Making a better world with crafts, food, thoughtfulness, multipotentialism, spirituality without religion, bettering myself, helping others, seasonality, cats, tea, geekery, happiness and style.
I haven't said much about it because I'm not that sort of drama-monger, but I'm just about broke. I have six dollars in my bank account, and I can afford rent for next month but none of my other bills and nothing at all for Feb. I don't know what to do with myself.
The only real upside is that the stress mad made me drop ten pounds. This is now how I want to lose it, however.
So here's what I'm asking you: How can I legally make enough money to keep my head above water? I've been applying online and in the real world for months and no one has called me back. I haven't sold any stories or poems yet. Reviewing doesn't make that much money. I need ideas. Quick, actionable tips. I'm out of ideas on my own.
If rejuvenation becomes a thing, the issue won't be that some can afford it and others can't; the issue will be that no one is dying off and leaving space for those who keep coming after.
If there's perfect and endless rejuvenation, it's not likely that it's going to be only for the rich OR only for everyone. Likely, it'll land somewhere in the middle, or it'll develop gradually so that people don't think about it-- or the whole issue will be drowned by some other tech spinoff / invention / discovery that no one saw coming and the whole path will be diverted somewhere else. In the 60s, we could have colonized the moon by now, but focusing on small tech devices was cheaper or whatever, and we have the internet instead.*
One of the commenters thinks there'll be revolution, and soon. Just says it offhand like it's a foregone conclusion. I don't think there will be. I have no doubt that people will do crazy things and think it's a revolution at some point, but a full-on one? There's too many people here who can't be arsed to answer their phones, let alone live in a ditch somewhere, plotting a war. If it comes, I think it'll be more that people have chosen other ways of doing things, not by fighting, and the social pressure will force change.
* Incidentally, I'm old enough to have noticed as things changed. I was 24 when I got my first cellphone; my niece was seven. And then there's the ubiquity-- I know that for my senior project in high school, I used the library research books to get my info, but now, I don't know that I remember how. What the hell did I do before Wikipedia and Google??
I just looked at my stats, and the single most popular post in the last two years was one I did about piercing. Way back when I was looking at dermal anchors. Neat.
So over on io9, a discussion of Crystal Skulls* became a long comment thread about the pros and cons of the Indiana Jones movies**, and as of right now, this is the last post:
"Youtube old nuclear testing PSAs from the 50s. Yes,
those weapons were destructive on a scale beyond conventional weapons
but they were not unsurvivable. Those PSAs give some pretty detailed
instructions on what to do to survive and what kinds of shelter would be
adequate, and some of the suggestions are no less improvised than
Indy's fridge dive. Hell, they even recommended, if nothing else was
available, to lie flat in a ditch and let the blast wave pass over you.
It wasn't guaranteed, and a hardened structure was much better, but it
gave you a chance.
In the Japanese bombings, there were many
survivors, some with no shelter at all. The radiation aftereffects were
often worse than the initial blast, fallout's a bitch. Evacuation from
the radiation zone and scrubbing like Indy got would have saved a lot of
lives.
There was a reason they once preached "duck and cover"
and sold basement bomb shelters. Against 50s era atomic weapons, they
would work. Once modern megaton-range thermonuclear warheads were
invented, that stopped. Because nothing would save you. Not even if your
name was Indiana Jones. "
Because I live in a world where I might, it's possible, get nuked***, I'm sort of always collecting bits of info about what could happen in that event. I saw some of those videos once, and the drills they were offering were almost identical to the ones we were given in Okinawa for earthquakes and in Florida for tornadoes. I suppose that all big disasters have similar personnel issues--keeping everyone calm (and knowing what to do helps that), knowing where to look for survivors, etc--but I always have to wonder: how much of what they tell us to do is just so they can identify the bodies? How much is just giving us something to do so we're comforted, like on TV when they tell husbands to go boil water while their wives are delivering babies?
Maybe I'm just jaded or cynical****, but it seems like in even a small blast, or an earthquake, or whatever else, that if the thing is bad enough that you have to really worry about these things, it's probably bad enough to kill you anyway, even if you do duck and cover. This isn't to say I'm not going to duck and cover given the chance, but I have this skittery feeling that it's all just to keep me calm and put me somewhere where they can know who the red smear belongs to.
Cheerful, right?
--- * They say it's better than Temple of Doom; commentary is pretty much evenly divided. I think the skulls themselves are neat, mostly hoaxes, and not related to the Mayan calendar that isn't telling us the world is ending anyway, but make great story-starters because they're weird. Also, I agree that the fridge thing was WAY overblown. Literally. ** I like 1 and 3. I'm scared to see what they'll do to 5. *** And because I'm a writer. And because I reached social consciousness just at the end of the Eastern Bloc and all that proliferation and all that losing of nukes. And because I've seen Terminator 2's opening dream sequence too many times and periodically I'll have dreams where everything is fine, and then there's a flash and the sky goes the wrong color, then a mushroom cloud, then I die, and I don't like that. **** I probably am jaded and cynical to some extent. I'm also a writer, as I said, and it sort of makes you think through all the options and possibilities, even when they squick you out. (Edit comment)
This lovely new house, even if it's accompanied by my longest-running lack of ordinary work.
That same lack of ordinary work that has let me put so much effort into getting my writing career off the ground, and getting the legs under my freelance writing career.
For Hayden, Alex, Ally, Leo, Nick, Sam, Lauren, Christine, and everyone else who makes life fun.
That my dad is still here, even being sick.
That my mom is still here, even when they keep having to take parts out and turn her into a cyborg.
That Alex's family just sucked me up like another cousin, without a second thought.
That the cats are starting to get along, even if they still fight sometimes.
That I'm finally free of a tourist town, for the most part.
The Troublemakers, in their entirity.
The intermittent Fall weather; it's better than no Fall weather at all!
That I still have candied sweet potatoes and butter down there in the fridge, to eat for breakfast once I'm done here.
For technology and all the neat things it lets me do (this next year is going to be full of side-projects, I can tell).
For our yard, and the fact that there's enough of it for me to plant things in the spring and have a lovely garden.
For Binka, who keeps me warm when it's cold.
For all our wallspace, to finally hang up all our pictures.
For unusual design and storage solutions that make this house ours, and not anyone elses.
For the Muppet Movie I get to go see tonight.
For the leftovers, even if I didn't get to boil down the carcass for broth this year (we'll just have to roast a chicken later).
For the greeness and tree-ness of this place we live in.
One of the ways I'm trying to improve my life is to have a defined set of rules to live by. I used to have note cards covered in rules when I was in highschool and I thought I could change the world, but they've all gone missing in the 20 or so moves since then, and I find I miss them. So I'm starting over from scratch. I'm a different person than I was then anyway, and I should have new rules.
Maybe one day I'll publish all my rules together, when there's enough to form a book out of them, but I really think that while some will be universal, a lot of them are going to be personal, geared to correcting and improving my own individual quirks and weaknesses, and I think that's how it should be. The reason while societies lose their strict rules is because they don't apply to everyone, and people start bending and shifting them. People need their own sets of guidelines, and they should make their own. It's an extension of the first rule:
1. Be Accountable.
Whatever choices you make in life, you've made them, and you're the one responsible for how they turn out. That also means that you're the one responsible for how your life goes, and if you want it to be a certain way, you're the one to make it that way.
2. Don't be a dick.
This one's borrowed from Wil Wheton, and it very concisely says how to treat others--if what you're doing seems like something that you'd call someone a dick for doing to you, don't do it.
3. You aren't entitled.
Nobody is entitled. The world doesn't owe you anything you haven't earned, so if you want something, go out and earn it. Even if you're born to millions of dollars, go out and be worthy of getting them.
4. Do it now.
Whatever you're doing, don't put it off. I'm terrible about this, I put off all sorts of things even when I don't realize that I am, and it makes a backlog that I never quite catch up with. It's a constant struggle to keep up-to-date, and I'm getting better (I miss very few deadlines anymore), but it's necessary to keep it visible.
More will come, and they'll likely get more specific as I go, but here's the first four. What are your first four rules to live by?
I'm looking for a job. I have to, I'm almost broke again. But there's a problem, and it's called OH MY GOD, THAT'S GOING TO KILL ME.
There's a good and solid psychological reason why I left my last job, and it's the same reason I took the job before it and the same reason I left the one before that. I get so bored. I get so frustrated. And then I just can't take it any more. All I really want to do is be myself, make my own living, and be left alone, and that's a huge problem when it comes to working for other people, but business owners will almost never give a new employee that sort of benefit of the doubt.
But I need the money. So I've been looking. Online, in news papers, in person. And more and more, I think I need to start my own business. And then I found Puttylike. It's like coming home--it's not that I'm indecisive, it's that my brain won't be limited for long and my attention is branching, not linear. I know this already from various tests I tool in elementary and middle school, but this is a new context: I don't have to limit. It's not a matter of learning to be linear, it's a matter of learning to let my strengths guide me.
So I'm recasting this blog a little. It's already my place for almost everything that used to have its own blog. And now it's going to be the place where I work on building myself the world I want. Not just losing weight, not just mental health maintenance, but all of it. This is going to be my new world, and I'm going to make it into something I can live off of. You just watch me. I've got the first draft of a Theme in mind for this blog, finally, and I'm going to make it work.
One of the blogs I follow (Well, I say follow. More like get the email and sometimes remember to read it, but always appreciate it.) linked to an old post about how to spread out New Years Resolutions so that they have more chance of actually happening. And that linked to his various updates about how he was doing, one of which referenced Firefly (and automatically got my attention), and then went on to explain this idea of collecting acorns. Basically, it comes down to doing one small thing every day to lead you closer to your goals. This is one of those revelatory moments for me.
I mean, sure, people say to make lists and sublists, and I read a lot about organizing and have an organization scheme for myself and all, but I think I forget that I should also like what I'm doing. And I like acorns--both for their tiny cuteness and potential for greatness, and for their metaphorical uses for the same thing. This is acorn season; I bet I could come up with some reminder-trigger thing with actual acorns in it...
But the point is, I think I've hit a clarity point today. I have a lot of balls in the air right now, and they get overwhelming sometimes. But I can walk for twenty minutes in the morning, and that's an acorn for weightloss. I can apply for jobs I want to do, and that's an acorn for the future. I can write my four pages, and that's an acorn for publication. I can clean one thing, and that's an acorn for getting my damn life in order.
I like doing it, and over on fatSecret.com (which has the worst name ever, really), there's a challenge going on for the next month where we're going to try to hoop for 20 minutes each day. I just did my first twenty minutes, and it wasn't that bad. Longer than I thought 20 would be, but not debilitating. I watched the tail end of Human Planet while I did so I wouldn't count it and make it longer.
This is the first exercise I've done since my back was hurt. Hooping is pretty low-impact, so my back is fine. Maybe even better, since the weight of the hoop sort of massages it. My knees, and the back of my thigh where that nerve is twinging all the time don't like it much, but they're doing fine, too.
Because I'm tired of being a fatty fat fat. I'm starting as soon as the videos are done downloading, and I'll keep you updated on my progress. Here's the starting stats:
"aimed at helping developing countries boost clean energy technology, sustainable farming and other initiatives, the survey said.
The survey said the 2007-2008 food crisis and higher food prices “revealed deep structural problems in the global food system” that produce high carbon emissions and lead to a warmer climate, as well as more polluted land and water."
There's an opportunity here: If we of the First World really have an obligation to fix everything, why not really fix it? Third World countries are only making horrible messes of themselves because they don't have the infrastructure and the resources to use the resources they have properly, and they're taking the cheapest, fastest ways to catch up with us. So, why not help them? It's not competition: it's mutual survival. If the whole world is at the same level, no one is getting cheated, so we should find a way to get them there.
And here's the opportunity: All those Third World Countries don't have infrastructure like we do. There isn't the need to dismantle a US food system to get something better in place. We could (or the UN could, or the World Health Organization could, or a new entity meant for this could) build an ideal infrastructure for them, and show them how to support it, maintain it and keep it healthy. The Third World could show the rest of the world how it's done, elevating them above that mental space where everyone seems to think there's nothing Africa or South Asia can offer the rest of the world other than manufacturing.
It's not simple to do, I know. There's issues of imperialism and local instability and we'd have to have the country as a whole behind the plan, but I think it's a very simple idea. Make Everyone Better. Isn't that a better goal than Bigger Faster Cheaper Now?
Quotables, because Mark Morford is so very quotable:
"It's not like it's easy being here on the planet 40 years from now, around the year 2050, the time when thenew U.S. census data indicates, after much sighing and general wringing of hands, that we as a rapacious and relentlessly procreative species will be exploding all over ourselves in numbers that, at first glance, seem entirely ridiculous and untenable and doomed, but which, when you look at them more carefully, are completely ridiculous and untenable and doomed. Here it is: A mere 40 years from now, the world population, which just recently reached a sweating, gasping seven billion, will be well over nine billion. Ethiopia and Nigeria are on track to grow the fastest, nearly tripling in population, along with similar patterns in other "high-fertility" African regions, which is all kinds of absurd given that continent's struggles to adequately feed and water even a fraction of its current population.Minorities will soon flip to the majority in America, much to the horror of Arizona, Texas and many, many panicky Tea Partiers, who very much believe that God really wants America to look exactly like a giant Idaho Wal-Mart, only with more gluten.
"America willretain its placeas third largest in the world, mostly by birthing 100 million more confused coffee slurping fans of reality TV (308 million now, 423 million then), some of them very beautiful, life-affirming and totally cute in those jeans, but many of them mal-educated, broke and living with their parents -- and by the way, if you're around 25 and reading this right now, that parent is probably you.
"Sure, we've managed to avoid complete cataclysm so far. But only barely. It turns out we are fabulously good at reproducing like drunken rabbits. It's everything after that where we seem to lose our collective minds.
"Some experts argue that the human species, if we did ourselves right, could sustain all those bodies fairly well. We have plenty of physical space. Plenty of natural resources, even. It's simply a matter of distribution, of economic health/wealth, conservation, environmental protection, careful resource management. Also, consciousness, awareness, spiritual evolution, a shared sense of humanity and ethical mindfulness. I know: Good luck with that.
Nevertheless, some say we're fully capable of sustaining 10 billion humans. We just don't seem to have it in us to do what it takes. We're terrible at efficiency, long range planning, distribution of wealth and power.
"The wolf is lurching ever closer to the door. In fact, he's almost here. Unless that's just the UPS guy with a new iPad 2, yoga books and our new wine club delivery. Gosh, maybe it's not so bad after all. Guess we won't know until we open the door.
I love the snark, but snark aside, this is what people are actually talking about more and more often: can we survive the way we have been? I think the answer is no, not entirely. And I think sometime soon it's going to be a Big Deal and we'll have to start taking Drastic Measures to keep things going. Probably in my lifetime, or my kids' (though, really, I hope I can witness it, because that's something amazing, isn't it, the end of everything we think we know?).
My favored solutions are also, apparently the expensive ones that will probably get dropped in favor of, like, police states and wartime-rationing mentality, but I think they're better ideas: Vertical farming in cities to feed the people who live there, home farming to feed individual families as much as possible, extensive terraforming of marginal areas using ancient methods of making a place livable, and then sending people to live there--give them some incentive, some reason that's better than slums and death and crime, and then send them there. Space colonies to create more space. Clean, new energy to reduce the need for coal and oil until it's just a footnote--water and wind and geothermal are super-efficient, and we can mine natural gas off garbage dumps which we have plenty of. New planned cities that function as organisms, not horrible sprawling eyesores.
There are people who know how to do this stuff, we just have to decide, as a planet, that we're willing to take the chances and pay the costs to make the whole planet better and cleaner and more sustainable. I think the decision will have to be made this century.
Poppin’ fraîche has gone global and even with over 1200 bakeries in Paris, why would anyone bother walk all the way across the street to get a fresh, buttery croissant in the morning, that only costs 90 centimes, when you can simply unroll a package of doughy crescents and never slip out of that comfy peignoir de bain? For all you lazy types out there, I took a bullet for you and tried them out.
And speaking of taking bullets, when I peeled back the first layer of the package, the dough exploded with a startlingly loud pop, which so shocked me that I jumped as the dough quickly expanded as it burst from its tight confines. I almost had a crise cardiaque."
This is exactly why, whenever we have Crescent Rolls, I have to open the tube-- H has a heart attack every time! We eat them because the Bunnery closes long before dinner and is a mile and a half from our house, and there's nothing closer. No bakery, no breadshop.* But why, oh, why would anyone bother to eat them in France?
I could very easily go on a tangent here about how gross American exported culture is and how we're slowly killing the world, but that's already Jaime Oliver's platform and he does it better than me. Suffice it to say that I pretty much agree, and that I'm trying to find ways to avoid falling into the bad-food trap. Every time I haul myself back on the eating-well wagon (I refuse to say "diet wagon" because that sounds too much like a little death of a bad sort), I'm more convinced that it's almost impossible to be healthy in this country. And it only enforces my basic urge to move somewhere else.
gripe<>
* If they really want to reinitialize our neighborhood, the Council should encourage things like bakeries to move into the old, empty shopfronts, and make it easy for them to offer lower prices than the supermarket, which is ages away anyway.
Recall a smell or taste that has a happy personal memory for you.
Fresh apples, before they're cut. When I was about eight or nine, my favorite fruit of all time was apples. Mom brought some home one time and one of them was just so fragrant and apple-y that I couldn't bear to eat it. I put it in a little basket and kept it next to my bed so I could smell it when I slept. I carried it around the house with me. I specifically remember sitting in the dining-room window, which was deep-set enough in the old part of the house that the will was wide enough to sit comfortably, sniffing my apple, while the golden afternoon sunshine poured through the window and warmed up everything. I felt like a princess before she finds out the apple is poisoned--I knew why the princess would take the bite even though the old lady giving the apple was so obviously creepy. I finally ate that apple and it was tart and sweet and crispy and juicy and perfect, and I ate everything but the stem.
This is the first week that it's really felt like summer, even though it's been warm for ages. I knew it was when I came home from work the other day to a house that smelled like my Grandmother's back room--old house, old furniture, books, a running washing machine, Florida humidity, grass, the dirt outside the open windows. I walked in, and for a moment, I thought I was going to cry. It's been almost a year and a half and I still keep getting broadsided like this.
But then, that passed and I remembered all the happy summers when we'd come back from wherever we were living all over the world, and we'd live in Grandma & Grandpa's un-air-conditioned old house, sleeping on cots and roll-out beds and the floor, and the heat didn't matter then because we were little and it doesn't matter to kids. I wish the summer could still be like that. I still get the urge, as soon as the temperature spikes, to go somewhere other than here. The emails I get from various travel sites probably don't help much with their "799$ for a week in an Irish Castle!"-type deals.
I guess I'll always be a gypsy like that. So I've made it a goal: I want to make enough money in my living to be able to just pick up and go every few months when a good deal to somewhere I want to go comes across my desk. I'll stay a week or three, decompress, work from the beach or a castle or whatever, and come home happy to see the place again.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to enjoy the sun before it gets so bad I can't bear to be outside.
Not that bad, considering they literally cut a piece off of me and charged me 115$ to do it. It was really rather anticlimactic: I went in at 3 and I was out at 3:11, including payment time. The most painful part was getting the Novocaine shot that made my foot numb for, like, twelve hours. For two days it hardly hurt at all. Then, when I went back to work, it started aching the longer I stood on it, and it's like now it remembers that it's an injury, and it hurts more. It's basically a moderately deep cut with a burn over it, so I guess it's entitled to hurt, but it's still annoying.
I'm going to replace my mole with a prosthetic one, then, later, a cyborg mole, and it'll be the first part of me upgraded. Barring that, and depending on how it scars, I might just tattoo around the scar in a circle filled with safety and healing symbols. You know, until the cybernetics are perfected.
I'm still waiting on the lab results, and that's the last bit of nervousness I have for this thing. He says it's probably going to come back fine, but until those results are in my hand, I'm still a bit twitchy about it.
I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. Scheduling, sticking to the schedule, keeping up with stuff, communicating with people. I keep forgetting things that need doing, and winding up doing them crappily at the last minute. I keep saying I'll do things I don't really have time for, and then being way late. My stupid computer lags more and more no matter waht I do. I can't get my external HDD to register. I don't have time to exercise, and when I do, my knee hurts. I have this stupid mole making me paranoid and enough flea bites that I am far too aware of every single thing that bothers me about my skin. I'm forever behind on everything. I just want to quit it all and crawl into a hole and never come out.
But I'm too damn stubborn to be a quitter, especially when I've put this damn much effort into school and stuff.
But I still hate being late on assignments. And I still am so freaking tired of arguing genre and critiquing things that don't really need my input. And I'm so tired of being awake so damn much. I want to sleep more, and not have to start working as soon as I wake up. I want to not have to worry about money. I want to get on with my life already.
Oh Em Gee. They officially released the first chapter of Ghost Story. And I read it, because I'm a sucker for spoilers, of which there aren't that many here, but I mean, really. I couldn't just let this slide. And now I NEED this book even more, and July 26th couldn't come sooner.
Earlier this year the scientists of NASA's Kepler mission announced that their planet-hunting space telescope had identified more than 1,200 possible exoplanets (worlds orbiting stars other than our own sun) in its first few months on the job.
The potential planets Kepler has located range from worlds a bit smaller than Earth all the way up to giants several times the size of Jupiter. Similarly, some of the host stars are several times as large as the sun whereas some are much smaller....
Sort of a poorly-written article, but the idea is something we should look into here in the US. America likes everything on a shelf to look the same, likes all our money to look the same, likes all its people to look the same, but that means no one can tell one thing from another. We need better food-labeling, that's already been established. Advertising gets to determine how healthy something seems, or gets to override health issues by making something look so cool that no one cares if it'll kill you. But food is a basic need, and its health and therefore our health should be the driving factor.
So why no color-code the food labels? The rising obesity levels in this country are always all over the news, there's several shows about ridiculously fat people around, but nothing has really changed about marketing the food and presenting it. Hopefully, if someone could get the point across that some food is just not good for you, demand would force manufacturers to do better.*
*...she said, knowing full well that the health of the people on the other end of manufacturing is very rarely the point of the business...
Golden years ... David Bowie in 1976. Photograph: Steve Schapiro/Corbis
David Bowie is reissuing a 1975 single as an iPhone app. Almost four decades after Golden Years was released, the singer's remastered classic will be available for fans to remix via dedicated, handheld software.
In In 2007, Tama (yes, a cat) was named Kishi's new station master - she was even given her own tiny conductor's uniform! Her appointment brought immediate publicity to the line and boosted its passenger count by 17% within a year.
Last year, Tama received a promotion! She was named to the post of operating officer for her dedication to customer service on the line. As part of the position, Tama received her own "office" - a renovated former ticket booth at the station. She is now the only female in a managerial position of the company's 36 total employees, and the only feline in history to become an executive of a railroad corporation! She technically holds the 5th highest position in the company! Read more about this crazy promotion.
Tama has her own Wikipedia article as well (quite an accomplishment for a cat) so you can learn more about this remarkable cat.
I just got this in an email from my sister. I hate forwarding things, but I think this is worth having a look at, even if it is a little... overdone. It's not true that you can always totally reverse the effects. My grandmother was in the hospital and they got to her in minutes, but it was still catastrophic. The steps are still valid, though so take a look.
"Blood Clots/Stroke - They Now Have a Fourth Indicator, the Tongue I will continue to forward this every time it comes around! Blood Clots/Stroke - They Now Have a Fourth Indicator, the Tongue STROKE: Remember the 1st Three Letters.... S.T. R. STROKE IDENTIFICATION: During a BBQ, a woman stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) . She said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Jane went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening Jane's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital -
(at 6:00 pm Jane passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ. Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Jane would be with us today. Some don't die. They end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead. It only takes a minute to read this... A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough. RECOGNIZING A STROKE Thank God for the sense to remember the '3' steps, STR . Read and Learn! Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions: S *Ask the individual to SMILE.
T *Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently)
(i.e. It is sunny out today.)
R *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS. If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call emergency number immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher. New Sign of a Stroke -------- Stick out Your Tongue NOTE: Another 'sign' of a stroke is this: Ask the person to 'stick' out his tongue... If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other, that is also an indication of a stroke. A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved. I have done my part. Will you?"
