Share Your World – 2016 Week 50

Thanks to Cee for this week’s challenge, Share Your World – 2016 Week 50.

share-your-world

What is your favorite smell? What memory does it remind you of?

I have always loved the smell of lilacs. Since they bloom in late spring, they are among the flowers that herald the coming of summer. When I wanted lilacs in my wedding bouquet for my June 5th wedding, my mother cut some of the last fresh blooms and kept them in her refrigerator for about a week so they’d last just that bit longer. I think I also like them because my grandmother had lilac bushes, and during much of my life I had a lilac bush that was started with a rooting from her bush.

What type of pet do you have or want to have?

I have always been a cat person: all my pets have been cats. But right now I don’t want to have any pet. We are trying to do some major traveling during our early retirement, and a pet would seriously complicate that aim. So, at least for now, we are petless by choice.

Are you usually late, early, or right on time?

I am so afraid of being late that I end up being early (sometimes even ridiculously early) for everything. That’s why I almost always have a magazine or book with me, so I can read, especially if I’m so early that I have to go somewhere or sit in the car for a while.

For recharging, would you rather meditate, swim, walk, listen to music, write, read, yoga, qigong other?

For clearing my head, walking is my best activity. Writing helps me to figure out and understand what I think or feel about something, but that’s such an active undertaking that I don’t think of it as “recharging.” The same is true of reading for me. It’s such a participatory activity that I don’t think of it as “recharging,” although I admit that it often does teach me something new.

Optional Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

I’m looking forward to next weekend’s Christmas Eve celebration with my husband and daughter.

Have a good week, everyone.

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Share Your World – 2016 Week 49

Thanks to Cee for this week’s challenge, Share Your World – 2016 Week 49.

share-your-world

What do you value most in a friendship?

Not too long ago I had to break off a close friendship because the other party did not demonstrate one quality that I require in a friend: reciprocity. My philosophy of friendship is that when I’m at the top of the wheel of life and you’re at the bottom, I’ll do whatever I can to help you about. But I also assume that, when that big wheel of life turns, leaving you at the top and me at the bottom, you’ll do likewise for me. My former friend was a taker: I did all the giving and she did all the taking. When I was on the wheel’s downturn, she had neither the time nor the inclination to help me out with a sympathetic ear or a caring pat on the back.

I finally had to break off the friendship because she neither respected nor appreciated me. So I guess those are two more qualities I value in a friend: respect and appreciation. But reciprocity still tops my list, because friendship requires mutual respect and appreciation.

Do you prefer eating the frosting of the cake or the cupcake first? Do you prefer a specific flavor?

I break the cupcake roughly in half horizontally and eat the bottom first. I save the part with the frosting to savor last.

Have you ever been in a submarine? If you haven’t, would you want to?

Yes, I have been in a submarine, but it was not submerged. A few years ago we toured a former WW II submarine on display at one of the piers at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. I was glad to see the interior, but I was also very glad to emerge at the other end.

I am slightly claustrophobic, and I also have a primal aversion to anything requiring me to go under water for more than a few seconds. I can put my face into the water to swim, but I’m not going all the way under for anything. For these reasons, being in a submarine under water is my personal vision of hell.

If 100 people your age were chosen at random, how many do you think you’d find leading a more satisfying life than yours?

Not very many. Retirement has been good to me. I love where I live (in the Pacific Northwest, where I can see the mountains and the ocean), and I now have few obligations to do anything I don’t want to do. I love my life.

Optional Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

Yesterday was our daughter’s birthday. All her life we have put off Christmas preparations until after her birthday so that she wouldn’t feel ignored on her special day. Even though she’s now well into adulthood, we still wait to start doing Christmas. Now that we’ve celebrated her birthday, I can begin to get into the Christmas spirit.

So let me expend my best wishes to everyone who observes a holiday at this time of year.

I hope everybody has a great week!

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Here are some of the articles I’ve been reading around the web lately.

Protecting Your Digital Life in 7 Easy Steps

Some suggestions for how to make your personal data”more difficult for attackers to obtain.”

What’s the Use of Regret?

Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, contemplates the meaning and function of regret, especially the type that he calls “moral regret.”

How Exercise Might Keep Depression at Bay

For those of us who need yet another reminder of how important physical exercise is:

Exercise may be an effective treatment for depression and might even help prevent us from becoming depressed in the first place, according to three timely new studies. The studies pool outcomes from past research involving more than a million men and women and, taken together, strongly suggest that regular exercise alters our bodies and brains in ways that make us resistant to despair.

Is Grief a Disease?

Common wisdom advises us that there are no right or wrong ways to grieve, that all people handle grief differently and in their own way. This article takes a long look at grief, including a new approach to something called “complicated grief”:

complicated grief is more chronic and more emotionally intense than more typical courses through grief, and it stays at acute levels for longer. Women are more vulnerable to complicated grief than men. It often follows particularly difficult losses that test a person’s emotional and social resources, and where the mourner was deeply attached to the person they are grieving. Researchers estimate complicated grief affects approximately 2 to 3 per cent of the population worldwide. It affects 10 to 20 per cent of people after the death of a spouse or romantic partner, or when the death of a loved one is sudden or violent, and it is even more common among parents who have lost a child. Clinicians are just beginning to acknowledge how debilitating this form of grief can be. But it can be treated.

What I found most interesting here is that this approach to helping people cope with grief involves storytelling:

Grief is a problem of narrative. A story, in order to be told, needs a narrator with a point of view who offers a perspective on what happened. But you can’t narrate if you don’t know who you are… . Plotting out the story restores the narrator and the narrative. Then, you can begin to imagine a new story, a new plot for yourself.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Share Your World – 2016 Week 48

Thanks to Cee for this week’s challenge, Share Your World – 2016 Week 48.

share-your-world

Do you prefer eating foods with nuts or no nuts?

I like a good nut in things like cookies and brownies. I even eat nuts by themselves sometimes, particularly almonds and macadamia nuts.

And I like Almond Joys, because sometimes I feel like a nut.

If someone made a movie of your life would it be a drama, a comedy, a romantic-comedy, action film, or science fiction?

I imagine a movie of my life would be a drama, or perhaps a melodrama. When I was a kid my mother used to tell me that I think too much. Sometimes too much thinking leads to overdramatization. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a drama queen, but I do like to try to look at things from more than one angle.

Who talks real sense to you?

My husband. He’s a scientist by training, so he helps me analyze and evaluate things instead of simply reacting emotionally.

Do you have a favorite board game?

As a child, I played Parcheesi with my grandmother. I loved the game, but I think what I loved more than the actual game was the fact that my grandmother played it with me.

When my daughter was young, my husband and I would play Sorry!, which is a modern adaptation of Parcheesi, with her. Again, I think that I liked the family time just as much as, if not more than, the game itself. We all enjoyed the opportunity to yell “Sorry!” as each other while sending the most advanced man back to the beginning.

As an adult I enjoyed Trivial Pursuit, which we played with friends. But it’s been many, many years since we’ve played that, or any other board game. I don’t think any games came with us in our most recent move.

Maybe we should see about starting a board game club here at our retirement community, since we don’t play bridge.

Optional Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

We were out of town for much of October. Yesterday was our monthly Lunch Bunch trip, and I was glad of the opportunity to reconnect with friends over a lovely lunch. I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things in the upcoming weeks.

I hope everyone has a good week.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Rewriting Your Nightmares

Tara Parker-Pope reports that as many as 25% of adults have at least one nightmare a month. And, she says, most people don’t realize that having chronic nightmares is a medical problem that can be treated with “‘imagery rehearsal therapy,’ a pioneering technique developed by Dr. Barry Krakow at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.” This approach “looks for ways to rewrite a nightmare’s script” by allowing the dreamer “to rewrite the nightmare during the day” using basic imagery techniques. The dreamer creates a better version of the dream, then practices that version by imagining it several times throughout the day.

Local writer specializes in telling life stories 

Here’s the heartening story of Gloria VanDemmeltraadt, who has found the calling of her later years in serving as a volunteer life story writer for people in hospice:

When a person is admitted to a hospice program, they are able to choose whether they would like a story done. Gloria receives the assignment and then spends several hours interviewing the patient, asking questions about their lives. She said the saddest thing she often hears is “I wish I had asked my mom that” and similar regrets about understanding the lives of our older relatives. Putting families in touch with older generations is part of her mission as a volunteer.

In her interviews she directs patients to focus on the better parts of their lives, especially childhood memories and family stories that are meaningful to them. Her aim is to produce a life story of 15 to 20 pages as a legacy for the patient’s family.

What’s up with these creepy clowns?

I hadn’t heard anything about this phenomenon when I came across this article:

Across the nation, and even across seas, people have been calling police to report being menaced by people in clown costumes. An expert in the field of group psychology at Washington State University says there are several factors that could play into the motives of the “deviant” jesters.

According to one psychologist cited, such behavior can occur during times of tension, conflict, and anxiety. Read how these incidents may have developed through the principle of deindividuation and been spread through social contagion.

WHY DEEP LEARNING IS SUDDENLY CHANGING YOUR LIFE

This is an interesting article from Fortune about how advances in technology affect our lives. From speech recognition to image recognition, from home computers and smartphones to X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans, these developments come into play in many areas of out lives.

[These developments have] all been made possible by a family of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques popularly known as deep learning, though most scientists still prefer to call them by their original academic designation: deep neural networks.

But here’s the most interesting aspect of deep learning:

The most remarkable thing about neural nets is that no human being has programmed a computer to perform any of the stunts described above. In fact, no human could. Programmers have, rather, fed the computer a learning algorithm, exposed it to terabytes of data—hundreds of thousands of images or years’ worth of speech samples—to train it, and have then allowed the computer to figure out for itself how to recognize the desired objects, words, or sentences.

“In short, such computers can now teach themselves.” This article, which includes a glossary of artificial-intelligence terms, covers the history of technology development and looks at projects now underway at companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Intel.

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Share Your World – 2016 Week 46

Thanks to Cee for this weekly challenge: Share Your World – 2016 Week 46

share-your-world

Are you a traveler or a homebody?

Before retirement we didn’t have much time for traveling. We’re trying to make up for that now, so I consider myself a traveler. I love to see new places and to learn about new cultures and countries. I also like to meet people from those cultures and countries and see how we’re different and how we’re similar.

I think that stretching my cultural awareness has become an even more important task since the U.S. election than it was before.

What kind of TV commercial would you like to make? Describe it.

I can’t think of any kind of a TV commercial I’d like to make. We watch our shows off the DVR specifically so that we can fast-forward through the commercials. In fact, we recently had to trade in our cable remote for a new one because we wore out the fast-forward button.

Describe yourself in a word that starts with the first letter of your name.

Mental

(As in crazy or intelligent? You decide.)

List some fun things for a rainy day.

Reading a good book.
Reading an ordinary book.
Reading a bad book.
Thinking about reading a book.
Writing a killer blog post.
Marathon viewing of a new (to me) TV series.
Watching a movie to see how it measures up to the book.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

I’ve been immersed in doom and gloom since November 9, when the U.S. Election results became evident. I’m looking forward to feeling a little better soon, but with renewed determination to be vigilant and to work toward restoring civility, tolerance, and respect.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

After Blast, New Yorkers Examine Themselves for Psychological Shrapnel

A poignant article about a recent bombing in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The “psychological shrapnel” of such an event can be just as traumatic as physical injury.

7 Surprising Facts About Creativity, According To Science

brain02For just about all my writing life I’ve known that I get my best ideas in the shower. This article based on the book Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire says that I’m not alone in this: The first of these seven surprising facts is “72% of people have creative insights in the shower.”

Read how solitude, daydreaming, and even trauma can contribute to creativity.

Rethinking madness: inside the world’s oldest mental asylum

For years, the term ‘asylum’ has evoked images of chaos and cruelty – in spite of the mental health community’s attempts to give it new meaning. Examining 700 years of history at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, a new exhibition intends to set things straight.

A fascinating look at Bethlem Royal Hospital in the Beckenham area of south London, the asylum that give us the word bedlam.

Where Creativity Comes From

Scientific American summarizes research of species other than humans to try to find an answer to the question of where creativity comes from.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Share Your World – 2016 Week 39

Thanks to Cee for this weekly challenge: Share Your World – 2016 Week 39

share-your-world

Cee writes on her blog that the questions for this week’s and the next two weeks’ challenges come from kids. And they ask the darndest things!

A class you wish you would have taken?

I wanted to take music appreciation in college but was afraid to because it was notoriously difficult. For exams, the professor would drop the needle on a record (yes, it was that long ago) and you’d have to identify the composer, the work, the movement in the work, and the significance of the excerpt. I was a scholarship student, and I was afraid I wouldn’t do well enough to keep my financial aid. (Not only was this the dark age of vinyl records; it was also the dark age before the pass/fail grade option.) I sometimes think I should check out a music appreciation course at my local community college, but instead I just listen to my favorite music, even though I can’t articulate exactly what I’m listening to and why I enjoy it.

What’s your favorite comic figure and why?

Calvin and Hobbes. I like the humor and the truthfulness of the presence of an imaginary friend.

Come on, now admit it: You had an imaginary friend when you were a kid. Heck, I had two, although they were people, not stuffed animals, and I think they were sisters both to each other and to me, an only child.

Name something you wish you could like.

exercising

Boy, do I wish I could like exercise. Even during the times in my life when I exercised fairly regularly, I never enjoyed it. It was always a chore, something that I knew I had to endure for a set amount of time.

Who was your best friend when you were 10?

My childhood best friend was Esther. We lived near each other in a small New England town, and whatever age children can be said to know each other was the age at which we met. We are still friends today, even though we live on opposite coasts of the U.S. I think it’s remarkable that we’ve known each other literally all our lives.

What sign are you? Do you believe in astrology?

I am a Virgo. I don’t believe that astrology determines our lives; I’m in control of my life and make my own choices. However, I do fit the major characteristics of a Virgo—organized and analytical—and occasionally chuckle to myself when I realize how like a Virgo I’m acting.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

My hometown Seattle Mariners are still chasing the possibility of a wildcard playoff spot, and I’m looking forward to their last two games. If they don’t make it, at least my first team, the Boston Red Sox, will be in the postseason.

I hope you all have a great week filled with good friends, good food, and good fun.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown

Share Your World – 2016 Week 38

Share Your World – 2016 Week 38

share-your-world

Are you a hugger or a non-hugger?

FrayneI was never a hugger—until I met Frayne. We met at a book group in our local Borders store and quickly became close friends. She was one of the warmest people I’ve ever known. She’d arrive at book group with a big “Hello, darlings!” and brighten up the day. She was a tiny person, barely five feet tall, but she had a big heart. And she loved to hug. When she wrapped her arms around me, I’d shrink into myself and stand awkwardly, uncomfortable with the contact and not quite sure how to respond.

I hadn’t known Frayne for very long when I found out she had cancer. “You’d better learn to hug back,” I told myself, “and you’d better learn it quickly.” I only knew her for about three years, but I still thank her every time I hug a friend for teaching me this remarkable life lesson.

What is your least favorite Candy?

As much as I love chocolate, I don’t much like Three Musketeers bars. I think it’s the whipped texture that I don’t like; I’d rather have my chocolate in a more substantial format. I also don’t much care for cotton candy. A small bite or two tastes good, but after that the taste becomes overwhelmingly, unbearably sweet. I might buy it occasionally if I could just buy that first couple of bites, but I resent having to pay a bunch of money for all the rest of the stuff on the stick, which I don’t want.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “fun”?

Travel. I love to see new places and new people, to learn about different customs, languages, and ways of life. There’s nothing more fun to me than a trip to somewhere I’ve never been before.

List of Favorite Smells: What smells do you love? Whether it’s vanilla scented candles or the smell of coffee in the morning or the smell of a fresh spring rain…make a list of all the things you love for a little aromatherapy.

bouquet of lilacs and tulips
bouquet of lilacs and tulips
  • freshly brewed coffee, especially the current seasonal pumpkin spice
  • lilacs
  • clean sheets, even without the benefit of fabric softener
  • pot roast cooking on the stove
  • pumpkin or apple pie baking in the oven
  • turkey roasting in the oven

 

 

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

We’ve had quite an unhurried, unstressful, peaceful week. I’m looking forward to more of the same next week.

Until then, I hope you all have a great week.

 

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown