What I’m Learning

The Big 40 Hour Training, which runs two eight hour days per week then one day the third week, is supposed to be all about domestic violence advocacy. Whether I’m interning at the local shelter or merely a volunteer, I intend to have something to do with it soon. It will help give my part-time-boring-job life meaning.

What I’m learning is a lot of stuff I already knew, plus a lot of stuff I didn’t, and not all of it has to do with domestic violence. For instance:

1. Alcohol is a poison, not a drug. Like so many other things we ingest, alcohol is in fact capable of killing us. It is not a drug because it does not affect the synapses. It affects the “soapy water” in the space between the dendrites in our nervous system, slowing the neurotransmitters and rendering the membranes between the different regions of the brain temporarily impermeable. Which is why our judgement suffers — the lobes of the brain that control things like reasoning, long term memory, and that little voice that says “I shouldn’t drive right now” are cut off from the “wooohooo!” lobe. Guess who wins. It’s possibly also why people black out. Stuff happens while under the control of your non-remembering brain. Stuff you will regret, probably. Coroners examining the membranes of the brain can tell a corpse belonged to a chronic alcoholic by noting the holes in said membranes — the brain is determined to function so punches holes in the constantly-impermeable stuff.

Drugs, on the other hand, affect either the transmitting or receiving ends of the dendrites, impacting the sensation of pain and pleasure and outside stimuli. Which is why I saw oozing purple blobs crawling on the wall when the doctor gave me vicodin. Suddenly, my nerve endings were getting all kinds of information that had nothing to do with reality.

Some heart medications aren’t drugs, but poisons with a side effect of altering the behavior of arteries and the heart tissue. Arsenic was a heart med until it was superceded by more effective treatments.

2. People have no clear grasp of relevance. I know I’m totally Ms. Tangent of the Year, myself, but I feel so much better after sitting in a room full of random access champs. Personal anecdotes flew, and neither proved or disproved or really had a lot to do with the point being made.

3. People have no grasp of word choice or meaning. One lady asked a question about masochists that had everyone sitting around with question marks floating overhead, until she elaborated a little and we realized she meant misogynists. I counted ten different uses of ‘loose’ for ‘lose’ in the powerpoint presentations.

4. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has more merit than I gave it credit for.

5. Attachment issues are key.