Posts by Cecelia
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It's not my genre but I enjoyed TINML. Perhaps admired it rather than enjoyed it deeply. Liked the set design/art direction/costume. The cars!
And although I am a sweet, mild mannered person, I have been known to shout at automated voices.
So yeah. It's a good'un.
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I haven't seen The Room but I enjoyed your take on it. I once met a young woman who was doing a thesis on spectatorship. This would have been right down her alley.
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Mums tend to like the Hedgehog book - I was recommended it by the mother-in-law of a friend's daughter.
It HAS got me wanting to read Proust.
And your mum sounds very edumacated:)
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I can't keep up with your puns but I looked at the ref to the film version of Hedgehog - somehow they've managed to Hollywoodise or Peter Jacksonise it.
Book has soppy parts but the philosophy bits are good to go. At one stage the main narrator muses on the nature of reality and perception. Is her cat "an obese quadruped with quivering whiskers" as she perceives him or a blob of green jelly?
My cat is now called "obese quadruped" - what would a tui be? A friend offered the following:
a two pronged tantalising trickster with a frivolous breast and an airborne aria
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chopped down all his trees on the boundary
"Good fences make good neighbours"?
And for you recordari and other avid readers ... Have you read The Elegance of the Hedgehog?
Story of a concierge in a big Parisian apartment block - has a sort of neighbour theme ... in a way
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David - a fabulous coffee-snorting, cackle-inducing read.
We have had neighbours who completely ignored us (because we're old?) and noisy neighbours - but we've always had at least one who would feed our cat and vice versa. Cats and kids can bring neighbours together.
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I've been thinking about positive thinking. If it's a hard won thing after a process of information seeking and grieving, then, yes, it's good. I was a great fan of Stephen Ray Gould's elegant essay, "The median isn't the message".
http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html.It helps when a patient can take positive action.
In my search for the works of David Spiegel (used to believe in positive thinking etc) I found the below
http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6853
Indeed, if someone is a natural curmudgeon, then continuing to be a curmudgeon may be the very thing to help lower stress, bolster the immune system and, possibly, influence the success of the cancer treatment.
"Many pessimists cope well with cancer," says Jimmie Holland, the chair of psychiatric oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York. "You can be as curmudgeonly or angry or whiny as you want and still survive cancer, as long as it doesn't cause your doctor to throw you out of the office."
Just goes to show. I'm the biggest pessimist out ...
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I don't know, Heather. If you were my daughter or sister or friend, I'd find a way to look after you whatever century you lived in or amount of money we had:)
I've been lucky in that I've had violent outbreaks of bad health followed by rapid recovery - even now after some gruesome head and neck surgery I'm only slightly speech disabled and getting better and have a minor disfigurement which friends now show no sympathy for:) I feel an empathy with those with chronic ill health for which there is no cure: my mother had lupus and rheumatoid arthritis for over 20 years.
I think Dyan is right about Vipassana meditation - it's different from positive thinking - whatever that is. I have friends who have made Vipassana a lifestyle. It sounds wonderful. They have never claimed that it could heal a physical ailment, OTOH. In fact I remember one of their foremost teachers dying of cancer some time ago.
how important empathy is in group dynamics
That is lovely recordari. I always thought you sounded like a nice young person.
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An interesting discussion ably steered back on course by Russell. I now have a much better understanding of CFS.
It shows that if you need to be well informed and to become your own advocate. I'm inspired by a young man on the Oral Cancer Foundation website who said his wife put up a sign by his hospital bed: "Don't touch this man without an anaesthetic." (Actually I can't remember if it was anaesthetic or morphine or whatnot but the principle appealed to me. His attitude was that only the patient knows what pain he is in and he has a right to pain free treatment. I can't put it as well as him but he sooo had a point!)
And part of making your way through the crocodile infested swamp of serious illness, is dealing with the wishful thinkers. After I bounced back from an advanced cancer in 1997, the very well-educated mother of one of my students, said, "It must be all your positive thinking." Good heavens - I was terrified and depressed and terribly worried about my kids. I had planned the songs at my funeral. (I was into Enya at the time - oh dear.)
I survived because I eventually got some gold standard treatment or by some lucky chance.
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She might be aNNOYing but she's not a MURDerer.