Age 98! / Alive-Alive O

Ferlinghetti: On Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

This morning, I watched above video which was featured on the Doonesbury video archive yesterday. One of the last things my mother mailed to me, a few days before she died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in December 1994, was a newspaper article about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My mother wrote poetry until 1966, at which time she stopped writing poetry and took her first watercolor class.  For the rest of her life, she expressed herself through the visual arts.  In the days after she died, I found that she had been reading a well-worn copy of The San Francisco Poets, by David Meltzer.

Haven't been posting much, due to trying to achieve basic survival as a self-employed medical transcriptionist.

Although I was making some headway, that all changed (for me and thousands of those of us who make a living as medical transcriptionists) on July 27 when the worldwide computer virus, first affecting the Ukraine, took down the speech recognition software provided by Nuance Communications, used by 86% of hospitals in the United States.  Nuance also hires transcriptionists to work at home for poverty wages for many of these hospitals.

Many of us who barely make a living doing this challenging and emotionally rewarding work that is at the bottom rung of the medical profession were without work for a full week.  Although Nuance's speech recognition software is still unavailable to us, many of us who are independent contractors have been hastily retrained on clunky back-up software that has not been used for years.  We are back to transcribing every word that is dictated.

We are faced with a tremendous backlog of medical dictation that must be transcribed in a way that takes up to twice a long as with speech recognition and is the source of repetitive motion injuries.

And yet, it's been a beautiful summer so far.  Sunny, breezy.  Although I have not had the energy for much walking or my yoga practice, I have made sure to spend time with friends when I am not working.

Many of the current events in the world are disheartening but we are:

Saved by beauty:

Holding steady.
















Perseverance furthers.  Have not been able to post videos on my blog for some time, but today I was successful.  This is from one of my rare walks in the past week or two.  High water at Whatcom Falls
(Hmmm ... the video shows up here on the editing page but not in Preview).  Perseverance furthers.

Saved by music:



Hope to have time soon to catch up on your blogs.

Woman With Heart

In 2007, I bought Joni Mitchell's CD called "Shine." That was a bleak year for me, and the CD brought me some light and some perspective on darkness. It was released in September, just after R had a brainstem stroke which left him in a coma for two weeks at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California. I would have heard about "Shine" after returning home from a yoga teacher training intensive in Eastern Washington that convinced me that I did not want to become a yoga teacher. I did not yet know that R had the stroke and didn't learn of his stroke until the last day of the year when his sister sent me a Christmas card. It is occurring to me that I may have stopped listening to "Shine" after R died the following April.



Listen to Joni:

Holy Earth

How can we heal you?

We cover you like a blight...

Strange birds of appetite...

If I had a heart I'd cry

Today I pulled "Shine" down from my small hard-to-reach up-near-the-ceiling shelf of CDs that I have kept but do not listen to very often. The CDs are more or less in chronological order, beginning with some early rock 'n' roll and ending with a 3-disk set called "Autoharp Legacy" (scroll down). Although that CD is from 2002, my recent interest in the autoharp places it there in my sense of history.

A few months ago, I put all my Bob Dylan CDs in a box which is now in the small storage closet in my hallway. They have been easily accessible to me for as long as I have had them, but I have not had any desire to listen to them, except occasionally in my car. As a long-time listener of Bob Dylan, I also have another box filled with his music on tape, and a shelf containing all his vinyl albums previous to the years when music began to be put on tape. Although I am still stopped in my footsteps and find myself close to tears when I hear Bob Dylan's voice as I did in the Bellingham Community Co-op grocery store a few days ago, and am moved to the core as I have been since I was 13 years old, something told me to put his CDs away and be open to hearing another voice. It's been very quiet here for some time anyway. Beginning in spring, when I can open my windows, I listen to the sound of birds. If I want to hear music, I sit down with my autoharp, dulcimers, and ukulele. It has been silent during the time that I have been making the first eleven mandalas, which was last September after most of the birds were gone.

A few days ago while checking for updates on Joni Mitchell's health, I discovered that on November 17, 2014, she released a 4-disk collection of CDs titled "Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced." Because I am living on my dwindling savings, I went to our local public library's website to see if they had a copy. I've been listening to the library copy ever since. It's a work of art. Hers is the voice I want to listen to while I am drawing and when I weave on my inkle loom sometime in the future or when I just want to hear the voice of a complex creative woman with heart.

It appears that I may be employed for 20-28 hours a week as a medical transcriptionist and editor sometime soon, working from my home. This is the first June in years that I haven't suffered from situational depression, and I am hopeful that I will be able to keep working as a transcriptionist for the rest of my life. That job will provide me with a modest income that will allow me to continue buying food, paying my bills, buying paper and colored pencils for drawing, buying strings for my musical instruments, buying yarn for weaving and other necessities of life.

I don't take anything for granted anymore and am grateful to have found Joni Mitchell and her fierceness and gentleness and her music and her art work once again.

Black and White Series: Family Travelling at NIght (2005)

Yesterday I realized that the recent images that I had labeled as being from 2006 were from 2005, the year that I worked at home full-time as a medical transcriptionist for a national transcription company which is based in Illinois. I remember now that having little time for art work made me prioritize my time so that art work would be possible.

Working for the national transcription company I chose to work for was financially demoralizing, although I thoroughly enjoyed doing transcription at home. After having been a transcriptionist since 1984, it was a shock to find that I was unable to make more than minimum wage when paid by the line. I had chosen that particular company to work for because they advertised that they paid incentive for quality. After a few months of doing quality work for them, they changed their policy so that high quality work would no long result in incentive pay. I was among the more productive transcriptionists in my group and was making less than a third of what I had been making in 2003.

In August of 2005, an old friend died, and in October of 2005, I received a deeply disturbing letter, which triggered an episode of post-traumatic stress disorder which led to a relapse of compulsive overeating, although not a return to bulimia. After Thanksgiving in November of 2005, I started eating refined sugar and chocolate, something I had not done since 1987. As a result of eating massive amounts of sugar and chocolate, I developed ocular rosacea, a condition in which the skin next to my eyes became acutely inflamed, and the whites of my eyes became red and irritated from rubbing against the irritated skin next to my eyes. I was eating sugar and chocolate instead of eating the nutritious food I usually eat, and I gained about 8 pounds. I went to my doctor, who notified my employer that I needed time off work. My eyes began to return to normal with the help of medication and with refraining from eating sugar and chocolate. After discussing the exploitive work situation with the doctor's nurse practitioner, I made a decision to resign from the meagerly paid medical transcription position in order to regain my emotional equilibrium.

In 2005, I had created 21 images, but in 2006, I created only 7. My sense of well-being returned very slowly.

Nothing to Say in Black and White (1982)

A story about this drawing which was done with black and white chalk pastel on Arches paper can be found in the December 13, 2006 entry. The image of the woman came from a photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe with Alfred Steiglitz. After doing this drawing, I didn't make any more images in black and white for twenty years. This is the third of a series of drawings done in the context of a university level drawing class, using a face from a photograph as a starting point. I graduated from Western Washington University in 1982 with a degree in English Literature (minoring in Art) and continued to be inspired to draw from faces in photographs I found in books. In 1984, I began working the evening shift as a medical transcriptionist and was no longer able to attend the informal life drawing sessions on Tuesday evenings in the Western Washington University Art Department.

Life Drawing #6 (1982-1983?)

This is the last of a selection from a series of life drawings done with pencil. For several years in the 1980s, until I took a job in a hospital as a medical transcriptionist on the evening shift, I spent every Tuesday evening doing life drawing in an informal life drawing group at Western Washington University. That was when I was in my early 30s, and it would still be several years before the beginning of my freedom from an eating disorder. Although this was a dark time in my life on many levels, when I was doing life drawing I was at least able to see and try to convey the light in other people.