Spring Fever!

What an Incredible Day!!! Completely Beautiful!!
The sun was shining and felt warm on my face. I love days like this. It feels like anticipation for what's to come.....SUMMER!!!

I grabbed my sneakers, sweats, and ipod and headed out to the Parkway for a nice walk. There were several people out there, just not as crowded as it usually is in the middle of the summer.
You can tell it is just Springtime and with the thaw has made the water rise. I walked down to the end where Willow Bay is and the one lane Bridge that the path goes under. There were Pylons across the pathway as the whole path underneath that bridge was underwater. You had to take the side path that took you to the backside of the Willow Bay 'Restaurant'.
On the way back I ran into a gentleman I used to work with a few years back. We ended up chatting all the way back to the beginning, where I run into, who of all people, my Director at the Clinic.

On Rollerblades!
She got all excited when I told her I rollerblade too, as she had mentioned that she doesn't know anyone else who rollerblades.
YES!!
We'll have to go rollerblading sometime. Probably right after Fosterdad gives me lessons on how to skate backwards gracefully, with Gracefully being the key operative word here! He has promised to teach me how, and for his effort, I will be making him a whole pan of Lasagna!!!
Hey FD..... Are you still willing to teach me???
Anyway, back to my Director. She's been bugging me to do some Speed-Dating with her and wants me to try one of the Internet dating services that she's done before.
I think I may need to save that topic to write about, for another time. It would be highly entertaining for some of the stories and experiences I've had. I'm chuckling as I type this, as I remember a few of those experiences! ;)

After returning home and having a late lunch, still being bit by the Springtime bug, I decided to sweep my front porch and bring out all my porch furniture.
I don't give a damn that it is STILL March and will probably have another snowfall....or two! I am soooo ready for Nice weather and was in the mood.

*Does happy Dance, knowing better weather is here*

~ZZ

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Fridays!

I LOVE that Day!

And couldn't wait until it got here, either! Not that I wanted the time to rush by. Not at all.

It's just that Work is starting to get very, very busy. And I am about to become buried in assessments, treatment plans, and engaging with new clients.

My place of employment had just recently changed the way we conduct our Client Intake Process, and while I think it will ultimately be for the better, will most definitely require some significant adjustment. Not only on my and other clinician's part, but the local community we live in as well.
It's interesting to watch how a change in how one clinic or psychiatric hospital will have a ripple effect on the others. Our community, in the last couple of years has seen this in action when Four Winds Psychiatric Hospital was closed down due to several NYS-OMH infractions severe enough to warrant them to be shut down in a community that is already in a crisis to accomodate children with mental health issues.
Between Four Winds closing, Hutchings on the brink of closing at times, and CPEP, with it's own share of financial problems, this has rippled to all the area clinics to be working with children who are more emotionally disturbed, than what they typically saw, say 5-6 years ago.

So, our change in how we conduct new intakes for clients will also impact the area clinics.
Without getting into too much detail, where we typically had a 3-4 month waiting list, these clients will now be triaged, and will be assisted imediately.
Better for the client, better for the community, better for the agency, but a HUGE adjustment for all the clinicians involved.
We'll see how this evolves.

Anyway......FRIDAY!!!

Looked forward to it.

Went to Happy Hour at Riley's, one of my favorite places to go. The atmosphere is quaint, the food delish and the bartenders wonderful.
Ended up splitting an appetizer and sandwich. And a bottle of wine.
Just what I needed to start off the weekend right and unwind after a particularly grueling week. :)

~ Happy Friday!

~ZZ

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"In the End, we will Remember,

Not the Words of our Enemies,

But the Silence of our Friends."

~Martin Luther King, Jr

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Happy Friday Everyone!!!

Have a Happy Friday Everyone!!!

Why?????....

Cause Tequila Makes Her Clothes

Fall Off!

~ZZ

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Morality Update

Wow!

I'm glad I sparked something in several of you regarding the prior post! Several who have chosen to not respond directly on this blog, have done so on yada.

It wasn't meant to be a nice little package, all dressed up in pretty bows and satin ribbons and frill and contain nothing more than fluff and other gooey sticky sweetness.

It wasn't meant to be replied to in the same automatic dispassionate response that one would give to, say, answering the question: Ketchup or Mayo?

And it certainly wasn't meant to be disregarded in the same fashion that one would disregard a fly buzzing about their ear.

I wanted you to wrestle with it.
Toss it back and forth, chew on it for a while.
Poke and prod at it.
Even, be agitated by it.

Just don't be apathetic about it!!


Spare me your apathy!

If it's one thing I don't like, it's being among the Walking Dead!

So I'm glad you all are ALIVE!! :)

The article itself and premise about how our sense of morality can be compromised by damage to certain parts of your brain, is what initially had intrigued me.

Experiencing an emotional Catch-22 regarding reconciling and coming to terms with an otherwise highly unpleasant answer, is normal.

The book I have included in this post, The Denial Of Death, addresses our concern with how we arrive at certain conclusions about denying death and how we cope with that.

Interestingly, the author, Ernest Becker (1924 - 1974) had received his Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University.

How each of us dealt with those proposed dilemma's, though vary across the board, are all still steeped in a level of denial to accept a certain reality. Responses ran the gamut of choosing to not make a choice (which is Still a choice), to including the death of yourself at the same time, to believing there must have been other options, to how can one choose, to rationalizing (my own answer) to trying to apply logic to feelings, to even believing it is a sin to even consider the possibility of these dilemmas.

These are all ways to help wrap our minds around the horrible dilemma and serve to protect us from the reality of our 'choice'.
Denial, though given a bad rap, serves the purpose of being a buffer between a horrible circumstance and what our mind can actually accept at a given time. It's actually meant to be a protective device for us on some level. Hawkeye's own denial of the awful truth had him believing the baby's cries were actually the squawkings of a chicken. His own denial system had been working real hard to 'protect' him from the cold, hard truth, and at the expense of his own sanity.

Without a healthy amount of denial, we really wouldn't exist.
Or rather, wouldn't exist outside a psychiatric institution, as the harsh reality of some things, in this instance, allowing the murder of a child of ours, so that another can live. If we don't allow ourselves to reconcile that horrible truth in some fashion, we, will go insane.

On a much more lighter note, that article had me reminiscing about the old M*A*S*H Shows.

I loved to watch them, all of them.

Somewhere between 109 and 125 million people watched that famous last episode, appropriately titled:

"Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen"

For those who would like a quick trip down memory lane for that last episode, please see the link Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen as it includes a wonderful synopsis of this last episode, not only Hawkeye's Internal Struggle and resolution, but how each character had dealt with the end of the war. Good Stuff! :)

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A Study in Morality

I usually would post an article that interested me in the Forum section of my blog, called "ZZ's Playroom", which is located on my sidebar. But I found this article particularly interesting and thought-provoking. Maybe it will inspire some healthy conversations and exchanges of opinions and thoughts.

Brain-damaged people give insights into morality

It's wartime, and an enemy doctor is conducting painful and inevitably fatal experiments on children.

You have two kids, ages 8 and 5.
You can surrender one of them within 24 hours
or the doctor will kill both.
What is the right thing to do?

For most people, this scenario based on one in William Styron's novel "Sophie's Choice" is almost an impossible dilemma. But for a group of people with damage in a part of the brain's frontal lobe that helps govern emotions, the decision was far more clear.
They would choose one child for death.

Scientists said on Wednesday a study involving these people has produced unique insights into the brain mechanics of moral decision making and showed that in some key situations emotions play a fundamental role in moral judgments.
The new findings highlighted the role of a region in the front part of the brain below the eyes called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Earlier research had pegged this area -- one of the more recently evolved parts of the human brain -- as playing a role in generating social emotions.
In fact, the people with damage in this region due to stroke or other causes experienced severely diminished empathy, compassion and sense of guilt.
The new findings published in the journal Nature seem to confirm its central role in guiding certain moral judgments like life-or-death scenarios.
The researchers set out to gauge to what degree emotions govern moral judgments by comparing decisions made by people whose emotions already were crippled by this brain damage to decisions made by people with no such damage.

TOUGH CHOICES
The judgments on what is right and wrong made by these brain-damaged people were similar to the others in some scenarios put before them.
But when asked to make decisions in emotionally wrenching scenarios like the permissibility to kill one's own child to save other people's lives, those with the brain damage were far more likely to accept this utilitarian but harsh solution.

Scientists and philosophers long have debated how people make judgments relating to morality. Are these decisions governed strictly by a calculus of cold, hard facts and logic? Do emotions carry the day?
"This shows a much more subtle, a much more nuanced view, which of course makes the whole problem -- the science of morality -- infinitely more interesting," said Harvard University's Marc Hauser, one of the study's authors.
The study involved six people with damage in this brain region who were presented with 50 scenarios requiring moral judgments, some trivial and some difficult. Their responses were compared to those of 12 others with damage to an unrelated part of the brain and 12 more with no brain damage.

Another wartime scenario involved enemy troops
searching for civilians to kill.
The people in the study were asked

about their willingness
to kill their own infant

whose crying was drawing the attention
of enemy soldiers who would then kill
the parent, the baby and people hiding with them.

Again, the people with this brain damage were far more willing to judge killing the baby as the right moral choice.
The scenarios weighed immediate harm or death to one person against certain future harm or death to many. These brain-damaged people regularly showed a willingness to bring harm to an individual, an act others may find repugnant.
"They are perfectly capable of endorsing the kind of extreme high-conflict dilemma in which indeed you would produce harm to someone because there would be greater good coming to a larger group," said study co-author Antonio Damasio, director of the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute.
"And this is something that human beings in general reject."


--------------------------------------------
The above article raises some interesting questions about how our own sense of morality is affected by how our brain functions or malfunctions.

The two examples given of morality dilemmas, had come from Movies. The first one, mentions "Sophie's Choice", but does not credit the second one. I had recognized it from the last and final episode of "MASH".

Remember that??? Hawkeye had an emotional breakdown when he was trying to get out of the enemy camp. The Army Psychiatrist was working with him to break through his denial about the Chicken Squawking he was hearing. The Chicken squawking was actually the crying of a baby, and how the mother had smothered him/her to death so the baby's crying wouldn't alert the enemy who was close by. I remembered crying during that part of the movie; and I still get a lump when I think about it.

How would you answer

the two dilemmas presented above??

How do you justify your answer?

How do you wrap your mind around it?

And How do you cope with the decision

that you've made???

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Dairy Aisles and Old Friends

I ran into an old friend of mine at Wegman's the other day. J1 was a couple years ahead of me in high school, but we also ended up going to college together in Buffalo for a couple years. It's kinda funny, I don't think I've ever spent that much time in the Dairy Aisle before. We were reflecting on some old times together as well as a couple of people we used to hang out with.


Below is a B&W pic from 1987 of from the left: me, S and J1. S was such a HUGE part of my growing up years from 9th grade till shortly after college. A smile creeps up on my face, as I type this, because the six of us (3 guys, 3 girls) were almost inseparable growing up. In a way, I think we were considered 'Eastwood's Brat Pack".
J1, who is on the right, had graduated from Henninger 2 years before me, and was the one who I ran into at Wegmans. Though J1 may have been a couple years older, and therefore, not part of that original 'brat pack', he still figured into a large part of my time spent at Buffalo.
This pic was taken in a park over the border in Canada, by one of my roommates. She now videotapes Crime Scenes for the DA's office in Manhattan, so she's got kind of a CSI thing going on for her. She had affectionately titled this pic 'Something Special' due to the friendship that is apparent with S and I. I really like the shadow effects of this pic, even though you really can't see much of my face in this shot.

One of the guys I had grown very close to, as he and I shared something in common that no one else had. Both of our fathers had passed away at a young age. Mine was first, in 8th grade, as he had Open-Heart Surgery and did not survive. J2's dad had suffered a heart attack the following year, and unfortunately, J2 was the one who found him.


Anyway, J1 and I were reflecting on some of those old friends. And what's happened over the years. I run into S occasionally and even J2 less than that, but with the upcoming reunion that we've been planning, I'm sure we'll be running into each other again.
As J1 and I have exchanged emails and finding out he lives very close to me, maybe we'll keep in contact with eachother too. Besides, it sounds like a mystery to be solved regarding the "Case of the Missing Chest of Drawers"! :)

Coming across someone from my past always puts me in a reflective mood. And it usually puts a smile on my face, thinking about some of the times we have had. It also makes me wonder, where the time has gone???
Wow.

~ReflectingZZ

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In Honor of Jack and "24"

Which 24 Character are you??

Which 24 Character are you?

David Palmer
Take this quiz!

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“It hurts to love someone and not be loved in return, but what is the most painful is to love someone and never find the courage to let the person know how you feel."

~unknown

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