The day Joe Biden finally took office was, no doubt, going to be a joyous one for many Americans and other people around the world. However, how joyous was it going to be, or could it be, considering we had just come out of four miserable years, and an even more miserable couple of weeks? It’s hard to turn around from long time trauma just like that, as if nothing had happened, especially with a doom and gloom pandemic raging keeping us generally apart from others far more than we’d like to be. But then Bernie Sanders showed up in his hand-knitted, eco-friendly, sustainable, and adorable mittens, and we were all suddenly reminded how beautiful and fun life, the world, and we humans could be! We suddenly had the unorganized, virtual party we couldn’t have right now to celebrate the new American Presidency and the floodgates of joy just didn’t reopen, the dam completely broke to let it that joy held back for four years all come out. I call it the #BernieSandersMittens dam!
Writing
Endo-Cannibalism, Casu Marzu, and Expressing Disgust
I listen to a lot of podcasts. In 2020, I listened to at least a half an hour of podcasts on 7 of every 8 days. I didn’t track how much time, though, because I didn’t think I’d be listening to that much podcast time, like maybe 100 hours? I regretted not keeping those stats to know in 2020, but I’m not too concerned as I know I will be listening to a lot more in 2021 as I find more podcasts I enjoy, and listen more efficiently in life while doing many other things than I did in 2020. Already, in 2021, I am averaging 100 minutes per day (1h 40 min), which, if kept up, will mean I will hit 100 hours by the end of February, ahead of my goal of 500 hours for the year that I have yet to blog about as part of my posts on my resolutions.
Meet my Writing Superhero Identity, Nightwriter!
I’m often working hard to write late into the night these days, fighting a never ending battle against Writer’s Block and Written Diarrhea that it feels too epic for a human writer. As a result, I have conjured up my vision of a writing superhero to visualize my glorious quest to push me through any barrier that stands in my way. I call him Nightwriter, and his symbol is that W you see to the right!
I Had a Dream
Supposedly, we dream four to six times per night. Remembering, them, though, is a different matter. I’m not talking about remembering them in super details, or a long time. I’m just talking about realizing you had a dream when you wake up, whether you could only say a few words about it like something that was involved, or describe it in detail. For dream memory, the going rate seems to be one or twice a week, though the distribution is rather diverse, which is why the rate is once or twice, a 100% margin of error essentially. That’s all great to know, but it has no context for the individual, like me. As a result, with my daily activities tracker that I use to track my performance towards my many resolutions, I had decided to track my dreaming as well.
Money, Happiness, and Psychotherapy
On today’s No Stupid Questions podcast, there was mention of a study on the value of psychotherapy where the study authors (not the podcasters), stated psychotherapy had no value, and arrogantly added, therefore, all the studies that showed psychotherapy had value were now in question. I’ll address that arrogance later, but in the meanwhile, I’ll address the problem with that study’s bias that the podcasters, economist Stephen Dubner and psychologist, Angela Duckworth, didn’t fully reconcile, to my surprise.
Digital Citizen 