This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns
I asked my friend Gemini to give me a random number between 1 and 99 since there were 99 pages in my book so far. Gemini returned with 78. I then closed my eyes and selected a random word from page 78. My finger landed on the word forearm. Does not seem interesting. Let me see where this takes me. It is early in the morning and I am eager for a random adventure of learning. There are two bones in the forearm. The radius and the ulna. According to what I read the radius is called as such because it rotates around the ulna, similar to the radius of a circle. The ulna is named for the Latin word ulna, which means elbow. The first thing I got when I Googled "78" was "an old gramophone record designed to be played at 78 rpm".
This led me to Ulna's "OEA" album from Born Yesterday Records and the song "Turn The Record On". The singer is Adam Schubert who is a recovering addict. What I read is that "OEA stands for "Opposite to Emotion Action." It is a term used in DBT therapy, an exercise to readjust oneself in the world around them. In short, OEA is about not suppressing or ignoring your emotions, but taking stock of them, holding them, and letting them go." That same writing describes the album as a beautiful bedroom folk-rock record. At the age of 14 Adam shattered his ulna in a skateboarding accident and that is how he later came up with the pseudonym Ulna. Since he could not skate, he decided to pick up the guitar and that is how his musical career emerged. I am interested in the lyrics for the songs "Borrowed Time" and "Ocean Ridge". I could not find this online and so I emailed Adam to request the lyrics.
I did some further reading on OEA. DBT stands for dialectical behavioral therapy. What I am reading is that emotion produces an action urge or behavior. The goal of the opposite to emotion action is to identify unhelpful behaviors and urges and to respond in the opposite way to improve mood. Marsha Linehan, a psychology researcher at the University of Washington, developed Opposite Action in the late 1980s. I noticed that if I combined the letters from DBT and OEA I could form the word BOATED.
Boated means to travel on water in a vessel (as in sailed). Which leads me to Ed Sheeran's song Boat from the album Subtract. In that song Sheeran sings "But the waves won't break my boat". Which leads me to Nazare in Portugal where they recorded the biggest wave ever surfed at 78 feet. Page 78 was how this chapter started. It is lovely how randomness and coincidences can take us on beautiful journeys. According to wikipedia the town Nazare derived its name from a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary that was brought from Nazareth. I do have some Portuguese ancestry. My grandmother on my father's side was named Rita Fernandes. Her parents came from the Madeira island in Portugal. My mother tells me that Madeira is famous for grapes and wine making. I read that, "The Stralhista, a ship from Madeira, Portugal, was the first ship to bring Madeirans to Trinidad, arriving on November 12, 1834 with 28 passengers."
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