Who I am

Originally, my self-diagnosis had been ‘food poisoning’ – prognosis: good. I’d gone down to my friend’s apartment in Platteville the weekend before and thought I ate something bad on the road down – gas stations are not exactly known for their fine cuisine. I suffered all the usual symptoms – passing on details for the comfort of my readers – and spent a day and night feverishly curled up on my buddy’s futon. The next afternoon, I felt well enough to drive; the one-hour-forty-five-minute drive took four hours to complete due to multiple stops on the roadside to nap. I got home, walked downstairs to my room and passed out on my couch. I was exhausted from the digestive gymnastics of the previous day, nothing more. But the next day, I was delirious. With a 105 degree fever, I was delusional, incoherent and a great concern to my parents. The accident of the night before was still uncleaned at 4 PM when I woke up from my thirtieth 5-minute-nap of the day and saw my mom, dad and sister standing nearby; they were speaking in hushed tones and looking occasionally in my direction. My mom came over and she was using the tone she used when I was four and had an earache: “Michael… You aren’t well… This is serious, and we’re calling an ambulance. They’re going to take you to the hospital.”

Fast-forward a few hours and I was being checked in to the hospital; forms were being filled, labels were being made, plastic wrist jewelry with my patient ID number was being stamped – an extra one was being hand-written on red plastic: allergy: Sulfa – and I was being interrogated. How did I feel? When had symptoms begun? Any previous history of… Everything. They asked me everything and I couldn’t muster enough coherence to be able to answer effectively enough. They asked me to lift my leg and I told them I couldn’t – the swelling was significant enough that I didn’t have the muscle strength in my feverish state to comply – and for the duration of my stay I was being tested for paralysis. But then the medicine came and I slipped away into a dream, both terrible and welcome. From my recollection, I slept most of the next four days with little pockets of wakefulness and lucidity. In between long blinks, I got snapshots: my mom sitting by my bedside, her hand on her rosary as she watched me. Blink. My beautiful friend Mike, perching on the chair as if any minute he would spring up and fly away as quickly as he had arrived – when he saw my eyes open, he presented me with the three Beanie Babies he had picked up for me on his way over. Blink. Ashley, an old and good friend from high school, who now had started working at the hospital and stopped by to chat when she recognized me from the hallway. Blink. My sister, showing me the green-gold hosta my department had sent over from work, along with the balloons and a horrifically ugly green grasshopper which had been an office joke for the better part of four months at that point. Blink. I don’t remember the rest of the time because I slept; the sleep was brought on by the medication they were giving me for the swelling in my leg. There apparently are some pills that are used for fluid reduction that have the wonderful side effect of horror-esque nightmares, and waking terrors. I was on these pills and my mother informed me a year after the fact that I had been awake at times, telling her about my dreams. She said they were terrible and I still don’t know exactly what I had said because she will not tell me any details.

My fever continued to grow. The medication was wrong. The doctor came in, avoiding eye contact, to tell me that the water pill they had given me was made with one of the main ingredients being the one thing which I am allergic to – Lasix was made with Sulfa. He came back a short time later to tell me the state of things. And still, my fever continued to rise. The raised heat had incubated some sort of infection in my leg, which was now swollen to the point of bursting in lesions which opened and seeped when I so much as moved my leg in bed, let alone walked. They diagnosed me with cellulitis (‘blood poisoning’) – prognosis: treatable. They were going to install a central line – an IV line that they can plug and unplug as needed without needing to poke every time – and they were going to send me to Mayo Clinic. Then he said the thing that makes people terrified of hospitals. “Because of the severity of the infection, and the worsening of your fever, we don’t know if it is all from the medicine. Your leg might now be septic.” I nodded, listening and itching – the side effect of my allergic reaction that most people noticed from fifty feet away was red, irritated skin and hives – and not worried; I’d heard that word on Scrubs, and E.R. and House – it couldn’t be that bad, right? “It could be fatal.” I stopped itching.

So now I was dying and doing my best impression of a boiled lobster. They came in a few minutes later to do the central line – my dad stood by me, his expression inscrutable as always and because I had to have a cover over my face for the surgery, he held my hand; I still remember every second of that surgery because of that fact. After that was done, I asked everyone to leave the room. And then I cried. I cried like I was watching the ending of Old Yeller, Where The Red Fern Grows, A.I. and Armageddon in simulcast. My leg was on fire, the sheets irritated every inch of me that wasn’t being irritated by my hospital gown, and my face itched more when I wiped my eyes. I sat there, and slowly I calmed down; there was no noise – they must have had an ordinance against talking in the hallway when someone gets this kind of news – and I was afraid that the fever had burned out my ears. I watched the IV drip. I watched Go-green the ugly grasshopper stare at me with the irritatingly happy-to-be-ceramic look on his face. One of my physical therapy techs poked his head in – he’d heard about the latest diagnosis and offered to pray with me. We prayed. I thanked him. I felt no different. I don’t know how long I was alone next, but soon a knock came on the door. The nurse needed to take more blood samples before they sent me to Mayo.

“Hi, can I come in?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“How are you doing today,” she asked as she prepared the small sample tubes and the needle – the central line was delivering my IV and I would still have to be stuck for blood samples.

“Well, someone’s here to stab me and I may or may not be dying, but at least I still have my looks, so I can’t really complain.” I gave her a wry smile – the best I could muster – and she stared at me for a beat or two. Then she burst out laughing as I started to chuckle.

“You seem rather upbeat for someone who got that kind of news.”

“Well…” I paused, thinking about it for a moment. “My day may or may not already be crap, but I guess that’s no reason to make it worse for people around me. This could be one of the best days of your life – who am I to bring you down?” I gave her a wink and proferred one of my arms for her to probe for veins.

Believe it or not, some questions are asked of me more often than I think is typical. One in particular stands out and is the one I wouldn’t mind cutting down on: “What made you this way?” It’s not addressed in derogatory fashion, with jeers and sardonic sneers; nor is it accompanied with the sad look you give a little boy who has been separated from his parents at the mall. Some part of me – who I am, how I deal with people – strikes people as peculiar and the only words for that quality are basic: my attitude. My attitude dictates my approach to life, the quality of my interactions with with those around me and even how I plan for the future. My attitude is different from my personality – this is not going to be one of those drawn-out odes to my sheer tower of ‘awesomeness’ or my charming quips. My attitude – your attitude – is the core of your being, the precedents by which you judge and sieze opportunities, and there is no more precise illustration of my attitude than this particular conversation. In that hospital stay, I was diagnosed with blood poisoning, poisoned with toxic medication, survived a 10-minute near miss with amputation, developed and resolved a mysterious-in-origin pulmonary embolysm. Since then, I’ve been to the hospital again, been fired, gone to school to be ostracized for the age difference between me and my project team, left one very long-term girlfriend, and been dumped by another. Through all of this, I’m still the guy with a smile on my face and a wise-crack at any opportunity or open moment of silence. What made me this way? Maybe it’s what my dad always told me when I was little: “If you act enthusiastic, you will be enthusiastic.” Whether it is, or not… It works, and I am.

Gever Tulley's Tinkering School

Or click here to go to the TED page.

While I think the tinkering school is an excellent approach to allow people to learn to manifest problem solving through creativity – to allow them the time to begin to think less about immediate solutions and more about the process of actualizing ideas – I don’t personally see any way for it to currently be accomodated into our education system as it stands today.  If you spend your time focussed on turning ideas into actuality, you limit the time in which to improve knowledge and have more ideas to work with; to counter, however, if you only focus on the acquisitions of facts and external processes, you limit the opportunity for the processes to be developed internally as understanding instead of rote memory.  Our  Schools today are curriculum-driven, with facts, figures and standards that must be met for achievement to be acknowledged – if you go into geometry class, you aren’t going to get an A simply for being able to show logical proof in the development any situation if you cannot also produce the theorems demonstrated in class and memorize the tables and operations of the opposite, adjacent and hypotenuse sides of a triangle.

The fundamental incompatibility of these two approaches is that as you focus more on one, you lose some of the other.  A unit which is fact driven with the results in a final test is only measured in the number of correct answers and it is not designed to enhance creativity or process.  While in a math course it is hoped that repeating the same steps multiple times helps the process sink in, it is for replication purposes and not complete understanding.  Ultimately, there are certain levels of fact where there is no process and understanding is simply oriented by the ability to reproduce results and mimic steps along the way.  Take, for example, Latin.

·        Amo

·        Amas

·        Amat

·        Amoa

·        Amamus

·        Amant

Does the teacher really care if I understand linguistically why there was a need for six distinct conjugations depending on the subject, or if I think I could understandably communicate the same distinctions with only five categories?  Not particularly.  That’s all well and good, but the Latin student who gets the A is the one that can rattle off in a single breath, “Amoamasamatamoaamamusamant!”  The understanding is taken secondarily to the output.

With a tinkering school approach, you are given a task and simply told, ‘Go.’  You decide where to start, you decide the design, it is all down to you.  If you try something and it doesn’t work, you don’t get an F; you get a list of things that need to be improved and the innovations you tried are lauded before and after.  You learn how to process information internally and how to take the external process and turn it into internal development.  I think that this is a skill we all need to learn.  I feel lucky that I seem to have a passing amount of both and not only seek to learn, but seek to understand where the knowledge came from and where it might go in the future.

Gever Tulley said, “When faced with particularly difficult syntax or complexities, an interesting behavior manifests: decoration.”  I find this particularly telling from my own experiences – not only is it true, it’s an important tool.  I have countless times been writing a report in Excel and run into a roadblock in a formula that I needed to use to tie up the summary page.  While I stared at it, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.  But then I took a break and I formatted the other worksheets.  I color-coded positive and negative; I turned Yes and No fields into 0’s and 1’s.  And then, by fiddling, coding, looking at the data in a different angle, the change to the formula just suddenly snapped.  Going back later and looking at my thought process, I can see where it came from.  But in the heat of the moment, when you simply need to get something done, decorating it is simply one way to let your mind work while you stay focussed on the project but not grinding away at the same point.

My Labor Day Weekend (The Cure For Hoarding)

     While other folks got to go out, travel ‘up north’ or go camping over the Labor Day weekend, I found myself instead doing something out of the ordinary – I was hard at work for the entire holiday weekend. Since childhood and through teenage years and young adulthood, I have collected hundreds – if not thousands – of objects, belongings and ‘things.’ For a long time, I was in a small bedroom where the mess and clutter was atrocious because I simply did not have enough room for my things. George Carlin, I feel, explains it best.

“Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all, a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff.”

-George Carlin, (See more here.)

     So, in order to get more room for my ‘stuff,’ I annexed, claimed and took over the basement. I finally had room for my stuff. Except I didn’t. I didn’t fully grasp just how much ‘stuff’ I had. And what’s more, not seeing how much stuff I had, I let myself get even more stuff. And then I put it down somewhere: “I’ll find a place for it later.” And more new stuff was simply placed next to the first things. And then I went through some boxes, and I found old stuff I wanted to keep. I put it by the new stuff; I’d find a place for it later, I told myself. In the end, my living area was nearly unliveable due to multiple moments of inattention that ended up in four days of serious cleaning that still leaves room for improvement.

     I was lucky, I didn’t have to do this process entirely alone. While my dad had offered to help – “If you don’t get it done by September, I’ll go down and throw it all out. I’ll get it cleaned.” – I still felt alone in the process. My sister then offered to assist me and while I hesitated, ultimately I went with it and there are not too many things this year I’m happier I went along with.

     Initially, I didn’t want her to see the mess that my hoarding had built up to. I also didn’t want her help to be: throwing things away without asking me if it was actually junk or not; or questioning my choice to keep something due to some sentimental value that might seem silly to someone who didn’t have the association I did.

     Trepidation aside, my sister was instrumental and ultimately I couldn’t have accomplished what I did in that period of time without her help. Her very presence not only motivated me to try to accomplish as much as I could in as short a period of time as possible, but to impress her with how much I could transform my environment in the amount of time she was willing to spend working downstairs with me. Besides trying to impress her, the simple fact that she was there to help kept me on track and my mind focussed on the goal and project at hand. Several times when I started to bog down in nostalgia as I went through piles of things and weeded out the actual worthwhile items from the chaff, she came back from some task or other and chimed in, “Michael, what can I do to help? Where would you like me working now?” The final role which she filled in excellent fashion was keeping me company; I didn’t have to feel alone with my things, or alone in trying to fix what a series of mistakes and poor judgements had left me with.

     I could also focus on the person in the room with me, so I did not get bogged down by the contemplation of these things and their relationships to me. Hoarding (or Disposophobia as it is referred to by professionals in social work and psychiatry) is partially an irrational need to accumulate objects, and partially an overattachment of emotion to the objects received at any given point in your life. It is the need to keep something because you don’t know when it is going to come in handy, when it’s something you might need. You may have bought it three years ago, intent on using it but never doing so, but that doesn’t mean you might not use it later – and if you throw it away, you’ll have to feel silly and buy it again, which surely is not as rational as keeping it in the first place, right? Well, it’s right to the hoarder…

     The trouble for a hoarder of throwing something away is simply a restatement of that argument: I might need it later, and I’m going to feel really dumb if I had it in my possession, got rid of it and then find a situation where I need it. However, things are not like a Swiss army knife. You keep one with you because it can do so many things in addition to just cutting tags off of clothes, or paring fruit; however, the Swiss army knife’s other functions could come in handy while not taking up more space than the original knife itself. The things that could contingently be useful are simply taking up their own space, and that hurts if they ultimately are never used. So every paper you had from school, every work review from a job you were fired from, every bag of exotic dried peppers you bought during your Capsacin phase in college seems like something you need to have, because they could provide some clue to your development, your growth, or a really great pot of soup.

     But all of this did not help to move forward. Ultimately, nothing did except the decision to simply begin and proceed with caution. And with that decision made, I was amazed how much better I felt as bag after bag of things to go to the dump, or things to go to Goodwill, or simply things that I no longer needed to keep handy, disappeared from my living area and left behind it a commodity which I now feel may be rewarding to hoard in and of itself: space. Where once I had placed a collection of get-well-soon cards from a trip to the hospital, I now had an area at which I could work on schoolwork away from the distraction of my media center. Disposing of more things, I had the space necessary to roll away my old TV stand and replace it with a new entertainment center, complete with a separate, idolatrous housing for the glorification of my Nintendo Entertainment System. I even found several bills – ranging from Ones to Tens and even a Twenty – while digging into the depths within and underneath my couch area. But most of all I found the space in which I’d been living. Space which could now accommodate me in the best way possible. The space I can now use for whatever I wish, instead of fill with whatever is lying around and currently handy.

     I have much progress still to make before I parachute onto an aircraft carrier and declare, “Mission accomplished!” But I have begun the process to improve myself, to improve my environment, and to get, and feel, better. I don’t think the problem was at all rational, but having done more research, I understand now where I came from; I understand why this process was so stressful and hard to start. But I also understand and know that it was worth it. Simply opening up a space for me to live in, opened up a space in myself. I felt immediately relieved, alleviated, and detoxed as the process unfolded. I know I’ll feel even better, and happier, when the project is done. And finally, I know that I will swear to myself on that day: I won’t let it happen again. And I’m damn proud of that.

My teacher made me do it! (An Introduction)

     Greetings and good day. My name is Michael Hansen and, if you are reading this, you have stumbled across my blog. You may or may not have questions at the moment; please allow me to address some of them now, as a means of introduction.

   Michael, who are you?
     I am a 27-year-old student enrolled at Western Technical College,

   Michael, how long have you been writing?
     While the answer – technically – would be ‘since Kindergarten,’ as I learned the fundamentals of my terrible penmanship, the actual answer would be 5th grade. During the school week, my sister and I would wait to be picked up and taken home at the café on Main Street; while there, we would sip coffee and both work on our novels – she in voluminous, multi-subject notebooks and I on napkins with a pencil I had pilfered from a nearby art station for children. While I never finished that first novel, I have continued writing creatively and for my own pleasure ever since.
   Michael, what are your interests?
     Well, as you can see from the title of my blog, music is a fundamental part of every day for me. I listen to music while writing, while playing World of Warcraft, while driving around the scenic Coulee region of Western Wisconsin, or while relaxing at home with a good book or a new video game.  In addition to music performance and consumption, my interests include acting, comedy, movie-going and taking extensive trips when possible.
   Michael, how about your family?
     My family is in the rural area near La Crosse.  My father is a retired air balancer (yes, it is as cool as it sounds) and my mother is a library media coordinator for a nearby school district.  Both have college educations - the former in Geology, the latter in Music and Library Media. My sister, also college educated, majored in Math and now does complex statistical analysis that I would speak more in-depth here except it would likely bore you to tears and excite me to near-palpitation.  She is married to a scruffy and calm man I am glad to call my brother-in-law and they have an incredible daughter whom I will heretofore refer to as Lucy-monster.
   Michael, what are your current projects?
     Currently, I am writing songs for an emo project with a friend of mine in Milwaukee, transcribing a set of novels which I hope some day to publish, and both writing and casting plays to be presented either on stage or Youtube.

     Thus concludes my primary introduction.  Should you feel I've glossed over or missed entire sections of detail about myself, please leave any comments or questions and I’ll be sure to address them as best I can.  Have a great day, because I know I will.
    -Michael D Hansen