Long time, no posts.

I was a bit confused when Blogger insisted that I confirm my profile name.  The page gave me the impression that it hadn't signed me into my own blog.  I mean, seriously, I wasn't planning to change the name I was posting under . . . at least I don't think I was.  I could have changed my mind years ago and just don't remember now.

Anyway, one update on the gluten-free stuff.  Same sister who brought the problem to my attention, also found a supplement that actually lets us eat gluten on occasion with little discomfort, about a year ago. So I can eat those foods again every so often, though now I have to avoid sugar more.

I think I have figured out why cat videos are so popular on the internet.  Pre-internet video posting, when I tried to explain how cool cats were to my dog loving friends, it was frustrating because cats rarely do things on command. (The same can be said of many humans, I must point out.) So, my dog friends didn't believe me when I tried to tell them that my cats were affectionate and clever.  That's because cats are independent souls who believe in their own privacy, even though they don't give a damn about yours.

But now we can share our cats private behaviors and prove that we aren't just making this stuff up.  It's liberating for us cat lovers, as well as enchanting for those who've never experienced cats firsthand.

Blow your preconceived notions of cats with this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2017/04/29/how-a-maine-coon-cat-helped-a-young-girl-with-autism-overcome-her-fear-of-water/#268f9afc85f1

Great Podcast about Memory

Got to talking last night to a fellow player in one of my favorite games.  Turns out that he's finishing his PhD in Neuroscience.  We pretty much nerded everyone else out of the chatroom discussing things like how children recover from brain trauma and such.

Anyway, he shared the following link with me: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Rat

Great podcast.  It explains the process of memory in a way laymen can grasp, while adding a few really mind-blowing discoveries that have happened in the past decade.  Of course, if you've been keeping up on the field, you probably already know it.  But if you haven't really been keeping up in the past 8 years, there will be at least one but you've might have missed out on.

You don't have time for a 22 minute podcast?  Here are the main points:

• Memories are stored in proteins.
• Certain drugs can stop those proteins from forming during the process of memory-making.
• When we remember events, we are actually reliving them, which causes them to be altered every time we remember them.
• The less you call up a memory, the more accurate it is.
• If we are given one of those drugs at the time we are remembering the memory, we lose that memory and only that memory.
• Inactive memories are not affected by these drugs.

These discoveries are already being used in different ways to help PTSD sufferers.

Why is Pokemon Go so successful?

I've been thinking about this post for a couple of days. I can only speak for the US, but I think it's because it came out at a time when people needed something positive to talk with other people about.  Think on that week.  We had two violent shootings of civilians by police, and then several deaths of police officers by a sniper, during a peaceful assembly to protest the earlier deaths. While we will always have the damaged people who fiercely believe that it's their purpose in life to make everyone as miserable and screwed up as they are, most of us really want humanity to just get along with itself.  We just don't know how to talk to each other.

Which is why this post struck such a nerve in me - https://www.facebook.com/NikkieTutorials/posts/985939084836854:0 - in a good and heartwarming way.  Yes, it was awkward, but at least the gentleman had the courage to make a connection that needed to be made.  Now we have something that you don't have to identify yourself as being this, that, or the other, to talk to people about.  Even though there are teams, as of yet, I haven't seen much "us against them" with them.

As one of the radio stations I listen to on the way to work stated: Pokemon Go engenders a sense of community.  Several cities have already planned Pokemon Go events for their communities. I know friends and coworkers who play it with their kids and then get hooked (though some of them are too embarrassed to admit it). I know people older than me that play it.  And to be honest, even though I don't do the walking thing, I find it rather relaxing to play for a few minutes every few hours.

Let's be honest, it play that builds the most trust between people.  You can work around someone for years and not feel any real connection with them, and then after a few games of ping-pong at a company picnic, you suddenly feel like you know the person more.  The fact that someone is willing to do something frivolous with us, makes them a little more human in our eyes.  Of course, there have been people who've misused the game, but there have been others who've made us smile by using the game to troll the Westboro Baptist Church and put a Pokemon named 'Merica in front of the White House (http://imgur.com/gallery/fM0Nm).

But the game wouldn't do so popular if there weren't other things going for it. To quote _Pokemon Go Reportedly Helping People’s Mental Health, Depression_ ( http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/07/11/pokemon-go-reportedly-helping-peoples-mental-health-depression/ ):

"Pokémon Go does this by encouraging people to get outside, take a walk, talk to others, and explore the world around them. Granted, it’s through their smartphone acting as an interface, but walking is walking, even if the motivation for doing so is to play a game. For a person suffering from depression or another mood disorder, the idea of exercise can be nearly impossible to contemplate, much less do. For someone suffering from social anxiety, the idea of going outside and possibly bumping into others who may want to talk to you is daunting."

Like I said, the right game for the right time...

Where I almost give up hope and then find out there may be a better way

There comes a time when you want to say "screw it" and do what make you feel less sick.  But then a light shows up and you realize that maybe it's not as bad as you feared.

Recently one of my coworkers noticed that I was eating gluten-free.  With a knowing smirk and crossing his arms, he asked me what happens to me when I eat gluten now.  I told him I curl up in a fetal position and wish for death, before dragging myself to the bathroom for my digestive system to try and rip itself apart for several hours, and it takes about 24 hours before I feel anything close to normal.  He opened his mouth, closed it a moment, nodded his head with a chuckle and said, "You have the very same symptoms my mother has, and she has Celiac's.  You probably have it too."  Since then, he's been telling me about restaurants with good gluten-free food and offering all sorts of advice.

It made me feel a little more confident that my plan to take a week of vacation to eat enough gluten to show up in a blood test.  I mentioned it to my sister, who said that you really should be eating gluten for two weeks, but even then her tests weren't positive because she has an over-active immune system.  My inner skeptic wanted to come out and argue, until I remembered how long it took one of my doctors to find the right level for a drug in my system because my liver metabolized it so fast.  I also remembered that according to the 23andMe DNA reports, my sister and I have identical immune systems - we share all 359 SNPs currently identified as affecting the histocompatibility between us.  But then, even though we'd make greaet organ donors for each other, my sister and I have differing lifestyles.  Maybe it's possible that I wouldn't need to eat gluten for so long.  I mean, I could hope, because I honestly don't see how I could handle being sick for so long.  It's not like I have a secondary income to rely on while I deliberately make myself sick for a diagnosis.

Today at church, I ran into another person who did the same thing I did - went on a gulten-free diet out of frustration, only to not be able to eat it in any form now.  She went back to eating gluten for over a month and her test still wasn't conclusive.  Her doctor told her that it can be very hard to get a postive test, even for those who had tested successfully for it previously after going on a gluten-free diet for several months.

Obviously, I needed to do more research on this test.  So, I checked http://celiac.org/celiac-disease/diagnosing-celiac-disease/screening/ and read the following:

"Keep in mind that positive antibody or genetic test results only suggest the presence of celiac disease—the test results cannot confirm it. If these screening tests come back positive, the next step in diagnosing celiac disease is to get a biopsy of the small intestine."

In short, to really prove it the doctor has to see damaged villi.  According to the page that covers the biopsy: "For biopsy results to be accurate, you must be eating gluten (at least 4 slices of bread) for one to three months prior to the procedure."  

I was about to give up hope, when I read that you can also be diagnosed by testing positive for dermatitis herpetiformis.  Looking at the pictures, I had a major outbreak of this about three years ago.  The skin in the area is still scarred and I pretty certain I have an active patch on my back, which drives me nuts.  In that case, I only need a skin biopsy to prove I have Celiac's.  Talk about being thankful for weird things.


Did a little more thinking and research.  According to my mother and her step-mother, I had horrible colic as a child until my mother's step-mother put me on 2% milk.  For a moment, I wondered if maybe I was reacting to the gluten in breast milk, because my great aunt told me that I would let other people feed me without any problems, but I would scream bloody murder when my mom tried to feed me.  However, after reading this from the University of Chicago Celiac's Disease Center, I'm thinking that it wasn't from the gluten in the breast milk.  It probably wasn't gluten related at all.  However, it is possible that when I was at my grandparents' house I only had rice cereal, and when I was at home, I was occasionally fed Cream of Wheat.  Mom's no longer around to ask and Dad doesn't remember after almost 50 years and four other children.  On the above website, I did read: "A large prospective study conducted in Colorado showed that if gluten is given to the infant too early (i.e. during the first three months of life), this highly increases the risk of subsequent onset of celiac disease compared to the infants who were first given gluten around four to six months of age."  So, it's a possibility, because I do know that we occasionally fed our infants Cream of Wheat in our family.  And it's not like this information was available then.

Monothons and Professional Curation

My son and I. The selfie was his idea.

Yesterday my son and I participated in the 2014 Monothon at [Press] at Untitled in Oklahoma City.  It's a yearly event that happens throughout the summer, where people can create pairs of monoprints.  The participants get to keep one print from each pair, while the other one becomes part of the Monothon.  In September, [Artspace] at Untitled will have the 2014 Monothon Exhibition, displaying prints created by those who attended.  Most of the participants are locals, but people are coming from Tulsa, OK, and Dallas, TX, to participate in this year's event.

"Catherine" a monoprint by yours truly. 

While we worked on our prints, we listened to probably one of the most eclectic mix of music I have ever heard, provided by [Artspace] at Untitled founder, print-maker, and professional curator, Laura Warriner. But as varied as the music was, collection flowed well together even on random play.  A few months ago, I created myself an Americana music playlist and I had to rearrange the order of the songs on it to keep from having jolts to the consciousness, but I don't have Laura's decades of experience of putting together exhibitions that feel coherent, while being full of variety.  Most of us don't pay enough attention to the harmony or flow of our environment to realize that it effects us, but it does.  While I'm not into feng-shui, I recognize the mental and sometimes physical friction caused from a disruption in my environment.  And I am very impressed when someone can create that flow, while still engaging and challenging my perceptions.

Some people think that they can put together elements based on solely what appeals to them and come up with something good, but I promise you there is a deep and rich difference between what an average person puts together as a collection and what a professional curator does.  A difference that can as profound as the difference between the glass animals at a carnival and the art of a professional glass-blower.

The Demon of Reactive Formation

Reactive formation - defending against an impulse by actively expressing the opposite impulse.

Yeah. That thing. The thing that makes us do stupid things in an effort to avoid doing something that we feel is undesirable. Also referred as over-compensation - not to be confused with normal compensation, where we focus on our strengths to make up for our weaknesses.

An example of normal compensation - when I took my studio art classes in college, I took longer to make individual artwork because I have impaired short-term motor memory. I can achieve techniques, but it takes longer for me to do them than my much younger and more dexterous classmates, or my more experienced friends.  I was able to compensate for this by my ability to visualize and come up with ideas faster.  So while my classmates were still trying to decide what they were going to create, I had already chosen from several roughly sketched concept drawings what I was going to do.  And by the time they had decided what they were going to make, I was already hard at work on my project.  My design teacher mentioned that he sort of had to teach me in reverse of his other students, because I had the ideas and understood the concepts of design, but I didn't have the manual expertise of the rest of his students.

Of course there are less healthy examples of compensation.  Like when someone uses their success in their career to excuse their lack of social skills. Or makes pronouncements of fact when they lack of knowledge in an area outside of their expertise.  Such are the things that "appeal to authority" logical fallacies are made of.

But back to reactive formation.  This can be used in a healthy way - like when you are dealing with someone difficult, who can't help it (or even if they can), and you respond by being extremely sweet and helpful to them, when you would love nothing more than to slap them upside the head and tell them to stop being an idiot.  Many people owe their lack of injuries and possibly their very lives to the fact that several of their fellow humans use this psychological defense mechanism.

Now to the point of this little blog post.  I just realized this week that I have pretty much done something rather ignorant and foolish because a personal reactive formation pattern.  It's not impossible to correct, just difficult and requiring some planning and vacation time.  You see, I am a daughter of a hypochondriac.  In fairness to my mother, she did has several legitimate health issues, but she prefer her own diagnoses to the doctors'.  My mother constantly poured over medical books to find illnesses she could claim to have.  When I was 12 years old, it was discovered that I had a curved spine.  My mother decided that I had sclerosis and made an appointment with our family physician, an osteopath named Dr. Bishon.  Good so far.  Then Mom decided that in the days before the appointment, we needed to go to the mall and look for clothes that would work with a back brace. We went to like six different clothes stores and two or three fabric stores over the course of two days.  At first I was very nonchalant about the whole thing.  I knew my mother's flair for the over-dramatic and just accepted my ordeal with all of the reluctant grace a preteen could manage.  However, I had a friend at school who did wear a back brace.  Her name was Victoria and I think that even without the back brace, she would have had an air of gentle formality to her.  While we were browsing the racks (we didn't buy any clothes or patterns during those two days), I had to occasionally point out that some of the clothes Mom was thinking of putting me in would not work if I had a brace like Victoria's. After all those hours of listening to my mother's dire predictions of my future, my calm because eroded.  Even though I had no problem with the idea of the brace - I had great respect for Victoria, after all - I succumbed to my mother's paranoia.

I was terrified when we went to that appointment that Monday morning.  After doing the normal vital signs checking stuff, Dr. Bishon's nurse had my back x-rayed.  Then we sat in the examination room, while my mother continued her narrative on how all of this was going to rule my life, up to and including having a family of my own.  After what felt like an eternity to me (though it was maybe 20 minutes), Dr. Bishon came in, talked to me a little about how I sat when I read books, and then had me lie on my left side.  He then pushed my shoulder forward and pulled my hip back.  There was a cracking noise and when he had me stand in front of a mirror, I could see that I was standing straight again.  He explained that I wasn't suffering from sclerosis; I was suffering from reading books, while sitting in bad posture in our sofa chair for long periods of time.  He made me promise to use better posture when I got into a really good book, and then sent me on my way with a huge smile on his face.

Back in our car, I was absolutely furious with my mother and told her to never, ever do that to me again.  It might be worth noting that she had completely forgotten the incident by her 60's, but then maybe not.  For me, however, the event is deeply carved into my psyche as something to be vigilant against experiencing again.  I "compensated" by going through medical books like my mother, but instead of having the intent of proving to myself that I had this or that condition, I approached it from the direction of disproving that I had serious conditions.  I was very much in this mindset when I first started noticing signs of Celiac's disease in my late 20's.  And I very successfully convinced myself that I didn't have enough of the symptoms for long enough periods to have the disease - despite the fact that nowhere in the description I was reading did it say that you had to have these symptoms continually.

So, when my sister brought up the possibility that I may have a problem with gluten, I really didn't believe her.  More precisely, I didn't want to believe her.  However, I do love her and recognized that she was really worried about me, so without bothering to re-research Celiac's disease, I figured it wouldn't hurt me to go gluten-free for a little while to make her feel better.  I didn't have health insurance at the time, but to be honest, even if I had, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it to a doctor because I had spent so many years convincing myself I didn't have the condition.  I did do just enough reading to realize that I would have some bloating and headaches when I did go back to eating gluten, but I was okay with that - it didn't really sound much different to what happens when I re-introduce beans into my diet after a long period of not eating them.  It was a massive shock to me when several hours after I ate that one little piece of garlic bread, I was curled up in the fetal position feeling as if my bowels were trying to tear me apart.

Still, I wasn't quite ready to accept the possibility of Celiac's disease.  But I began to revise my feelings on the matter when friends started to bring studies to my attention about gluten intolerance and Celiac's.  In one of the more publicized studies of gluten intolerance, I read the description of the self-reported symptoms and realized that not one of them included explosive diarrhea or wishing for death because of severe cramps that lasted several hours.  Then this month, a friend of mine was hospitalized multiple time, while the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with her.  I looked up several of the conditions they were trying to rule out on the Mayo Clinic's website, and a little voice told me that I really should look up Celiac's disease again and at least see about getting myself tested for it, so I could get a professional diagnosis as to whether I had it or not.  The first thing that struck me was the fact that in the two decades since I first read the symptoms of Celiac's disease, I had exhibited many more than I had remembered.

The second thing that struck me was that to be successfully tested for it, I need to be eating gluten for about a week before I'm tested - with the warning that you shouldn't go on a gluten-free diet before being tested first.  In short, I've screwed myself with my own denial.  However, it is still possible to be tested.  I will need to discuss it with a doctor before I eat gluten for the test, and I will need to take a week of vacation so I won't have to worry about missing work because I can't leave the bathroom.  So, probably sometime next February I will get myself actually tested.  And if it's negative, I might ask if there's a better way to get used to eating gluten again.  I really miss cake donuts and KFC.

Observations on the Art of Acting from a Non-Actor

Occasionally I break my promise not to read the comments on videos.  It wasn't a deliberate act. I was scrolling to find a link at the bottom of the page when I saw this comment under an interview with Jim Parsons of the Big Bang Theory on CBS.com:

"I find it weird when actors separate themselves from their characters."

My first thought was "Someone is very unclear about the concept of acting."  And I could be very correct about that.  But at the same time, not all actors approach the art of acting in the same way.  Jim Parsons couldn't play Sheldon Cooper if he was like Sheldon Cooper, because a personality like Sheldon could never be an actor. Parsons doesn't even have the same interests. In his own words:

I don’t feel like I’m bringing much of anything when it comes to personal experience with him. For one, he doesn’t talk about anything that I have second nature of. Not only do I not have my own language for science, but for comic books, graphic novels, most science fiction, after Star Wars. I think this has been to my benefit and allowed me to connect with him more on a humanistic level because I don’t really get what he’s talking about 90% of the time.

From http://techland.time.com/2010/09/23/big-bang-theory-the-jim-parsons-interview/2/


People like Sheldon aren't emotionally aware enough to portray a realistic and humanistic view of themselves.  You need someone like Jim Parsons, who can portray him in a way that the rest of us can understand and identify with, while still being able to recognize as someone who is quite different from ourselves.  The same thing goes for the Evil Version of Wil Wheaton on The Big Bang Theory:

When he first talked to me about working on the show, Bill Prady told me that I'd be playing a "delightfully evil version" of myself. This sounded like a lot of fun to me, but it was more difficult to find that character than you'd think. When I'm playing Fawkes on The Guild it's easy to slip into his kilt and be a jerk, but wearing my own clothes and essentially playing a stylized version of myself made it a real challenge to hit "delightfully evil" without veering into "not committed to being delightfully evil" or "just plain evil." Keeping that twinkle in my eye, and knowing that Wil Wheaton (The Big Bang Version) is planning to scam Sheldon from the moment he sits down, was essential to this particular characterization working out, and I didn't completely find it until we'd run the episode a couple of times.

During one of the run throughs, when Jim did his Klingon bit, I turned to Kevin and asked him, "Did he just say 'revenge is a dish best served cold' in Klingon?" like I was trying to figure out if that's actually what happened, like maybe I misunderstood him. Chuck Lorre told me that it would be funnier if I was more exasperated. "You're just here to play this game, and now some guy is quoting Klingon at you. This happens everywhere you go," he said.

I sighed dramatically, and said, "Oh, it does." Everyone laughed, hard, and Chuck pointed his finger at me. "Yes. That is exactly the way to play that beat."

When Chuck gave me that note, I grokked how to play Evil Wil Wheaton (The Big Bang Theory version), and I could see the comedy in every beat I played for the rest of the show. I totally grew a level in comedy acting, and learned something about letting go of who I really am, so I could embrace the Delightfully Evil version of myself (who I seriously hope will return in the future, because OMG was it fun to play him.)

From http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/10/the-creepy-candy-coating-corollary.html


I think the evil version of Wheaton works because in reality, he's so not that way and is able to play a jerk because he doesn't have to be in denial that what he is doing is obnoxious.  He doesn't have to defend it or minimize it because it's not really him - it's a warped-alternate-reality him.  Of course, this is comedy, so exaggeration in proper amounts is essential for success.  This may also be why people say comedic acting is actually harder than dramatic acting.  You almost have to step outside yourself to be able to deliver these lines without becoming self-conscious about the whole thing.

Now on the other end of things, you have Viggo Mortensen who played Aragon in The Lord of the Rings.  By all accounts, Mortensen practically became Aragon. He carried his sword with him even into town and actually spent his days off riding the horses he used and even bought them because he bonded with them.  Being a dramatic actor, he goes to great lengths to become the character he's playing.  For Everybody Has a Plan, he learned his character's hobby, beekeeping.  He explains how he prepares for a role:

I think part of it is just how you prepare roles. When I prepare, I ask a simple question: “What happened between the character’s birth and page one of the script?” And right there you can find most of the answers, even before you start shooting. I find that process really enjoyable. Just like a kid does when he pretends: It doesn’t matter how little they look like a princess or an Indian or a Viking or a sports star, whatever they’re pretending to be, they really believe it. They enjoy playing, basically. So the goal is always — in a very serious, methodical, detailed, much more layered way, I suppose, intellectually, than kids use for make-believe — to get to the same place where it’s just fun and play. But you have to do your homework first, and that’s what I try to do.

From http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/viggo-mortensen-everybody-has-a-plan-interview.html

He's not kidding about being more layered.  He's not just playing Agustín in the movie, he also plays Agustín's ailing twin brother Pedro, and then plays Agustín pretending to be Pedro.  I haven't seen the movie, but based on the trailers, I don't see much of Aragon in those characters.  And let's face it, outside of cult films, an actor who can only play one character isn't going to be that successful.

Helen Mirren, who does an awesome job in both dramatic and comedic roles, approaches her craft much differently than Mortensen:

A light bulb went on in my brain. I thought, ‘That’s it! Just play what’s on the page.’ I’ve followed that ever since. If it says, ‘Over-the-hill, angry woman with no makeup gets out of bed,’ that’s what I’ll play. I don’t mess it up with, ‘What’s her back story?’

From http://www.simplyhelen.net/category/interviews/

Obviously, there are many different ways to be an actor.  You can be like Robin Williams and ad-lib when the spirit hits you, leaving the director and editors decide what fits with the story content-wise. Or you can be like Ian McDiarmid and memorize the scripts so thoroughly that you can easily change the delivery of said lines to fit the mood of the story, without derailing anything later in the plot.  It all depends on what works for you and the role you're playing.

Back to the young lady who posted the comment that started all of this musing.  While it would be easy to dismiss her as just lacking in knowledge, it's very possible that perhaps she, herself, doesn't have the capacity to separate - to imagine herself as someone much different than she is - to get inside someone else's experience.  So, it would be extremely mystifying that people can do this; she may even think that they really aren't doing what they say the are.

I'm just as guilty about this.  For over 30 years, I could never understand why people would not only eat cilantro, but relish it. To me, cilantro tastes like liquid dish soap.  I had assumed that people must have deliberately cultivated their love for the taste of soap, for reasons I couldn't fathom.  The closest I came to a reasonable explanation was to think that maybe they had their mouths washed out with soap too often as children, but that wouldn't explain the wide-spread acceptance of cilantro as a culinary mainstay. Then one day my best friend took me to a Mexican restaurant for lunch because I needed to get out of the house.  Already in a grumpy mood, I complained about the salsa dish not being rinsed out properly. She was about to ask the waiter to bring me another bowl, but I told her not to worry, I would just take my salsa from the center.  Then I tasted soap again, only this time I paused a moment and detected the taste of leaf behind it.  "Oh, it's cilantro," I said in a disgusted tone.  I then launched into my I-can't-believe-people-like-this-stuff rant, when she interrupted me with "Cilantro tastes like soap to you?" I nodded and she excitedly explained how they were discussing on her foodie mailing list that about one third of the population has a genetic tendency to taste cilantro as soap. She was extremely stoked to find out that she knew someone in real life that had this condition.  And I realized after all those years that the rest of humanity wasn't actually insane when it came to this herb, they just weren't tasting it the same way I was.

So, in answer to the woman who commented - actors separate themselves from their characters because that really is how they experience it.  Even though Jim Parsons "becomes" Sheldon for short periods of time, he's not Sheldon.  He's not a comic book geek.  He's not an arrogant physicist, who looks down on others.  He's no where near as socially clueless as Sheldon.  He's not even heterosexual.  But he can portray a character who is all of those.

And it's okay that you don't have the ability to separate from yourself and an imagined self.  I have several friends like that.  I used to think that they were like that because they were afraid of losing themselves in some way, or of weakening their moral compass.  But as I've grown older and studied more, I've found out that for some people, that's just the way their consciousness works.  Sure it frustrates the hell out of me sometimes when you're not able to understand any view different from your own, because running separate mental simulations is how I explore concepts and achieve empathy to a level that I am not naturally gifted with.  But I realize that I can be just as frustrating to you too.


I'm not sure how to exactly transition in this story into this post, but I really have the impression that it belongs here as part of the discussion of being someone else other than yourself. Many years ago, I created a persona for an online group my kids initially wanted to be a part of.  She was brash, out-spoken, devious, and a born leader.  She was also a Slytherin head of house. Even though my daughter lost interest in the online group, she liked pretending to talk to Prof. Mysteria Ester Paracelsus, and we had fun pretending together.  Then one day she came up to me, looking glum, and asked if she could talk to Mysteria.  I assumed that she just wanted to be cheered up, so I played along.  To my shock, she began to tell me about something that happened at school that upset her.  Staying in character, I gave her Mysteria's solution to such a problem - a solution that I would never advocate as her real mother.  Then I dropped the character and reminded her that I was always there for her; and that I didn't approve of the solution my alter-ego just gave.  She said, "I know, Mom.  You would have suggested (...), but I really needed to talk to someone who has no problem kicking butt."  I realized then that what she needed was a way to stand up for herself, not a way to be diplomatic and civil.

Some days, I think I need to channel Mysteria more often...