DL on YouTube

Apparently the West Coast Swing guy who I danced with a couple times at Starlite and who came to Big Dance last year after he asked about my dancing background (ie. why I can't dance with people at Starlite), has posted some videos of DL on YouTube.

I watched the Elana video. So I was remembering how during one of the Steps To Remember performances, the rose got stuck in M's hands. While he kept shaking the rose for what seemed like an eternity, I was thinking in my head, "Why is he not letting go of the rose?!" So I tried to yank it out without looking like it. Not working... Now thinking, "Uh oh. What are my options? Glare at him.. no.. really yank it out hard.. hm.. or change my mind and not take the rose.. uh, the music is going to start really soon.... Apparently his finger was stuck between the plastic branches of the stem, and luckily he managed to free it just in time.

Browsed YouTube some more and found this video of Steps To Remember and our middle school performance from DanceScientist. DanceScientist has apparently discovered YouTube and has a pretty popular site with a lot of dance videos! And some goldfish videos.

Meditation, Martial Arts, and Dance

A two-post day, because this is an interesting article about martial art as an expression of religion in Shaolin. There is one video of kung fu together with ballet.

There's no distinction, Polly said, between sitting meditation and what can happen while doing kung fu -- a meditation through dynamic movement, like yoga.

"If you're practicing Shaolin kung fu properly, it is a form of meditation," he said. "It's just fast and hard meditation, instead of slow or sitting. And that's why many of those moves seem so strange -- because they're actually moves that were developed for meditation purposes as well as self-defense and not purely self-defense purposes."

This reminds me of Zen and the Art of Waltzing. When I went looking for that article, I found this other article about dancing making you smarter. An interesting detail I saw was that "when brain cells die and synapses weaken with aging, our nouns go first, like names of people...." Interesting, kind of like the symptom of "difficulty word-finding" with Lyme disease or chronic fatigue syndrome.

The discussion about parallel-processing and exercising your brain connections also reminds me of this post, For Your Brain, over at Whistle Dance.

So this means that I'm going to continue doing the Tai Chi silk-reeling exercises that I learned, and go back to tai chi class and dancing as soon as is possible...

Time to Ride BART

I checked SFGate this afternoon (morning for me), and seeing the large bold centered headline with the words "blast" and "meltdown", reminiscent of how they presented the 9/11 news, my brain was wondering what disaster had occurred while I was sleeping, but when my brain caught up to the reading, it's not really that huge a disaster.

One possibly cool thing that could come out of this traffic blockage, is that lots of people might have to start taking mass transportation or working from home for a while. And maybe they'll find that it's actually pretty cool.

A year or two ago when gas prices seemed to hit a first psychological threshold, a lot of people at work suddenly bought much smaller cars and shopped around for gas mileage. It also becomes easier to work from home more frequently, because well, maybe your boss and everyone else also want to save gas money and time. More people started carpooling, including myself, and I found that it didn't take that much extra time to meet the carpool. You get beneficial conversation during the ride, or a chance to nap. The only thing I didn't like sometimes is not being the driver, but my carpool-mates were pretty safe drivers.

With all the new attention towards "green" things these days, it's interesting to think about all the elements that coincide to bring new behavioral trends into existence.

If only BART were cleaner. They have this effort going on to clean up the cars, but it seems that they haven't yet figured out that it's the filthy seats that is the biggest problem. They plan to hire more cleaners and get rid of the carpet. But those seats are uncleanable.

Doctor Logic

Because this is one of my favorite topics lately.

My mom was discussing Lyme disease with a doctor at CPMC who happened to be from Mendocino county where according to him, 70% of people get Lyme disease. He added that, in most people, it's a relatively mild disease, but in some cases it can be severe and take up to two years to get better. Most doctors don't acknowledge it exists in California, and most don't acknowledge it can be a severe illness. Since he lived in Mendocino, he's seen more.

On the topic of whether Lyme disease can be transmitted from person to person, through blood to blood contact... at first he said, no, it's not possible. Then after thinking for a little while, he revised that statement, saying that it could happen if you injected blood from a needle into a large vein. But it couldn't happen even if you rubbed two people's bloody wounds together. Hm...

Okay, then how does a tick, less than one millimeter in size, transmit the bacteria into people? It only goes less than one millimeter into your skin and doesn't go into a large vein.

Why do we put antiseptic on children when they scrape their knees?

Would you want to rub wounds with a person who has AIDS?

***

Pharmacist Logic

Says that the Lyme bacteria doesn't live in the blood, so that's why it can't be transmitted from person to person even with blood to blood contact.

Okay, then why do doctors try to culture the bacteria from people's blood???

And how does the bacteria get from the tick bite to the rest of the body?

***

Collective Logic

Take what one doctor says and what another says, and it just doesn't make any sense.

But what can you expect, when doctors don't even believe it's possible for a person to have Lyme disease after they were bitten by a tick and had a diagnostic bullseye rash.

***

Through my Web-stalking habit, I found that the doctor/resident who had chronic fatigue syndrome, was treated successfully, and now does volunteer work for the Stanford research study, is in family practice. When she finishes her residency, I might have to go seek her out to be my primary care physician... if she moves to this side of the bay. Because you will hardly find one doctor who acknowledges chronic fatigue syndrome exists, even with the CDC stating that there are now thousands of studies showing that it is a real distinct entity. Though she might not even believe that it was induced by a tick-borne illness.

My current primary care doctor is supposed to be one of the best and raved about in the area by both patients and other doctors, but even consultation from a Stanford doctor/research doesn't seem to make an indentation in him. And even that doctor doesn't actually treat chronic fatigue syndrome except for his research focus.

***

But when I really need something done, I'd probably have to go to my doctor sisters. This story came to mind, about a doctor who found her way into treating arthritis with antibiotics. I had come across it a while ago, and found it again with an interesting Google-age: "I'm your mother" arthritis.

Placebo-izing

I came across an article mentioned in a blog post about how China plans to modernize traditional Chinese medicine. Unfortunately you need a subscription to read the article, so I've only read the blog post. Everything has a blog these days. Even Nature has blogs.

Western medicine seems to rely solely on the randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial to research and prove that treatments work. This is well suited to treatments you can take in a pill form. And yes, Western medicine seems to rely solely on the taking of little pills to treat everything. Magic pills indeed.

Now how would one conduct a placebo-controlled trial on whether massage therapy or acupuncture work? Or tai chi or yoga or just plain exercise. Or changes in diet.

The solution so far seems to be to just ignore and dismiss all possibility of anything that is not a pill and cannot be placebo-ized. It doesn't fit into the one trusty scientific methodology that has been developed, so let's just not look at it.

Instead of, how about trying to come up with and use research methods that do work for something different?

Some people say things are not possible. Some people ask, how? How can it be possible? How can it be done?

Disjointed Thoughts

I was tempted to give feedback to SFGate to create a section on environment topics since they have had so many articles on the topic recently. They must have read my mind, because the Green section just appeared. We're going to be hearing green this green that coming out of our ears before long, whether or not things actually get done.

It's probably a lot easier to be a "locavore" if you live in the Bay Area and California....

***

I was just remembering a brief conversation I had some time ago about a seemingly perennial question women have about who is better to marry. The one with romance but lacking in some other qualities, or the one without romance but who has the other qualities. Well, since just about everyone says that romance goes away after being married for a while, let's see what that leaves us. With the first option, you end up with no more romance as well as nothing else. With the second option, you end up with the same characteristics that you started with. Putting it that way makes the choice sound so obvious.

***

I noticed on Craigslist that there are some new forums including one on "dying". Reading some of those is painful.

Ray's Tea Time

Apparently I'm getting a lot of hits directly on my Google Oops post, and almost all of them are coming from a mysterious nextweb.com without a referring URL. I can only guess that either it's a single crazy stalker, or that nextweb is actually a bunch of Google employees reading my complaints.

Ray's Tea Time sent e-mails saying they are closing because the landlord is increasing rent too much. I had been looking forward to having a pearl milk tea there once I got well again. After tasting pearl milk tea from Ray's Tea Time in San Mateo and Ten Ren in Cupertino, I never wanted to drink any pearl milk tea from the other shops again.

This sucks because Ray's Tea Time was the reason to go to downtown San Mateo. It's the coolest store there. What a conundrum. Downtown San Mateo and the vicinity has become so cool that rents are too expensive for the cool stores to stay in business there. I guess they did have a humongous store though.

Google Oops

Today I received an automatically generated e-mail from Google about Google Accounts in Arabic. After inspecting the e-mail very carefully, I decided it was in fact from Google and the links it contained were harmless and from Google. So I clicked on them. Voila! All my Google Account pages and FAQs were now in Arabic.

A couple months ago, after clicking on a Picasa album link sent by someone Italian, all my Picasa pages got stuck in Italian. And I could not find the switch to turn it back to English, until quite recently. This was made harder by the fact that everything was in Italian. But at least with Italian, I can guess... not so with Arabic. Then I have to make my guesses based on geography of the link on the page. Actually, it's not always that hard, because hovering over the links will show the URL at the bottom of the browser, and that's usually in English.

I found a drop-down menu with a few selections that looked somewhat like language selections, but didn't see an option for English. So I selected "Dansk", as that was the language option available that would be most easily "readable" to me. When the page converted to "Dansk", suddenly all the correct language options appeared in the drop-down menu. So finally I found "English" and fixed the problem. But not before noticing that random other non-Picasa Google pages are still appearing in Italian for me. Sigh.

Okay Google, why I am I receiving e-mails in Arabic? And why am I receiving an e-mail in the first place? Why does clicking on links mess up language settings? And how come the main "Preferences" option to set *all* pages to a selected language does not do that?

G-Mail has also been having problems, with more frequent downtimes than any other e-mail service I've used. A couple months ago, messages from my Trash were magically appearing back in my Inbox, and all my "unread" e-mails suddenly lost their unread status, never to appear again.

Not to mention that more and more products are being rolled out half-done with some necessary functions missing, as my recent playing around with Google Pages and Picasa has shown.

Since Google has provided so many exceedingly wonderful services, we will overlook these snafus, but they seem to be growing over the last year or two. Hopefully they do not grow as exponentially as its successes have. Are we running out of enough geniuses to operate Google?

It has all of our e-mail, our blogs, our pictures, our documents... all of our information... so better not screw anything up.

Dancing Dragon Reads the Bible

The impossible is possible, and things never thought to happen can happen, like me being interested in learning about Christianity and seriously attempting to read the Bible.

Even for those not into religion and higher beings, might one be curious about who is this man around which we date our calendar years?

I found that there are a lot of online Bibles. From blog-surfing, I found this English Standard Version to be the most appealing so far, including font and user-friendly audio. It is much easier to read than the King James Version, which is almost like reading Shakespeare in high school. There are a zillion different translations though, and I wasn't expecting so many choices.

While searching for more explanation about some passages, I found these helpful reflections on the University of Toronto's Catholic church Web site.

So you're supposed to be able to read the Bible in a year by reading only four chapters per day. I'm currently just attempting the New Testament first, and as little as one chapter at a time. Reading online is apparently easier than physically holding a book and turning pages. So far, it's pretty cool.

What version of the Bible and other online resources do you recommend?

Tech Support

After the runaround with a half dozen Washington Mutual customer service agents, now I can't even access the other online account that I did not even refer to. They really need to use instant messaging or something so that they can cut and paste, because there's too much room for error in transcribing a username and e-mail address over the phone. In general, there seems to be bigger problems with night crews. So hopefully I'll have enough energy to straighten out the now bigger mess tomorrow during business hours.

Now I'm too tired to shower, and it's late anyway.

***

Update: shower accomplished. Still the second main accomplishment of the day after eating. Since inflammation is supposed to be a big part of this disease, I made an effort to shower anyway.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Awareness Campaign

Apparently, I'm having post-exertional malaise from cleaning out fish sauce and hauling the bottles to the dumpster two days ago. So I spent most of the day in bed, pretty much waiting all day until I had enough energy to type something here. However, it's not quite as bad as it was a few months ago, which I describe as, even if I had been starving in bed I would not have been able to get up and go out and acquire some food to eat, assuming money falling from sky, of course. I've read another person's description as, even if the building were burning down, she could not have gotten out of bed. Yes, this is really hard to imagine if you don't experience it yourself. It's one of those things where in order to understand, I wish people could experience it, yet it's really not something you'd want to wish on anyone.

The CDC and CFIDS Association have partnered up for an educational campaign. They have a pretty informative Web site: Provider Education Project and the CDC site on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

However, as far as the Awareness Campaign, I don't know who it's reaching. The people who are looking for the information are already aware. The people who need awareness are the ones who would pass over learning about it even if the information fell in their laps. Who is this Awareness Campaign reaching, if in San Mateo County, between world-class UCSF and Stanford medical centers, one of the wealthiest and most highly educated regions in the world, and one of the most progressive supposedly... if I can go to twenty doctors in various specialties and hardly a one even recognizes this thing exists? The old-minded ones (who aren't quite used to women being in the work-world yet) say it's anxiety, stress, or psychosomatic. That's a pretty "interesting" conclusion, because when you think about it, that's an even more nebulous mechanism of causing physical symptoms than what the same people would call hokey in alternative medicine explanations of energy flow, meridians, trigger points, and whatnot.

So I wonder what would happen if, in response to my PCP saying to please let him know if there's anything else he can do to help, I suggested learning about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, even if he doesn't believe in the Lyme disease stuff. Doctors don't like to be told things.

What's better, a doctor (or any person) who is dumb and nice, or one who is smart and not-so-good a person? My mom says that people who really are nice and caring won't be that dumb, and people who are not-so-good people won't really be that smart. Hm... but in the case of a sick person seeking treatment from a doctor, which would be more effective? Neither? If a dumb person really cared enough, could he find a way to solve a problem with endless effort? On the other hand, does dealing with some smarter people require navigating Jekyll and Hyde?

I really haven't come across many doctors if any (excepting sisters of course) who are both really smart and really caring. There may be some luck involved there. I still have to share the story of the Stanford pre-med who tried to put out a fire with a paper towel. That's also the story of how I saved the Chem building from burning down, hehe. Next time you go to see a doctor, even a Stanford or Harvard educated one, consider the fact that even with that stamp, they might try to put out fires with paper towels. Scary.

Today is a record day for comments from new commenters. I was especially amused that I got an answer to my chemistry question. Yay!

Blogging

Okay, I'm replying to e-mails at the improved rate of about one per day or two. But I'm still avoiding the phone because it takes more energy, and breath literally.

Mr. Wilyness complains that my blog is not RSS-ified. I switched off that Blogger feature several years ago so that bloggy sites wouldn't pick up my blog and thus make it searchable. When I started blogging, it was really just a personal journal that I kept on the Web for my own convenience so I could type something anytime from anywhere. I suppose I can turn that feature on now.

And as a personal journal, I actually try not to write too much with an audience in mind, though that is hard when you are actually aware of people reading. So I'll write about things that I don't think anyone would be very interested in reading about...

like the fact that I went to my condo today and dumped about a million bottles of old smelly fish sauce that my roommate left behind. That's because I'm a little better and am actually able to physically do that now, otherwise, I'd have to call her back to clean out her own fish sauce and other unwanted left-behind items. I can actually carry a bag of garbage or recycling to the dumpster now, but only one at a time.

Blogging is Easier

From long-lost drawmates to former dot-com coworkers to current coworkers to ex-boyfriends, everyone seems to be deciding to send me a "How are you doing?" e-mail or "Do you want visitors?" phone call at the same time. Much appreciated, though I might not reply for a while. At the so far average rate of having enough energy to do one phone call and one e-mail per week, including doctors and administrivia, it is going to take a while. Adding in disability forms and taxes right now, I'm not quite keeping up. I haven't even called back my not-so-long-lost drawmate from several months ago. Unfortunately, not all of the above-mentioned read this blog.

TurboTax Fun

So I figured out the TurboTax depreciation dilemma after some very diligent Google-searching. I happened to come across a page mentioning how to access and edit forms that are not in the TurboTax interview. I thought everything would be taken care of in the interview.

So, if you ever need to look at a tax form directly, you can access from the menu, Forms -> "Show My Return" (or "Open a Form"). Right-clicking on a field gives a menu that includes an "About" description, and "Data Source" that tells you where it's calculated from.

To enter an asset for a rental property that is not the land nor the building, and which falls under some other mysterious depreciation schedule, you need to open the "Asset Entry Worksheet" for Schedule E, and fill one out for each asset. (Or some other schedule if it's something other than a rental property.)

To see mysterious depreciation schedules for different categories of assets, such as "7-year property half year convention", check out Appendix A of this handy IRS document, IRS Publication 946, How to Depreciate Property. And this document will also help explain mysterious acronyms such as MACRS (modified accelerated cost recovery system).

So yay, my brain now still works enough to do taxes. If I can no longer figure out how to debug application servers, maybe I can do mindless tax preparation for a living. Although I recall a former coworker mentioning that his brother made only around $4000 working for H&R Block one year.

Do Your Own Taxes

With disability forms to fill out, and taxes, there's not a lot of the few functional hours of the day left for blogging. Today has been highly productive relative to the last half year, as I made a field trip to the grocery store to buy some now-very-expensive freshly squeezed orange juice since the orange crop in the Central Valley got frozen. After not having been to a grocery store in half a year, it's kind of like going to an amusement park.

It appears that tax preparers get paid a lot of money for punching in the same numbers into TurboTax or whatever software that most people could do themselves. It appears that old people like my dad don't realize that the paper questionnaire that the tax preparer gives clients to fill out is similar to the questions TurboTax asks you. So if you can fill out the paper questionnaire, you can pretty much do your own taxes, even if you have more complicated stuff like a business or property rentals and sales, and save a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. As for the few cases where knowledge of tax details might help reduce taxes owed, I'm a bit doubtful that most of them aren't already programmed into the software.

Except that I can't reproduce my tax-preparer-prepared taxes from 2005 using TurboTax 2005, as a pre-exercise to see if I can do this year's taxes myself, because I don't know what or where he punched in some property and depreciation values, and I figure it should have continuity until I sell my condo. I guess I should have just done my own taxes last year.

I just saw in the TurboTax Help that renting to family or friends at below-market can be considered personal use, which I guess means you can just report the rental income and not deal with the business use tax issues. Why didn't I find that sort of information last year after endless Google-searching and poring over IRS documents?

Now I'm pondering, what if you let a friend inhabit a room in your house for free, and they give you $12,000 of gift money per year?