Healing - Part II

In addition to moving onto sophmore year in "la scuola misteriosa", I also need to keep working on the things not up to the standards of my usual ... er ... scholarly, brilliant and talented self.  ("What, you mean like humility?") (Yeah, exactly!) .  In my case:  distance healing.

So, in line with that, I just read the most horrifying ... well, let me not get overly dramatic, here ...

I am getting ready to work on my healing exercises (again), because the first attempts were so not up to the standards of my usual yada, yada, yada, and was going through the 11 (or 12) body systems.  One of the parts of Christopher (Penczak’s) guided healing meditation that threw me a little bit was the instruction to:  “scan the lymphatic system”, “scan the nervous system”, etc.  I knew basically what the body systems were, but couldn’t visualize all of the parts of it.  Example:  I knew what lymph nodes were, I knew I had lymph nodes on my neck and under my arms, because those were the areas doctors always poked at whenever they wanted to check lymph nodes.  What I didn’t know was:  what were all the parts of the entire lymphatic system?  It’s been a long time since I was in high school biology class.

I realized that before I continued with this exercise, I needed to refresh my knowledge of the bodily systems:  11 systems if you combined the lymphatic and immune into one system or 12 if you didn’t.

So, I happened to be checking on the circulatory system.  In the results Google sent back was the actual question that someone sent to “Ask.com” or whatever that awful website is.  I say “awful” because, while I’m sure they have some legalese in it that disclaims their responsibility for any wrong answers, the problem is:  a hell of a lot of people in this country are seriously stupid and their site is chock full of some spectacularly and dangerously wrong answers.

The question was, why is blood blue inside the body and red outside the body?  And the answer was an astonishing:  that’s because it gets exposed to air. (<---- WARNING!  That was a grotesquely wrong answer!  Do not pay any attention whatsoever to that answer!!!)

The correct answer is:  It isn’t.  Blood is red inside and outside of the body, but may have a different shade or intensity of red outside of the body depending on how oxygenated the cells are.  The veins in your skin appear blue because the light waves being passed through your skin and fatty tissue make the veins appear blue when in fact they are more of a reddish brown color.

(And even mine is

Pelham Memorial High School, Pelham, NY

a minimalist answer; I guarantee you that a biologist or scientist could easily pick MY answer apart, so don’t even take my word for it, look it up yourself on a legitimate medical or scientific website or in a textbook.  And no, “Creation Science.com” is not a legitimate scientific website.  Or even science at all, but let's not go there right now.)

The point is:  incredibly stupid web sites like, “Ask Me Anything Even Though I Have Only a First Grade Education!” ought to be banned.  Seriously.  No wonder we’re a mentally backwards country.

I ought to stop at this point and thank Pelham Memorial High School, in Pelham, New York.   No, really.  Last class in biology I took was at PMHS, and their educational system was so top-notch at the time I attended, I still remember enough basic biology to know that first answer was staggeringly wrong.  My jaw dropped when I read it.  And I guarantee you, too many people who read that answer no doubt never questioned it, and are still wandering around thinking they’re “blue-blooded”.  I’d laugh, but .... that is so not funny.

And speaking of not funny ... in the middle of all the chaos unfolding over the last several weeks (job applying, bad blood test results, a killer eye infection), the Toshiba TV/DVD player stopped working – not the TV part, the DVD part.  TV works fine.  I couldn’t find anyone in Seabrook who could fix it.  Bought another one.  Not a Toshiba, heaven forbid.  An RCA one, via Walmart Online for store pick-up.  Figured – hey, RCA makes good stuff.  Right?

Naturally I was spectacularly wrong.  Walmart lied through their teeth about this being new – as soon as I opened it, I knew it was a refurbished one.  The rumpled “Quick Start Guide” was completely unintelligible and had a lovely ink blot of a coffee stain on it.  (Brand new, eh?)  None of their diagrams matched.  Best of all, there was only a power cord (attached to the unit) – no cords to attach it to a cable box.  The power cord couldn’t even reach the plug.

After spending an hour searching for an extension cord and disconnecting an old HTMI cord from an even older TV, the TV worked (after I called Comcast), but I hadn’t tried the DVD player.  Naturally, it didn’t work.  So THAT was why it was returned the first time.  WALMART just re-boxed the broken thing up and re-sold it to the first gullible dupe they could find.  (Waving cheerfully at you via computer monitor:  Hiiiii!  Gullible Dupe, here!  How - ahhhhh - ya?)

I had purchased a warranty or service plan, managed by a company called “Asurion”.  Their nightmarish phone line from hell announced after 15 minutes of maneuvering through selection after selection that they were having “technical difficulties” and couldn’t answer their “24-7” customer service line.  Their web site didn’t include in a list of choices the product I actually purchased, and they then cheerfully announced that THEY couldn’t open a claim because the serial and model number didn’t match any product they had a service agreement for, even though Walmart had just sold me one.   W ... T ... F ......???

I threw the TV back in a box and drove back to Walmart with the nightmarish experience in the trunk.  They took one look at my face and refunded my money.  Or maybe they would have done it anyway, but they took one look at my face and decided to do it really cheerfully.

So, may I state for the record:  [bleep!] WALMART.  [bleep!] RCA.  Definitely [bleep!] Asurion, a huge scam foisted on the public, and, as always, [bleep!] CHINA, who have managed to toss RCA's once stellar reputation in the mud and stomp on it.  Oh yeah, and [bleep!] US, for being in such debt to China we keep getting saddled with this poorly made crap. [bleep!] the completely insane collection of brain-dead pinheads we call CONGRESS.  [bleep!] EVERY PRESIDENT SINCE ABRAHAM LINCOLN, [bleep!] our depraved version of capitalism, and anything else I can think of.

I finally found another TV at another store, this one an Emerson, smaller and cheaper than the Walmart RCA one, which actually works.  I’m not going to name THAT store, because they also neglected to mention that I needed an HTMI connection of a different sort than the one I had already salvaged, which required me to get back in the car and drive to Radio Shack in a state of bleary eyed exhaustion to get a new one.  An entire day wasted just to install a working TV.  (*sigh*)  Maybe the Universe is telling me I don't REALLY need to keep up with "Game of Thrones" all that badly, whaddya think?