After becoming a regular visitor to ERs for dehydration, pain and side effects of migraine meds, I had to switch my approach completely.

I went to an acupuncturist because a heart valve problem contraindicates any of the current meds used for migraine relief. Within 15 minutes of treatment for an active migraine, the pain was almost gone. I was told that for a few minutes I'd feel what would best be described as grief, I would probably sob, then I'd fall asleep. I slept for 4 hours.

After that, I went home and conducted my evening business, then slept like I'd never slept before in my life.

Some migraines have taken longer to relieve, but the treatment, even if it doesn't completely remove the migraine, is so much easier to do than the drugs or visits to the ER. It took a few years of treatments and changes to lifestyle to do it, but after 40 years of violent, debilitating migraines, I'm down to maybe one mild one a year.

The research on acupuncture is a little thin, but the scientific aspect is leading to some link between acupuncture and the body's electrical system. When in migraine, the brain is lit up like a constellation, by flashes of intense electrical activity. The brain overloads.

In Chinese medicine, headache, especially migraine, is linked to the emotions of sorrow, anger and frustration. This doesn't mean these emotions bring about a headache, although stress certainly doesn't help anything. Rather, it looks at the body as an elaborate biochemical electrical system that is as energy dependent as the rest of the universe.

We are the same stuff as stars, after all.

Writing representatives doesn't help. I've tried that, In fact, I do it every time I go through the stupid TSA line and find yet another example of incompetence and meanness by petty nazis.

How do we get the media to do a story on how ridiculous the set up is instead of doing more fearmongering claptrap? (Ooh, we're so investigative, we snuck a gun and a disposable shaver through security!)

Surely someone at Salon.com is connected toa media mogul.

Study after study reports that doing too many things at once decreases efficiency, effectiveness and attention. Yet, we pile on the tasks and continue to cram stuff into small spaces of time and place.

What are people talking about? Are we communicating or just jabbering? Are we really so pressed for time that we have to eat, make business deals, get directions, call friends and change our clothes while driving? If so, the problem is not talking and driving, it's not making good choices about what makes a life worth living.

We don't need most of the stuff we've got jammed into our garages, spare rooms and storage lockers any more than we need to be use driving time as a sales call. As long as people think of driving as private time and cars as small mobile homes, they blur the edge between work and home, attentiveness and rest, need and safety.

We're strangled our lives with trivial tasks. By believing we need to be on the phone at all times we make hanging ourselves easy, even if we kill ourselves by accident.

This isn't a story, it's a way for a political operative to keep harping on his fatuous, mean spirited talking points.

Not once did Mitchell call Davis on his overbearing behavior - a strategy that works when one side is trying to be polite while the other stomps all over the place. She could simply have said, "You've got to be kidding, you're telling me you had no idea what you were doing in that campaign ad?!"

Nope, that's too straightforward. Instead this mealy mouthed lack of challenge is called, wrongly, "objectivity."

Three columns? The right side is mostly blank, so it makes it appear that there's more empty space than there are feminist ideas. Or, worse, that feminist thinking has gone missing.

Edwards had an affair and lied about it. That puts him with anywhere between 37% and 60% of married people. It also puts him in the same club as loads of other politicians and famous people who've done much less good work.

The media will now go on and on with pseudo-outrage posing silly questions framed as examinations of trustworthiness, reliability, honor and political survival. In reality, it's the media who will choose or not choose to turn infidelity into a lead weight around Edwards image. Talking heads will tell us we should care and harp on it until we can't avoid thinking about some part of it. No one will ask whether a personal issue matters to anyone except the people involved.

As they did during Clinton's impeachment for lying about the same thing, sex, the media and opposing politicians will turn attention away from truly important matters and focus on digging through trash. How many politicians have spent years building an anti-poverty program or working on changing the crappy US health care system? How often has the media examined poverty in the US? How much did the media examine the reasons for war?

Nope, it's easier to take on a personal issue, one that many people can relate to, then inflate it into the shape of yet another political football. We're so much better at kicking people around that tossing ideas back and forth.