Friday, February 29, 2008

Love from Darwin

My show's getting really good. Last night there was a lot of physics on chalkboards and discussion of moving through time (if only in your consciousness and not necessarily physically) and about how, without an anchor -- someone you recognize in both time periods --, you can get lost in one of these time trips (which the writer in me recognizes as a HUGE metaphor). I must say, this particular smarty-pants direction is getting me all hot and bothered because I have this almost pathological attraction to anything 1. related to crazy-sounding theories of physics and/or 2. hilarious. The smart/funny nexus melts me. Of course it helps that Desmond is being featured so prominently because he could be as dumb as a box of rocks and I'd still want to see him naked. He, incidentally, looks almost exactly like someone I was very close to at one time and came shockingly close to marrying, which makes the experience of watching him that much more confusing and exciting. My LOST fanatic friend at work sent me this article which you can read if you want but won't really make sense unless you watch the show...

Also, just because it's weird, here's a photo of a new toy my brother and sister-n-law gave me. Here's what it looks like when it's stable:















And here's what it looks like in it's active state:



Cool, huh?

I'm going to a birthday party tonight that is a 90s themed party so I'm breaking out the combat boots and a flannel and going grunge. But not before I get my hair did at a new place in town that I can't wait to try out.

And I wish I had known about this before Valentine's Day because a very different email would have been circulated letting everyone know I love them.


Oh yeah, and Helen Mirren's Oscar dress blew all others out of the water. Score one for mature women with impeccable taste. Go girl.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Perfectly, pervertedly matched

Even though I kinda hate how they came together, I sorta secretly love that they did because Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman are probably the perfect couple and belong together. Here's a video she made that aired on his show and then his response. The sheer number of celebrities featured in Jimmy's is astounding and Harrison Ford's little cameo just cracked me up. Note -- if you are easily offended by bad language and sexual suggestion (Mom) then I'd advise you not watch. However, if you've always wanted to see Ben Affleck in tiny cut off jean shorts, roll tape. (Inexplicably, Huey Lewis also makes an appearance which is weird because I was just talking about him with my boss who's all about the movie American Psycho where Huey is mentioned reverently...)



Friday, February 22, 2008

It's just been on my mind...


...And I've been wanting to write about it for a while but I didn't want to offend anyone because, while I'm not trying to judge anyone's need I just think it's gotten way out of hand, so I'm glad Wired has written about it for me so I can maybe make the argument that it's on other peoples' radar as well and it's not just that I'm an emotionless judge of societal norms forgetting that we are talking about real people here who are just trying to find a little happiness in this mad, mad world...(and if there's a run-on sentence contest anywhere out there let me know cause it would feel good to win something.)

And here's a good, really funny song in honor of my friend who's letting me come (work project pending) and visit him soon in the gleaming city of all things political. I know he likes this band and it makes me nostalgic for the days when I wore Doc Marten combat boots with long flowery skirts and acted like a punk rock rebel, something my Dad found hilarious. So much so that he made me pose for a picture so I could see what was up 10 years down the road. I still have that picture and I do look totally ridiculous. But it was most definitely fun being that big a dork while remaining completely unaware of the fact that I was that big a dork...

WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 16.02


Yale Lecturer Advises: Flush the Prozac and Hack Your Own Happiness

By Josh McHugh Email 01.18.08 | 6:00 PM


Illustration: Christian Northeast

Sometime in the 1990s, the concept of better living through chemistry turned a corner, thanks to drug companies' efforts to synthesize antidotes for every possible mood swing. So writes Yale lecturer Charles Barber in his new book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation. An OCD sufferer himself, Barber spent a decade working in places like New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He knew something was wrong when he discovered that his colleagues' perfectly functional, $300-an-hour Upper West Side clients were taking the same potent pills as his own schizoid, homeless, crackhead patients. "I would spend part of the day in shelters dealing with seriously ill people," Barber says. "Then I'd go to cocktail parties and find out that the people there were on the same medications." He proposes that we just say no to multinational drug peddlers and heal ourselves with cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies — "talk therapy" techniques that minimize pill pushing, dispense with Freudian dream analysis, and engage patients in actively reprogramming their own brains. It's like "a highly selective carpentry of the soul," Barber writes — therapy as self-engineering.

He does acknowledge the need for medication in the hardest cases. Just like cancer, severe mood disorders can be life-threatening and should be treated as such, Barber says. But we need to distinguish between real depression and just being bummed out.

The vast majority of the 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants in 2006, he notes, were for people in the second category. Barber lambastes the drug industry for its attempt to turn "the worried well" into customers; he also takes aim at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for according disorder status to conditions like social anxiety and adjusting to a cross-country move. "Nonsense," Barber writes, "anger, greed, laziness, impulsivity, as well as jealousy, lust, anguish, and so on, are simply part of the human predicament. They are not medical conditions."

Thursday, February 21, 2008

The original Southern Gentleman

It's my Pop's 71st birthday today and in honor of the occasion I'm posting one of his favorite poems that, consequently, became one of mine. I told him earlier on the phone that he, given the longevity of age that runs in his family, would likely be around another 20 years and he said, "Good Lord I hope not!" and we had a good laugh. Cause we're cool like that. Happy Birthday Poppa. I love you.




If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

~Rudyard Kipling

I feel ya Tennessee


Brick: Win what? What is, uh, the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?
Maggie: Just stayin' on it, I guess. As long as she can.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

I admire their stealthy skills

"He who sneaks up on me sneaks up on his own ass kicking." -- Ninja master I met once in a bowling alley

Friday, February 15, 2008

1 percent wax

A'right so I lied about not posting too much. I can't help it...I just have so many questions, like can someone please explain to me how having superdelegates is in any way democratic? Seems a lot like elite rule (cough, cough, socialism, ahem) but maybe I just don't understand the concept (which is entirely possible)...

Also, is it possible -- as my sister Juje and I think it may be -- that the shooting down of a rogue spy satellite is really just a way for the US to showcase it's defense capabilities in light of what always happens around election years which is the posturing of certain, um, allies?

Let me be clear -- I have no problem with this. Fire away.

And also I'm just feeling so satisfied because it looks like I may have been successful in the epic battle I've been waging against a multinational, extremely powerful organization over what amounts to bad administrative practices on their end. Luckily, I had federally sanctified documentation, the ability to write scathing correspondence and my dad's big-shot lawyer in my corner (which, let's face it, may have been the deciding factor) and so, while it's not a done deal, it looks like I may have won the war. I totally feel like Braveheart. Perhaps I can reign in the psycho behavior a bit now...but really, what fun would that be? I'll just find something else to trip out over cause I pretty much feel like this lately.

And yet, as I was writing this, someone at work whom I thought didn't care for me much, gave me a cupcake. It was left over from Valentine's Day and had a sweetie heart on top that said "Melt My Heart." And it did.

And, just cause it's Friday, a coworker of mine, due to my need to always have a candle burning on my desk, introduced me to Mandles, or as I like to call them, my brothers' Christmas presents this year.



Happy Friday.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Nothing like a man in a fedora hat

Call me a dork but I had to. I'm very excited...

Not something you say but something you do

I think it's funny how "I love you" in sign language looks like rock fingers. I'm a simple woman who is easily amused...thank God.

Happy Valentine's Day my loves. Here's one of my favorite love songs...

And for those of us who like to celebrate our, um, independence, there's this from Despair.com. Wish someone would have alerted me sooner...I'd have left them out on my desk for the work folk...

Monday, February 11, 2008

The week begins with...

This guy I work with used the expression "Bojangles-style corruption" to describe someone we know who's a bit of a backwoods simpleton but is erroneously of the opinion that she's a major player.

It's been making me laugh for about an hour.

This workmate of mine is also fascinated by this guy, famous for playing the PC in the MAC/PC commercials, who wrote a book wherein the middle section is a listing of 700 hobo names (which he reads in one take in the book on tape version), so I guess his fascination with the guy who's fascinated by hobos makes it make sense that he would come up with a description utilizing the lovable tramp Bojangles.

He's also fascinated by Dennis Kucinich's wife -- well maybe less her and more the union of the two. If I correlate the descriptions he invents with what fascinates him I'm slightly afraid of what will be borne from this particular interest...

Friday, February 08, 2008

Here in this water

So my synchronicities are coming back full force -- amen to that I say. I was reading some CS Lewis because of the reference to him on my show and came across an excerpt from Mere Christianity which made me so happy because -- surprise! -- it's exactly what I needed to read. I'll post it here and I encourage you to read it because it's simply the truth.

And here's some more Peter Gabriel to listen to while you read it. It's coincidentally -- ahem -- apropos.

"There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we
have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You
may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you
that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.

Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. Does this seem to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others. In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it
when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?' The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive - is competitive by its very nature - while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever,
or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse may
drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. Butthat is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different girls. But a proud man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his
power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride. ...For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is
nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers."

--CS Lewis

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Tabula Rasa

My mood has been pretty foul lately and I'm fighting like a mad woman to keep the faith, something that has been very difficult over the last few weeks.

But there are those who hear you cry and you know you can spill all your ridiculous thoughts while your nose runs and you're basically speaking gibberish through tears and they listen and tell you that you're still okay despite your weakness. And even though you spend all your time talking about your own pain and fears, they still believe in you and encourage you.

And these people who put up with you tell you to focus on the good things like your favorite TV show LOST, which leads you to a conversation with a work friend who also loves the show that your particular opinion about where these people are lost is a lot like the book you read in high school called Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which then leads to a google search wherein you discover that on one episode -- something you missed when you saw it a year and a half ago -- your favorite character John Locke -- like the empiricist philosopher -- is holding a copy of that very book in his hand.

And coincidences (or synchronicities), the cornerstone of faith for you, come back into focus.

And you'll never know how to thank them for giving you your joy back.

I really don't know how to thank you. I hope I can do the same for you someday.

UPDATE: I just finished watching LOST and one of the new characters is named Charlotte Staples Lewis. Um, Clive Staples Lewis...C.S. Lewis.

I love this show...

Monday, February 04, 2008

Gridiron gorgeousness

There's this great line from the movie Bull Durham where the boys actually begin to win and Susan Sarandon, in her lovely North Carolina drawl says, "The Durham Bulls began playing baseball with joy and verve ... and poetry."

I know it's a different sport but that's what came to my mind when I saw this last night. Eli Manning is my new crush...



Friday, February 01, 2008

Believe your own hype

Discover your operating thetan.