Ten Things/In a Compressed State

When I directed my first full-length play in my mid-20s it consumed me. I was working a temp job, which I was able to manage -- but I found I couldn't bring my mind to focus on anything other than earning a living and doing the play.

In some cases, I'd let myself get dragged along to other people's activities (perhaps because I lacked resistance), but other than that it was all about directing the play. 

If I tried to focus on something else -- even simple stuff like journal writing, bookkeeping, organizing or processing anything at all -- I couldn't do it. It is as though my energy was so uniformly directed that I lost the capacity to reflect and process. Or perhaps I worried that any attempt to process would detract from my singular creative mission. 

Over the years I've gotten a little better at shifting gears, at finding a little more space inside myself during these compressed-state periods of intense outer-directed activity.

But only a little. 

The past several months have been consumed with drama, onstage and off. 

Insane and bizarre things happened on the job that perhaps one day I will blog about; I've been through some incredibly twisted comings-together and partings on a personal level (all pretty much resolved now ... lessons learned -- albeit expensive ones -- though those are the most important kind, I guess).

Blood on the Veil is going great -- beyond my wildest dreams, and still getting better. And when I'm not rehearsing, polishing, promoting, etc. that show, I'm putting together stuff for other shows, like the recent Confessions of a Bellydancer and Mother Wove the Morning. 

And of course I write lots of stuff for my job, and answer professional and personal emails at all times of the day and night, and do more than my share of chatting and posting stuff on Facebook (also at crazy hours) ... but I could not organize my mind to blog about ... well, pretty much anything at all. 

Jellybeans ... I managed to squeeze out a few thoughts about that -- but only because a post on Facebook prompted me. So even that was reactive creativity.

And now I'm thinking -- maybe that's not a bad thing. Reactive expression is better than no expression; and I have been promising more blog entries....

So with that in mind, what follows is what I posted on Facebook in response to the "Things People Don't Know About Me" meme. 

The lovely Raksanna prompted me for ten items. And here they are!

~~~~~~~~~

TEN things you might not know about me (Disclaimer: some of this stuff is in my show, blog or mentioned in this interview: http://reviewfix.com/2013/10/review-fix-exclusive-carol-henning-interview/ ... but I'll try to add bits that aren't generally known.... )

(1) My first bellydancing class was in 2001 with Stella Gray. The "intermediate layered" move she did that frightened the willies out of me was an earthquake shimmy with an undulation. And, as I say in BOTV, I really did think, "Good lord! You have to be a freak of nature to be able to do that!!"

(2) My first role ever was in a Girl Scout Christmas pageant about being kind to the environment. I was five years old and played a girl who poured lemonade on a tree. My line was something like, "How about over by that tree!" And the tree responded, "Ooohh... that's cold!!"

(3) I was such an enthusiastic Girl Scout that I memorized the Brownie Origin Story ... by accident. We were discussing the story, and the leaders asked us to summarize the action, going from girl to girl. When they got to me, I just started reciting the text -- dialogue and all ("and those acorns too!"). I remember the leaders (including my mother) saying, "Is she reading? Where is the book?" This began a lifetime of memorizing crap for no particular reason.

(4) I entered a Shakespeare recitation contest when I was 16 and memorized a Juliet speech, as well as Sonnets 29 and 116. I won the contest, (but I lost the inter-school finals. Boo.), and went on to fall in love with the Bard and currently know about 20 Sonnets and maybe a dozen speeches, scenes, soliloquies off the top of my head. But these days I have to work a lot harder to memorize.

(5) I have no formal training for my current line of day-job work: third-level tech support at a law firm. In my late teens I started doing secretarial work at a law firm because I was doing stand-up and didn't want to commit to an office career. But I am a TERRIBLE secretary. Fortunately, I had learned some BASIC in Junior High and was able to parlay my rudimentary programming skills into Word Perfect script, getting the computer to do much of my work for me. And then started doing this for others... and now it's what I do!

(6) I am allergic to dust and dust mites and spend the first two hours of every day blowing my nose (this is absolute MAGIC in relationships ...)

(7) I have refinanced my co-op four times over the last ten years. Each time I've done it has cost me about $4000 -- and yet the deal I have now is so good (THANK YOU, FED!) that it just may have been worth it.

(8) Throughout pretty much all of grade school I was relentlessly unfunny. When I got into college, however, I started dating a comedian and began to figure out how jokes were constructed. I figured: If he can do it so can I. So I took the mike and dumped the boyfriend.

(9) My first time onstage as a stand-up was in February 1989 -- and it went GREAT. The next 30 or 40 times were not so good, however..... But I was hooked.

(10) I commuted for my first year at NYU and had a 4.0 grade point average ... but was miserable. Then I had the opportunity to move into campus housing with the Science Fiction club (finally -- to be with my own kind!), albeit renamed the SubGenius Alliance because of a prank the SciFi club played at Loeb Student Center (Glenn Hauman could tell you more about that).

My happiness level rose dramatically ... and my GPA dropped. I earned my first F ever... IN PIANO! Ah well...

(Coda in a follow-up comment about playing the piano: "I can barely play at all anymore. The first semester I got an A; but then when I moved on campus, I had to reserve rehearsal time with the piano, and I kept getting shut out by the music majors who got first dibs. So I was never able to practice. The only piano I could get had a broken E key .. and I was learning to play Chopin's Prelude in E Minor!! Grrrr. )

The Great Healthcare Debate: Facebook Style!!

Recently, a FB friend posted a video of Ted Kennedy's passionate plea for universal health care.

I and many others weighed in with a whopping 77 comments.

One comment-poster in particular, whom I'll call John because that is his name, seemed at first to have some interesting devil's advocate points. He had done a lot of reading and offered multiple links.

And then I started following the links and found that they didn't say quite what he said they did.

And then I found he began to use this tactic on me.

What follows are the final dozen comments in this thread. (His comments are italicized, mine are not. Original grammar -- typos and all -- are intact for your amusement.)

Enjoy!!

*******
Insurance companies are being dumbly demonized to pass this bill, and anyone who looks a the facts has to conclude that Pelosi & company has been misleading the public. That's why they need to go on a fishing expedition to find something 'wrong' in the spending of insurance companies... because the vast majority of people are just fine with their insurance company. That's why they keep paying the premiums.

People keep paying premiums because they have to -- but choosing the lesser of two evils still leaves you steeped in evil: Ultimately insurance companies are asking for your money or your life, and they know it. And that's sick. ...

And as to the "contract" that insurance companies claim is violated as an excuse to cancel expensive policies -- do you really think it's fair to deny a cancer patient care because she was once treated for acne?? Or to deny a person whose weight was written down incorrectly by the INSURANCE AGENT who SOLD him the policy?? See http://www.pri.org/health/ira-glass-health-insurance1517.html

Carol; whose selling fear?
You wrote that insurance companies are asking for your money or your life?

Thus the dichotomy; our president is telling us that conservatives are selling fear while saying things like:
"What is truly scary, what is truly risky, is to do nothing..."

Yet, no insurance company can make me buy insurance. At least, not yet...

I hope you'll pause and consider this thought: You seem to be arguing that having to pay insurance companies is evil. Correct?
Then why would you be in favor of a law that is making insurance mandatory, and where if you don't have 'adequate' insurance, you pay increased taxes?
How is that not *more* evil, given what you've written?

"no insurance company can make me buy insurance. At least, not yet..."

Um.... do you own a car?

yes, Carol. I own a car.
But its not the insurance company that makes me buy insurance. Its the government doing it.

Now I presumed we were talking about health insurance.
You were arguing that having to pay health insurance companies is evil.
Right now, you have a choice as to whether or not you HAVE to buy it.
Given your stance that paying for insurance is evil...
Why are you in favor of a bill that would REQUIRE you to buy insurance, or be taxed if your insurance does not meet the government's minimum standards?

Tell me again where I said paying for insurance is evil?

"People keep paying premiums because they have to -- but choosing the lesser of two evils still leaves you steeped in evil: Ultimately insurance companies are asking for your money or your life, and they know it. And that's sick."

Granted, I did use the words "premiums" and "evil" in the same sentence -- but that comment, either in itself or within the greater context of everything I've written in this thread, cannot be logically interpreted to mean that I have been "arguing that having to pay health insurance companies is evil."

As is apparent to anyone with a grasp of the English language who is not sealed within an echo chamber of his own ideology, the "two evils" to which I was referring are:

(1) Going uninsured, risking the possibility of a catastrophic illness that could leave me destitute or dead; OR...

(2) Paying premiums honestly and in good faith to a morally questionable industry that may, at a crucial moment, deny coverage because I was once treated for acne, leaving me destitute or dead.

The evil is in the behavior of the companies, not in the exchange of money.

To take my words and jumble them to erect a strawman opponent -- at which you can then take seemgly logical shots -- is a dishonest, manipulative or weakminded tactic (manipulative if you know you're doing it, weakminded if you don't -- and dishonest, either way).

And this is not the first time you've done so!

To paraphrase Barney Frank: Debating you is like having a conversation with a dining room table ... only a dining room table is on the level.

"Ultimately insurance companies are asking for your money or your life, and they know it. And that's sick."

Carol; no one could read that phrase, nor the one that sets it up, without fairly coming to the conclusion that you were equating having to pay for insurance as being evil. For you to call my repeating of that phrase as a strawman argument isn't right. Stop blaming my ideology for your wording.
You equate being uninsured with being evil.
I don't.
You equate trusting in insurance companies as evil, because you believe that they are morally questionable.
I don't.
Insurance companies don't stay in business by refusing to pay out. If they did on any bit of a regular basis, guys like me wouldn't be buying in..
Moreover, the current administration wouldn't be trying to get people to buy into their program by suggesting that we could keep our insurance... because a lot of people actually like their insurance.

That's not to say that insurance companies are without reproach... but the knee jerk approach to create evil where there isn't any is, in my opinion, evil.
Insurance companies are making 3.4 percent profit. That's not going to keep me up at night.

John, you said, "no one could read that phrase, nor the one that sets it up, without fairly coming to the conclusion that you were equating having to pay for insurance as being evil."

No one?? Really? NO ONE??"

I decided give your claim a reality check and created an informal survey using my status update. I wrote the following:

"PLEASE read the following sentence and let me know which choice BEST FITS the meaning of the sentence: 'Ultimately insurance companies are asking for your money or your life, and they know it. And that's sick.'"

In creating the fairest possible choices, I did not add anything outrageous or unusual (other than your interpretation, which you do not see as outrageous) to see if ANYONE would agree with your interpretation within the context of other reasonable interpretations.

Incidentally, I have many conservative friends and family members.

The choices, and my reasoning behind each of them, are:

A. Insurance companies charge unfairly high premiums; (not what I meant, but something many consider to be true; this choice is a red herring).

B. Having to pay for insurance is evil; (your looney interpretation);

C. People pay high premiums even though they may be denied coveraged on a technicality because this is better than not having insurance; (This is what I meant when I wrote it, but which might not be clear out of context.)

D. The health insurance industry is corrupt, unethical and scares people into buying insurance. (This is not what I meant, but is a fair interpretation of that single sentence, out of context).

Over a dozen responses appeared over the following hour. Most people chose "C" or "D." NOT ONE PERSON CHOSE "B".

NOT ONE.

It would appear that my wording is not such a problem after all. If you doubt this, repost the survey on your own status in its entirety and see what your own friends think.

Your wording, on the other hand, has more than a few issues....

You wrote: "You equate trusting in insurance companies as evil, because you believe that they are morally questionable." And you stated this belief is a "knee jerk approach to create evil where there isn't any..."

It is not the trusting that is evil; it is the behavior of the companies that is evil (which you may have meant, but this is hard to tell from your poor wording).

You cite the companies' 3.4% profit (this is down from the 4% you cited earlier, but who am I to quibble?).

Well, OK, that's true -- but take insurance giant Humana's respectively meager profits of 2.2% in 2008. Their revenue was $29 billion -- that's BILLION -- with a "B"!!

2.2% of a whole lot of money is still a WHOLE LOT OF MONEY!!

But the problem isn't with them making money. It is that an average of 18,000 people DIE EACH YEAR due to lack of insurance (this is the uninsured, and people who are denied, etc.).

Indeed, the problem isn't the money, per se. Insurance companies could make 99% profit for all I care -- as long as people aren't dead or destitute (or both) as a result.

But for-profit companies are beholden to their stockholders more than they are to the lives of their clients who depend on them. And they employ a series of despicable tactics to make their 3.4% (but still multi-mega-million-dollar) profits.

This is a conflict of interest and results in, yes, tremendous evil.

You say: "Insurance companies don't stay in business by refusing to pay out. If they did on any bit of a regular basis, guys like me wouldn't be buying in."

Sure, for routine matters, insurance companies can be great (as long as you're not seeing the insane premium your boss is paying for your coverage). And for most people, we bump along pretty happy for years. Maybe forever.

But those of us with a conscience or moral compass can envision a time when catastrophic illness or injury MIGHT occur ... or we imagine the state of others who are denied coverage for cancer -- like the woman I cited in the PRI article above -- because they were once treated for acne.

In her case, her insurer did finally conclude that -- surpirse -- acne is not related to breast cancer.

But months of paperwork and unnecessary stress went by before her surgery was approved; her tumor doubled in size and her chance for survival greatly diminished.

For a list of other such underhanded tactics, go to: http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/health_insurance_providers_find_ways_to_prosper_as_more_people_lose_coverag/
Do you really want an industry standard that allows your insurer to fine-tooth your application for a typo -- or, I daresay, a misused semicolon -- and rejects coverage when your life is at stake?

Well, that is the current for-profit industry standard.

Go Free Market.

And for those free-market true-believers who insist that profit is the only and/or best incentive for excellence, THINK AGAIN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

You have repeatedly said that I believe having to "pay for insurance is evil." I have not said or implied this.

You seem obsessed with this idea that those who favor health care reform don't want to "pay." This isn't our position at all, and if you think it is, you haven't been paying attention.

No one minds paying premiums that are reasonable -- as long as the coverage is delivered when needed. End of story.

You said, "You equate being uninsured with being evil."

Really? I equate BEING uninsured with BEING evil? Really? "BEING??!!"

If you really believe that I said or implied anything like this, then I hope your insurance includes mental health, because your projections are getting the better of you. You need help.

As such, I think it is best to follow Mr. Frank's lead and table this discussion.