B.W.S.S.

B.W.S.S. stands for "Busy Writing Short Story." It's the txt slang kids are using when they get trapped in a feedback loop between the real and the figurative that's so intense they just have to write a short story. Like:

Cassandra: Did you watch the inauguration?
Ashton: No, I had to finish this chapter on the Civil War.
Cassandra: How did that feel?
Ashton: a mixture of relevant and irrelevant.
Cassandra: B.W.S.S.

or

Kimmy: Hey, what are you doing?
Shaun: Making a poster for global capitalism.
Kimmy: But that poster reads "msilatipac labolg"!
Shaun: Oh no! I inverted the whole thing! And it didn't take effort, just me not paying attention...and a little luck.
Kimmy: Also, when you think about it, none of it really matters. Everything is the still same, especially our essence.
Lenore: B.W.S.S.

Get the picture? It's really helpful. I wish it were around when I was putting generic Visine called "Artificial Tears" in my eyes in a parking ramp at the Mall of America and I heard on NPR that Ronald Reagan died (true!).


Anyway, here's what's getting all my best BWSSs right now:

Mirror Box Therapy

It's a treatment for phantom pain. It works by the patient putting their amputated limb in the hole of a "mirror box" (pictured above), then moving the non-amputated limb in front of the mirror while watching the reflection. The image in the mirror tricks the patient's brain into thinking the absent limb still exists, and this alone cures the pain.



Want to know more about it? Let me help you with a link I found.

Also, these FAQ bits are great for people like me (people who love to BWSS):
from a blog:

1) Are there any known side effects?

None have been reported yet.
Things that can happen - depending on the condition are:
Lorimer Moseley reported a patient that was so distressed seeing the amputated limb move again that he had to withdraw from treatment.
Another interesting phenomenon is Dysynchiria - if you touch the unaffected limb and watch the reflection pain is felt in the affected limb.

from mirrorboxtherapy.com:

Can I do myself harm using mirror box therapy?
Mirror therapy is not a placebo effect as it reconditions and retrains the brain to normalise its function. It is important to understand that asymmetrical movement, keeping one limb intentionally still whilst moving the other and simultaneously looking in the mirror at the virtual image may worsen the condition.

If we have different BWSS styles and you can't see where I'm coming from, here are some S.S. plot pitches I came up with involing mirror box therapy:

• mirror box therapist looks at images of estranged family every night


• mirror box therapist writing book about life of the Jewish mind before Holocaust


• mirror box therapist's young mistress introduces him to Second Life


• mirror box therapist who is a liar/believes lies too easily


• mirror box therapist protests the building of a large mirror-covered corporate headquarters in his community


• mirror box therapist gets really into magical realism


• mirror box therapist goes tubing down a big two-hearted river

it's endless.

Happy BWSSing!

So Hot Right Now: Essentialism!

The NYT Magazine, which has officially changed its name to the Gender Pseudoscience Times Magazine, has an interesting story on single-sex education:

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

First of all, shout out to my boy Gary Paulson.

Second of all, what is Enlightenment? The use of knowledge to cast off the shackles of servitude. Or, to paraphrase Kant, the use of science to confirm your dishwashing technique.

Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls’ hearing ability is much better than boys’, as is girls’ sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: “Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn’t smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon.

There you have it: already one concrete benefit to Sax's line of inquiry. Let’s keep going down this path. Frankly, I don’t see how any of its costs or reverberations could outweigh that girl getting rid of her dead rat.

I’m positive that the anecdote about the dead rat rotting in the wall is an allegory for gender essentialism, but I'm still trying to work out the ending. Maybe the rat comes to life and eats the little girl, and it turns out that her Dads smelled the rat the entire time but had been willfully repressing it in order to drive her crazy. Then an army of little girls comes over and fills the house with buckets of oil and water mixture, drowning the rat. Then they do the Dads’ dishes, and all seems to be well again! But in the last sentence we (the readers) discover that the rat is still alive in a sewer, feeding off of anti-depressants and transfats, and growing stronger than ever as it plots its revenge.

Lookout, Kafka!

Endorsements, Part Two

The L.A. Times’ endorsement of Obama had me at hello, and then had me again at “experience has value only if it is accompanied by courage and leads to judgment,” and then it sealed the deal with a surprise turn to my favorite type of language:

In the language of metaphor, Clinton is an essay, solid and reasoned; Obama is a poem, lyric and filled with possibility. Clinton would be a valuable and competent executive, but Obama matches her in substance and adds something that the nation has been missing far too long -- a sense of aspiration.

I liked this metaphor so much I decided to turn it into what in literary circles is known as an “extended metaphor":

The essay that is Hillary Clinton is an essay I copied off the internet, written by a kid who also sells his Ritalin and is rich from online investing, and I could probably get a better grade if I wrote my own essay, but I’d rather just keep watching this Project Runway marathon.

The lyric poem that is Barack Obama is this:

Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid, and free, and tender! O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear…yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

That poem is by me.