Lydia Schoch

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

Guard against cynicism. The truth of the matter is, for all of the problems we face, if you had to choose any moment to be born in human history, not knowing who you were going to be, you’d choose this time. The world is more tolerant than it’s ever been, more educated than its ever been. The only thing that stops that is people thinking they can’t make any change. – President Obama

Fairy Tales Are Women’s Tales. I was obsessed with fairy tales for several years during my childhood. The  darker ones disturbed me sometimes, but they somehow seemed more true than the later versions of the same tales that were heavily sanitized.

I Watched Three Killer Whales Eat Some Sea Lions via JuliaRBarrett. The pictures are what make this such a fascinating post. No, they aren’t graphic.

Your Questions, Please via brucegerencser. Once a year my friend Bruce answer any questions his readers send to him. If you have any interest in Atheism, deconverting from Christianity, politics, living with a disability, or photography, I highly recommend checking out what he’ll be posting in the near future. (This isn’t an exhaustive list of the types of stuff he talks about, but they are a good cross-section of his interests).

Reasons Why I May Change My Opinion. This is great.

Over the River and Through the Woods. So is this. But everything I want to say about it will give you major spoilers, and it’s so much better if you start reading without any hints about the ending!

“Mom, I’m Bored.” Now What? via CarlgrodyliswS. My parents used to agree with us when my brothers or I told them that life was boring or unfair. We’d then talk about possible ways to make it less boring or unfair, but I always appreciated their willingness to be so honest with us.

From Masters of Love:

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were.

Missing Microbes made me think of all of the deliciously morbid* stories I read and heard growing up about distant relatives who died or were seriously injured by things that we rarely fear these days: severe food poisoning, farm accidents, birth defects, childbirth, prematurity.

The world we lived in before antibiotics were invented was heartbreaking and dangerous. A scraped knee or sore throat could heal up without a problem. They could also kill you. What makes this book even better, though, is that most bacteria are harmless or beneficial to humans. We wouldn’t survive without them.

So what happens when overusing antibiotics begins to snuff out the strains that might be doing us the most good? Mr. Blaser has some very interesting theories about this. I don’t know enough about the topic to say if I agree or disagree with him, but I’d love to sit down and pick his brain one day.

*Yes, I was an odd kid. I found this stuff utterly fascinating, not scary. 😉

What have you been reading?

One of my favourite things to do while brainstorming  is to scroll through the search terms that lead new readers to this blog. Someone recently ended up here by typing Can social skills be ruined? in a search engine, and I thought it would make a good topic for today’s post.

Social skills are like muscles.

If you exercise them regularly, they’ll make daily life a little easier.

Some people are born with conditions or into circumstances that make it more difficult for them to do certain things. This isn’t an excuse for bad behaviour when it comes to social skills, but it is an explanation for why certain things happen. (Perhaps one of these days I should blog about the difference between excuses and explanations?  🙂 )

It’s much easier to criticize how someone else is doing them than to improve your own weak spots. Every year I become less willing to tell other people what to do unless they seek out my advice. Figuring out the best choices for myself is challenging enough.

A muscle can atrophy if it’s injured severely enough, you’re bedridden,  or if you have a degenerative disease.

I’d argue that the same can be said for social skills. Most people are capable of improving, but there are rare cases when this isn’t possible. Listing them would require much more space than I have for this post.

If you’re self-aware enough to ask this question, though, there’s always hope.

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

The Secret Life of the Depressed Exposed via Monica_Wilcox. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out the right person to attribute this quote to, but it came to mind while reading this confession.

What Feminism Means, According to Kids. This is great. It’s funny to see just how long it takes kids to figure out adult society.

Is Self-Improvement Just Another Word for Self-Loathing?  I don’t think so, but this blogger does make a good point about the dangers of spending too much time thinking about our flaws.

Stop Being Strong via ohheynina. I love this.

From The Truth About the Amish:

But right now, that’s what the future held for this big gelding: a trip to Canada, or one to Mexico– with no possible chance of reprieve. No one could save him, because the seller decided to get a guaranteed price (perhaps less) by selling directly to the kill buyer than taking their chances in the auction ring.  Who does that to their horses? Who steals from them their very, very last chance?

The Amish, that’s who.

From I. Don’t. Think. He’s. There via lovejoyfeminism:

Quite frankly, I didn’t leave Christianity—it left me. I just couldn’t believe anymore. It stopped making sense. And as it stopped making sense, my personal relationship with Jesus became more distant. I tried to hold on, but it was like trying to grab hold of a ghost. Tired of fighting, I let go, and avoided thinking about any of it for a few weeks.

The Remedy is one of the saddest and yet most fascinating medical history books I’ve read this year. Tuberculosis was once endemic in Europe. It was almost impossible to live there without being exposed to it at some point because the bacteria that causes it was everywhere.

If not for how often it killed people, I’d compare it to something like a cold sore or the common cold. It was simply part of everyday life for a surprisingly large portion of the population. What piqued my interest in this book even more, though, was that most people never developed any symptoms after being exposed to it. As soon as the bacteria settled int other lungs, their immune systems basically encapsulated the invaders to prevent them from doing any damage.

You could live the rest of your life with a tiny graveyard of tuberculosis germs in your lungs, and you’d never know that they were even there. I’d always assumed that this disease eventually killed almost everyone who had it, so it was fascinating to see how most people’s bodies were able to fight it off.

This is an excellent choice for anyone who loves reading about medicine or history. It’s also fascinating to see how scientists came up with a cure for this disease given that the cure is beginning to fail with certain, virulent strains of it these days. Scary stuff!

What have you been reading?

Drew and I started dating. We don’t pose for many pictures together, but this is one of the earliest ones of us I could find. It was taken a year or so after we got married.

We met on a now-defunct Christian message board called The Ooze in late 2003 or early 2004. I don’t remember the specific day or month anymore, only that his posts made me laugh almost as much as they made me think.

He smelled nice. The pauses in our conversations were never awkward, even though I can be pretty quiet when I meet someone for the first time.  We wanted the same things out of life – no kids, no pets, and a quiet, simple life in the best city I’ve ever known.

A year later we got married. I’ll save the story of how that happened for our proper 10 year anniversary. As far as I know, all of the time you spent dating somehow stops counting once you’re married 😛

I read a lot of books about marriage and relationships when I was younger. Why? I read everything, and sometimes books are more interesting if you don’t agree with them. It’s boring to stick to one genre or school of thought.

To each their own, but it never made sense to me to distill something as complex as a relationship into bullet points and a one size fits all mentality, though. It still doesn’t.

People aren’t machines. You can’t get what you want from them by pushing the right buttons. What works for me might be a dismal failure for someone else.

So far, so good.  🙂

This is a fantastic explanation of why poetry matters.

I always seem to run low on blog post ideas this time of year.

Is there anything you’d me to write about? I’m open to any and all ideas!

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

Graveyard Shift via prnancarrow. Everything I want to say about this post will give away spoilers. Sometimes stories work better if you go into them without any clue what they might be about, and I think this is one of them.

Be More Like Dandelion. Dandelions have always been my favourite flower. This is why.

The Face of Evil via CGAyling. I’m sharing this with the knowledge that it might offend some of my readers, but I’m willing to take that risk.

Litany for My Mother’s Body. This is quite the story.

Spilled Milk: Dads and Bras via davidbadash. Hilarious! I wonder how these dads would have handled a daughter like me who couldn’t care less about these things?

From The Great American Chain Gang:

Compensation varies from state to state and facility to facility, but the median wage in state and federal prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively.

Because inmate workers are not considered “employees” under the law, they have none of the protections that word implies.

A Guide to Being Born is the most inventive short story collection I’ve read in 2014.

It’s difficult to discuss the plots of any of these tales without giving away spoilers, but I was impressed by every single one of them. If I had to choose a favourite, it would be “Safe Passage.” In it a group of elderly women mysteriously find themselves travelling on a massive ship. None of them can remember how they got there and no one has any clue where they’re going.

I figured out what was (probably) going on pretty quickly, but I still loved the process of sifting through all of their theories. This story, like all of the ones in this collection, has complex characters that I really enjoyed getting to know.

What have you been reading?

I’m in the middle of sprucing up this blog.

Suggestion Saturday will be published on time tomorrow as usual, but please excuse any temporarily unavailable pages or other possible tomfoolery over the next few days.

You never know what will happen when you play around with the back end of your blog.

( This also wouldn’t be a proper site maintenance update post without at least one bunny. You’re welcome. 😉 )

Photo by Agustín Ruiz from Mendoza, Argentina.

I’ll admit it – I’m not that good at keeping in touch.

Losing track of what friends and relatives are up to these days isn’t something I do on purpose. It’s always nice to hear about the new babies, spouses, jobs, and creative projects in their lives, not to mention the more mundane stuff like forwarding a funny video to  so-and-so because I think he or she will like it.

But life happens. A week becomes a month, a month becomes a year. There are so many other things to accomplish in a day that sustaining these relationships gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. Before you know it, it’s been far too long since you sent your last email, text, or postcard (for the rare relative who can’t be found anywhere online).

One of my goals for this summer is to get better at reaching out to people I haven’t spoken to in a while. It only takes a few minutes to write an email or send a card, but it will be fun to hear what’s new in everyone’s lives. I’ll be updating my readers on this experiment over the next few months.

For those of you who are better at keeping in touch than I am, how do you make it part of your routine? Everyone else, I’d love to hear about your results if you choose to join me!