Wordstalks 7: 'Intrusive Liquids'

I remember when I was at Stanford, Ivan Sag told us about a dialect of American English that had an 'intrusive 'l' and cited a couplet from a country-and-western song that had 'rilver' rhyming with 'silver.' I was a little incredulous about this - egregiously wacky poetic license not worthy of the name, I thought - couldn't be part of someone's dialect?! 

Then, a year or two later I started going to raw food potlucks and seeing 'alvocado' on people's ingredients lists. Not once, but often. Like 'definitely,' it seems that 'avocado' is a word that many people have trouble spelling - aside from the oft-noticed 'alvocado,' I saw 'alvacodo,' 'avocado,' 'avacada,' 'alvocadoe,' etc…

When I got to thinking about it, that whole 'rilver' thing shouldn't have surprised me at all: I noticed 'intrusive 'l's' when I was a kid listening to East London dialects. I remember hearing a woman saying she was 'divoulced' and spelling it out to myself in my head, imagining how you'd need to spell it to have that pronunciation, when I was about 6 or 7. And when I went for horseback riding lessons, aged around 12 or 13, there was a girl who would always talk about 'riding an oulse.' I found this one very funny indeed, because by then I knew enough French to know that 'bear' was 'ours' and enough about language in general to know the lability of 'r's and 'l's, and I would amuse myself by picturing her horse as a bear!

But another 'intrusive liquid' phenomenon that keeps me giggling (and that does not seem to include any 'r'/'l'transgression is the pronunciation, apparently common in rural dialects all over the US, of 'wash' as 'warsh,' 'Warshington,' squarsh,' etc. Considering how much British English speakers get teased for ''r' insertion' intervocalically (e.g. they would say 'Elarand I,') (and considering how much that phenomenon sticks out to me when I hear British accents nowadays, as much as the conspicuous absence of the 'r' on the end of words like 'car,' 'number,' 'center,') there's something especially amusing about this kind of 'r' insertion, where there's no vowel to be orphaned by the lack of it and no etymological motivation for it either!

New Recipe Series - Themes and Variations Intro and #1

New Recipe Series - Theme and Variations

Time for some food talk!

I realized that there are several categories of recipe that I make over and over again, with constant variations on a consistent theme. I thought it would be fun to share these 'themes' and list some 'variations' too. It will be a helpful thing for me to do now, to remind myself that yumminess and using up ingredients are ok and good things, and might turn out to be a helpful collection also.

So, here goes! Today, I'll make my list of 'themes' and talk about just one of them, and then every week I'll talk about another. I'll link everything back, so that eventually it'll all be interconnected. Like life? 

Themes/Food Categories

Coconut Oil/Stevia 'Barks'/Fudges (still not quite sure what to call them but they're my staple atm)

Nut Milks

Salads

Crackers

Smoothies

Puddings and quick-snack-mini-puddings

Variations: (1)  'Barks'/'Fudges'

I might as well start with these, since they are the one thing that I really do seem to be making and eating at the moment, and since I have posted a couple of recipes for them fairly recently.

But what should I call them? I really don't know, and would much appreciate suggestions. 'Fudge?' 'Bark?' 'Nuggets?'...

The basic Theme for this Variation is:

1 c coconut oil, with 1 t white stevia powder, a shake of sea salt and spices and/or essential oils added as desired;

Then, gradually mix in dry ingredients until it holds together, spread out in a flat container (baking sheet or similar) and refrigerate or freeze until firm, then cut into pieces and keep cool. These will melt if they get warm, so I carry them in a small mason jar. They're still really good even if they aren't solid pieces.

Dry ingredients consist of superfoods, ground nuts, protein powder, and often I also include some nut pulp from making nut milk just to extend them. 

Superfoods include: maca, bee pollen, cacao nibs, spirulina, chlorella, glutamine powder, lysine powder (anti-viral), reishi mushroom powder, lecithin.

Ground nuts (presoaked and dehydrated): almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, sesame seeds, hemp seeds are what I have mostly used. I also always include some flax or hemp, to ensure a goodly omega-3 to -6 ratio. I talk about the importance of this in my article for the 'Eighty Percent Raw Magazine' for this month.

Hemp protein/fiber powder is a good addition also, although it always seems to make the overall product blander, so more spicing is necessary. I also use pea protein powder sometimes.

Variations that I have made so far:

I have posted the recipes for my original maca-bee pollen variation and for my green mint-chocolate variation. Last time I made the mint-chocolate version, I added some reishi mushroom powder. It was a great flavor addition.

I have also made:

a Mediterranean almond/sesame/cardamom variation,

a lemon/ginger/poppyseed variation

a cardamom/clove variation

a hemp/bee pollen variation

But the two for which I've already posted the recipe have been by far the most commonly made, especially the mint choc! That's partly because I love getting the algae in: I'll have to think of another 'green' variation besides mint choc.

Another variable with this recipe is how much 'dry' ingredients to add. If you really saturate the oil with dry ingredients, especially if you add a lot of something gelling, like flax or chia, or something very fine, like pea protein powder, you can end up with a taller, chunkier nugget; it's moldable when you pour it out on your sheet, whereas if you leave it a little looser, it'll spread all over the sheet and set up into something thinner and crispier. Both ways are really good.

I'm going to try using a little lavender essential oil and make a lavender variation. Any suggestions for other variations?

And if someone can help me come up with a name for these little treats, I'd be so glad!

Enjoy…

Some More Poems to Glance At

I just posted two more poem drafts (for which the same considerations hold as the previous ones) to Nicelle Davis' blog.

The original post with the poems is here but as with last time, I'll paste it in here too:

Hello again!

I have two more poems to share, representing ‘imagination’ and ‘music.’ Truth be told, I found it harder to produce poems that represented just one of these features: in fact, both of these poem drafts could probably fall under either ‘imagination’ or ‘music.’


[Edit: of course, I had them the wrong way round! The two poems below are 'Imagination' first and then 'Music.']

Well, here’s ‘MusicImagination:’ ironically, it’s the only one of the four I’m posting that doesn’t have a set rhyme/rhythm scheme.

Water

When the snow melts, all is familiar and yet strange:
tools, posts and barrels emerge from the white unchanged,
each in its place, though grass and metal are revealed
with sorry tale: underneath all that whiteness, it was dark!

The yin-yang of the harlequin’s painted face haunts me,
relearning our topography minus its frosting:
the black underside of the searing white snow
is rust and death to blades of steel and grass.

The snow melts, revealing what we knew was there -
top-heavy weight of awkward liquid on a friable tilth:
a thirsty land that follows snow’s runoff down the bluff
in chunks – real estate sledding headlong toward ocean.

The smile on the harlequin’s painted face haunts me,
harbinger of melting of more than just water;
as the white shades to black, I hear ironic laughter,
black earth gives chase, the white water departs.

Snow’s leaving leaves a strange spring, a cyclic returning,
seeds hidden like Persephone in the black womb of snow’s blanketing;
snow leaves, and takes some earth with it, and spring is dry
wind buffeting the sunseekers in new round of sprouting.

Black and white harlequin, where is the reason
for your swift departure from our growing season?
You lay on the ground drying air when you’re freezing
but when the seeds are sprouting is when you’re a-leaving.

And here is ‘ImaginationMusic:’

Crazy-Tired

Will there be
a true sound
in the clang
of my insanity?

Will a phoenix’
egg be found
in the holocaust
of my exhaustion?

Will I find
fertile ground
in the standstill
of my debility?

Can the thread
be unwound
through the maze
of my craziness?

Mercury is Out of My Mouth!

Yes! My final mercury removal was yesterday! Between the actual dental work and the vitamin C IV afterwards, it's been taking up most of a day out of each week for the past several weeks. What a relief to have that taken care of.

My mind is still boggled that the situation exists, that so many people end up with their mouths full of such a toxic substance, that this has been allowed to happen in the name of healthcare.

Here are a few observations about the process:
1) In general, top-row teeth were more painful during the procedure (even with anesthetic), whereas bottom-row teeth were more painful afterwards.
2) Conversely, being numb on the upper jaw interfered with speech more, but chewing was ok after the numbness wore off, whereas being numb on the bottom jaw didn't interfere with speech distinctiveness but when I'd had the bottom jaw worked on (which was most of them) I had to stick to liquids the whole day.
3) Having your mouth wide wide open for so long leaves a sore jaw for up to a couple days afterwards!
4) Despite all the precautionary measures - the dam, the mask over my nose, the vacuum exhausting all fumes away, the IV, this is a debilitating procedure.  Generally, I have felt pretty smacked for the next day at least, as well as the day itself. I don't know how much of this is the anesthetic and how much of it is mercury mobilizing.
5) As I went on with removals, the tendency to be constipated the day after the removal increased. This is the last thing you want, as mercury's main exit route is through the bowel and if it gets stuck, it could be reabsorbed! Last week I had to take an enema; yesterday, I loaded up on cleansers to keep things moving today. It's strange to me that this was not a problem at all for the first couple removals but became a problem later.

One final point: I know that this is just the beginning of a multi-step process of getting out bad crap that ended up in here when good stuff wasn't available to my body, and presumably, of putting good stuff in. In other words, arduous as this process has been, I'm not expecting to feel like a new person and be bouncing off the walls overnight. I know that some people swear that it solved all their health problems at a stroke, and I'm delighted for people for whom it works like this. But then I also know of people who don't feel instant success, and of people who have heard stories lacking the 'instant success' component, who then dismiss the whole process. It's important to me to say that I feel quite sure that this is going to be a lot of help to me but that instant transformation can't be expected, with all the yeast, lead and other extraneouses in this body. Apparently, the temple cannot be destroyed and rebuilt in three days!

Please bear with me.

The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here

It is ironic, when there are still several feet of snow on the ground in the higher parts of town, that this is such a dry place. The whole of last week was glorious sunshine, daytime temperatures in the 40s (getting to be too hot for Phil, beginning to approach my comfort zone, which is above 60). And the ground was drying out fast, as fast as we could plant it! We've used up almost all of our (admittedly meager) rainwater catchment. Today is the first overcast day for a week, and we're hoping that we'll get some rain on those little seedlings. 

That little moose that hung around our cabin throughout the big blizzard in March has been back daily, has eaten the tops off of all our currant bushes (damn!) and, small though she is, is more than a match for our tiny garden plants that are already pitting themselves in a race against the short season here. We may need to resort to more robust fencing than the stakelines designed to keep our friends' and neighbors' dogs from trampling everything…

Looking out from inside of me, the view from here is confused and low: looking outside of myself really is what I have to keep on doing, just keeping busy, so as not to sink back into despair. I have at least moved out of the intense death wish that possessed me for a week or two, but trying to ask myself what I want instead merely yields great confusion, so 'looking out' seems like a good idea, and keeping as busy as my energy allows.

Up For This Week

And so, looking out and keeping busy, up for this week is also some 'manifestation.' I swept the floor in the cabin this morning, which I hadn't done for way too long, and am ready to manifest a vacuum cleaner that is bag-less, quiet and functional. We have a big old deafeningly loud one that neither one of us can stand, and last I tried it wouldn't even turn on. Phil is convinced that he can fix it, but it's always going to be a low priority and I'd rather have a small, quiet one that actually fits in our corners anyway! So, for months, I've been sweeping with dustpan and brush, which is probably how I've cleaned for at least half my life anyway, but with the amount of dust and dirt here it's not very effective.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a bag-less, quiet vacuum cleaner? Do you like to clean? Do you use it as 'distraction/therapy' when feeling down? Or do you loathe it and avoid at all costs?

I'm also ready to manifest a camera that actually works. I wish I could have taken some pictures of the little moose again, and that baby rhubarb that I showed sprouting up a couple weeks ago now has chubby little stalks on it! An ironic thing, when I've been feeling like 'checking out,' that I seem to be finding 'things' to want that will bolster my feeling of participation.

I'm still, I guess, trying to find my own answers to my question of last week - 'why do we go on?'

One last little thought: last Friday the naturopath decided I needed an IV, and he prefers the veins in my left arm, which leaves me stuck in more than one way, since I'm left-handed! This time, I had to fill out some insurance forms for a couple blood draws and did so, rather messily, with my right hand whilst having the IV. As I went on with it, slowly, slowly, it forcibly struck me that my right-handed writing is so very inept purely through lack of practice. And I wondered what sorts of corners of my brain were getting stimulated by the unaccustomed use. I may have more to say about that later.

Last week I barely talked about food at all. Maybe this week I will some. 

Last week I posted some of my poems but no wordstalk: this week there will be one.

'Apples and Appetite,' 'Never be Afraid of your Hunger,' and High-Grading versus Slippery Slopes

'Apples and Appetite'

That is the koan the naturopath left me with yesterday. He's asked me to eat an apple a day for a little while, because in his opinion all the yeast cleansing I've been doing so far isn't going to deal with the yeast imbalance until I've gotten the last of the mercury out (which will be next week, yay!) This means that after almost three months of strict no-sugar eating, I'll have another three months of the same to look forward to when we start tackling the yeast post-mercury. 

Meanwhile, he says that a few apples aren't going to impact the yeast situation, and when I protested that I prefer not to eat apples because they tend to make me hungrier, he said that that should be a good reason to eat them! While we try to address the emotional components of my food restriction and lack of appetite, there's a major physical component too (deficiencies in certain things lead to loss of appetite, which then leads to further deficiency…) and he wants me to connect to my appetite as a good thing, not a fearsome thing, a sign of good health.

'Never be Afraid of Your Hunger'

Has anyone read 'Olive Kitteridge' by Elizabeth Strout? A beautifully written and enjoyable read, with exquisitely loving attention to the minutiae of life of the denizens of a small Maine village, centered around the redoubtable Olive. There are a couple chapters featuring a girl with an eating disorder, though, and I thought those were very poorly done: they were extremely triggering and yet far-fetched (ruined my day and night when I read them, for sure). But leaving that aside, in one of the storylines, the only role that Olive plays is to be quoted by a teenager, whose Math teacher she is, as having said, 'Never be afraid of your hunger. Otherwise, you'll just end up like all the other idiots.' 

That really stuck in my head. Occasionally I use it as a stick to beat myself: I am pathologically afraid of my hunger, so I must have ended up 'like all the other idiots;' more usefully, I use it metaphorically, as a measure of the far reaches of my curiosity (which are far indeed). And often it is just striking to me how very afraid I am of my literal hunger and how fearless in the more metaphorical realms.

How does that advice resonate for you?

'High-Grading' versus Slippery Slopes

When I first gravitated back toward eating just raw foods and cut out all sugars, Phil was concerned that it was yet more restrictive behavior and self-deprivation, and I insisted that to the contrary, I was 'high-grading.' At this point, there's an integrity gap. It's true that having that accident knocked the stuffing out of me and made things worse, but it's also true that I'd gradually been eating less and less before that. This week I detachedly realized that I'd been buying produce and making coconut kefir (both of which are mostly 'my' foods although he does eat them too) on the same schedule as usual, but hadn't been eating them. 

Part of 'high-grading' was giving myself permission to buy avocados. Well, this week we had a whole pile of uneaten ripe avocados! (I blended up a bunch of them with mint, 'chia-sweet,' cacao, maca, protein powder, coconut oil, and froze). And the coconut kefir is piling up too.

The last three days we have been planting our garden in the mornings and today Phil needed my help transplanting a 10ft tall spruce tree. The kind of thing he does all the time, and we did it lots last year. But it's so heavy and exhausting, and underscores how much weaker I am now. He's feeling upset with me for allowing myself to get that way, and bear-hunting, hiking and all the springtime activities are calling louder and louder. And he feels like I've betrayed his trust - which I can understand, thinking back to the whole 'high-grading' discussion. 

It's going to be difficult, there's a huge self-sabotage demon in here and not much motivation to eat more when doing so makes one feel sick. But the ND has given me some supplements to help support my crashed adrenals and I'm going through all kinds of motions toward trying to feel better, so I need to keep looking at this little issue of integrity.

Why do we go on? Especially when I'm at rock bottom, or having a resurgence of old anorexia demons that I thought I'd wrested my life free of and feeling hopeless and incorrigible, I cannot answer that question to my satisfaction. I'd love to hear some other answers.

Some Poems to Glance At

Apart from my spoofy poem in photos last week, I haven't talked much about my own poetic predilections on here, being unsure of levels of interest, etc.

However, I just posted two of my newest poems (and please understand that they are in draft form and unpolished) in response to my blogger-friend Nicelle Davis' 'April Poetry Challenge,' based on an analytical essay in Gregory Orr's masterful book 'Richer Entanglements' which distinguished four main 'temperaments' in poetry writing, namely 'story,' 'structure,' 'music' and 'imagination.' Nicelle invited people to write four poems, one of them to emphasize each of these temperaments. Whilst this is the opposite strain from Orr's advice that each poet should aim to identify their own strongest 'temperament' and build up all four so that their poems contain them all, it's a useful exercise for sure. This was supposed to be in honor of April's National Poetry Month, so I'm rather late!

Today, I posted poems highlighting 'story' and 'structure.' I'll be working on the other two.

You can see Nicelle's original post and my poems in response here - but I'll paste them in here too. Please respect my intellectual integrity and property, and please also know that they are unpolished drafts!

Temperament: ‘Story’
‘Spencer Allen Nearly Loses His Truck in the Tide’

Just a regular guy in an old ford truck,
trying to turn an honest buck…

To drive the beach of Homer is a risky proposition
but the equinoctial low tides make for easier decision
a vast exposed expanse of sands don’t need so much precision,
and just a few miles north of town you barely see a soul –
you own the beach! – you and the birds – a beach bestrewn with coal!

Just a regular guy in an old ford truck,
trying to turn an easy and honest buck
with his jacket of tatters and two shaggy mutts
he gives his own orders and takes his own pride
when you don’t expect much then you stay satisfied
summer sea, winter land, always the tide.

He’s gathered quite a load of coal but wants that last big slab
(the mutts have chased a poodle and been banished to the cab)
tide’s moving in, he’s almost done, but thinks he’ll take a stab.
That hunk of coal, though close to shore, is in a deeper region:
as soon as he pulls up his truck, he rues his rash decision –
his vehicle sinking in the sands dooms this and every mission.

Just a regular guy in an old ford truck
trying to turn a simple and honest buck
it doesn’t look so simple now that his rig is stuck
He digs in the quicksand to no avail
all hopes of driving away curtailed;
he gives it up for lost, gets ready to bail.

Ground giving, sinking, fluid, it’s acting just like water
well, normally it’s under sea, so water’s been its tutor
the sea’s an endless gaping maw, it gives no mead nor quarter;
it wants his truck! He knows this, drags his tools above the tideline
his tools, his dogs, himself – relegated to the sideline
a wretched, truckless future stretching clear within his mind’s eye.

We found the guy with his sinking truck
ruing his rashness and cursing his luck:
we swore we’d get him out of the muck.
We’d put down boards for the spinny wheels to tread
jack it up in front to lift up its head
but first, for goodness sakes, let’s unload the bed!

So certain had he been of the ocean’s claiming all
that salvage of his mobile goods had been his only goal
and so his sinking truck was packed with hundredweights of coal!
So we helped him shed his load and bring the tools where we could use them,
our optimistic flurry seeming merely to confuse him
but jacked and treaded, towed, there’s just no way his truck was losing!

So our regular guy in his rescued truck
made haste for home as soon as he’d gotten unstuck
with a new respect for intertidal muck.

Temperament: ‘Structure’ (Villanelle)
Journey’s Mirror

If I’m alive, it must be meant to be
there must be some end point to all my journeying
my end, my death, is all that calls to me.

So many charts and plans are sent to me
adventures’ invitations, constant learning
if I’m alive, it must be meant to be.

But yet a constant shadow pulls on me
participation’s liveliness deterring
my death, my end, is all that calls to me

Life’s chartless plan promotes its liberty,
its winters hint at signs of joy returning
if I’m alive, it must be meant to be.

These plays of life flick by like shoals at sea,
mere ripples on the ocean of my yearning
my death, my end, is all that calls to me.

Mind’s mirror must distort reality
and keep the whirlpool of my vision churning:
if I’m alive, must it be meant to be?
my death, my end, is all that calls to me.