Dragonflies, framed.

At some point, I will probably revisit last week's post on giftedness. It did get a conversation going on Facebook, which I'm glad of. I think a lot of us smart folks learn to hide our light under a bushel basket to appear "normal", so that we aren't subjected to bullying, jealousy, and so on.

I do want to apologize for some of my terminology, though. I did not mean to denigrate people who have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum. My beef is with those who would lump everybody who's not "normal" into the same basket and offer all of them the same sorts of solutions for their "problems", when it's clear that our situations are wildly different.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

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I am hoping to be in a position to reveal the new and improved laundry closet in next week's post. There have been some setbacks over the past couple of weeks, so I'm not promising anything. But I want to focus this week on small bits of progress -- like this picture. 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

It's not actually a picture. It's a piece of Italian wrapping paper that I found at Barnes & Noble. I put it in the frame yesterday. (I also covered some in clear contact paper and glued it to a small wooden crate.) I thought the colors would go really well with the yellow walls. But the dragonflies are symbolic, too.

If you ask Mama Google "dragonfly meaning", you'll get a whole bunch of hits, most of them centering around the idea of transformation. Dragonflies start out as larvae and eventually transform into the four-winged creatures we're familiar with. When you extend that idea symbolically, you get the idea of maturing -- from a childhood state into a more evolved, more mature form. So dragonflies represent not just transformation, but also the gaining of wisdom that comes with maturity.

I've written about dragonflies before, in July of 2016. Back then, I talked about how I think of them liminal creatures because they live on land but must stay near water to lay their eggs. That connection to water also connects them to the emotions, and gods know this has been an emotional time for me. Besides all the complications with renovating a literal closet in my home (more on that next week, assuming all goes well this week), I've also been dealing with the thing in my head that I mentioned briefly in July.

What I have is an acoustic neuroma -- a benign tumor on the auditory nerve of my left ear. It's also called a vestibular schwannanoma. This type of tumor is slow growing; I first realized I had a problem in February 2021, when I was sitting at my dinette table one day, minding my own business, and suddenly the hearing in my left ear cut out and tinnitus replaced it. It tooks months to see an ENT here in Santa Fe. An MRI confirmed that the thing was in there. The protocol then was "watch and wait", plus another MRI in a year's time. After the second MRI, I was referred to an ENT specialist in Rio Rancho.

There are two treatment options besides "watch and wait": surgery, in which the surgeon literally cuts into your skull and fetches the thing out; and gamma knife radiation or gamma knife radiosurgery, in which the doctors and technicians put you in a machine and focus a whole bunch of gamma rays on the tumor. That wrecks its DNA, so that eventually it dies off and hopefully shrinks. My docs said I was a good candidate for gamma knife, so that's what I had done on October 3rd. 

The worst part was having the metal frame attached to my head. It has pins that go through your skin and anchor it to your skull in four places. The frame is then clipped into an MRI machine so they can map your brain and figure out how to target the tumor; then it's clipped into the gamma knife machine for the actual procedure. We got there at 6:30 a.m. and were done before noon.

For a couple of days after, I had a mild headache and swollen eyes. Plus the pin above my right eye hit a blood vessel, and I still have a pretty good shiner from it. I've also been more tired than usual. But that's pretty much it for side effects.

Because the tumor grows slowly, it'll take a couple of years before we know whether the procedure worked. If not, then the option of last resort is surgery. But gamma knife has a success rate above 95%, so I'm hoping this will be it. Some patients get their hearing back, but my docs say it's not gonna happen in my case. Which sucks, because I can only understand 12% of the words I hear in my left ear. 

So yeah, it's been a crazy time here. 

But coming back to the surface: Dragonflies live near water. Laundry rooms are a place where water comes into your home. And a transformation happens there: the machines remove dirt and stains from your clothes and linens, fluff them up, and dry them. Right? So if you're looking to put some symbolism in your laundry area, dragonflies are perfect. 

Plus this wrapping paper goes really well with the yellow walls. So I framed it.

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These moments of transformational blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Make sure you're registered to vote -- and then do it!

Whither the CD player?

I'm going to take a break from current events this week and talk about another facet of our late-stage capitalist dystopia: electronics. Specifically CD players.

While I'm a progressive politically, I'm old, so I'm a Luddite when it comes to certain things. I admit freely that I have not yet embraced the digital age 100 percent. Yes, I publish my books as ebooks; yes, I own a Kindle; yes, I have a smartphone and a laptop (and a several-generations-old iPad that has sat unused in a desk drawer since I moved here four years ago). But I have not yet succumbed to digitizing my music collection. Strike that: At one point I spent hours over several days uploading a bunch of my CDs to Apple Music on my laptop. Then I got a new laptop. Everything made the migration to the new machine except my CDs; the album cover images that I'd painstakingly uploaded made it, and I think maybe the playlists, but not the actual songs. Then I learned that Apple uses a proprietary format for music files, and there was probably no way to get those songs to transfer from my old machine to the new one.

What I took away from the experience is that uploading stuff to the cloud gives the cloud owner the rights to your stuff, and they may or may not let you keep it. Which I already knew from a debacle many years ago involving ebook files that disappeared from users' devices because reasons. Hence, I have not given up my actual, tangible CDs.

The challenge these days is to find something to play them on. For maybe a couple of decades, I owned a Bose Wave music system with the add-on CD changer. It looked like this: 

Stolen from the internet

It was hella expensive. I used to get really nice holiday gift cards from my bosses at the law firm, and one year I used my gift card to buy this system. It worked great for many years. But then, as Facebook reminded me earlier today, the changer started giving me error messages on various CDs and finally refused to play any of them. When I got hold of someone at Bose customer service, I was told it was a known issue, and they recommended that I unplug the changer or it might mess up my main unit. Reluctantly, I did. 

That was four years ago. The main CD/radio soldiered on for another couple of years, but then the CD player in it started to die, too. So a few months back, I started looking for a replacement. Of course Bose doesn't make Wave radios anymore; you can get a rebuilt one in random places, but they're super expensive, and I'm not getting those really nice gift cards anymore. So I looked for something less bougie.

My options were pretty limited: either I could go back to the component setup that I'd ditched in favor of the Wave or buy a glorified boom box. I settled on this: an AIWA Exos Home Speaker. (Note that it's marketed as an external speaker that just happens to include a CD player; this is where we are, kids.) I figured that AIWA used to be a decent brand and the unit would probably have acceptable sound quality.

When it arrived, I pulled it out of the box and set it up. I put a CD in the slot and tried to get the drawer to retract. Didn't work. Shoved it shut with my hand. Of course then it wouldn't open again and it wouldn't play.

AIWA customer service was very nice about it. The unit was clearly still under warranty -- I'd just bought it! -- and the rep told me to pack it up and send it to them on their dime, and they'd send me a replacement. He also assured me that I'd get my CD back.

So I sent the broken machine back, and in the fullness of time, the replacement arrived. And it works! But then I tried putting it in the space where the Wave radio used to live. Of course it's about a quarter of an inch too tall. 

The Wave radio fit on the shelf under the TV. The AIWA does not.
Lynne Cantwell 2024

But I can play my CDs again. The sound quality isn't as good as the old Bose, but I didn't expect it to be, and part of the problem might be my hearing issue. 

Did I get my CD back? Of course not. Is it worth calling AIWA again? Not to me!

But now I'm tempted to replace my TV stand so that the CD player will fit. In fact, a full entertainment center would look great on that wall. I could use more bookshelf space, as well as more storage space for my DVDs and Blu-Rays (which I am also hanging onto, thank you very much).

The answer to every problem in our late-stage capitalist dystopia is to spend more money, right?

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The hearing issue: I can't remember whether I've mentioned this here before, but I have an acoustic neuroma in my left ear that has been affecting my hearing for the past four years. It's to the point now where we need to do something about it, so I'm going in next month for a "gamma knife" radiation treatment. It will be a couple of years before we find out whether the treatment is effective, and I won't get my hearing back regardless. But I'm hoping that it's successful, as the other treatment option is brain surgery. Which I would rather, y'know, avoid.

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These moments of bloggy retro consumerism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!