I Can’t Sleep With or Without You (My iPhone)

The closest pic I could find to my own beloved phone and case

Sung to the tune of the U2 song “With or Without You.”

In some of my recent goals posts, I’ve mentioned a goal to sleep without my phone. This has been an ongoing struggle for me ever since I got an iPhone (and I was just telling a friend that I got one the day they became available to Verizon people), and in different iterations even before then. I thought it would make sense to give some background on this habit that I’ve struggled to break.

Because the thing is, I know all the things. I know that you’re supposed to get off electronics before going to bed. I know taking the phone into the bed with me, scrolling endlessly, listening to podcasts, having the blue light in my face (and I hold the phone much closer to my face than the average person, thanks legal blindness) is all bad. I know when I fall asleep with the phone, my sleep is worse. I don’t sleep as deeply. I wake up more often to pee or just to wake up, most likely because I’m still in the lighter stages of sleep. I probably miss out on a lot of deep sleep and all the goodies that it provides. I even read somewhere, years ago, that screens in bed has been linked to weight gain.

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(Overdue) Writing Update: Publication in Aerial

Jul28

screen-shot-2019-07-24-at-11-45-40-pm I was away for a long time, and in that time, I had some writing news and updates that I’m overdue in sharing here.

One of those is that my piece “Living the Dream?” was published in Aerial, the art and literary magazine from OHSU’s School of Medicine.

Knowing that such a magazine existed was one of the many things that drew me to OHSU as a school. I wanted to be somewhere that valued writing and the arts along with all the science-y, clinical-y stuff I love. Since starting school there, I’ve found a good group of people, not only the people who run Aerial, but also a lot of people involved in narrative medicine, humanities in medicine, live storytelling, and so forth.

In fact, this piece came from the final assignment in a Narrative Medicine elective class I took last winter, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Lahti, who is THE narrative medicine, medical humanities person at OHSU. The assignment was to write “25 Things I Know About…” something. The assignment was based on the short story “25 Things I know About My Husband’s Mother” by Louise Aronson from her book A History of the Present Illness. We read this and other stories from this book in our class, and I highly recommend.

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Blind Job Interview – Blind Alien Nation 3

May16

Another installment from my bitchy essay about blindness. It should be noted that this incident I’m describing, and the writing about the incident, took place before I took organic chemistry and discovered that it was my academic subject soulmate.

It affects everything. As a blind person, you quickly learn all the coded ways that potential employers dress up, “I won’t hire you because you’re blind,” or the coded way potential dates dress up, “I don’t want to go out with you because you’re blind.” It often doesn’t matter how well you present yourself, how positive and open you are about discussing your blindness and showing that you do and feel and are the same things as other humans. There are still countless ways that people deny your full human dignity.

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Blind Dating – Blind Alien Nation 2

May9

This section directly follows the first segment from this essay.

A few months ago, a similar thing happened to me. I was out at an event with some friends, including a guy I had a met few times, had lots of great talks with, and who was, that evening, flirting with me. To some extent he knew me, knew about my blindness, had seen me at several different events and get-togethers before this. That night, our group took a bathroom break and the guy asked me, “Do you need help in there?”

The crazy part? This was not a total anomaly. It’s happened before this particular instance. And will probably happen since.

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The Simple Things in Life – Blind Alien Nation 1

May2

A few months ago, I was talking to a blind friend and mentor. She’s a practicing naturopath who teaches seminars for other naturopaths about thyroid conditions, depression and biochemistry. I asked her if she ever got sick of people making a big deal about how amazing she is to have gotten where she is while being totally blind. She said no. She said it was a big challenge, a career that’s challenging even for people who are fully sighted, and she had to work hard for it. “What does get to me,” she said, “is when people make a huge deal about me doing things like climbing a flight of stairs without falling. I’ve been doing stairs my whole life.”

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Miss You, Love

Apr18

Our talk turns to crushes. “I just miss that feeling, you know?” I say. “Like when you’re just so alive that even when it hurts you’re just glad you can feel. I miss the excitement.”

Jillian says, “My friend Emily calls it the ketchup phase.”

“Catching up with what?” I ask, uncertain.

“Well, because it’s like, when you first fall for someone, they’re all you think about. No matter what the subject, it reminds you of them. Someone could say, ‘pass the ketchup,’ and your first thought is, oh wow, my guy likes ketchup too.”

I sigh. “Yes, that’s what I miss, the ketchup phase. I hope I’m not too old or numb.”

~~~

A tiny little conversational snippet from Moonchild. It took place almost fifteen (!!!) years ago, this talk, but the funny thing is that I feel a little bit of that at the current moment, too. And wow, the topic of passion, in so many different forms, keeps coming up in the manuscript. It may be more of an underlying theme in Moonchild than I realized.

Check out other Samples, Published and Early Work!

~EJ

All of Our Rubbish Dreams

Apr11

Some moments are crystallized in memory, even if they are ordinary.

I remember one early evening in the springtime of ninth grade, I was sitting on the arm of the couch, which Mom hated, and wearing my Hole t-shirt with the heart logo, probably the band I loved that Mom hated most, and she stood by the stove getting ready for dinner. I was watching MTV–this is when they still played videos all the time–and singing along. Low spring light came in from the window near the TV and left big fans of light on the rug that stretched all the way to the kitchen where Mom stirred frozen vegetables in a pan.

“So, Emilia,” she said, and I could tell by the way she wasn’t turning towards me, the way she was trying too hard to sound like a thought just occurred to her, that whatever was coming, she’d worked herself up to it. But I didn’t move my gaze from the TV. “What do you want to be when you’re older?”

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When You’re Eighteen with Crippling Writers Block, Music Can Set You Free

Apr4

Instead of sitting down to absorb the album, I let it trickle in, play it over and over while I read my astronomy textbook, when I doodle in my journal hoping to come up with story ideas for my creative writing class, when I’m on the phone, when I’m reading books and when Jillian comes over to chill.

One night I sit on my inflatable chair writing away in my journal with half my mind on the page and half with the music. As I try to think up story ideas, a song called “Moonchild” starts, launching me into the ether in its intro. Something about the words, the singing, though I don’t know it by heart yet, makes me feel at all like my old vibrant self, or at least its shadow. By the time I get to the bridge, the song stops me in my tracks, using my foot absentmindedly against my bed to rock my chair. I have the seed of a story idea.

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When You’re Eighteen with Crippling Writer’s Block and Rehashing Old Relationships

Mar28

I try to have crushes, because it’s one thing I’ve always done without much prompting, and if my most recent breakup shut me down, then what better than infatuation to open me back up. I don’t care if I get burned. In fact it might be better that way.

I rehash all the things I told myself when Nick and I started going out. I thought then that I was enlightened, that all my previous pain was acceptable because it helped me get to that precious present moment. Nick was very practical. When I had problems with my parents—which I wasn’t supposed to have because I was enlightened, but which I did, because I always did, and because I was a teenager and they still treated me like I was twelve—we approached it in very rational, spiritually advanced ways. I wasn’t supposed to get mad, or let it bother me much or dare dwell on it, Nick kept reminding me.

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Icebreakers

Mar21

My friends and I hang out in Stacy’s room and read from a questions book meant to give interesting topics to discuss at parties, to get to know other people better than those icebreaker games during orientation.

“Okay,” I say, flipping through the book. “Would you rather live a life that’s simple, safe and secure or one full of adventure and passion, with high highs and low lows?”

“I’d vote for the latter,” says Jillian.

“I don’t know that there’s a such thing as a simple and secure life,” says John. “I mean I think they’re getting at the whole like, house with kids and a dog, but I think that’s a pretty unsafe, insecure, exciting life too. Anything could happen even in that situation.”

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