The Tsarnaev Ripple Effect

One of the nastier things that surfaces around any heinous crime is a putrid fascination with sordid details of anything and everyone around those involved-- especially the perpetrators.

In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, I'm appalled at how their family problems were drug through the mud. It's one thing to note, as we grapple to understand the suspects, that one was arrested for violence against his girlfriend. It's another thing altogether (and a nasty one) to find headlines like, "The Mother Of The Boston Bombing Suspects Was Arrested For Shoplifting Last Year".

As long as they could get away with it Big Media danced around the fact the brothers were Muslim. I saw blog and Facebook posts suggesting that since the suspects were Muslims that explained everything. Both attitudes are wrong. We are perfectly capable of assimilating facts without making judgments. Why do so many refuse to do so?

In both Big Media and on blogs, some were quick to assume it was the work of "right wing extremists", "the Tea Party". and so forth-- while decrying any who would assume it was Muslims or foreign terrorists. Guess what? Any of those is just as wrong as another.

Today (and every day) you have a choice. You can wait for the facts or jump to unwarranted conclusions based on prejudices or feelings at the moment. You can stir up trouble for people or you can show grace and love and try to help heal people and situations.

Any time you throw a rock into water, you get ripples. But if you put up barriers, you can keep the ripples from spreading. If you leave the water alone, the ripples will dissipate. If you throw more rocks in, it just makes more ripples... and squashes life under the surface.

Don't encourage the mess. Don't dig up dirt on people, or listen to it, much less rejoice in it.

Choose life. Choose love.

Real Poo and Green Hair

It's Tax Day, so "poo" seems like an appropriate subject.

A while back I blogged about not putting poo in your hair. There I covered shampoo and no poo, but not real poo. Today I want to talk about all three, with some experience under my bandana on two out of three.

But first, a note about "real poo". I figure if the totally synthesized stuff made from all sorts of scary chemical names is shampoo, then there ought to be real poo, made from natural, scalp friendly ingredients. I wondered why nobody was marketing real poo. Then I thought about the name. I'm a little slow at times.

We'll come back to this and green hair later.

The Experiment

I've stuck as much as possible to the No Poo treatment for almost a year. I cut waaaay back on shampoo, but I work in IT. I can't run around with greasy hair, and left to its own devices, my hair definitely heads that way. Most days I use the baking soda solution on my scalp, as little shampoo as I can get away with on most of the hair, and vinegar solution on the ends. For a while I was pushing my luck, trying to skip shampoo every other day. That seemed to be iffy, but was all over when we went on vacation.

I didn't think ahead of time to plan for hair cleaning while traveling. I make up large containers (old shampoo & conditioner bottles) of the two solutions. These would not travel well without leaking (or bursting open and emptying). So I punted and used shampoo and conditioner for 10 days, losing serious ground.

Results and Thoughts on No Poo

• My scalp doesn't itch! Most shampoos make my scalp itch to some extent. The baking soda doesn't. Even two days of full bore shampoo usage irritates my scalp.
• I can get by with very little shampoo. A normal bottle will last at least a year now. (My wife uses it as her main hair product, so I have no idea how long the bottle would last if only I used it, but certainly over a year.)
• When I don't underdo the shampoo, my hair looks great, and is very controllable. It's super fine and most conditioners leave it either waving in the breeze, or looking plastered down. Vinegar is Da Bomb.
• I still haven't figured out why my hair gets greasy. I am guessing it rubs the scalp, and if the scalp thinks it's too dry, it cranks up the pump on the oil pipeline. Any hair scientists out there?
• The three stage process, and being careful where each part goes, takes a little longer, but not much.
• Keeping the baking soda only on and near the scalp, and vinegar only at the hair ends, is a lot easier if you have very long hair that's pretty much the same length. It's almost impossible with medium length or short hair, especially if the hairs aren't all similar in length.
• My hair dries much faster with vinegar than with conditioner.

Real Poo, Marketing Poop

I tried one brand of shampoo and conditioner a friend recommended. It was supposed to be "organic". And a couple of ingredients were. But others came from the same list of chemicals I find on most hair product labels. Ultimately the one I tried didn't work; it made my hair sticky and clumpy. Not quite oily, more like I had been in a food fight,. And it smelled weird-- "pork chops cooked in industrial chemicals" or something like that.

I may have tried the wrong flavor. There were several types, each for a different type of hair. Unfortunately, none of them were aimed at guys, much less geeks. I wanted one for "oily hair". Apparently I wanted a "full bodied" effect, but that sounded like Farrah Fawcett, so I got the only one that didn't sound like that. I tried it twice and gave up. IT guys are not supposed to come to work straight from a food fight. Especially when they work for the VP of Finance.

Toward Greener Hair

Green isn't really my color. If I dye my hair, purple is far more likely. But I try to be reasonably green ecologically. To this end I prefer not to use a hair dryer unless I have to (very cold weather, have to go straight to somewhere I need to have dry hair, etc.) With medium length hair (about collar length) my hair dries in a half hour most days (just right for my drive to work). With conditioner it used to take twice that. Also, with most conditioners, I had to blow dry my hair or it did Very Strange Things.

Between the chemical changes and the hair dryer, I'm not saving the planet, but it's a part of my part in hurting it less. And it's less expensive. That's the best of both worlds.

A Final Note-- It's Alive! (Not.)

Hair is dead protein. You aren't actually damaging a part of you if you lighten, dye, straighten, or perm it. Unless you do something to destroy the follicles, you'll grow more, and you can cut the old off. In fact, I bet you do already.

It does no good to put nutrients and vitamins on your hair. It's dead stuff, remember? And vitamins don't absorb through the scalp; you have to ingest them. So don't obsess over "hurting your hair" or "keeping it healthy". If it looks good and does what you want (or as close as it ever does) you're golden.

 

So... Can anyone recommend a good, natural shampoo?

Writing 101 - What's a Writer?

So you think you want to be a writer. Or maybe you think you are a writer. Maybe you think you are not a writer.

How do you know? What's a writer?

Let's come at this obliquely.

What is a musician? A person who performs music.

What is a plumber? A person who plumbs.

What is a cook? A person who cooks.

What is a programmer? A person who writes programs.

By ostension a writer is one who... writes.

Some writers hit the big time right away; the first thing they write, or close to it, nets them big bucks and big attention.. Precious few, but some. Most of us start by writing. And writing. And writing.

What both groups have in common is that they write.

We all want to write brilliantly, to craft words in such a way that people are immediately moved, whether to tears, laughter, awe, inspiration, action, or simply to give us money. But for most of us, this means a lot of writing that doesn't do that. It means writing a lot of crap and mediocre stuff. It means practicing, just as a musician practices. It means reading and studying. It means taking risks and letting people read things you aren't sure about. But without writing, none of that happens.

You need to know the basics:

• sentence structure;
• grammar;
• spelling;
• punctuation.

All these are learned. It's easier for some of us than others, but nobody comes out of the womb knowing these things.

But what about compositional skills? What about this, that and the other? What else you need to know will depend on what you are writing. It really helps to know how to tell a story... if you are telling a story. Not everyone tells stories. Poets, especially, may simply describe scenes or objects, or relate feelings, or turn abstract thoughts into concrete (or liquid gold) words. It's good to learn all you can, but if you are writing love poems, or greeting cards, or haiku, you don't need world class compositional skills.

One thing you do need is a mastery of the language[s] you will write in. It may be a formal language, a street language, church speak, technobabble, or marketing buzz, but you need to be fluent. To this end, read, listen, and study. And write.

You can pick a time or grab time. But find or make time to write.If it's ten minutes a day to start, go with that, but find or make more as you move forward. A writer writes. Writing takes time.

Composing things in your head is not writing. Do that if you like, but write it down.

If you don't know what to write about, write anyway. Describe a nearby object. Write down what you are feeling. Capture a moment, whether present or past, or even a possible future. I once started describing a coffee cup, and three pages later realized I had written about feelings I hadn't known I had. Another time I stared with "I don't know what to write, so I am writing about not knowing what to write about, This feels stupid. It's gray out. I feel gray. I remember a song I liked, called 'Grey Day'..." It turned into a story from my hippie days. Just write.

Save everything you write. All of it has value. Fragments may inspire you later. If nothing else, you can look back at it and laugh and realize you have improved. Assuming you have, but if you write you almost certainly will. So write.

If you are still reading, I hope you are inspired to write. But perhaps you think this is too simplistic. If that's the case, I can offer one other piece of advice.

Capture your thoughts via physically transcribed language in the forms of symbols conveying meaning to the eyes in your language of choice. I believe the technical translation of this is, "write".

So go write!