Month: March 2011

WordPress directs us today to On Techies’ “Blog More. It’s Good for Your Health.”

For scientific details, On Techies directs us to Scientific American’s Blogging–It’s Good for You: The therapeutic value of blogging becomes a focus of study.

The latter article cites research done by neurologist Alice W. Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease, which was the subject of yesterday’s Tuesday Teaser. Despite the quotations I used–I displayed them because I liked them, not because they reflected content–the book reports serious scientific research. And it’s fascinating.

Flaherty, who studies hypergraphia and writer’s block, notes “‘that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,’… Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.”

The article also cites the work of University of Texas professor James Pennebaker, who for nearly twenty years has been studying the link between writing about personal emotional trauma and a strengthened immune system as well as an increased sense of well-being.

Now. Do I have to be told all this about writing? No. I’ve known about Dr. Pennebaker for years. I’ve known about Dr. Flaherty for years (fewer than about Dr. Pennebaker, but still years). I didn’t know about the finer points of the articles, but I believe what they say.

I question the part about blogging improving memory and sleep, because I tend to do my blogging between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., and all that adds to is sleep deprivation. Nothing good comes of sleep deprivation, sleep debt, disordered sleep patterns, or messed up Cicada rhythms (to use my husband’s phraseology). I am a living example, and if you don’t believe me, you can look it up.

In addition, while I was blogging every day, I still spent a disgusting amount of time trying to remember why I’d opened the refrigerator.

But overall, I agree that blogging helps the blogger. When I posted daily, I had more energy–at least mentally–and I got more writing done. I had to produce a post a day, so I had to think. Even if I ended up  inviting Emily Dickinson to guest, I had to find the appropriate poem and a photograph to go with it.

Having to think is not a bad thing.

Furthermore, I was more fluent. Pressure of a deadline required me to come up with a topic and the words to follow. Practice increased my ability to come up with more words, and faster.

What happens when I slack off? More slacking off.

What can I write about? I can’t think of anything to write about. If I don’t have to write today, I’ll leave it until tomorrow. Or the day after.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

I sound as if I’m back in junior high.

I even start to slack off in my reading and commenting on other blogs.

Stopping the daily post seemed, at the time, the right move.

But I had concerns.

Sure enough, eschewing has led to more eschewing.

I received an e-mail today from NaBloPoMo reminding me to add my blog to its April blogroll if I intend to post every day.

So I suppose it’s time to resurrect the obsession/compulsion/addiction/hypergraphia and see what happens: Improved sleep or no sleep, plus T-cells or minus T-cells, arhythmical Cicadas and all.

It’s already 1.75 hours after my bedtime.

But I’m wide awake.

All this dopamine is doing wonders for my mental state. Five more minutes and I’ll progress from cheerful to ecstatic and I might make it to the border of downright manic.

Now. What in the world will I write about?

Related Articles

• Study: Sleep-deprived people eat more (boston.com)
• ADHD and Sleep (everydayhealth.com)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author too, so other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers.

My teasers:

“When I was growing up, girls in the South were–and are still today, I think–oftentimes raised to be fitting into some sort of a ladylike mold where they are not supposed to express feelings and they are not supposed to stand up for things. I just think of girls in the South being squashed as they’re being raised.”

~ Lee Smith, in Mary McDonough Murphy’s Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of “To Kill a Mockingbird”

 

 

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Technically, it’s Wednesday, but so what.

For Christmas, I received a solar-powered action figure of the Queen.

She wears a blue dress and white gloves and carries a purse.When her little solar panel is exposed to light, she waves.

I put her on the mantlepiece beside  my china teapot from Stoke-on-Trent and my red ceramic London phone booth.

Since visiting England and Scotland in 2002, we’ve become confirmed Anglophiles. (And, I suppose, Scotophiles as well.) Or David has. I think I was born that way.

I also have great respect for a woman who went through the Blitz when she could have been holed up in Oklahoma, and who can, or at least could before computers invaded, operate on automobiles.

My Queen reminds me of the Nancy Pearl action figure. Ms. Pearl is the librarian, author, and literary critic whose Book Lust was a best-seller a few years ago. The main difference is that, instead of waving, the Nancy Pearl figure raises her index finger to her lips and says, “Shhh.”

It’s nice when you can have fun with stereotypes.

Not that librarians don’t say, “Shhh.” They do. Just the other day, one of them said that to a certain party I know. I said the same thing to that party a week later before the same librarian could say it again.

I like to stay in practice.

But librarians have gotten a bad rap in this country.

Buns. Old-lady shoes. Granny glasses before John Lennon made them the thing to wear.

And every year at Christmastime, here comes It’s a Wonderful Life, reminding us that if George Bailey had not been born, Mary Bailey wouldn’t have been a Bailey at all. She would have been Miss SomebodyorOther, a–gasp–librarian. With a bun.

I will not stop to mention that the best continuing education classes I’ve attended over the years were taught by librarians. That Dr. Kenneth Ferstl’s workshop on updates to the Dewey Schedules kept a roomful of women laughing for six solid hours. That when Margaret Irby Nichols taught reference workshops, it sounded like a roomful of women listening to Dr. Ferstl. That…Well, I’ll leave the rest for another post.

I will say something about that most famous of librarians–Marian Paroo of River City, Iowa.

Marian the Librarian is generally described as a stuffy, straight-laced, Puritanical, rigid, inflexible, smug, goody-goody, Victorian, prim, prudish, prissy piano-playing prig.

She does all she can to discredit Professor Harold Hill without knowing a thing about him (except that he tried to follow her home before they were properly introduced, or introduced at all).

Marian gets all the bad press.

I see Marian in a very different light. To wit:

Marian Paroo does, indeed, try to discredit Professor Hill. She (rightly) suspects that he is a flim-flam man, out to con the residents of River City into buying band instruments and uniforms but with no intention of creating the boys’ band he promises.

She is, of course, the best person to find information on the professor. She knows how to research Gary, Indiana, in the Indiana State Educational Journal. And she finds evidence that the professor is a fraud.

When she sees how happy her brother Winthrop is with his cornet, however, she rips the page from the book and lets Professor Hill go on with his con. She sees that under the spell of his Think System, River City comes alive. At the sound of the pitch pipe, even the feuding school board members fall into harmony.

Marian watches and encourages, and when the inevitable comes to pass, she engages an anvil salesman in a tango on the sidewalk in front of her house, to give Professor Hill time to flee.

And she’s a darned good dancer.

Finally, when a shackled professor–so charmed by Marian that he refuses to board the train–appears before the enraged populace, Marian hands him a baton and tells him to direct the band.

And the townsfolk are amazed at what humming the “Minuet in G” all summer can do to teach a boy to play a brass horn.

Professor Hill is amazed as well.

Everyone is amazed. Except for piano teacher Marian Paroo.

And at the end of the show, they march down the street, trombones, cornets, reeds, horns, everybody, happily ever after.

And why?

Because a librarian had the good sense to know a good thing when she saw it, to tell herself, “Shhh,” and to take her own advice.

That is my statement on the subject of librarians.

To anyone who thinks differently, I can only say: Shhh.

*****

The Nancy Pearl action figure appears at http://www.mcphee.com/shop/products/Librarian-Action-Figure.html.

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Image of Queen Elizabeth II by Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls[see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The trouble with eschewing is that there’s no way to know when to stop.

I posted on Tuesday. On Wednesday  I eschewed.

I continued eschewing on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Now it’s Sunday, a half-hour before I should retire. Thirty minutes isn’t enough time to finish this. I may eschew by necessity.

And then what?

Tomorrow an’ tomorrow an’ tomorrow.
How slow dey movink! Almost cripps!
Soch a pity de pace!

Forgive me. I’ve been wanting to quote Hyman Kaplan for years.

But you get my drift. What if eschewing does not end?

More than once this week, I pulled up the New Post screen and began to write.

But you know how that works.

Three- or four hundred words in, you stop and skim over what you’ve done. You realize it stinks.

You forget that everything you write starts out the same way–stinky–and that if you persevere, cut it by about half, rewrite what’s left, you can get the reeking to cease, mostly.

At least that’s the way it works for me.

But it works that way, obviously, only when I’m in practice.

Go without writing for several days, and what happens? The connection between the brain and the hand weakens. The personal lexicon diffuses. Words spring loose, leak in to the spinal fluid, slog through the lymphatic system, and end up stuck somewhere near the tip of the tongue.

And what appears on the screen is just “‘a tale told by idjots, dat’s all, full of fonny sonds an’ phooey!'”

At least that’s the way it works for me.

Sad, isn’t it?

More than once this week, I scrapped what I’d written. That cannot continue.

If I’m going to blog, I must set aside public opinion and the slings and arrows of outrageous critics, and, as my husband would say, put my nose to the brimstone, and blog.

I’ll stop now before this gets any worse.

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Quotations from Julius Scissor (or, possibly, from Macbeth) are taken from “Mr. Kaplan and Shakespeare,” in The Education of Hyman Kaplan, by Leo Rosten.

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Image of the tongue: This faithful reproduction of a lithograph plate from Gray’s Anatomy, a two-dimensional work of art, is not copyrightable in the U.S. as per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.; the same is also true in many other countries, including Germany. Unless stated otherwise, it is from the 20th U.S. edition of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body, originally published in 1918 and therefore lapsed into the public domain.

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I have been fiddling with the preceding 420 words for the past 2.5 hours. That includes the 30 minutes I gave myself to write it. Lesson: Nocturnal individuals should leave blogging to the daytimers.