The Prepper Life

So it appears that the US’s response to the coronavirus thus far is, “Good luck with that.” The saga of non-testing continues, with standard procedures still continuing to assume that travel to an outbreak area is required in order to catch the virus, and no real plan in place to do serious triage and infection control before exposing other patients and staff.

A few token patients get identified and quarantined, and everyone else gets a generic “stay home if you’re sick” message that in no way takes into account the reality that American society is almost entirely built on not staying home when you are sick. School attendance policies don’t allow for it. Workplace attendance policies don’t allow for it.

To make the spread of the virus even more certain, many school and work attendance policies require the provision of a doctor’s note in order to excuse absences and thereby avoid truancy charges or termination — thus the booming urgent-care industry, where you can pop in during extended hours and spend five minutes with a doctor who will write you an excuse.

Barring a major public health campaign to change these factors, people who value their jobs and their good relationship with the department of social services are going to carry on as usual. Even with a public health campaign in place, unless there are serious provisions made for assistance covering lost childcare and lost wages, people are going to make the hard decision to continue faking their way through the day, as we do now. Which means we continue to live behind the curve. Call it Italian-style.

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The good news is that South Korea, which is testing vigorously and thus has the most reliable statistics, is showing only a half of a percent overall mortality rate (.62% at this writing). That’s awesome news for the general public.

Italian-style, though, does not bode well for nursing home residents, people at high risk of complications, and Walmart employees. Thus, prepping: If you buy your extra pack of toilet paper this week while you aren’t coughing and sneezing, you won’t need to run to the store in a pinch when you do come down with the thing, and thus go around infecting the people who cannot afford to be infected.

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I do not have good prepping advice to give. I am not a minimalist. My house is cluttered. My hoarding instincts have been steadily reinforced over the years thanks to hurricanes, ice storms, dam breaks, water main breaks, almost-a-snowstorms (you want to never truly *need* groceries, lest you get stuck going to the store the day before the snow doesn’t come), guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner and “by the way I need _________ by tomorrow morning.” So maybe I have a closet we call “Prepperville”? Yes I do.

But these are things that I know:

#1. Bleach. It does so, so many useful things. Good for all kinds of emergencies. Get the plain stuff.

#2. You know you’re a born prepper if you hate going anywhere without dish soap. It can be used on bodies of many species, clothes, dishes, your bathtub, your car . . . whatever needs to be washed. You actually *can* put it in a laundry- or dish-washing machine, if you manage the dosage properly. Gets the grease out.

#3. Duct tape and contractor bags, individually or in combination, can be used to solve so many different problems I can’t imagine you don’t keep both on hand at all times. In a crisis, it’s therapeutic to go ahead and top off. It doesn’t really matter what kind of crisis.

#4. My son buys the wrong coffee. Actually every member of my family buys the wrong coffee, but 4/6ths of those people are not my problem, because they can just cope. In a crisis, nobody wants the boy and I going cold turkey on the caffeine. He buys this stuff:

Aldi brand dark roast coffee from Columbia

Photo penance of the day: Me holding a package of Aldi brand dark roast coffee labeled “Colombia.”

This is wrong. In the same box from Aldi you can get either “Colombia” or “Sumatra.” Both are dark roast. Both are fair trade. But one of them is just not as good as the other. I confirmed this by accident this morning.

First week of any disaster, he and I are going to have the coffee we want.* We can slowly adapt to our circumstances as we toughen up gradually. Everyone will be happier that way.

#5. Your three teenage daughters do not want to adapt to improvised feminine hygiene products the first week of the disaster. Give them at least a month into the apocalypse before you lay that one on them.

#6. Yes. I know that most people throughout history did not have toilet paper. Many manage just fine without even to this day. I don’t care. Quit making fun of people who binged on toilet paper this week.

#7. Other people’s ideas of good prepper-food are usually disgusting. You have to figure this one out on your own. I go with ingredients that already feature in our regular menu, are pretty durable in a weather event, and can be consumed either uncooked or else can be cooked over an alternate cooking source (propane stove, charcoal, wood fire, etc). You’ll be pleased to know that the best popcorn recipe ever stands up to this rule.

In conclusion: In the face of any disaster, I’m totally prepared to live on coffee and popcorn. We’ll be fine.

*The ability to improvise coffee-making** under nearly any circumstance is my chief super-power.

**I did not say you would like my improvised coffee. Indeed, I prefer that you do not.

2 Things You, Your Friends, and Your Family Need to Know About Dysautonomia

It is the time of year when I get flooded with reminders about Dysautonomia Awareness Month. I’m aware, thanks. I’m not a big fan of colored ribbon empathy-signalling for any disease, so we can skip that. I’m going to save the “How’s it going, Jen?” post for another time, too. Let’s skip this year straight to the info that is useful for anyone headed to the doctor about those weird symptoms.

Refresher: What is Dysautonomia?

You can skip this part if you already know.

Your autonomic nervous system is the part of your body that makes things work without you having to think about it. Your heart beats, your innards digest, your temperature regulates, and your blood pressure presses, even if you completely ignore them.

Autonomic dysfunction, or dysautonomia, is when that system doesn’t work right. When your blood pressure fails to compensate when you stand up. When your stomach declines to empty. When your heart decides to beat to the rhythm of its own drummer.

It’s complicated (we’ll get into that again in the next section) because of course you might have problems with these symptoms due to some other disorder. It’s double-complicated because you can have autonomic dysfunction as a complication of an ordinary disease (like diabetes), a horrendously complicated disease (like certain inherited mitochondrial disorders), or just cause.

So “dysautonomia” is a bit of an umbrella. It’s like saying “I have stomach problems” or “lady troubles” except more scientific sounding. But just like you need to know that your digestive and reproductive tracts sometimes require medical attention, it is important to know that your autonomic nervous system is a part of your body that can malfunction.

What happens when you don’t know about this is what I’m writing about today.

Problem 1: Don’t Be So Nervous!

If you’ve ever felt your heart race, your stomach churn, or your hands sweat when you were nervous, you’ve felt your autonomic nervous system doing one of its things.

This creates a tricky dilemma: Say you go to the doctor because you are short of breath, and all the tests show your heart and lungs are just fine. Are you just really anxious?

Maybe you are. You’ll probably get referred for a psychological evaluation. What you need to know is that many forms of dysautonomia have surface similarities to the physical side of anxiety disorders. How do you know the difference? For one thing, anxiety disorders involve being anxious.

So here’s the layman’s differential diagnosis:

If your stomach churns every time you walk past your boss’s office, regardless of the time of day or what you’ve eaten or how much sleep you got or whether your boss is wearing way too much cologne or not — if there is no physical reason for your boss’s office to make you ill — and you feel fabulous otherwise, it’s probably anxiety.

But if your stomach sometimes churns while you’re chilling out watching your favorite movie, or relaxing with your family on a vacation you genuinely enjoy (don’t lie), or on the day when you and your boss whom you love are on a roll achieving great stuff . . . that doesn’t sound like anxiety. It is highly unlikely you are secretly anxious and have no idea. The physical symptoms of anxiety tend to correlate with anxiety. The physical symptoms of dysautonomia are not dependent on your emotional state.

Some minor complications to remember:

You can be a person with a known anxiety disorder, but also have a dysautonomia. There’s no numerical limit on how many diseases you are allowed to have.
You can be a person with dysautonomia who develops anxiety symptoms related to the stress your illness causes. People with cancer or typhus or foot-and-mouth disease sometimes get anxious about their condition, so if you worry about your life sometimes, you’re not exactly a pioneer there.

Therefore do some reality checking. If you get faint with prolonged standing, that’s probably dysautonomia. If you get faint at the sight of blood, that’s probably anxiety. If you get faint under both instances, it’s probably two different problems that have similar symptoms.

(Or maybe you have a pathological fear of standing, and also a latex allergy you’re unaware of, because you think it’s just fear of needles. But it’s more likely you have POTS than a pathological fear of standing, despite the thirty-seven physicians who looked you straight in the face and told you to get a hobby, because it never occurred to them to do a tilt-table test. Tell me about your childhood . . . did you have to stand a lot? How did that make you feel? Did your mother do a lot of standing around you? . . . )

Problem 2: You Just Need to Exercise!

Your body works better if you use it regularly and well. Lots of people are overweight and out of shape, and when they make the decision to eat sensibly and get out for a walk every day, they find they feel much better.

What you need to know is that some forms of dysautonomia can present like you just need to get more exercise, but actually they are a disease process that inhibits your ability to exercise.

In my case, my diagnosis of IST (Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia) hinged on the fact that my treadmill testing looked like a basic model “she needs to work out more” case, except that I didn’t actually need to work out more.

I presented with shortness of breath on exertion, but every test came back normal. If I had been overweight, I would never have been diagnosed, period.

The only clue we had that I had a tachycardia and not a fitness problem was that (a) my symptoms came on too suddenly to be deconditioning and (b) I wasn’t fat enough. I “passed” all tests with three different specialists, because I was healthier than any of their usual heart-attack or COPD patients. Because of my underlying fitness level and experience as an athlete, I had the ability to push myself on a treadmill despite feeling horrible, so I’d score in an “acceptable” range. (Even if I was gasping for air in order to do it — they didn’t chart that. Just the number. Hmmn.) It took a really fat doctor who knew his own numbers and who liked to geek out on technicalities to pick up that something wasn’t right in what he was seeing.

So here is my firm advice: If you are tired and intolerant of exercise, and you try taking the usual steps to improve your health but it seems like it’s just impossible, or like you just can’t do it and you keep falling off the wagon, dig deeper. There are a number of endocrine disorders that can cause this problem, there are some dysautonomias that can cause this problem, and there are who knows how many other things as well.

You’ll have to go through all the other first-line tests looking for obvious stuff (if you have a pulmonary embolism, you need to know that ASAP, so rule it out, please). But if that all that comes back normal and you are still pretty sure there’s something wrong, start looking at dysautonomia as a possibility.

“Failure as a human being” is not a medical diagnosis. Find a doctor who doesn’t shove you off, and keep looking until you figure out what’s wrong for real. After you’ve addressed the underlying health problems that are sabotaging your efforts, you’ll find that the triad of healthy diet, exercise, and stress management actually starts to work for you.

And that’s why you should be aware of dysautonomia, and some of the other ribbons in the rainbow as well.

Follow-up Reading: Here’s a post from a health care professional who didn’t believe in dysautonomia until it happened to her.

Artwork: Mihály Munkácsy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Dysautonomia Awareness: You’re Not Insane, You Just Feel That Way

It’s Dysautonomia Awareness month, and I’m hereby aware. Dr. Google can tell you all sorts of things, but my favorite link is to Living with Bob, FYI slight language warning (which I don’t approve of), but I like the assortment of information. When you visit Dr. Google and the major advocacy organizations, what you mostly hear about is POTS, to the point that some outfits equate the two. That’s sort of like equating “leg pain” with “broken femur.”

[FYI: You don’t want POTS. Or a broken femur.]

Dysautonomia, aka Autonomic Dysfunction, is when your autonomic nervous system doesn’t work right. That’s the part of your nervous system that does all the things you don’t have to think about and really don’t control. Any underlying illness or injury that affects the nervous system can cause autonomic dysfunction (MS, diabetes, lupus, spinal cord injury, etc.), and there are an assortment of disorders that have autonomic dysfunction as their chief complaint.

Since blogging is all about self-absorption, let’s talk about me.

Complaints, Complaints, Complaints

The most dramatic and pressing element of my dysautonomia is Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia, which drama longtime readers know all about, check the archives. What happens is that on exertion my heart rate accelerates excessively, which leads to dramatic shortness of breath and an inability to do, well, anything. Conveniently I’m one of the people who responds very, very well to a low-dose beta blocker, so the symptoms are under control.

Curiously, this study from 1966 recreated exactly what my heart rate does. The difference between the “control” and “parasympathetic blockade” heart rates is pretty much me before IST vs. with IST. “Double blockade” is what I look like with IST controlled by a beta-blocker.

In everyday terms: One day on vacation last spring I forgot to take the beta blocker. After a leisurely breakfast, about noonish I started getting ready to go out and do something fun. Brushing teeth? HR of 120. In the shower? 140. In contrast, on the beta blocker, 120 would be my heart rate having just jogged up two flights of stairs carrying a full bookbag.

On the vacation story, once I noticed I’d obviously forgotten something, I went and took the beta blocker and was fine to go out and be a normal active person traipsing around the city all afternoon.

One of the things that people will say about these kinds of idiopathic tachycardias is that they must be due to “deconditioning.” When I first started with severe shortness of breath on exertion, I had just gotten home from a trip up north where I’d spent one morning climbing up and down a snowy hill sledding with the kids, no problems. You don’t decondition that quickly. Likewise, once I was diagnosed and treated, I went in the space of an hour (time it takes to make propranolol start working) from unable to walk an 1/8th of a mile slowly to doing laps at the school walking track as quickly and for as long as I liked.

I assure you that if you are so deconditioned that you can’t walk an 1/8th of a mile, the lowest available dose of a beta blocker will not instantly improve your conditioning by a factor of twenty. Dysautonomia is not deconditiong.

Stupid, Annoying, Incurable

Because the tachycardia responds so well to treatment, it’s not a significant problem as long as I’ve got access to the drugs. I would say the most debilitating and limiting symptom I have is that I will, intermittently, get lightheaded when talking.

It’s a sensation a lot like hyperventilation, and the effect is similarly cumulative — you can handle some amount of it, but eventually you have to quit. It’s a fairly common complaint among people who have POTS (which I don’t have, but which is a different tachycardia), and one that there is basically no discussion of in the literature that I can find.

I manage this symptom by daily reconsidering whether maybe I should have been a Carthusian. Just kidding. I’ve never even had chartreuse.

What really happens is that if I’m particularly feeling it, I just avoid talking to people. This is a tad socially awkward. Alternately, I talk to people and secretly resent them for being a person that I’m talking to (tad immature); or I feel guilty for making my brain hurt having so much fun (tad scrupulous), because it does take a toll on my ability to do other things as the day wears on.

Much like the way people who get migraines or stomach aches don’t necessarily have those symptoms 24/7, sometimes I’m just fine. So that’s even more socially awkward, because one day I might be, say, subbing teaching a class with no difficulties, and another day I might want to hide from people because they persist with this crazy idea about talking to each other.

On a medium day I can get away with pacing myself. I do better if I’m the one choosing how quickly I talk and if I’m alternating with someone else. So a phone call to my grandmother works great; group Rosary not so much. On a medium day I might sing most of the best two hymns at church, but with a certain amount of lip-syncing interspersed because the pace is still more than the brain can take.

Simple, Manageable Paths to Insanity

The reason I’m writing today, mid-awareness-month, is not just because I’m procrastinating on other work (true) but because I was made suddenly re-aware of one of last year’s most interesting developments.

What’s happened is that we are now, thank you Hurricane Matthew, having beautiful southern autumn weather. Lows in the 50’s, highs in the 70’s, huge clear blue skys, low humidity, you can’t ask for anything more idyllic. This morning I dropped off the 5th grader at school and then picked up a few groceries on the way home, perfectly comfortable in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Sitting in the shade in the early morning, you wanted a flannel shirt — remember it was in the 90’s a week ago, so we southerners get a flannel shirt pass, thanks.

But let me emphasize: This weather is PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE. Important to the story.

So anyway, later in the day I laid down for a quick nap (because: procrastination makes me sleepy, ha). The bedroom was a comfortable 70 degrees. I’m wearing jeans, socks, long sleeve t-shirt, flannel shirt. All clothing is that perfect fit for temperature regulation, not-to-tight-not-too-loose. No gaps at the waist or ankles or anything. On top of this, because we humans cool down when we sleep, I pull on blankets.

Not just any blankets: A down comforter, and on top of that a synthetic comforter. You are now thinking to yourself this girl’s going to wake up a sweaty mess in half an hour.

Nope. It’s fall! We’re down to a brisk SEVENTY DEGREES! So it’s time to resume . . . the thing where we wake up shivering immediately upon falling asleep.

No, Really, I Can Do Winter

I spent many decades camping in the winter. When the huge ice storm hit twelve years ago, and we had no power for a week and the house was 45 degrees inside? No problem. I won’t say I enjoyed it, but we all slept great. I know how to sleep in cold weather.

What’s happening with the dysautonomia is that my body temperature drops too quickly when I fall asleep. In the summer, it’s not a problem — hence the fact that I had two comforters on the bed even though it was in the 90’s last week. Humans intuitively grab the amount of bedding they need, that’s a basic survival instinct.

I don’t have persistent hypothermia (which happens to some people). My body will eventually warm up the clothing and bedding and I’ll be just fine all night. But because of the steep temperature drop on falling asleep, I’ll go through three or four attempts at sleeping before I can stay asleep.

This will make you feel like an insane person.

You will remember that sometimes when it’s very cold, people will wake up in the middle of the night looking for more blankets. And then you will have to remind yourself: Those people aren’t going from perfectly-comfortable to body-shaking-shivering in the minute it takes to drift off to sleep. Under a lot of blankets. When it is seventy degrees in the room.

The Insanity of Dysautonomia

The maddening part of autonomic dysfunction is that every thing that happens is something that your body might also do under normal circumstances. People get hot or cold. Heart rates go up or down. Something like getting dizzy talking or singing? Hyperventilation happens. You have to remind yourself that gosh, no one else in church is begging the organist to slow down so we don’t all pass out. Every. Single. Hymn. in the hymnal isn’t some manic composer’s effort to see how many people have the breath to pull it off.

It’s not normal for an ordinary Sunday service to feel like some kind of survival-themed reality show. Last Congregant Standing — Do You Have What It Takes To Sing All Four Verses?!!

But humans adapt marvelously, and this only makes you feel crazier. You get used to the idea of needing an external heat source* in order to not be shivering on a seventy degree day. You get used to the idea of assessing how much conversation your brain can take before you really have to stop. You lose track of the fact that other people aren’t constantly managing all this weird stuff.

There’s more to complain about, but I’ll stop there. To summarize: Dysautonomia is a condition whereby your autonomic nervous system has gone off its rocker and is trying to take you with it. The end.

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia [Public Domain]

*For an external heat source, think electric blanket or heated mattress pad. Basically it converts your autumnal weather back into summer in the area adjacent to your body. If you also happen to need an extra two hours of sleep in the winter months because of the energy it takes to keep your body warm, if you religiously use such a heat source whenever you are sitting or lying still, it can buy you a couple more hours of wakefulness.

Related: Inside Tired World

Effort & Illness: The Confusing Habits of Sick People

Since I surround myself with people who know better, no one’s yet given me the dreaded words You don’t look sick. Even people who do look sick often don’t look as bad as they feel*. As Jen Fulwiler explained it last year:

I feel self-conscious that I’ve been doing better, and have no visible symptoms of being ill. . . . I worry that the folks dropping off the food are starting to suspect this is some kind of scam. The other day a super sweet lady from the parish came by with a steaming gourmet dinner for our entire family, complete with appetizers and dessert. I had just gotten back from a doctor’s appointment so I was dressed up and wearing makeup; I’d been resting most of the day so I was unusually energetic. She seemed tired from having worked so hard to cook for our entire family in addition to her own, and I used my Neurotic ESP to determine that she was wondering why I wasn’t cooking for her.

I told Joe that I should get some crutches for when I answer the door for people delivering meals, as a symbolic gesture to assure them that their efforts were not wasted. He looked at me like I was insane, and pointed out the obvious fact that my problem is with my lungs and that I would have no use for crutches under any circumstances. I said that I know, but they sell them at the grocery store, and I didn’t know where to get my hands on a ventilator — and, again, it’s all for symbolism anyway. He backed away from me slowly and went to pour himself a large glass of wine.

Yes. This. I put a short section in my catechist book on invisible disabilities, because it’s something that comes up in religious ed more often than you’d think. Mostly among catechists, but among students as well. That one chapter is the one I get the most thank you letters about.

You can be seriously ill without being 100% incapacitated.

It’s pretty rare for someone to be completely felled in a single blow. This causes confusion, because you see people wandering WalMart who look like they’re going to collapse any second now. So if your sick person still has good balance and coordination, and manages to answer the phone in a cheerful manner, you think, “Must not be that sick. There are people at WalMart who look much, much worse.”

The people at WalMart might be worse. But that doesn’t cause the sick person to be less sick.

Some people are good at putting on.

I knew a lady once who would answer the phone cheerfully even if you woke her up at 4AM. It wasn’t that she wanted you to call then. She just had excessively good phone manners. And thus the Perceived Illness Paradox: Some people complain a lot, other people don’t. Some people are good at masking their symptoms, other people aren’t. Some people are good at coming up with clever work-arounds that keep them high-functioning, other people aren’t. You really can’t judge how someone feels inside by how they’re acting outside.

Rest makes a difference.

Anyone who races knows you manage your training schedule so that you peak when it counts. There are days when you can ride hard and fast, no problem, and days when you can’t. Depends on how much sleep you got. What you did the day before. What you did the week before.

Illness doesn’t change that, it just changes the scale.

Figuring out an unpredictable body is exhausting.

Normal people spend most of their time operating well within the margins of their abilities. If you knew you had to ride 100 miles on your bike sometime soon, you’d have to plan ahead to make sure you could do it. You’d strategize how to make it happen with as little trouble as possible. But you wouldn’t feel the least bit of guilt if you misjudged: “Wow, that was easier than I thought it would be, why did I make such a big deal out of it?” Or conversely, “I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realize how hard!”

Sick people have to figure out the 100-mile ride about everything they do . . . and then get in trouble if they misjudge. “Why’d you spend half an hour answering e-mails? You should have rested up so you could talk to your mother on the phone!” Or “Why’d you put off that phone call, look, you talked for twenty minutes, no problem!”

It’ll make you bonkers. You hear the mail truck go by, and you think to yourself, “Should I walk to the mailbox? Or get a kid to do it for me? What’s the best thing here? How will this decision impact my family life?”

What you like is easier than what you don’t like.

Sick people are confusing because their gifts don’t go away. Okay, if your gift is watching football on TV, everyone will think, “Look he spends all day watching football games, he must be sick.” But what is hard for you is effortless for someone else. What is easy — even fun — for you is difficult for someone else. It’s not about the sheer physical energy required. It’s the mental energy.

So my son might say to my daughter, “I see you have plenty of time for scrapbooking. Why don’t you research computer components? What’s wrong with you? Just lazy, I see.” And she’d point out to him that he received a photo album for Christmas, and he’s supposed to put his photos in it. He had time to build a computer, and even more time for playing computer games . . . why so lazy with the photo album?

Everything costs.

There’s service to your fellow man, and then there’s letting your fellow man turn you into his servant. We live in a hyper-critical age. What you wear, what you eat, what your hobbies are, how you spend your money — all of it is subject to the approval of seven billion self-appointed guardians. That doesn’t change when you’re sick, it just becomes harder to please the seven billion, because you’ve got less to please them with.

Normal people might say, for example, “Is it worth it for me to give up an hour of my time to visit my crotchety uncle who invited me for dinner tonight?” When you’re sick the question becomes, “Is it worth it for me to set aside an entire afternoon to rest, and give up getting any chores done, at all, the entire day, so that I can physically pull off the feat of visiting my uncle for an hour?”

In normal life, a dysfunctional friend is the one who makes inordinate demands on your time and energy. In sick life, everything is an inordinate demand. But some of those demands are very gratifying, so you organize your life to make them possible. The chief sin of sick people, I suspect, is in gratifying too many whims.

Order in all things.

Sick people are confusing because of the scale change. With so little room for covering-over, it becomes obvious what the sick person values most. It becomes obvious where the conflicts lie, because there’s no margin where you can quick slip in a nod towards other people’s priorities. As in academia, the rivalries can be so bitter because the stakes are so small. “Just a few minutes of your time” is now also, “all your time”. How are you going to spend all that time? The way you want? The way I want? Something in between?

The Darwins have a novena started on just this question.

*Sometimes things look so bad that you assume the other way, “It’s not as bad as it looks, I hope?” To which I’ll observe: A badly scraped knee looks horrible. But it feels even worse.

Seven Takes: Life, Death, Warped Things Governments Do

No, I’m not back to regular blogging. But I had approximately seven things to say, and it’s a Friday, so that makes this Seven Quick Takes, right?

1. Why yes, that was us you saw at the National ~~Vocations Meet-Up~~ March for Life.

Low point: Children in tears due to experience of being a southern-person whose mother does not know how to dress them for cold weather.

High point: Making a brief retreat into the National Gallery to go potty, rest, and warm-up, then re-emerging to a gentle made-for-TV snow flurry, taking up our signs, and falling into line with these guys. Who sing beautifully.

Weird Point: The Metronome, as my 3rd-grader calls it, is determined not to take my money. I kept trying to pay full fare, but the machines refused me at every turn. Fortunately the kind metro-ladies are apparently used to clueless tourists with five children in tow, and sorted me out with a combination of generosity and exasperation that I think must be the hallmark of the metro system.

2. Petersburg National Battlefield is a good place to run the kids and get your history fix all at once. The ranger does come around checking to see if you’ve paid.

–> Touring tip: Always ask if you’re supposed to pay. Because they expect you to pay, even if they never ever tell you that. And the ranger lady has a gun. Luckily I had asked.

Discussion Question: Any Particular Reason the Union had to engage in war? Why not just let the Confederacy secede, and work on patching things up diplomatically? Put another way: Did the US Civil War meet just war criteria for the Union?

My boy says yes. I’m playing neutral professor-person.

In other US history topics: The essay “Smuggler Nation” in this month’s Harpers is really quite good. One more shovel of fodder for that pirates-vs.-privateers topic that’s always coming up around this household.

Our other airline-miles magazine subscription, Western Horseman ran a great piece a month or so ago on the troubles ranchers along the US-Mexican border are having with Mexican smugglers, and the lack of cooperation from some of the US border patrol in keeping their lands safe. I can’t seem to find an article link. But let me just say right now, that if you purchase approximately one plane ticket every five years, and want a family-friendly periodical to purchase with your miles before they expire, WH is the one.

3. My son objects to the strong language in Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Views the Body. It pleases me greatly to discover I’ve reared a middle-schooler who complains about words like “damn” and “hell” improperly used.

4. My January New Evangelizers column was 10 Ways to Support Evangelization Even When Your Parish is Falling Apart.

Apparently it grabbed someone’s attention, because the Catholic Vitamins people invited me to do an interview for their podcast. Which is exciting, in an I-hope-my-phone-battery-doesn’t-die-while-we’re-talking kind of way. I think I can bribe my kids into being quiet with the promise of Krispy Kreme donuts. Also, presumably this is just one step on the long road towards true fame? By which I mean, of course, being on Rhett & Link’s Good Mythical Morning? My son doesn’t think I’ll ever be quite that good, but he puts on an encouraging face all the same.

5. Helen Alvare nails it on the head in her analysis of the new HSS regulations.

Let me observe once again that there would be no moral objection at all if the government merely required employers to pay workers a sum sufficient to pay for the desired contraceptive services — for example, by putting the necessary funds into a healthcare savings account that employees could then use to purchase supplemental insurance if they so chose.

And how exactly is it “freedom of religion” if insurance companies and self-insurance administrators must sell (or give away, per the new iteration of regulations) products they may themselves object to? Is there no legal right to sell insurance for some but not all health care services? Will insurers eventually be required to pay for euthanasia as well? Apparently there is a religious test required in order to enter the insurance industry.

6. Speakin’ of that constitution thing . . . my boy observes that 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides. (Wikipedia’s citing 60%.) Which puts a certain corner of the culture in the odd position of wanting to outlaw something they’re trying to legalize. Apparently depressed and disabled people should die, but only at the hands of licensed death-care providers?

If you aren’t from Gunlandia, you probably should not visit gunmemes.com. It takes a special red-state redness to enjoy.

7. You know you live in a warped culture when you feel the need to clarify something like this: “For the record, I’m 100% opposed to all forms of murder and suicide.”

Ooh, oooh, want me to exasperate everybody in one single catechism quote? How about this one? Enough to make everyone you know get all squirmy-wormy:

2269 The fifth commandment forbids doing anything with the intention of indirectly bringing about a person’s death. The moral law prohibits exposing someone to mortal danger without grave reason, as well as refusing assistance to a person in danger.

The acceptance by human society of murderous famines, without efforts to remedy them, is a scandalous injustice and a grave offense. Those whose usurious and avaricious dealings lead to the hunger and death of their brethren in the human family indirectly commit homicide, which is imputable to them.⁷⁰

Unintentional killing is not morally imputable. But one is not exonerated from grave offense if, without proportionate reasons, he has acted in a way that brings about someone’s death, even without the intention to do so.

Happy February.

Will the House Do what the Senate Wouldn’t?

Here’s where you can see the text of House Bill HR1179. Basic-model conscience protection — what the constitution promises, it just lays out in general terms as applies to the health care bill. You can look here to see whether your congressional representative is a sponsor.

HSLDA Supports Religious Freedom

From HSLDA’s website:

Urgent calls are needed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) and your two U.S. senators to urge them to support Amendment No. 1520 by Senator Roy Blunt (MO). This amendment would halt the Obama Administration’s new mandate requiring all employers—including religious employers—to violate their consciences and provide free birth control and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees. . . .

. . . HSLDA and a host of organizations across the religious and political spectrum continue to strongly oppose the Obama Administration’s mandate. If the president can force religious employers to violate their religious views and own conscience, the president can threaten any of our liberties.

While this is not a homeschool issue, many families homeschool because of their faith. This attack against religious freedom, if not stopped, could mean the beginning of the end for the free exercise of religion for all.

I knew I liked HSLDA ages ago. Good bunch of people doing a good work.

These are the times that

call for zombie music.

(Same rendition of re: Your Brain that I posted before. The kids started singing it in the truck on the way home from religious ed tonight, and I thought, “Wow, that really sums up the situation so much better than my heated anti-HHS rhetoric.” Happy listening.)

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Refresher: What is Dysautonomia?

Problem 1: Don’t Be So Nervous!

Problem 2: You Just Need to Exercise!

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Complaints, Complaints, Complaints

Stupid, Annoying, Incurable

Simple, Manageable Paths to Insanity

No, Really, I Can Do Winter

The Insanity of Dysautonomia

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You can be seriously ill without being 100% incapacitated.

Some people are good at putting on.

Rest makes a difference.

Figuring out an unpredictable body is exhausting.

What you like is easier than what you don’t like.

Everything costs.

Order in all things.

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