, apparently, the teeth. This is hard to find information about, because humans, even scientists are, as it turns out, Very Sensitive about the possibility that we are becoming dumber as time goes on. 

Even though we keep deciding things are useless when they aren’t. 

I’ve been reading a lot about soil lately. That’s not dirt. Dirt is soil with all the supporting organisms–bacteria, fungi, and larger creatures like worms–removed from it. Soil engages in complex interactions with plants, providing them with nutrients and enabling inter-plant communication and feeding underground, sometimes even working from inside the plant.

Today’s scientists are just starting to understand soil. Just last December, scientists published* findings of microbes in ancient Irish soil, microbes that seem able to combat four of our six worst antibiotic-resistant disease organisms.

There’s not too much ancient soil left for us to check out.

Sadly, we’re on a course to destroy all the world’s soil, along with all the other stuff we are destroying. “We” refers to that global blight, homo sapiens’ Civilization. So many problems it causes! Yet could we live without opera? Much less indoor plumbing…

The May Harper’s cover story, We Can Do It Again, describes the origins of the New Deal, which were well before WWII. Caucasian settlers had taken one look at the prairie and proceeded to did it up, despite millions of people having been bountifully sustained there for thousands of years prior. Big money/power forces were responsible for policies that resulted in desperate farmers forced to compete against each other to produce crops for which prices were dropping to turn to the bad farming practices that changed feet of rich soil to dirt. Corporate America contributed in its usual helpful fashion, for example, convincing farmers to sell train rights to their acres of dust because the steam from the train would create rain.

Maybe I should characterize the blight as white homo sapiens’ Civilization.

Can it be that those of European origin, which includes me, have an innate urge to destroy nature rather than understanding it? By methods such as deforestation and dam-building, we have destroyed habitat from Australia to New England and beyond. Of course we were racist then, determined not to learn from the successful inhabitants, or even to acknowledge them as successful. Now we are not racist at all, and always take the time to understand any system before altering it.

Or not.

The more primitive humans weren’t living in passive harmony with nature. Huge numbers of bison and passenger pigeons were managed by natives in North America, and swaths of the Amazon were terraformed by those in South A. All these people were able to maintain the bounty of the land while being both healthier and more satiated than the Caucasian immigrants. Were they just smarter than us?

Seems possible, since we have evidence of the problems we are causing now, and we still can’t seem to stop ourselves.

If only the current inhabitants could have controlled their borders!

On the other hand, we did a great job of turning around a lot of the Dust Bowl effects, both by restoring ecosystems and by putting people to work improving living conditions for themselves and others. This work was diverted to the war effort during WWII, then, sadly, dropped for the most part thereafter, despite exhortations from some leaders. Those people who accomplished this monumental turnaround were the same ones I was complaining about above.

Hope? Go Green New Deal!

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* https://phys.org/news/2018-12-bacteria-ancient-irish-soil-halts.html

Flying out of Newark Liberty International Airport, which we have done frequently since we moved to California and left a son in NJ, has led me to feel it should be renamed Ye Olde Newark Field to indicate its sub-modern status. For example, it practically never honors TSA Precheck. Every time, the TSA personnel say, We don’t have TSA Precheck today. Really? What day do you have it? Time to post a permanent sign, TSA Precheck Not Honored Here. Boarding passes for EWR departures should read TSA Precheck, Not! This time, at least I got a card allowing me to keep my shoes on. I still had to dig out the laptop and take off my hoodie.

Despite months on the brain diet, I managed to reach the tedious-sorting-into-bins step of the non-Precheck world with a non-empty water bottle. My older son made that mistake once and had to surrender his. Mine is a Kleen Kanteen with a Lifestraw in it, so I was not about to give it up, and I didn’t feel like returning to the start of the line, so I put my bag on the ground and pretended to fumble with my possessions as I unscrewed the top and dropped the bottle onto the floor. A lot of water came out, but I guess the flustered act worked since they did not frog march me to the TSA interrogation area.

ATC struck again this trip, perhaps due to Midwestern weather, though NJ was balmy and flowering. Every flight between the Bay Area and the environs of NYC was delayed, and our predicted arrival moved from 10:30 pm to 12:15 am west coast time, three hours later for our EDT-adapted bodies. I wondered whether the parking service would charge us for an extra day.

I will never know if they would have done that though, since AS stepped up to address the delay again this trip. No gate games this time; the plan was Extreme Turnaround. It started with an annoying-but-effective Dad Talk from the gate agent, admonishing us to gather our items and go to the bathroom Now as the incoming flight was on final approach. They opened two lanes for boarding pass scanning–not different lanes for different traveling classes, just a second gate agent with a scanning tablet–and once on board, received encouragement over the intercom:

• Orient your overhead bin vertically, like a book, so we can fit more in!
• Move into the seating area to unpack your personal items so the folks behind you can continue to their seats!
• Those seated in the exit rows should read the safety instructions while others are boarding!

The plane was full, and it was definitely the fastest full-plane boarding I have experienced. The moment folks were seated we pushed off, and they stepped up the speed too: we landed at 11:35, so the parking folks did not have a case. Even with checked bags and a 45-minute drive, we were inside our house by 1:00 am. 

I did notice the plane bathrooms were dirtier than usual.

Someday I will have pictures of the opera we saw, but all the ones I took are really blurry. My adventures with my new phone is a possible future topic, though an embarrassing one.

We had a great flight to New Jersey yesterday, by which I mean, as great as a coach-level commercial flight can be, so I want to send out a shout-out to Air Alaska. Not that the flight was perfect. In fact, we were already at the gate when it got delayed forty minutes by Air Traffic Control due to congestion in the NYC area.

AS gate personnel were very apologetic, even while they, like all airline reps, assured us the ATC delays weren’t on them. While we were waiting, though, they led a couple of games, each featuring a $25 airline voucher as the prize. The first prize went to the passenger with the oldest US penny–the winner had a 1959! The second went to the passenger with the most recent birthday. There was a tie between passengers born on April 9 and April 11, so two vouchers were awarded.

It’s always a good flight when the flight isn’t full, and this one was not much more than half full. For perhaps the second time ever, my strategy of booking my husband and I into aisle and window seats in the same cluster resulted in an empty seat between us, rather than the more usual result, me trading my window seat with the person assigned to the middle. Plenty of single travelers had their own clusters as well.

Someone in the AS cockpit apologized again when we were delayed nine minutes after we had already backed out of the gate. He implied with a deep sigh that we should have gotten a break given we had one delay already, and said we should be able to make up at least some of the delays since we had a “leisurely” assigned flight time. By this point everyone was enjoying the extra space and not too worried.

I have romantic views about air travel, and am one of those who think piloting a plane would never stop being a thrill. San Jose was crowned by a deep blue dome of sky, and from my window I was able to follow along as we turned onto the runway, powered up and soared into it. We climbed, first heading north, then made four successive turns that dipped the plane on my side, revealing SJ in all its sprawling glory, surrounded by first the Diablo range to the east and south, then the Santa Cruz mountains to the west with the Pacific ocean beyond, then the Bay in all its glory, which we climbed over as we resumed our northern track.

It was almost as if the pilot wanted to give everyone a view to remember.

The flight was uneventful, and the landing only about 15 minutes late.

Avis even upgraded his to a Yukon Denali, though this seems to be a mixed blessing. A running board and interior handle allow me to clamber aboard without pitons, and we occasionally find a parking space that both fits the car and allows us both to open our doors widely enough to disembark.

I realize several of the positive features I have listed were not controlled by AS. Fairly or not, reputations are often made–or destroyed!–by happenstance. Just as hanging around with a positive crowd seems to generate positive energy for the group when apart, flying with an upbeat airline seems to lead to travel contentment.

I walk on the cliffs by Monterey Bay multiple times a week, yet yesterday was the first time I had ever seen a rat, so I posted to Nextdoor asking if that was a possibility. The first reply was, Welcome to Pleasure Point. The second opined that we had more rats than people here. Those were followed by multiple posts listing the types of rats, what the rats do, where the rats live, and so forth, including the post from which I stole this blog’s title. One person also posted a description of seeing “hundreds” of mice at a beach picnic are one night for variety.

It happened yesterday evening and I worked this morning, so I haven’t been back. Will the landscape look different to me, now that I know it is rat-invested? Will I walk a little farther from the vegetation? Will I look for rats while I walk, or keep my gaze firmly fixed on the water?

While walking near the ocean, one does tend to look at it, and perhaps that’s why I hadn’t noticed rats before. Despite the descriptions from the posters, it isn’t as though rodents are actually running over your feet while you walk. Most people, myself included, use stairs to access the beach from the cliffs, and that behavior is certainly solidified, now that I realize there are questionable creatures lurking in the scrub.

There were mentions of rats living among the rocks as well, though.

Last weekend, I was walking up those stairs and was startled to glimpse a full-grown surfer lying under my feet. He had just found a rock niche below the stairs in which to rest. At the time I wondered whether creatures would come to inspect someone in such a spot; now I feel sure it would happen.

I know rats are animals, and wild rats are wild animals, or if not, people have none but ourselves to blame for their ubiquity and proximity. Nonetheless, the landscape does seem a bit more fraught at the moment. The upside is, I am now pleased to live one-quarter mile from the water, rather than closer, as I had sometimes wished. Of course I know rats can travel, but we have regular pest inspections, and so far the ancient dust in our crawl space remains undisturbed.

Just another example of learning something about one’s world that isn’t new, yet it changes your perceptions once you know it, a phenomenon which happens to me periodically. Internet porn sites get more visitors than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined*?  30% of Americans think our population is between one and two billion people**? My husband doesn’t like beets?

I still prefer knowing to not knowing, about the rats at least. I’m also pretty experienced at not dwelling on things I don’t want to think about, a useful, though not boast-worthy, task.

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* Huffpost.com, ca. 2017. Youtube gets almost twice as many visitors as porn sites.

** Harper’s index, ca. 2018.