elainegrey

Ooof. So, i think i read comics all yesterday because i forgot to take my antidepressant. Today i braved the weather outside and ...wow, am i out of shape. Not only did i melt into a puddle (dew point was 75°F for the high 70s -low 80s temperatures. It wasn't hot but it was terribly muggy) but i think i exerted myself in a way i haven't in ages. In good news i managed to beat back some of the horrible overgrowth so i can get to the garden. But as i dug potatoes i found many with a milky rot, and i didn't find that many (admittedly, i probably didn't find them all because i was not well motivated). I've got a good growth of a new weed that might beat stilt grass. It's native, but i wonder how well we will get along:

Virginia buttonweed (Diodia virginiana) is one of the most difficult-to-control broadleaf weeds in turf. It commonly proliferates in poorly drained areas and can tolerate mowing heights as low as one-half inch. This deep-rooted perennial produces both above- and below-ground flowers. Its prolific seed production, extensive root system and ability to vegetatively reproduce make control extremely difficult.

http://www.tennesseeturfgrassweeds.org/Lists/Fact%20Sheets/Attachments/9/w147updated2015.pdf

And when i was running the wheeled string trimmer i caught some of the fencing and ripped a big hole.

So, i'm sort of bummed, but i can get to the garden now. I also found two of my sweet peppers fruits had rotted. I dunno: it's been wet. I think that the corner where i dug up the potatoes is a little more wet than other areas in the garden (oddly, because it's up hill, but i think it catches the run off.

Last night we watched "Hell or High Water" (2016, "neo-Western heist drama"). I'd seen the trailer some months ago and thought it looked good, but ... ambiguous. How dark would it get? How depressing? There are so many times that what i want from entertainment is comfort and diversion, and i couldn't tell how affecting this would be.

The good about the film: it's well crafted, and it's a story of the part of the United States left out the post 2008 recovery. I wanted to say that the movie presented the events as morally ambiguous, but that's not it. It's the portrayal of desperation in the face of other wrongs, of the layers and layers of wrongs. The film makes it clear with the opening scene graffiti: “3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US.” I'm not sure i felt sympathy for anyone in particular, just a great sense of the layers of inequities. The film came out in 2016, at the very end of the Obama administration: i wonder about the sterotypes and wonder about the truth.

The bad? Well, the gendered and racial ruts are pretty deep. One character does things for his sons, and i turn over in my mind why it wasn't for his kids. I could go on with the spoilers.

I only went to one session at today's conference, where a woman talked about the power of storytelling. I split, with one part of me enthusiastic and celebrating: yes, reframe! Yes, shape your reality! And another part distrustful. There's such subtlety, a yes and no. Yes, i do think that some parts of one's lived experience are completely malleable to framing. I also don't believe all people are equally capable of reframing to the same extent.

I could be wrong about that. This research https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095985/ indicates that one's susceptibility to someone else's frame is independent of cognitive style. But the ability to convince oneself of an alternative frame?

I want to believe i am frame-flexible, that i can reframe experiences to be enjoyable more than average. It's something, though, that comes from being raised in a household where my mother was unendingly critical and a perfectionist, along with incredibly anxious.

... ...

and then discussions were hard and there were tears and i just don't know but keeping one breath after another, one heart beat after another, and trust that some how i'll do more good than harm on this planet.

It is entertaining that i get my cognitive science/psychology snippets from Harvard's Business School. Entertaining, and creepy, in that the folks who are studying how we think are the folks who want to make or save a buck.

I haven't read the paper yet, so i don't know how much evidence is behind "Human nature being what it is" (did research turn this up or is this just an assumption?) but this insight seems intriguing.

A new paper by Robyn A. LeBoeuf and Michael Norton begins, "Imagine that your computer suddenly crashes: the screen turns black, the power drains away, and you cannot bring it back to life. How might you determine the cause of this event?" Human nature being what it is, they continue, instinct is to pin the cause on something that equates with the outcome. If the result was a small outcome—losing an e-mail that was of no consequence—then we might attribute the crash to a lunch burrito leaking on the keyboard. But if the outcome had serious repercussions—a wedding invitation list lost permanently—then we decide the cause must have been a targeted computer virus. Furthermore, we ratchet up or down our response to the event based in part on where we assess blame. We tend to link cause with outcome because it prevents us from perceiving ourselves to be at the mercy of capricious and arbitrary forces: "What do you mean a leaky burrito ruined my wedding?" Understanding this reaction can help firms plan for the choices made by consumers after a product has failed them. Read "Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes."

By the way, are we assuming this is a laptop that you've drooled your burrito on? Because a hacker isn't going to do anything that drains the power away. Bad power supply is more like it. Or, fan died and you've overheated. (Have a colleague who, when his disk was encrypted, his computer started crashing, and just putting an external fan system under the laptop stopped the crashing.)