20 Random Things Friday

1. The threat of 30 has been looming over my head, but Hank Green has cheered me a bit with the concept of Logarithmic Aging.  “So that you have more birthdays when you’re younger, when you like birthdays, and fewer birthdays when you’re older, when you don’t wanna think about em!”  Brilliant.

2. He is, incidentally, also right about the eating less meat thing — that we need to stop dividing people into meat-eaters and vegetarians, but instead encourage people to be thoughtful about their meat eating and do it much less.

I was a vegetarian for a couple years and my cholesterol got so low that it was bad for me.  Because even though we’re all “Cholesterol is bad” it turns out your body, you know, actually uses it.  Too low cholesterol is associated with depression, anxiety, and higher rates of mortality!  It also makes you bad at making vitamin D — and I don’t go in the sun much, so my vitamin D also got quite low.  So now I eat meat occasionally and feel better and categorizing me as a terrible meat eater isn’t useful.

3. Christina Hendricks is almost always wearing a wig or a hair piece.  I can’t believe I never noticed it, it’s super obvious.  Beyonce as well.  I feel so lied to.

christinahair

4. I had this thought today: “My flowery galoshes are almost perfect, except that no one can see my dinosaur socks.”  I’m a grown-up.

Galoshasaur

5. Also on hair, I’m trying to re-train my part to be further from the center, partially because I’m not entirely convinced one can train their part and the internet doesn’t have any authoritative claims on that front that I can find.

6. Photos from meeting Annie Leibovitz: https://www.facebook.com/mgafm/media_set?set=a.10100422213881817.1073741832.2605101&type=3

7. Photos from my trip to New Orleans: https://www.facebook.com/mgafm/media_set?set=a.10100422226162207.1073741833.2605101&type=3

8. Video of a real rescued baby sea turtle: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10100422239111257

9. Video of koi murdering a butterfly: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10100422242968527

10. Occasionally South Carolina does something amusing in a positive way.

sclawnmower

 

11. I thought I’d try this whole mindful meditation stuff that Greta is doing but I feel totally incapable of teaching myself to do it and the internet seems mostly filled with hippie dippy woo crap.  Thoughts on where to start?

12. Number one on this list so hard.

13. How many of the world’s 197 countries can you name in 15 minutes? I got to 120. I can place all the country names in the middle east in 1:45.  BAM.  I wonder if there’s a world map where you can place names instead of having to remember them off the top of your head?

14. DRUNK DIAL CONGRESS: http://drunkdialcongress.org/

15. Our prison system is just the worst.

16. Once again when a woman says “Guys, don’t do that,” atheist dudes are there to blow the whole thing up and call her irrational and oversensitive.

17. I really miss google maps Wikipedia plugin.  How am I supposed to learn random stuff about Western China?

18. Rebecca wrote a wonderful article about how useless the police are when it comes to online harassment.  It reminds me of my experience with Eddie Kritzer.  First comment? Go to the police.  I did.  And they told me they wouldn’t file a restraining order unless I changed my email and phone number and he kept harassing me.

19. ARGH ANTONIN SCALIA BOOO

20. Me repeatedly today:

jonwhat

 

mugatu

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20 Random Things Friday
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20 thoughts on “20 Random Things Friday

  1. 2

    Ashley,

    Many big hospitals offer mindfulness courses, some free, some not. Also, the Teaching Company sells a course, which is quite excellent. Just wait until its ‘on sale’ for $70. As with other TC courses it is aims for academic rigor.

  2. 3

    11. I thought I’d try this whole mindful meditation stuff that Greta is doing but I feel totally incapable of teaching myself to do it and the internet seems mostly filled with hippie dippy woo crap. Thoughts on where to start?

    Check out the Present Moment podcast and website. It’s specifically dedicated to a secular, evidence-based exploration of meditation and mindfulness.

    http://presentmomentmindfulness.com/

    They have basic meditation instructions on the site:

    http://presentmomentmindfulness.com/meditation-support/basic-meditation-instructions/

    If you want to get in-person instruction, look for something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. I took my class through Kaiser; as Mark R Allen said, other hospitals, clinics, and medical providers offer classes as well.

    1. 4.1

      It’s not that I mind aging as such, I’ve always thought of myself as a middle aged person stuck in a young person’s body, it’s more the crippling fear of the total destruction of my reproductive organs before they are used per the constant chorus of 35, 35, 35.

  3. 5

    Re: #11, I’m barely a regular practictioner of MM, but I really liked the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center’s downloadable guided meditations, particularly the 19 minute one.

    http://marc.ucla.edu/body.cfm?id=22

    My problem is that I don’t want to listen to the same guided meditation every day, but I also find just sitting in silence difficult, so I’ve been (barely, lazily) looking for like a meditation podcast or something that changes it up.

      1. Zencast, Audio Dharma, and The Interdependence Project all have different speakers from time to time. Not many of the speakers try to sever mindfulness practice from its Buddhist roots.

        I think it’s going to be impossible to (1) do a religious practice that has deep roots in a religious context while (2) claiming zero contact or connection with religion, and zero benefit to one’s life obtained from any religion, and (3) maintain integrity. Pick any two.

        1. Well, that depends. Just because they quote the Buddha doesn’t mean they’re getting all supernatural about things.

          Also, your #2 is needlessly absolutist. I don’t see why I can’t follow, e.g., the Noble Eightfold Path, or find benefit in the words of Lao Tzu, and still call myself an atheist.

  4. 9

    Christina Hendricks is almost always wearing a wig or a hair piece.

    This is evidence that just because you’re having a bad hair day doesn’t mean you can’t have a good wig day.

  5. 10

    Re #5: My hair didn’t used to have a part, really. Then it was on one side (I forget which one), now it’s in the center. All of these took years and lots of gel to change from one of the other, but now I’m finally off the gel. The trick was just to grow it long enough that its own weight pulls it down and out from the center, and the ponytail holds it all in check. So it is possible, it just takes a while.

  6. 11

    Being thirty was, ironically, both the time when I started to get proper depression instead of just a vague thought that I Am Doing It Wrong™, and the time when I:
    started to love my body despite the extra pounds that come with being 30
    stopped caring about my baggage and accepting that it wasn’t my fault that someone abused me
    started appreciating my friends even though our lives were going in different directions
    got some wicked awesome cats that are now my little furry penates
    accepted that I am a comfort lover and that this doesn’t make me a horrible person

    Even with the depression I would not go back to being 20-something again. 30s RAWK.

  7. 12

    The best introduction to mindfulness for me, was washing the dishes. Pick a chore that can be done easily on autopilot, but make a point of not being in autopilot. Be present for every scrub.

    Then, bearing that in mind, I moved on to eating. When eating, don’t watch TV. Eat. Don’t think about Zombies vs Aliens. Eat. Dont even think about refilling your spoon until your mouth is empty. There are so many different aspects to the eating exercise that its lessons are bottomless (can you taste, uncritically? Can you stop eating at the perfect time?), and you can apply all of them to day to day life. Everything is eating in one way or another.

  8. 13

    I just read through that Eddie Kritzer post and the comments…that was among the strangest comment sections I’ve ever encountered.

    Obviously. Kritzer himself was a vulgar, incoherent a-hole, but I was thoroughly entertained by his transparent sock-puppity –Why would Art LInkletter and Bill Cosby trust him? He did have those accolades on his website, afterall.

    But it went through the rabbit hole when some other person claiming to be an agent of some sort wrote a long post bashing Kritzer. The juvenile language for a supposed literary agent struck me as odd in the first read-through (lot’s of uses of “LOL!”), and then he started a fairly long back and forth with someone agreeing and reinforcing every point he made with a very similar writing pattern.

    I know that’s tangential to the serious issues that caused you to link to that bit of history in the first place, but man, that was a really, really strange thing to read.

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