Category — Uncategorized

This kid at the school science fair had a really cool project looking at how closely people’s personalities align with the traits commonly assigned to various star signs.  I know that doesn’t sound very scientific, but it was more in the personality psychology vein.  Anyway, he had you circle 5 positive traits about yourself and 5 negative traits to join the research.

While I didn’t align at all with Gemini traits, it was interesting to boil down my personality to a few adjectives.  I wish I could find the sheet.  The only things I remember putting down were anxious and inflexible.

My parents are not anxious or inflexible, so I didn’t learn this from them.  My kids are not inflexible, but they are definitely anxious.  Actually, they’re anxious-lite; more cautious than anxious.

Anyway, on the heels of that science fair project, the Atlantic had a very interesting article on personality psychology that outlined this question: “To what extent is our personality given to us, and to what extent do we make it ourselves?”

I definitely didn’t choose to be anxious, and I don’t enjoy being anxious, but while I can temper my anxiety from day to day, it would feel really unnatural to try to be carefree.  I’m just not a carefree, wind-in-my-hair type person, and it would feel as if I were acting if I pretended otherwise.  So… inherited… right?  Except it’s probably learned?  But from where?

It’s an interesting discussion, and the Atlantic article made me want to read more about it.  Not about Trump as it states at the end of the article, since he makes me tired, but personality psychology in general as applied to myself.  Because it’s all about meeeeeeeeeeee.

Do you have the same personality traits as your parents?

I paid the ChickieNob 25 cents for a “selfie lesson” so I could learn how to take a great image of myself with Truman during tummy time. Truman didn’t really listen to my advice to look into the little dot at the top of the phone. But he did, at least, lean in close.

Still paralyzed, but also still eating and drinking and wheeking for cookies.  So no change, but I added another antibiotic yesterday.

Truman is sick again.  On Monday night, he stopped using his back legs.  His front legs work fine, and he can drag himself forward by those paws.  But his right leg is tucked uselessly under his body, and he’s dragging it around like a deflated balloon.

The vet said, as always, bring him in.

He has lost weight again despite eating enormous amounts of food.  She took x-rays to rule out a fracture, which leaves us with two possibilities.  An infection (the same one or a new one) that is affecting his nervous system.  Or cancer.

The twins’ faces crumpled when she said that word — how can your face not crumple when you hear that word? — and we continued the conversation silently through stares and shrugs.  What can we do if it’s cancer, I asked aloud.  Nothing, she told me with her eyes and a head tilt.

So now we wait.  And we give him the antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory drug.  It may be an infection or it may be cancer, and we won’t know until we know.

*******

We went down to Hilton Head on holiday.  The ocean is fairly calm, and you can walk far out into the water.

We were jumping waves in the sense that we were bobbing up and down every time a gentle wave passed by, and I was hanging off of Josh’s back because the last time I put my foot down in the water, I accidentally stuck it in a crab’s pincer.  I rationally know that oceans are not swimming pools and they are homes for animals, but… I don’t like the reminder.

So we’re in the water when a man comes running down the beach and screams, “Massive shark!  Get out of the water!”

Fuck the crabs!  I race for the shore, screaming at Josh, “Get my daughter out of the water!” (Like that I get all possessive when panicked?  She’s suddenly mine and only mine.) When we get to the sand, I turn around to survey the water, expecting to see a huge dorsal fin where we were just bobbing.  But nothing is there.

When the man loops back, I stop him to ask about the shark.  Massive shark, he told me, came within 10 feet of his child.  He was running up the beach to warn people.  But where is it? I asked.

Over there, he pointed, many many yards away.  We could have swam towards the shore at a normal pace, and it still wouldn’t have reached us.

But isn’t that life?  Everything seems dangerous until it’s not dangerous, and simultaneously, everything feels fine until you realize it isn’t fine.  It could be a calm day in the ocean or it could be the seconds before a shark attack.  It could be an infection or it could be cancer.

You just never know until you know.

Sleep is one of those things we expect people to learn on their own, like eating or breathing.  We don’t really teach people how to eat, even though they may need lessons to improve their relationship with food, and we don’t really teach people how to breathe, even though yoga studios offer lessons on how to full inflate your lungs.

Sleep falls into that category.  We expect babies to know that at some point in their day, they should close their eyes and lose consciousness.

But I am living proof that not everyone naturally gets it.

I am really terrible at falling asleep and staying asleep.  I’ve tried all the tips sleep experts offer up, and all of them are sound ideas for people who already know how to fall asleep.  But that is my problem — I don’t know how to make myself sleep.  It doesn’t naturally happen when I close my eyes.  I can keep my eyes closed for hours, thinking about nothing, and I still don’t fall asleep.  Nothing is keeping me up, in the same way that nothing is holding me back from fixing my own car except for the fact that I don’t know how to do it.

Sometimes I fall asleep by chance only to wake back up a few hours later.  I am just as unknowledgeable at staying asleep as I am at falling asleep.  I have never been able to nap unless I’m operating at such a sleep deficit that my body switches to autopilot.

There are a lot of articles on the importance of sleep, and I believe everything they say.  There are manifestos about setting aside time for sleep, and posts about limiting screen time before bed, and articles about what to eat for a good night’s sleep.

But zero books that explain how to force your brain to take a few hours off.

Do you fall asleep and stay asleep easily?

It’s the weekend, and a long weekend at that if you live in the United States.  Monday is a holiday, which means that people generally scatter offline for three days.  They may post an update to Twitter or throw up a picture on Instagram, but my rss reader has been a little thin this weekend.

My rss reader rarely feels emaciated.  This is because I am constantly replenishing it with new blogs.  Sure, bloggers stop writing, but new ones step into their place, and I add them to my reader.  But even so, long weekends mean that tumbleweeds roll through the semi-empty reader; the only posts peeking up are the ones from large sites giving me 10 new uses for popsicles and 5 reasons I should apply extra sunscreen.

Not that there’s anything wrong with good, old-fashioned, informative posts.  I can read them for a bit, but after the third post on the topic du jour (is it something asinine that Trump said or a new meme sweeping the Internet?), I get tired.

I like personal blogs; especially posts that make me think or see the world from a different point of view.  I’m willing to wait until after the weekend to get them again.

I recently read a post on internet overload.  It stems from the fear that you’ll miss out on an important fact if you skip over a story or take a break from Twitter for a few days.  That scrolling past more is better than pausing on a single thought:

A person’s fear of being left behind because he failed to consume enough data may start to outweigh the need to understand exactly why you are consuming this data in the first place. Every minute of the day, Facebook users share 2.5 million pieces of content, Twitter users tweet 300,000 times, YouTube users upload 72 hours of video, and 200 million emails are sent.

That is a lot of content.

Knowing so much exists is somewhat freeing because clearly no person can consume everything being produced.  It’s impossible, so there is no harm in taking a step back and not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by the deluge of tweets and status updates and photos and videos.  It’s okay to not tap into the zeitgeist for a long weekend because the zeitgeist will still be there on Tuesday, churning out more things to read or gaze at or share.

It’s funny; I get weighed down by tweets.  I get overwhelmed by photos on Facebook.  I get tired of reading article after article about how I’m doing everything wrong, or the latest election news, or how the world is going to hell.

But I never get internet overload from personal blogs.  From hearing people’s stories.

Sometimes the stories are so sad that I need to step back for a moment to catch my breath, but I never walk away from personal blogs feeling as if my brain is buzzing and I can only skim the surface and no longer dive deeply into words.

Hope you come back from the long weekend and write about it.  Or tell us what you’re doing to relax today.