Lydia Schoch

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, essays, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Pumpkin Spice. This is so true.

Death and Grieving as an Atheist via tmamone. There’s a lot of good stuff here.

The Suicide Forest and Overtoun Bridge: What Makes Them So Deadly? via ForteanWriter. This article was written by a friend of mine earlier this month. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read so far this autumn.

Children: Like Brain-Eating Zombies but Cuter. It took me ages to pick just one post from this blog to share with my readers. The woman who writes it is extremely funny, so narrowing it down was almost impossible.

Compassion Across Borders: International Disparities in the Vocation of Healthcare Providers. I’d read an entire book on this subject if I could. It’s fascinating.

From I Wasn’t Her Man via Pr4bhas:

Sunday morning, at the cafè I sat
And as I slurped my coffee, she made a face
Quite some etiquette she carried, as she munched away her croissant
Without slurping the coffee, sipped it with a grace.

Earlier this year I recommend the short story excerpt from The Girl With All the Gifts. It was all that was available at the time, but now that the full-length book is out I wanted to talk about it again.

This is the tale of a little girl who lives in a highly militarized, post-apocalyptic world. She’s fed once a week, can’t remember the last time she left the bunker that holds all of the rooms and the classroom. What’s even odder is how afraid all of the soldiers are of her.

If you’re read the short story, you know what I’m leaving out. If you haven’t, this is as many spoilers as I’m willing to give you. The wait was worth it, though. I loved the book every bit as much as I loved the original excerpt.

Science fiction and horror fans, this is a great choice for you.

What have you been reading?

Photo by John Davies.

Someone asked me recently how I’ve managed to slowly tame my email inbox.

First of all, I should say that this is still a work in progress. I definitely don’t have it all figured out, but I’ve had a lot of success with the 5-minute rule.

The whole thing started earlier this year when I began exercising regularly. The hardest part about getting into that habit was convincing myself to do it. It’s really easy to put stuff off if you feel like you have to do the full 30 minutes of cardio or completely empty your inbox every day. Eventually putting it off a few days morphs into a week without any progress, or a week becomes a month.

Rather than give up or wait until I had the motivation to do everything I thought I should do in these areas, I made myself a promise:

Do it for 5 minutes. Once that time is up, you can stop for the day.

You can do anything for 5 minutes…unless you’re trying to hold your breath.

Some days I counted down every last second. When my time was up, I stopped replying or lifting weights or whatever it was I’d been working on as soon as I possibly could.  What I’ve found is that the motivation to keep going often becomes much stronger once you’re already doing whatever it was you’ve been putting off. If it doesn’t work that way on a particular day, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with throwing in the towel after 5 minutes. Over time that has been happening less and less for me, but I don’t beat myself up when I can’t do any more than that.

Exercise is the easier habit of the two now because I’ve been doing it longer. I was sick last week and actually really missed weightlifting while I recovered.

Email is getting there. As I said earlier, I’m still not 100% settled into my new approach to it yet. The amount of time it takes me to reply has gone down, though, and I have gotten a lot better about clearing stuff out of my inbox that I no longer need.

While trying to figure out what to blog about today I received word that my Internet access might be a little spotty this week.

The reptilian part of my brain that used to only squeak when I received word of a particularly violent storm or other, real emergency headed my way woke up.

“Wait, no Internet? We’re not prepared for this!”

As if a short time without Internet access necessitates the same amount of preparation you’d need for a potentially dangerous storm or something.

The funny thing is that I spent most of my childhood not having access to the Internet. It existed for a while before my parents decided to hook up to it. Hell, we didn’t have a television (much less cable) during a few different chunks of my childhood. Theoretically I should be well-equipped to survive a short time without electronic entertainment. We did it for years after all

There are books to read, puzzles to work on, and lots of streets to explore. That’s not even to mention all of the other places I can go during this short period of time when I’ll need to search for other ways to get online.

Yet I’m sitting here planning for this as if it’s something that needs to have all of the kinks worked out of it ahead of time.

It makes me wonder how my niece and nephew will adjust to this kind of thing when they’re adults. Both of them are growing up in a world where you can access wifi almost anywhere that has electricity.

The picture I found for this post is a joke, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s becoming true to a certain extent.

What do you all think?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, history lessons, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Writing About Sex via RoseW007.  I’d love to hear my reader’s thoughts on this topic. Is writing stories about sex more controversial than writing about violence in your social circles?

Curiosity. Fear. Love.  Sometimes I share links here that work better if you click on them without any preconceived ideas about what they might be about. This is one of them.

Workhouse Inmates, A Personal Story via LizanneLloyd. This is one of my favourite kinds of history.

In Defense of Lying. I’m curious to hear what my readers think of white lies.

Always Use Protection via StephNeighbour. There are some people in this world who live out their entire lives based on their fear of what others would think of them. Steph’s approach to them is absolutely perfect.

From Growing Up in Therapy:

My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors.

I don’t normally recommend short stories as my book of the week, but The Lady Astronaut of Mars blew me away.

Imagine being one of the first colonists to move to Mars. You’d see so many exciting changes over the years as humanity adjusted to the idea of seeking out new planets to colonize. It’s hard to discuss the plot in any greater detail than that without giving away spoilers, but I strongly recommend giving it a try to anyone who has a dollar to spare and 20 minutes to sit down and read something wonderful.

This is the kind of story that I find impossible to to put down. While I was immersed in it I actually felt as if I’d stepped into the mindset and body of the main character. It was incredible.

What have you been reading?

Photo by Tomwsulcer.

Earlier this week I came across an insightful link from  Laura L. Hedgecock about why you should write about no good terrible horrible very bad days.

Normally bloggers write these kind of responses to things they vehemently disagree with, but I actually agree with much of what Laura has to say. The purpose of this reply is not to paint a black and white world in which everyone needs to pick one side and stick with it come hell or high water. Anyone who has read more than a handful of my posts knows that’s not my style in the least.

It’s important to find a healthy balance in life, though, so here are my six reasons why you should not write no good terrible horrible very bad days. I hope you read both lists and pick and choose the parts of each one that work best for you:

Some things in life are private.

There are ways to deal with the unpleasant parts of life – whether it’s as trivial as a rude encounter with a stranger or as serious as dealing with a relative who is suffering from an untreated mental illness – without revealing every last detail of it to the outside world.

Once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.

Today it’s even easier for something you wrote to be preserved forever, especially if it ends up online. There’s no way to predict ahead of time where an email, blog post, or note might end up. There’s also no way to erase it if it does go viral.

My maternal grandparents own things that were written by our ancestors many generations ago.  Just because you wrote it down in a diary or on a letter is no guarantee that someone won’t find it valuable. Unless you personally destroy it, there is always a chance that anything you write might still be around in 150 years.

It’s not necessarily your story to tell.

A lot of the rough times in my life have involved the suffering of people I love. I have mixed feelings about discussing this kind of stuff in such a permanent way, so I generally process it either in quiet conversations with those closest to me or by taking long walks instead.

Once enough time has passed, I may change my mind and write about it after all. But I’m pretty protective of the privacy of my friends and family members, and I’d much rather wish I’d said something sooner than regret doing it too soon.

The truth always comes out with time.

I grew up in a family that did not condone gossip in any form. We were taught to look for the good in other people and to say nothing at all if we truly couldn’t think of anything positive to say.

That’s not to say that we ignored the faults in others though. We simply believed that the truth is far too powerful to be held back permanently. They might be fooled temporarily, but eventually everyone will figure out what’s really going on. There’s simply no need to open their eyes before they’re ready to see the truth.

Sometimes emotional reactions can be contradictory or hard to explain.

No two people react the same way to hardship. There are many factors that influence why certain experiences might be much more (or less!) difficult for one person than it is for another. Just because I found experience X easy to deal with doesn’t mean that you will. I’ve also had times when my emotional reaction to something has evolved over time. A topic that was excruciatingly painful 5 or 10 years ago might not be so today.

It can be hard for some people to understand that not everyone feels things the way they do, which leads me to my next point.

Not everyone gets it.

In fact, some of them will go out of their way to take offence at whatever it is they don’t think you’re doing correctly in your life. The more volatile the subject matter, the more likely they are to come out of the woodwork.

I don’t judge those who make other choices, but I choose to give this group of people as little ammunition as possible.  There are a lot of amazing people in my life who do understand. I’d much rather ask them in private what they think instead.

I’m sharing this short film about a man who can’t convince a gigantic rabbit to leave his apartment with my readers for the following reasons:

1. I love rabbits.
2. Storytelling that doesn’t involve words utterly fascinates me.
3. The body language and facial expressions are absolutely perfect.
4. The main character’s journey is a great metaphor for so many difficult things in life.
5. I love rabbits.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Question via STBeals. Rude? Maybe. (Although so was the original question). Effective? Yes.

15 Things You Don’t Owe Anyone At All (Though You Think You Do). This is great.

The Witness.  What I liked the most about this article was how it refused to make assumptions about what its readers thinks. A lot of sites would have trouble not making these assumptions based on how controversial the subject matter is in the U.S.

Life Looked Different 100 Years Ago via HistoryInPics. Who else is mesmerized by old photographs?

Tiny Humans Lost in the Majesty of Nature via purewhitemoly. When I was very young my parents used to take us on hikes through a nature preserve called Goll Woods. It’s one of the very few forests in Northwest Ohio that was never cut down by people when the white settlers showed up. Definitely check it out if your’e ever in the area. It’s a gorgeous place to visit, and I thought of how small it made me feel while scrolling through these pictures.

The Future of College. I hope this model takes off. The cost of a college degree is ridiculously overpriced these days.

From This Is Your Brain on Silence:

As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”

Belle is the true story of the daughter of a slave whose white father acknowledged her as his child. She was raised alongside a cousin by her aunt and uncle in high society London.

It’s a short book in large part because history has forgotten many of the details of Belle’s life. What was preserved is incredible. It doesn’t shy away from the brutality her mother almost certainly experienced as a slave or how uncomfortable some people were with the way Belle was treated. This isn’t a book for people who want to forget the ugly parts of history.

For everyone else, though, this is an unforgettable glimpse into the life of a remarkable woman. From what I understand, it’s been made into a movie as well. I can’t wait to see it!

What have you been reading?

I’ve been on Twitter for almost 6 years now. One of the things I like the most about it is interacting with the wide variety of people I’ve met there: asexuals, artisans, atheists, authors, altruists, anabaptists, academics, acrobats, agnostics, and activists.

And that’s just the first letter of the alphabet. 😉

Yesterday J.D. decided to give his followers a homework assignment. Through the magic of the Internet you can see what he told us to do without clicking away from this post.

Do me a favor and yourself one, give someone a genuine compliment today and a smile right now, seriously go do it!

— J.D. (@iownjd) September 3, 2014

I prefer to keep my random acts of kindness anonymous, so I won’t give away specifics of how I participated in this challenge.  I love being spurred on to do more of them by likeminded friends, though, and wanted to pass it along to my readers.

If you’re comfortable talking about what you’ve done, I’d be interested in hearing about it. If you’re not comfortable with that, no worries. It still counts every bit as much as it does for people who are less private.