Mar
18
Narcissistic personality disorder
March 18, 2009 | 1 Comment
Slate has a great piece on narcissistic personality disorder (NPD):
Shame, that painful sense one has acted in an unacceptable way, is another necessary emotion that is also largely missing from the person with NPD. Since shame feels so terrible, it sounds liberating not to feel it. But psychologist Schore points out a feeling of shame signals that we need to reassess our behavior. “Shame is a moral emotion,” he says. “It’s without feeling shame that the most horrendous acts occur.”
The article suggests that so-called “helicopter parents,” the type who invade children’s lives and make decisions for them, serve on boosters and school committees and basically are my worst nightmare personified, are at least triggering NPD in more children. By smothering children from birth, parents can negate children’s ability to do internal emotional regulation, make children the center of their own worlds, and, sometimes, kill the ability for empathy before it even emerges.
My parents put a lot of trust in me from a very early age, which means, surprise, I’m my own person and don’t need validation from other people. At the same time, I’m painfully empathetic and feel too connected to other people most of the time, something doubtlessly preferable to narcissism.
Mar
17
March 17 Miscellany
March 17, 2009 | 1 Comment
Mega link roundup!
Paradigm Shift — A long-form weekly webcomic detective story set in Chicago. Um, perfect?
Dykes to Watch Out For (a seminal alternative comic strip) spawned the Bechdel Test, in which one character only watches movies with two or more female characters, who talk to each other, and not about men. Amazing.
“Community reading club of Fort Lauderdale” (Google search). Backstory: A confused older man called and asked why we’d sent him a bill, and it turns out he was looking for the so-called Community Reading Club, which is a big regional scam. But when I searched for it on Google I came across dozens of links blotting out the consumer complaint sites, where apparently you PAY them to clog up search results in exactly this way. Oh, jeez.
Google Hacks is a swell little program that can search almost anything for almost anything.
Billy Corgan went to some political thing wearing, well, a suit. And, well, he still looks cool.
And for some truly random linguistical ideas: Orthoepy and barbarism*. Barbarism is the corruption of language, such as nuclear versus nucular.
Mar
17
Mr Incan Empire
March 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment
My fellow alum and former colleague Hunter recently started a concept blog, Mr Incan Empire, which takes place in the modern-day Incan empire. It’s a great idea and ties into a novel he’s shopping around.
Mar
17
Ginger oatmeal cupcakes
March 17, 2009 | 2 Comments
Economic pinch and all, I got tired of eating inappropriate things for breakfast1 or spending money on sort of ridiculous things2. Straight cooked oatmeal kind of grosses me out no matter what I decorate it with, and it never seems filling even though, I know, it’s supposed to be one of the most filling foods there is. Mostly I go straight from hungry to inflated-feeling and right back to hungry again, no thanks.
Inspired by Cake Maker to the Stars‘ Kittee and her cookzine Papa Tofu (Seriously, a great investment), I took her basic vanilla cake recipe, halved it, and fiddled with it a bit in order to make some straightforward cupcakes with mild nutritional value.
• 3/4 c whole wheat flour
• 3/4 c + 1 tbsp unbleached white flour
• 1 cup unbleached granulated sugar
• 1/3 c brown sugar, pretty packed
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp each cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves
• 1 cup liquid (almond milk, orange juice, whatever you want)
• 2/3 c + 1 tsp canola oil
• 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1 tsp vanilla or other extract
• 1 1/2 c cooked oatmeal, drained and pressed to remove extra water
Preheat oven to 350. Combine dry ingredients and mix well. In a separate bowl, combine all wets except oatmeal and mix into dry ingredients. Beat out all lumps. When the batter is smooth, mix in the cooked oatmeal.
If you use foil baking cups, you don’t need a muffin pan, just a cookie sheet with the baking cups lined up on it. Fill them most of the way full, leaving about 1/3 inch at the top. Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. (Check first at 25 minutes.)
They don’t need any frosting, though I wouldn’t discourage you. I didn’t use any, and they have a complex, satisfying flavor and texture. Using ginger paste instead of ground ginger would do something totally different that might be equally good, though you’d want to balance it with a little more flour and sugar.
1 Leftover pizza, saltines
2 $5 for a box of cereal, $2 plus tip for a bagel with hummus
Mar
16
I’m no longer one of those guys
March 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment
There are two love songs I really, really love. They’re both country songs.
Alan Jackson’s “Living on Love”:
Two young people without a thing
Say some vows and spread their wings
Settle down with just what they need
Living on love
Simple, effective.
And Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever Amen”:
You’re not this time that I’m killing
I’m no longer one of those guys
Shakespeare’s sonnets sometimes seem cloying or overly ornate to us now, mostly because of their language. When he wasn’t mocking intentionally, Shakespeare sought to pay simple, meaningful tribute. It’s hard to find both simple and meaningful these days.
Mar
14
The universe gives back
March 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Since my parents went to see Fleetwood Mac my dad has texted or emailed me a Fleetwood Mac-related tidbit or thought at least once a day. This morning, he said he couldn’t find one of their albums to download and his hard copy was cracked.
Well, good thing like 10 years ago I ripped it onto my own computer and have been moving it around to new machines ever since. So I just sent him back a copy, because I’m generational backup.
Mar
13
In the new Esquire, Ben Affleck uses a word I’ve never seen before.
amortize: 1: to pay off (as a mortgage) gradually usually by periodic payments of principal and interest or by payments to a sinking fund; 2: to gradually reduce or write off the cost or value of (as an asset) amortize goodwill, amortize machinery
Mar
12
So quick and so throwaway
March 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment
After a long list of shows ranging from unexceptional to cumbersome (Sugar-pink fuzzy sweaters and matching hats? Really, Chanel?), of course leave it to Alexander McQueen to turn everything upside down.
McQueen’s new collection is sort of a self- and industry-mocking spectacle, exactly what we should be seeing for a season when few people are purchasing anything, let alone the safe or downright dreary — but still couture — crap issuing forth from most of the designers:
After the triumphs of [McQueen's] recent collections, this was a risky show, entirely uncommercial and intentionally provocative, and it generated extreme reactions. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, was visibly ecstatic watching the show; but another magazine editor, afterward, compared the trash-bin styling to “a collection inspired by Wall-E.”
How funny that someone trashed (hurrr) McQueen for a supposedly Wall-E aesthetic when that movie also took a risk and aimed to provoke by commenting on the failing status quo. In a way, this is a crisis time for fashion, but it presents an opportunity too, one which McQueen embraces in this collection: Fashion has the potential to reinvent itself as a legitimate commentary and art form. I can buy safe clothes at the mall. And I can watch reruns of 90210 if I want to relive the 80s.
As part of a recent list of retooling and reinspiring ideas, Seth Godin offers a simple, lovely mantra (from Pivots for change):
Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
Well said.
Mar
11
March 11 Reflection
March 11, 2009 | 5 Comments
At age 23 I’ve already forgotten a substantial amount of things that have happened to me.
Since I’ve been keeping a journal in one fashion or another for the last almost ten years, it makes me wonder if writing things down impedes actually remembering them without the memory jog.
This is both a depressing and a fascinating thought.
Mar
8
March 8 Miscellany
March 8, 2009 | 2 Comments
• Siam Country, my favorite local Thai place, offers these spiciness options for their dishes:
Not Spicy
Mild
Medium
American Spicy
Thai Spicy
Medium turned out to be more than I was prepared for, my bad. But I definitely laughed a lot at “American spicy,” which also sounds imprudent.
• Hearts for Housing happened Friday night and I had a seriously good time, while inadvertently embarrassing a group of lawyers I played with by admitting (when asked!) that I graduated from high school in 2003.
• Thanks to Netflix, I’ve begun an epic quest to watch the entire series of Homicide: Life on the Street, by the same guy who later created The Wire. I believe Homicide to be one of the best TV shows ever made. In fact, here are my top nine in no particular order, excluding single-season shows because those, to me, play out more like movies.
1. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
2. Homicide
3. Six Feet Under
4. M*A*S*H
5. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
6. The Twilight Zone
7. Northern Exposure
8. The Simpsons (up to probably season 8)
9. The Bob Newhart Show
• My parents saw Fleetwood Mac at the Allstate Arena this week and said it totally rocked. I wish I could have gone! As a special karmic punishment, the radio played really good Fleetwood Mac pretty much all weekend long. Thanks a lot, universe.