A cat, a tooth, a dream...anxiety!

This morning I had a nightmare. My cat Murphy had crawls into my bag (obviously, because he stows away and comes with me undetected all the time...duh). So there we both are, in a coffee shop. Nothing weird about that, right?

The coffee shop patrons start cooing over Murphy -- who wouldn't? One of them notices something is not right: Murphy's bottom front tooth (do cats even have a tooth there?) is about to fall out. And it is green and slimy and rotting and putrid.

[Backstory: This totally preventable catastrophe is my fault. When I took Murphy to the vet six weeks ago I found out that he needs $400 worth of dental work. Right, I don't have that kind of money. So I did what I do best: I put if off.]

Ok, returning to the dream... A frantic search for the vet's phone number ensues. I can't find it. When I do find it, they don't answer. Time is ticking. All of a sudden it is 10 a.m. (or is it 11 a.m.? In my dream I forgot daylight savings...just like in real life) and I am late for class. And Murphy is trying to escape. And his TEETH ARE FALLING OUT!

...and I wake up.

Phew. So normally analyzing dreams is a futile yet totally unavoidable process. It's the grand goal of us instinctively pattern-seeking humans -- tease some sense out of a mess of images.Valiant efforts have been made (Freud, Jung, and, as Wikipedia tells me, a slew of neurologists) to explain dreams but, like trying to train a chicken, it's mostly futile.

Until, of course, Jordan Wirfs-Brock hits the scene. Ok, not quite. My dream made me realize something, but that something wasn't about the nature of dreams. It was about the nature of pets. Pets and people. People and pets.

Anxiety dreams are crazy common, and teeth falling out is a frequent target. I've had that dream countless times (and damn, it's frightening), but this is the first time I projected that anxiety on an external actor: my cat.

In my dream, along with the teeth falling out thing, I was nervous about:

• making it to class on time


• money


• fitting everything in to my schedule


• the BURDEN of carrying things around with me

Hmmm, funny, these are all things that were tugging at the corners of intricately woven quilt of worries this morning. I had set my alarm early to go and search for my lost USB data drive which held, yes, "important assignments". Gah.

So here's the revelation. Maybe one of the reasons we have pets (besides the companionship and the fuzziness and the adorableness) is so we can push the anxiety of our people problems on to our pets.

There is generally little emotional wiggle-waggling involved in this process. Does Fido or Mittens need something? OK, it's done...no need to worry about whether your dog emotionally and intellectually fulfills you, or whether you are living up to your full potential when you are helping your cat. It's a different, more manageable, less ambiguous kind of anxiety. This is, I maintain, distinct from another reason we have pets: the desire for unconditional acceptance.

If you, like me, most likely were a Baby 19 and have a form of anxiety disorder somewhere between mild and severe, having a pet lets you channel that anxiety in a way that at least feels productive. Is it exploitation of the animal kingdom? Probably. Is it merely a distraction from dealing with those real people problems I mentioned? Maybe. Am I ever going to stop having anxiety dreams about Murphy that are really about me? Definitely not!

P.S. Also, I just really love typing the word "anxiety." It is so strange.

Worfs-Brock

My name has been misspelled in fabulously inventive, seemingly infinite ways:

Wirss-Brock
Wirstbrook
Brock-Wirfs (yes, really!)
...

But never until today had I been a Worfs-Brock.

Today...it happened twice! Fancy that! I actually found it endearing, and it warmed my heart a little bit when it was very cold outside.

Other things that warmed my heart recently:

• The baristas at the library coffee shop talking about their hobby, library stalking. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. They trail someone around the library for 15 minutes or too and see how long they can do it before the stalkee notices.
• Journalists squiggly dancing to Balkan music at the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference.
• A man with mismatched socks going through airport security.
• Seeing not one, but TWO legitimate flat-top hairdos this weekend.
• The phrase "glow-in-the-dark great!"
• This passage: "Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece -- millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work." Ian McEwan, Saturday, page 3

Have a glow-in-the-dark great night. I know I will, most literally.

First day of class blues

As if the first day of classes wasn't already depressing enough (just kidding...I really do love being a student), I just found out my car needs a new power steering pump.

The damage? I'm too devastated to recreate the quote here, but let's just say it's brought to you by the letter "G".

Who needs some cheering up? I do, I do! How about some stories about the food industry. Oh wait...this will only drive my spirits even further into the ground.

Except that Nicholas Kristof has a cute anecdote about a chicken who thought it was a goose (an example of the soul that industrial food has lost).

And except that in TIME's expose of industrial food, they have this to say:

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."

They also have pretty photos:


So, things aren't that bleak. I'm going to go home, drink a beer and finish reading a Japanese crime novel about prostitutes, glass ceilings and social strata. Life is pretty good, actually...

Novelists get sober: the best thing in the world for some, the worst for others

Check out this article by Tom Schone on how writers fare when they sober up.

Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. (Elmore Leonard said that attending AA meetings had made him a “better listener”.) It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones—Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis lists drinking under “Activities and Interests”). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.

Come one, somebody's got to have written a similar article about great journalists.

(Thanks to Yiyan for the tip!)

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/12/2009

• Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com

  Interesting. Because of the "price of anarchy" when it comes to individual drivers trying to minimize their personal travel time, closing roads along a route can actually make everything more efficient during rush hour.
  
  See...expanding roads isn't necessarily the solution!

  tags: CSM, traffic, group behavior, congestion, driving, cars, urban planning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/03/2009

• The truth about grit - The Boston Globe

  "Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit."

  tags: no_tag

  • Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.

• Shouts & Murmurs: A Guide To Summer Sun Protection : The New Yorker

  The perfect thing to read on a Monday morning while nursing my crispy neck and serious racoon-face after a long weekend of burning -- I mean beach camping.

  tags: new yorker, zev borrow, humor, SPF

  • SPF 100—This is to SPF 99 and below as excellent heroin is to Capri Sun juice boxes.
  • SPF 175—Ever wanted to have unprotected sex with a prostitute in Haiti? Don’t answer. Doesn’t matter. The point is with SPF 175 that’s now an option.

• Dan Morgan -- Farm-State Democrats Are on the Rise in Congress - washingtonpost.com

  tags: washington post, agriculture, politics, farming, democrats, food safety, FDA, EPA

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/30/2009

• Marathons and Memory : The Frontal Cortex

  At The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer has a post on marathon running and memory. Stress, like the stress from running for 4 hours, is known to disrupt memory -- but all memory isn't disrupted equally. The study found that after a marathon, runners had reduced "explicit" memory (ability to remember specific words, facts, numbers, etc.) but improved "implicit" memory (the ability to remember actions, motions, processes, etc.).
  
  Fascinating! As someone who has run -- oh, is it 5? -- marathons I definitely felt a deterioration in my cognitive abilities as the races progressed. My ability to do simple math (like calculating mile splits) withered away. But it wasn't because I couldn't add anymore -- I could do that just fine. It was always because I couldn't remember what my watch said one mile earlier. That's a distinctly "explicit" memory function.

  tags: memory, cognition, marathon, running, stress, jonah lehrer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/29/2009

• Re-Engineering the Earth - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

  tags: no_tag

  • Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting, problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering.

  • Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks we ought to test the technology gradually. He suggests that we imagine the suite of geo-engineering projects like a knob that we can turn. “You can turn it gently or violently. The more gently it gets turned, the less disruptive the changes will be. Environmentally, the least risky thing to do is to slowly scale up small field experiments,” he says. “But politically that’s the riskiest thing to do.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/23/2009

• Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today

  Jonah Lehrer on how art heightens natural stiumlus-response. He uses this Picasso quote: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -- or, as neuroscience shows, art isn't a complete lie, but a deliberate exageration.

  tags: jonah lehrer, picasso, neuroscience, art, abstraction, symbols, hyperbole, peak-shift effect, herring gull, ramachandran, neuroaesthetics

  • Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."

  • What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a "super-stimulus."

  • the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/22/2009

• Mind Hacks: Vision shift glasses alter time perception

  Whoa! Wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the left "shrinks" time, while wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the right "expands" time. I'm intrigued by the linguistic implications of this, since so many of our time/space/numeric perceptions are based on our language.

  tags: mind hacks, perception, time, space, vision, neuroscience, linguistics, prism glasses

• Scoring/Criteria | Smarter Cities

  (Ed. note: Gah! I wrote this already, then Diigo deleted it! Or I did by accident...)My pre-stated theme for the summer was "data visualization" -- although it kind of got pushed aside by the completely unrelated theme "fictiontion writing" -- so instead of commenting on the methodology behind NRDC's new "smarter cities" ranking, I'm going to comment on how they presented their data.Things I loved: the division of cities by size and the ease of moving between those groups; the division of the data by category/scoring criteria; the control the user has over the list (i.e., clicking on a category like "green spaces" and re-ranking the table); the use of size-graded circles to indicate scoring; the mouse-over titles combined with simple icons to display each category; the orange and teal color scheme (of course!)Things that I think could be improved: instead of just naming a category when you mouse over it, it would have been nice to have an easy link or pop up description of what that category means (instead of a hidden link at the bottom of the table); the sizes of the circles are discrete (small, medium or large) not actually reflective of the numberical score, and that's not indicated very clearly; the "city profiles" should list the scores in each category; although city profiles have maps, there is no map on the front page -- this would have been nice for looking at metro areas (i.e., Portland is in the large city category, Beaverton is in the small city category -- you have no way of knowing that those two cities are both ranked high and geographically adjacent unless you do some clicking)Also, this has nothing to do with data visualization, but isn't the preference for the term "smarter cities" over "smart cities" reminiscent of the recent shift in sex-ed-speak from "safe sex" to "safer sex"? Just saying ...

  tags: NRDC, urban planning, smart growth, smarter cities, rankings, data visualization

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.