KAREN LEA ARMSTRONG
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Deep thoughts & existential dread

Blog postings to get things out of my head

Justice: has anything changed since 1615?

22/5/2024

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In Rivka Galchen’s book Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (see book review dated May 22), the reader accompanies the narrator through a true witch hunt. Although it is a novel, the book is based on the actual trial of Katharina Kepler. Her son was Johannes Kepler, whom you may remember from science class as the mathematician/astronomer who developed understanding of planetary motion, telescopes, and was considered the father of modern optics.
 
     In this book, we see “she said” vs “he said” testimony, false accusations under oath, corruption, bribery, exorbitant legal costs, and painstaking slowness in the process of justice.
Sound familiar? It certainly does to me. Has anything changed since 1615?


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THE WEIRDNESS OF DREAMS

15/5/2024

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Apparently, other people don’t have these recurrent dreams to which I'm prone. I seem to have themes that appear over and over, psychoanalysts rejoice!
  1. Triathlon dreams, even when I have not done a tri for 5 years now. The race is starting and I’m not ready. I have no contact lenses and can’t see, I’ve forgotten my bike, my gear is at home/in a locker/unavailable. I’m swimming madly to catch up, having missed the start. We’re running, but the route is crazy: up many stairs, through a house, on an escalator, on a floating dock. The only fun one was the dream where the swim portion was completed on waterslides!
  2. Exam dreams: I’m late for the exam. I can’t find the room (often my high school, or the hospital at McMaster where I did some of my medical training). I didn’t study properly. Or, I studied but they changed the exam subject to something else and now I’m unprepared. My bike has been stolen, I have no transportation. (I last wrote an exam in 1997. Honestly, brain, for God’s sake…let it go.)
  3. Performance dreams: figure skating, dancing. I’m in a large group, it’s a show or contest of some kind, and I know none of the steps. No idea of the choreography, so I’m always a beat behind. Sometimes my vision is impaired here as well.
  4. Medicine dreams: office or hospitalist. There are many patients to see and I’m way behind. I can’t find them, I keep getting lost or distracted, I think I’m caught up and then realize I’ve missed an entire list of people, or haven’t seen them for days. There’s a maze of obstacles, or the computer isn’t working, or I go to an examination room and it’s someone’s living room behind the hospital door.


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clean up your stuff!(or should you?)

1/5/2024

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After reading Plum Johnson’s “They Left Us Everything,” (see What I’m Reading, April 10, 2024), I’m feeling torn about Marie Kondo, the tiny hyper woman who told us all to thank our stuff and then let it go unless it brought us joy. According to Plum, cleaning out her parents’ very large and cluttered home brought a new appreciation for her parents, their past, their love story, and her family history. She lovingly catalogued and sorted over a century worth of stuff, and it took her a solid eighteen months. She photographed favourite areas of the house and made a photo book.
Whereas my brother-in-law told his parents that if they didn’t clean out their basement, when the time comes, he’s lighting a match and throwing it down the stairs. Obviously, there must be an in-between point here.


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    Author

    Hi, I'm Karen. This space is a chance for me to get some of those notebook sessions out there:  Motherhood, medicine, writers and writing, the state of the world. Non-published, sometimes non-polished, just a chance to open a discussion. Let me know what you think!

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