A hole in the sacral joint?

Dear me. If only Aggie and Conchie hadn't gone missing in the hurricane. They know all about these "alternative" therapies.

I've had excellent results with physiotherapy on my lower back, especially when I do the exercises they told me I should do. But physiotherapy is mostly evidence-based (I say mostly because I don't think there's a lot of support for those electro-vibrator suction cup things that are right out of an episode of KinK) and evidence-based medicine just can't give the answers that alternative medicine has.

Meanwhile, poor Musie seems to need one or all of:
- a Reiki master,
- colour therapy
- sexual healing, or
- something else to fill that hole.

Is she being meta-ironic?

Back on Thursday, 5M suggested that Nice Guys:

...never put themselves down, as though fishing for reassurance and putting you down at the same time,...

Saturday, she told us:

The Dwarf always seemed to see me as particularly dreary, whereas most people who know me in person seem to find me funny.

She also gave us a quote from Linda Hutcheon on the use of irony. (The quote uses expressions that I find dreary, like "discourse" and "dominant tradition".) It also seems to be saying that "saying one thing and meaning another" is a "simple sense" of irony.

In my world, "saying one thing and meaning another" is sarcasm. It's something I do so much that when I compliment someone they often look at me with narrowed eyes and I have to say, "no, no, I mean it! I really do think it's terrific." On the internet, I've wound up in bizarre fights because I've jokingly said something and the receiver took me seriously. (Ask me about my encounter with the Skipper of the Pirate School some day.)

So... I am about to say a series of things that are what I mean to say. Not sarcastic, ironic or facetious:

• There have been a number of times that I thought 5M was speaking seriously when she was "joking". Notably, I didn't get it that she thought the Pool Guy was being funny when he told her she might catch a cold going out with wet hair on a hot day. I believe it's because her reply to him didn't play with his irony, but contradicted it. The rest of the ESIs had the same misconception as I did.
  
• When someone puts themself down to seek reassurance, I think they should be encouraged to not put themself down. I also think they should be reassured. And if I'm in a relationship with them, I try to think about what I'm doing that they don't feel reassured enough. If they put me down while they're doing it, it's certainly something I'll note. Perhaps confront them on it.
  
• I've never thought the 5M is dreary. I think the person described in her blog is unhappy more often than a person should be unhappy. The person she describes as an ideal partner is not realistic, but she's demonstrated that she'll spend time with someone who is far from ideal. And that she's open to new experiences.
  
• How could you describe a woman who tells you about meeting a man and wanting to jump him as dreary?

Being Patient

Early this morning at 2AM, the Fifth Muse was asking herself many questions. I wonder if she's noticed this sign in front of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, just across the street practically from the Bridgehead.

And now here's the Chair, ready to wade into the "nice guy" issue with her.

It's interesting that neither Bob nor the Chair seem able to measure up to the standard that Musie has set for them. If I know any man who is a nice guy it is the Chair. And if Bob is not a nice guy, he is doing a remarkably consistent impersonation of one.

I, of course, am not a nice guy, and so won't even take her test. Besides I have something unresolved in my heart that I need to address.

Sense and Insensitivity

Had some trouble parsing the Muse this morning.

I couldn't find yesterday's Ian Brown column in the Globe. I imagine it would have helped explain what she means.

how incommensurate to compare the visual consumption of women's naked bodies to that of unadulterated curiousity about difference.

incommensurate: adjective, (often followed by 'with') not corresponding in size or degree or extent; "a reward incommensurate with his effort"

visual consumption: I'm not getting anywhere with this. It seems to be about images being commodified, but it's not like food or energy consumption, the commodity doesn't get used up or turned into something else. Found an interesting article on 19th-Century dating that the Chair might want to look at.

unadulterated curiousity about difference: This must be the good way to be looking at women. When the viewing is not about sexual arousal or objectifying women.

It comes down to sensibility. Are there any men of sensibility?

sensibility: 1. sensitivity: (physiology) responsiveness to external stimuli; "sensitivity to pain" 2. In measurements, the smallest change that is reliably detectable. 3. refined sensitivity to pleasurable or painful impressions; "cruelty offended his sensibility" 4. Sensitive feeling, emotion. The term arose early in the eighteenth century to denote the tender undercurrent of feeling in the NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD and continued through Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility(Holman 425).

I think 5M is getting at definitions 3 and 4. But the question is, is it about how sensitive the men are? or about what they're sensitive to?

A broken man on the Quyon pier

All I remember is stumbling in the dark below decks, a crashin' thump on the back of me' skull and I awoke in a stormy sea, with a carpet bag lashed around me neck fer a life preserver.

I floated fer several days. Me only sustenance a tin o' lemon squares in th' carpet bag. When I began to give up hope of ever seeing land again, a US Coast Guard cutter rescued me. I'd a fine time convincin' them not to send me t' Guantanamo or Damascus. They were mighty suspicious of the cross-shaped bruise on the back of me head.

I'm back home now. The adventure didn't kill me, but I can't say it made me stronger.

I fear the pirate's life may not be fer me after all. I've some thinkin' t'do.

As fer the Fifth Muse, I was worried about her when I first got back to reading her entries, missing all of Tuesday and obsessing about M instead of sleeping, but now she's spied a rainbow through the slats of her blind. Amen.