Lately

I've been in a creative mood lately. So I am working on a few poems with borrowed rhyme schemes and accessories over on Rampant Letters. If I re-edited forever, I would have some nice poems. :)

I have also been busy with so many projects around the house etc. My energy is back. Now if only I had endless free time....

My short diatribe on religion in response to someone that believed it was counterproductive for minorities.

' Karl Marx, had an ambivalent and complex attitude to religion viewing it primarily as "the opium of the people" that had been used by the ruling classes to give the working classes false hope for millennia, while at the same time recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions. '  - Wilkipedia

Many civil rights leaders use churches to organize protest and use the freedom to worship as a strong tool toward change. Nonviolence adds legitimacy to a cause and violence often leads to the dissolution of the movement. The church at Ferguson that was used as a training ground for protesters is a recent example of the positive. The shootings in Charleston served to delegitimize white supremacy groups because they are associated with attacks on good people, people who are so good they are willing to publicly forgive. Religion is a mixed bag. It can be what motivates you towards good or evil, and can be a ball and chain to either hold you back from progress or ground you to resist behaviors that lead to failure.

Evolution of the Hipster / Paste Magazine

The latest hipster evolutionary tree explains a lot. :) 

Some of these days...

The Twin Peaks soundtrack is glorious but no selection is better than Laura's Theme for the mood. There are days at work that are exactly like this: the remembering that slowly fades into the present. I can think of no other place in my life that this pattern manifests itself more strongly. At home, even in dark moods I can just lay down, pull up the covers and think of how lucky I am to be able to do so knowing all of the places I could be that are worse off than my present.

The Measure of the Cut

The measure of the cut of the tomato depends on its intended culinary usage.

The measure of a man is in small things that define a previously sculpted character.

I spend my last days giving away credit for my ideas and the things I do. I give the credit to others to help with their lives, to make them feel better, and darn it to make them like me (actually to make me like me.) However, when those things are snatched which I would have otherwise freely and selflessly given... it is a reflection on that particular wielder of the paring knife. The peels are away and the true tomato is shown with all its seeds and slimy stuff which in truth I love except when a clump falls on my shirt.

Join us next time for:

I would give the shirt off my back for a really nice tomato sandwich.

Or,

If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives.*

 *proper credit to Robert South

                                                                                          

Loneliness Is Deadly

Social isolation kills more people than obesity does—and it’s just as stigmatized.

By Jessica Olien    Slate    /   slate.com

Over the winter I moved from New York City to Portland, Ore. The reasons for my move were purely logical. New York was expensive and stressful. Portland, I reasoned, would offer me the space and time to do my work.

Upon arriving, I rented a house and happily went out in search of "my people." I went to parks, bookstores, bars, on dates. I even tried golfing. It wasn't that I didn't meet people. I did. I just felt no connection to any of them.

Once social and upbeat, I became morose and mildly paranoid. I knew I needed to connect to people to feel better, but I felt as though I physically could not handle any more empty interactions. I woke up in the night panicked. In the afternoon, loneliness came in waves like a fever. I had no idea how to fix it.

Feeling uncertain, I began to research loneliness and came across several alarming recent studies. Loneliness is not just making us sick, it is killing us. Loneliness is a serious health risk. Studies of elderly people and social isolation concluded that those without adequate social interaction were twice as likely to die prematurely.

The increased mortality risk is comparable to that from smoking. And loneliness is about twice as dangerous as obesity.

Social isolation impairs immune function and boosts inflammation, which can lead to arthritis, type II diabetes, and heart disease. Loneliness is breaking our hearts, but as a culture we rarely talk about it.

Loneliness has doubled: 40 percent of adults in two recent surveys said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s.

All of our Internet interactions aren’t helping and may be making loneliness worse. A recent study of Facebook users found that the amount of time you spend on the social network is inversely related to how happy you feel throughout the day.

In a society that judges you based on how expansive your social networks appear, loneliness is difficult to fess up to. It feels shameful.

About a decade ago, my mom was going through a divorce from my step-father. Lonely and desperate for connection, she called a cousin she hadn’t talked to in several years. On the phone, her cousin was derisive: “Don’t you have any friends?”

While dealing with my own loneliness in Portland I often found myself thinking, "If I were a better person I wouldn't be lonely."

“Admitting you are lonely is like holding a big L up on your forehead,” says John T. Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, who studies how loneliness and social isolation affect people’s health.

He admitted that on an airplane he once became acutely embarrassed while holding a copy of his own book, which had the word Loneliness emblazoned on the front cover. He had the impulse to turn the cover inside-out so that people couldn’t see it. “For the first time I actually experienced the feeling of being lonely and everyone knowing it,” he says.

After the public learned of Stephen Fry’s suicide attempt last year, the beloved British actor wrote a blog post about his fight with depression. He cited loneliness as the worst part of his affliction.

“Lonely? I get invitation cards through the post almost every day. I shall be in the Royal Box at Wimbledon and I have serious and generous offers from friends asking me to join them in the South of France, Italy, Sicily, South Africa, British Columbia, and America this summer. I have two months to start a book before I go off to Broadway for a run of Twelfth Night there.

I can read back that last sentence and see that, bipolar or not, if I’m under treatment and not actually depressed, what the fuck right do I have to be lonely, unhappy, or forlorn? I don’t have the right. But there again I don’t have the right not to have those feelings. Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.

In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems.”

Most of us know what it is like to be lonely in a room full of people, which is the same reason even a celebrity can be deeply lonely. You could be surrounded by hundreds of adoring fans, but if there is no one you can rely on, no one who knows you, you will feel isolated.

In terms of human interactions, the number of people we know is not the best measure. In order to be socially satisfied, we don’t need all that many people. According to Cacioppo the key is in the quality, not the quantity of those people. We just need several on whom we can depend and who depend on us in return.

As a culture we obsess over strategies to prevent obesity. We provide resources to help people quit smoking. But I have never had a doctor ask me how much meaningful social interaction I am getting. Even if a doctor did ask, it is not as though there is a prescription for meaningful social interaction.

Both Denmark and Great Britain are devoting more time and energy to finding solutions and staging interventions for lonely people, particularly the elderly.

When we are lonely, we lose impulse control and engage in what scientists call “social evasion.” We become less concerned with interactions and more concerned with self-preservation, as I was when I couldn’t even imagine trying to talk to another human. Evolutionary psychologists speculate that loneliness triggers our basic, fight vs. flight survival mechanisms, and we stick to the periphery, away from people we do not know if we can trust.

In one study, Cacioppo measured brain activity during the sleep of lonely and nonlonely people. Those who were lonely were far more prone to micro awakenings, which suggest the brain is on alert for threats throughout the night, perhaps just as earlier humans would have needed to be when separated from their tribe.

One of the reasons we avoid discussing loneliness is that fixing it obviously isn’t a simple endeavor.

Even though the Internet has possibly contributed to our isolation, it might hold a key to fixing it. Cacioppo is excited by online dating statistics showing that couples who found each other online and stayed together shared more of a connection and were less likely to divorce than couples who met offline. If these statistics hold up, it would stand to reason friendships could also be found in this way, easing those whose instincts tell them to stay on the periphery back into the world with common bonds forged over the Internet.

Me? I moved back to New York.

Jessica Olien is a writer and illustrator living in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter.