Bedtime Story--for Sunday Scribblings

Once upon a time there was a mother. She was usually an ordinary mother, not too tall or too short, but maybe too thin. She had long dark hair and dark eyes that could be too intense. This mom had two sons. Like all moms she thought they were smarter and cuter than all other children, although less well-behaved than most. The mom was pretty smart, a little pretty, and often kind and understanding but none of these things made her special. It was her angry side that made her special to her two boys.
Now, usually anger is a bad thing in a mother. Angry mothers yell, give time outs and take away privileges like Game Boy time. But this mother needed to be angry because her house was infested. Little infestations like mice, roaches and termites are easy to solve. You buy a cat or hire an exterminator. Once the carcasses are gone, all is well.
This house was infested with something extraordinary. It had monsters.
These were the kind of monsters that preferred to live in little boys’ bedrooms. They liked to hide under the bed or in the closet and would make strange rustling noises at night. The boys were sure the monsters were green, scaly and had large fangs. Of course they never saw them. Monsters are too smart and always hide when you look at them directly. But you know they are there, peering at you through the crack in the closet door. And they never came out when it was light. Keeping the closet light on helped a little but the monsters just went under the bed then.
Every night after lights out, the little boys would call their mother in to the room to sleep with them. Every night the mother would say, “Go to sleep. There is no such thing as monsters.” But the boys knew better and the mother always wound up sleeping with them.
Once in a while the mother thought she could hear the monsters too, but every time she checked under the bed there were no monsters there. In fact, she never saw them, no matter how vigilant she was. The monsters were always sneakier. And every night the mother became a little more tired and every day she became a little more cranky.
This went on for some months until one evening the mother finally lost her temper. “Come out you monsters!” she screamed. And they did. So she bit their noses off and they ran away never to return again.
The little boys still wanted their mother to sleep with them but they knew the monsters were gone for good. Every now and then they let her sleep by herself because they had a healthy respect for her anger and did not want their noses bitten off too.
So everybody in the house slept better and they lived happily ever after. Except for the noseless monsters.
The End

Read this story to your kids.

Byzantine Fish

I am submitting to "Macroday" this picture of a Byzantine pottery fish seen at the Byzantine Museum in Athens, Greece.

The Upstart Crow

I am currently sitting in the Upstart Crow Bookstore in a window seat sandwiched between the philosophy section and the books on books section. Life could be worse especially as I have a large iced Americano coffee next to me. The only thing that could make life more perfect would be if they had wireless here.
I think my next book purchase may be from an Oxford series on the seven deadly sins entitled Anger by Robert Thurman. It has a fittingly red cover and a picture of two hands holding a broken pencil. I got it off the philosophy shelf where it is displayed next to Pride (purple), Greed (yellow), and Lust (blue). They have the final three deadly sins as well but Anger suits me best. It seems the most important sin for a psychiatrist to understand.
My meeting is going well although I am not accumulating as much Continuing Medical Education as I might wish due to general sloth on my part (sloth is a light blue deadly sin). Should I buy that book instead? Well, I should probably pay attention to how many books I can carry home and I prefer anger for now.
On the books about books shelf behind me I found a product I want to buy for my once and future work library. It is called a Personal Library Kit {For Bibliophiles}—brackets are part of the title. It includes 30 self-adhesive pockets, 30 insert cards, a genuine pencil, 30 For Reference Only (Do not circulate) stickers and a date stamp and stamp pad. Maybe I’d get more books back if I used these (see my post "On Amazon and Advertising"). The kit comes in a nice little box but weighs a lot. Since they have a web site, www.knockknock.biz, I may wait until I get home to order this. But no one is purchasing from my Amazon.com ads yet so my library is still growing at my own expense.
Speaking of budgets, I learned more about my medical malpractice insurance. The type of insurance I have has changed in recent years. What I hadn’t realized is that it will keep on increasing over the next 3 years to a total of about $19,000.00 a year. I may need to stop going to meetings and buying books soon. I also may need to raise my rates again. Malpractice would need to be an entire additional blog so I’ll leave this for later.
Signing off for now as I have a “Special Interest Group” to go to soon.
My new book:

Night trees

Submitted to Lens Day--topic "night".
Since I don't have a tripod, I had to prop my camera on a concrete lamp post and set the timer. The exposure may have run as long as 8 seconds by my count.

It's California, Dude--Child Psychiatry and the Holocaust.

I made a call on my cell phone a couple of days ago and the young person who told me I had dialed a wrong number called me dude. Really!
Somehow the title seems appropriate here in San Diego, although I haven't made it to the beach yet. I'm in the right coffee house though. It is an internet cafe (free wireless!) by the name of Lestat. No vampires yet but a few vegetarian-eating, chain-smoking, tattooed women, and a bearded man who is drinking bottled water and talking to himself loudly. I just bought Day of the Dead skull earrings (for Halloween) but hope I don't scare any of my young patients. I also bought a couple of 1906 postcards with pictures of my Chicago neighborhood. Figures I would find them in California.
I am playing hooky from my conference. The only meeting over the lunch hour was pretty dull and not germane to my clinical practice.
This morning's meeting (8AM which is torture for me) was one of the most moving conferences I have ever been to. I actually cried. We saw a documentary movie about an Englishman who was responsible for saving 669 Czech children during the Holocaust. The English gentleman who rescued them was so unimpressed with his feat that he did not tell anyone until some 50 years later his scrapbook of documents pertaining to the kids he rescued was discovered in an attic.
Then we heard from a panel consisting of 3 of the children (now each 70 or so) who were saved, one of their daughters, and her high schoo-age daughter. It was hard not to cry when hearing testimony of children whose parents opted to put them on a train to a foreign country. The kids were mostly bewildered but the parents knew they might never see their children again and most of them indeed perished. I think everyone in the room must have been trying to imagine the pain of a mother or father deciding to ship their children to safety and then saying good-bye to the kids in a train station. We child psychiatrists deal with children in foster care all the time, but this was hard to hear.
The final speaker was an American university professor who had also escaped as a child from Vienna and then Prague, but via Russia and then Shanghai. In the United States he was recently reunited with his childhood friend who was one of the transported children who also spoke. He spoke eloquently about his own experiences and the people who had helped him escape. He even managed recently to thank the 90 year old Japanese man who had helped rescue his family.
In spite of the Holocaust theme the message was hopeful. The professor talked about making the acquaintance of both absolute evil but also of good. The four survivors who spoke all mentioned their gratitude that they were alive and the movie referred to not just individuals saved but also to the subsequent generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And the man who rescued these kids? Still alive and well. In the movie he seems very modest despite a recent knighthood. It seemed the thing to do at the time, we are told.
In a room full of people dedicated to helping children, I imagine that nearly every one of us felt somehow inspired to do a little more by the magnitude of what this one man did on his own. I wasn't the only one who cried either. The conference moderator was so choked up he couldn't make his concluding remarks. The professor sang Beethoven's Ode to Joy in German to us instead. Really, dude, he did.

A ticket to my destination. . . .

I always wanted to start a travel essay that way. That song sticks in my head when I travel. Thank you, Simon and Garfunkel.
Today I am somewhere over a state between Illinois and California. Since I cannot see the ground and have no navigation information handy, I have no clue where we are, Nebraska, Nevada, Texas? I guess it really doesn’t matter anyway, so long as I am on the right plane. My computer says it is 6:47 PM so I have been in the air for 1-1/2 hours and have around 2-1/2 to go until my arrival in San Diego.
I departed uneventfully unless you count wasting time getting ready and then having to rush. I didn’t realize until in the taxi on the way to the airport that I neglected to pack any bathroom supplies, e.g. toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, headache medication and so on. Good thing I’m a doctor. If I have a migraine emergency, I can write my own prescription. I did accidentally bring a prescription pad that was in my laptop bag that I didn’t have time to clean out, which may come in handy.
I did remember the essentials—computer, camera, and more books than I can possibly read while at a conference. I also brought my latest magazine reading—Pychotherapy Networker and ADDitude. Somehow given the procrastinating and forgetting I mentioned above, reading a magazine about ADHD is fitting.
This trip may turn out to be more of an adventure than I had wanted. I had planned/hoped to stay with my aunt in the San Diego area but for reasons I do not understand, have not been able to reach her. I kept trying until literally minutes before my flight so I don’t have a hotel reserved. I doubt I’ll be sleeping in a doorway somewhere (this sort of happened to me in college when I launched an impulsive road trip), because if all else fails, I’ll check into a really mundane airport hotel or a really expensive luxury hotel. When I was in college that time, I couldn’t afford either.
Pardon me we’re having turbulence. The seat belt light just came on. This doesn’t bug me unless it makes me spill a drink or the lurching is enough to make me queasy, but it does make me think of my past clinical work with people who are afraid of flying. Fortunately for me, despite a mother and grandparents who feared air travel, I consider plane crash stories to be interesting reading. I read Alive (about the soccer team that crashed in the Andes and was forced to eat their dead to survive) when only a teenager and look forward to reading the recent revisiting of the gruesome topic (see ad below).
Speaking of irrational or rational fears, I learned at the airport that today there was an Orange Alert. I forget exactly what that means, except that like a yellow light it must be between green and red. I have no clue what the trigger for this alert is (if it has even been announced by our secretive government) and can’t Google it as I am in the air. Cynic that I am, I wonder if it has anything to do with it being two weeks before a crucial election. Or maybe it is like the buildings in Chicago that currently have orange lights on their tops in honor of Halloween. It is to get us into the holiday mood.
Trick or treat! Signing out from 20,000 feet or thereabouts.

Dot and Dash

Dot and Dash
Originally uploaded by skron.

Now you've met both my cats.