Monthly Archives: August 2009

How stress makes you stupid

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And what to do about it.

From the article — quote from Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal:

[W]e’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.

The hardest thing about life as a human being is that we get trapped inside our own minds.

As Sousa’s research shows, there’s a biological basis for this.

So if you’ve hit a high-stress patch in your life recently, you have to assume — assume — that your capabilities in the area of “executive decision-making” and “goal-directed behaviors” are impaired.

And then, for your own good, you have to do something about it.

It’s the only way out of the trap.

(The worst part being, of course, that people who are in the trap don’t know it . . . and that when you’re under stress is when you most need the very skills that you’ve lost.)

Overpromising

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“The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.”

— Carl Jung

New other stuff :-)

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Okay, I went a bit overboard, wouldn’t you say? New background, changed the column background from white to pale green . . . yes, green’s my favorite color. But this is a bit over the top. I feel like I’m peering into a dish of lime Jello. (Is there an award for greenest blog btw?)

Trouble is, there are always little issues that come up. The theme is basically Kubrick, modified — if you’ve ever installed WordPress, you’ll know what I’m talking about . . . over the years, I’ve tweaked it in various ways. But right now, with these latest changes, I can’t get the .widecolumn to match up to the header exactly, and I can’t get the bottom margin of .widecolumn to match up with the bottom of the sidebar.

For the header, what I really need is help from a designer. Blurring out the photo helps make the title pop, which is a good thing, but it’s plain ugly typeface, which is not a good thing. Unfortunately my tools are limited, and so’s my time — we might have to live with it for awhile.

That said,  y’all come here for the scintillating prose, not how pretty it looks, right?

:-)

Seen the latest Rochester Healthy Living?

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I have an piece in the August issue: Much to do About Migraine.

After more than 2 decades of living with migraine, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can nearly always head them off. The article describes the tricks I use. (My fave standby? Tincture of cayenne =-O)

I’ll post a link to the article once it’s been transferred to RHL’s website, but in the meantime, if you’re in the Rochester, NY area, look for a print copy in your local supermarkets, healthfood stores, athletic clubs, etc.

Pick up a copy. It’s free :-)

A lot like genre women’s fiction

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From an article on the enduring popularity of serial dramas, published in Drexel University’s online culture magazine, The Smart Set:

A telenovela is all about a couple who wants to kiss and a scriptwriter who stands in their way for 150 episodes.

That’s also the fun of both romance novels and romantic comedies, isn’t it? Although obviously for novels it’s the writer who’s in the way.

The article’s author, Stefany Anne Golberg, also makes an observation about how emerging technologies are changing the way people consume serials:

With the advent of On-Demand viewing like Netflix and Hulu, one is able to watch serials from start to finish without missing a moment. What’s totally different than the video rentals of yore is that you can also watch many episodes in quick succession, just like reading the chapters of a book. In a way, you’re having your cake and eating it, too. Each episode is a complete story and also adds to a greater narrative.

Could this help make serials more popular — by enabling people to sit down with them, as compared to receiving them on someone else’s schedule, by installment?

Will it affect the serial’s form?

[UPDATE: And then one day, I wrote a serial novel…]

Reading for its own sake

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Column in the LA Times by David Ulin. Title: The Lost Art of Reading.

The predicament: Ulin was a voracious reader but today finds that he’s having trouble reading books.

These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I’m reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

Question.

Is he reading the wrong books?

I find that I have trouble when I try a book because I think I’m supposed to read it. Example: piece of literary fiction that’s been lauded by people whose tolerance for literary affectation is greater than mine. Got stacks of that sort of book in my unread pile.

OTOH I couldn’t put down Mark Helprin’s Freddy & Fredericka when I read it a few weeks ago: the engagement was effortless, it was swimming downstream. And he’s definitely a writer’s writer, so it’s not like I gravitate toward pot boilers.

With some quarter of a million print titles published annually in the US now, books themselves have become their own fragmented cacophony. We need to be selective. We need to know when to give up on a book and move on.

Second question: might there be something else at work besides the encroachment of the new media bogeyman?

Unrest is unrest. A feeling that there’s something out there that you’re missing might be a clue that there is something out there that you’re missing — something that might have nothing to do with books and reading.

I’m reminded of the folk tale about the in fool is searching for his key under a street light. The punchline is that he didn’t lose the key near the light; he lost it somewhere else.

Sometimes we have to look for things in places that aren’t so easy or obvious . . .

Inside the Little House

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Interesting piece, in the New Yorker, about Rose, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I read and re-read all the Little House in the Prairie books as a kid — the love story that culminates the series is one of the sweetest ever written — and still recall the little jolt I felt when I got a little older and realized they are autobiographical.

Click & read for a glimpse at the untold bits of the story . . .