evening shadows

My good friend ArtCat did an excellent job of describing PTSD. He said:

PTSD is like a hydra. If you do things piecemeal, you may resolve one symptom but two more will pop up in its place (or it will return twice as bad as before). You need to strike at the root and work through the fundamental issue in and of itself. Everything else should be taken in context of that.

I... I have a hard time with my cPTSD when I reach the end of the day. Beloved pointed it out to me the other day and it's been rattling around in my brain. At the end of the day, I run out of things to distract me from my disorder. I find my emotional reserves are fairly close to tapped out and I dread going to sleep. Even with my medications, nightmares will come fairly regularly. They just don't have the same kind of effect on me that they did before.

I suffer from emotional flashbacks on a daily basis. I haven't the slightest idea what is triggering them. This upsets me greatly. I just want to get to the root of this latest go on the hellish merry-go-round. I want to face this stuff down and move on as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it's simply not that easy.

I sit here, trying to figure out what more to write. I don't know why I'm posting this here, even. I guess it's just to get it out and off my chest. I want to cry. At the same time, another part of me decries it as a sign of weakness, which must never be allowed. I feel confused, hurt, and alone. I don't know why. It's terrible to feel this way because I don't know what set it off.

Science is getting interesting.

A few days ago, I read this really interesting story about how scientists grew and then successfully implanted an organ into a person using their own tissues. I thought that was really exciting news. I knew that nanotechnology was getting applied in various interesting ways throughout various industries. What I didn't know was how far advanced it had gotten in the medicine sector until I read that article.

I have a friend who had to have a double lung transplant almost two years ago. I immediately pointed this article out to him. We both agreed that it was pretty amazing. The idea that medicine has advanced far enough that we could theoretically grow a new, healthy version of an organ that was diseased and failing was something that just struck us as wonderful.

Granted, we're both of a mind to watch these developments carefully. Organ transplants are notoriously tricky and the risk of rejection is always high. The proof of success in this case is going to be a bit down the road.

But then I stumbled on to this article and I was just left in shock. It was only a few years ago that the idea of regrowing a fingertip was science fiction. To see evidence that it has been done just left me in awe. What is going to be next?

Obligitory Casey Anthony post.

As a person who reads the news and occasionally blogs about it, I suppose I must put in my two pennies worth on the subject of the Casey Anthony fiasco. Fiasco really is an understatement. I think train wreck may be a better way of describing it. It was a disaster from the beginning.

One may ask, why I think it was a disaster from day one. My answer is really simple, the media sensationalized the living hell out of it. Imagine if this case unfolded and the mother wasn't involved beyond misreporting a missing child. There wouldn't be half as many people screaming for blood as there are today. Let's take this little thought experiment a bit farther. Let's imagine if the person involved was an acquaintance of the family. The number of people screaming for that person's blood would drop off exponentially.

In my opinion, the first thing that judge should have done was bar the media from the courtroom. I think it should be a standard practice in any and all high profile cases. This should be as routine as sequestering jurors. Did the district attorney botch their case? Probably. Is Casey Anthony guilty? I don't know.

There's a chance that she is guilty as hell. That doesn't matter in the eyes of the law, however, because a jury of her peers found her innocent. Yes, a terrible thing happened to a little girl. The injustice of it smarts because we can't pin the crime on any one person's head and exact some form of vengeance, because let's face it that's what people are looking for with the death penalty.

That doesn't mean that we automatically criminalize parents who don't know immediately if their child's missing. Older children are harder to keep track of then younger children because they're much more independent. Guess what, that means that little Suzie may be spending the night at her friend's place and if she and her friend get lost while they're out doing stuff, Suzie's parents aren't going to know until at least 24 hours later.

I'm not a big fan of that sensationalist rag the Huffington Post. At times, however, they have good articles. This article does a better job then I can illustrating why we shouldn't jump to knee jerk conclusions and start changing/writing laws in the heat of populist passion. Cases like that of Casey Anthony and O.J. Simpson are rare. Writing laws that affect everyone because of things that happen in these outlier cases is bad policy.

The Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said it best:

The more laws, the less justice.