For patients with life-altering illnesses or anyone just getting older, it helps to roll with the punches and make the best of the here and now.
By Jane E. Brody in the NYT, thanks to Donna D for finding this
Just when I needed it most, I learned a valuable life lesson from Lynda Wolters, who has a cancer that is currently incurable, diagnosed just after her 49th birthday. As an Idaho farm girl used to hard work, Ms. Wolters led a healthy life, enjoying ballroom dancing, horseback riding, rafting and hiking when not at work at a law firm. Then, as she wrote in her recently published book, “Voices of Cancer”:
“Everything changes with cancer — everything. Life will never be the same again, even on the smallest of levels, something will be forever different. There is no going back to who you once were, so embrace it and grow from it and with it. Find the new you in your new space and make it wonderful.”
I’ve long been a stubbornly independent do-it-yourself person who rails against any infirmity that gets in the way of my usual activities. For jobs I think I should be able to do myself, I typically resist asking for help. But in reading this book, I finally understand the importance of accepting and adjusting to a “new normal” now that my aging, arthritic body rebels against activities I once did with ease. Like sweeping and bagging the leaves around my house, tending my garden, preparing a meal for company, hosting house guests, walking several miles, even visiting a museum for more than an hour.
Are you interested in thousands of free on-line college courses, or in movies, books and music. Check out the amazing collection at www.openculture.com!
Posted inEducation, Entertainment, literature, Music|Comments Off on Introducing The Radiohead Public Library: Radiohead Makes Their Full Catalogue Available via a Free Online Web Site
MELBOURNE, Australia in the NYT — Coco Gauff was a qualifier and Grand Slam rookie when she played Venus Williams for the first time.
That was at Wimbledon in July, and Gauff’s first-round, 6-4, 6-4 victory over the five-time Wimbledon champion sent shock waves through the All England Club and beyond, far beyond.
Much has changed in six months.
Gauff is still 15 years old, still a fighter on the court and still a charmer in the interview room.
But with a ranking of 67 and a tour singles title in her possession, Gauff no longer has to bother with the qualifying tournament at Grand Slam events. She no longer needs a wild card to get into a major, like the one she received into last year’s United States Open.
In a floodlit hurry, she has become part of the tennis landscape, and it was striking to watch her first-round rematch with Williams on Monday at the Australian Open and realize as the crowd chanted “Coco” that it might now be a bigger surprise if Gauff lost than if she won.
“We almost had the impression that it was Coco who was the favorite,” said Jean-Christophe Faurel, one of her coaches.
Gauff, to her credit, found a way to shrug off her new status and navigate the shoals, winning this duel, 7-6 (5), 6-3, by showing plenty of power and finesse when it mattered most against Williams, who, at 39, is closer to triple Gauff’s age than double and had not played an official match since October.
“I definitely was more confident this time,” Gauff said. “I think I was used to playing on big courts, so I guess the size of the crowd didn’t startle me as much as last time.”
The Wimbledon match was played on No. 1 Court, the second-biggest arena at the All England Club with a capacity of about 11,000. The rematch on Monday was in Margaret Court Arena, the third-biggest show court at Melbourne Park, with a capacity of 7,500.
Nearly every seat was full as Gauff made her Australian Open debut. Her only previous match here was a first-round loss in the junior event in 2018. A year ago, she was ranked No. 684 and preparing for satellite events in the United States.
But she is now one of the main first-week attractions in Melbourne.
“My mission is to be the greatest,” she said. “That’s my goal, to win as many Grand Slams as possible. But for today, my mission was to win. I didn’t want to let the nerves come to me.”
Mission accomplished, even if the nerves were clearly there when she failed to convert her first three set points in the opening set and double faulted to lose her serve at 5-4.
But again, to her credit, she did not allow Williams to do what she has been doing for more than 20 years: dictate the terms of a rally with her huge groundstrokes and aggressive mind-set.
Instead, Gauff dug through her tennis toolbox, which is already precociously complete, and came up with bold strokes and abrupt changes of pace, including drop shots and forays to the net.
It was not always clean, not always effective, but the intent to pose an all-court threat was evident, which should pay dividends down the track.
“You have to learn to go forward to the net,” said Corey Gauff, her father and head coach. “The game is changing. If you want to have a long career, you can’t be out there playing 30 balls per point.”
Part of what makes Gauff so promising is that she can play the game in all manner of ways. She has the foot speed to grind from the baseline and extend rallies when necessary, but she also has the power with her serve — and second serve — to end points in a hurry.
The buzz surrounding Gauff is a brand of mania to which Williams can certainly relate, considering the buzz she herself generated as a teenager in the 1990s.
“She clearly wants it, works very hard, is extremely mature for her age,” Williams said of Gauff. “I think the sky’s the limit for her.”
Williams said the same about Gauff at Wimbledon, and it was quite a surprise that they got met again so soon in an opening round.
“When we saw the draw, we went, ‘There’s no way that’s random,’” Corey Gauff said with a chuckle.
The Gauff family has seen a lot of the Williams sisters of late. Serena Williams’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, has been one of Gauff’s longtime benefactors, and he organized a preseason training camp in December in Boca Raton, Fla., that included Gauff and Serena Williams, as well as Chris Eubanks and Marius Copil.
Gauff and her parents saw that as a special opportunity.
“She’s a living legend right?” Corey Gauff said of Serena Williams. “She’s paved the way for a lot of these girls, made it easier. Some stuff she and Venus had to deal with, Coco doesn’t have to deal with. They moved all those obstacles.”
The weather could have been better in Boca Raton, and Serena Williams and Gauff often practiced separately with their teams. But there was plenty of bonding off court with dinners, karaoke sessions and a dance performance that was filmed and posted online.
“My highlight definitely,” Coco Gauff said. “Serena and I, we didn’t pick up the choreography as fast as everyone else. In the end, we did well. She pulled a split. That was really cool.”
Gauff might not play like a 15-year-old, but she can sound like one. She is into TikTok, the app that has become a global addiction.
“I procrastinate a lot on that app; I have to do homework,” she said. “I mean, everyone thinks I’m so serious because of my on-court. Really I’m not. I don’t take life too seriously. I mean, I just like to have fun. Same with my dad. I know my dad seems like this big, intimidating guy, but he’s really more the jokester.”
But beating Venus Williams — even a rusty Venus Williams — continues to require serious talent and a serious sense of purpose.
Williams, ranked 55th, has lost a step but not her love of the battle, and though Gauff leads the head-to-head by 2-0, that is also a virtue of Williams’s staying power.
“She’s showing my daughter you can play tennis as long as you want at a high level,” Corey Gauff said. “I’m glad my daughter won, but I hate to see Venus out in the first round. I wish they didn’t have to play each other.”
Posted inSports|Comments Off on Coco defeats Venus – again – in the Australian Open!
Chinese New Year is fast approaching – and with it comes a host of superstitions that will apparently dictate how the next 12 months will play out for each of us.
Washing clothes, using scissors and sweeping floors are some of the easier omens to sidestep. However, parents might find it difficult to dodge crying children and – on the more extreme end of the scale – women might find it difficult to avoid leaving the house all day.
According to Chinese superstition, doing any of these on January 25th – the day Chinese New Year falls in 2020 – will lead to bad luck for the entire coming year. But it isn’t all doom and gloom: 2020 is the Year of the Rat, an animal that symbolises wealth and the beginning of a new day.
Here is everything you need to know about the annual celebration, as well as recipes to cook for a delicious family feast and why the Year of the Rat will be more lucky for some than others.
When is Chinese New Year?
The annual celebration begins on the new moon that comes between Jan 21 and Feb 20. The Chinese year will start on 25 Jan 2020 and end on 11 Feb 2021, when the Year of the Ox begins.
By Heather Cox Richardson, an historian and professor at Boston University. She has authored several books, including American Carnage. Thanks to Mary Jane F. for sending this in.
Today the impeachment
managers for the House of Representatives released their trial memorandum for
Trump’s impeachment, getting underway Tuesday. Written in simple language, it
begins, “President Donald J. Trump used his official powers to pressure a foreign
government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political
gain, and then attempted to cover up his scheme by obstructing Congress’s
investigation into his misconduct.”
The managers explain: “The
Constitution provides a remedy when the President commits such serious abuses
of his office: impeachment and removal,” and points out that “the Senate must
use that remedy now to safeguard the 2020 U.S. election, protect our constitutional
form of government, and eliminate the threat that the President poses to
America’s national security.” It lays out where we now stand: “The House
adopted two Articles of Impeachment against President Trump: the first for
abuse of power, and the second for obstruction of Congress. The evidence
overwhelmingly establishes that he is guilty of both. The only remaining
question is whether the members of the Senate will accept and carry out the
responsibility placed on them by the Framers of our Constitution and their
constitutional Oaths.”
In 111 pages, the document
lays out, in detail, with quotations and notes, the timeline of the Ukraine
Scandal, making a clear case that Trump has abused the power of the presidency
and obstructed Congress.
Trump answered. His lawyers, Jay Sekulow and Pat Cipollone, slightly cleaned up the same hysterical defenses Trump has been making since the Ukraine Scandal first broke. In just 5 and a half pages, with no footnotes or evidence, Trump argues that the Democrats are attacking “the right of the American people to freely choose their President.” He claims impeachment “is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election.” He calls the articles of impeachment “constitutionally invalid on their face,” “an affront to the Constitution of the United States, our democratic institutions, and the American people.” The president, he says, “did absolutely nothing wrong.”
Seattle is better known for its setting than for its citizens. The postcards are of Mount Rainier, Puget Sound, jumping orcas, the Cascades, the Olympics and evergreen forests. But people have often come to symbolize the city to itself and, from time to time, the outside world. It’s an intriguing human menagerie that never fails to tell us something about our values. Here’s my short list of symbolic Seattleites past and present.
One of the newest is Bus Lane Woman. Here is a Seattleite seeking order and justice. She stepped into a bus lane at Sixth and Olive to tell cars that were intruding to keep out of the damn bus-only lane. She was standing for the environment, for the good citizens who take transit, for not tolerating the unwieldy mob of scofflaw car commuters. The video of her taking on car culture went viral. She spoke from the heart for many Seattleites weary of driver misdeeds. She spawned a bevy of imitators. She is not the first Seattleite to turn vigilante over cars. In 1906, when the horseless carriage was first causing havoc on city streets, anonymous protesters built speed bumps to slow down what they called “automaniacs,” who were racing around at, oh, 20 mph. Bus Lane Woman isn’t solving a problem, but she was making a point heard around the town.
In August 2019, a one-woman bus-lane protest went viral, spawning the myth of “Bus Lane Woman.” She stepped into a bus lane at Sixth Ave. and Olive St. to tell cars that were intruding to keep out of the bus-only lane. (Farpoint Station)
A more obvious enduring symbol of Seattle is Chief Seattle. We are the largest major city named for a Native American leader. His profile is on the city seal. He’s also a symbol for how we’ve treated Native peoples and culture. Although naming the city “Seattle” was intended to honor him, he wasn’t asked for his permission. The name itself is a mispronunciation (“Sealth” is close, “Se’ahl” even closer). He was eventually paid for use of his name, but it was appropriation. Chief Seattle’s famous speech at an 1854 treaty conference was translated, transcribed and probably later augmented by a white man for white audiences. As that speech has come down to us, it reminds us of the perpetual presence of the past, and of the resilience and importance of the Salish peoples who lived here first and helped create the city we live in. One of the most powerful lines of his speech rings true: “At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.” Indeed, we are not, and we best honor the chief and Native peoples with better behavior.
Back during the first decade of the 20th century, a bearded man full of tall tales became a familiar civic symbol: Umbrella Man, named for the unique umbrella hat he wore. The old codger looked like, as HistoryLink.org says, a “cross between an Old Testament prophet and a raggedy Santa Claus.” He told stories about his adventures as an Indian scout and fighting in the Civil War — some were even true. He also predicted the weather. His name was Robert Patten, and he was a familiar sight on Seattle streets. We still debate using umbrellas in Seattle, but Patten solved the problem by turning the bumbershoot into headgear, and he came to symbolize the rainy city. So much so that he was also rendered by artists into a popular newspaper cartoon figure. At a time when local cops could, with no justification, arrest anyone who seemed weird or quirky, Patten mostly generated endearment. He was a street character. His picture was on postcards, his image on souvenir spoons and book covers, and, more recently, he was subject of a graphic novel. In a city that likes quirky, Umbrella Man was once king.
A statue of Chief Seattle stands nearby another symbol of Seattle, the Space Needle, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 1997. (Barry Sweet/AP)
And then there’s Bertha. Yes, the giant boring machine that got stuck digging the new tunnel under downtown, which led to legal wrangling over who was responsible for her breakdown. But with the tunnel complete and operational, and the Alaskan Way Viaduct down, we can begin to see the advantages. Perhaps more importantly, Bertha has revived interest in her namesake, Bertha Knight Landes. She was Seattle’s first female mayor — the first female mayor of any major city — back in the late 1920s. She was a powerhouse of reform and fought city police corruption. We can be proud of being on the progressive cutting edge regarding gender in politics, although it was nearly a century until we elected our second female mayor, Jenny Durkan. Both of our female mayors discovered that the job of mayor in Seattle is no picnic. Like the boring machine, the position requires slow, steady, determined work to get anything done. And you need tough blades to cut through the crap.
Jimi Hendrix rose to prominence out of Seattle, a city that has cultivated an artist-friendly reputation. (Globe Photos/MediaPunch /IPX/AP)
Perhaps Seattle’s most iconic figures are its pop stars: Jimi Hendrix, Bruce and Brandon Lee, Kurt Cobain. They were local creatives who live on in people’s hearts. Jimi has a park named for him and a statue on Broadway; the Lees have one of the most visited gravesites in the city, always laden with fresh flowers and treasures; Cobain’s bench in Viretta Park is covered with graffiti and offerings, an enduring shrine to grunge. Seattle has produced other stars, but these three combine the power of rock, television, film and international stardom. All died too young and unexpectedly; all spoke to people of all races and classes, and across political lines. Seattle has a reputation for nurturing artists; we like to take credit for stimulating the creative spirit. Whether we deserve that reputation is debatable, but we’ve embraced these artists as symbols of what we’d like to think we do best. Who can blame us?
You may have heard that Senator Keiser (D-33) introduced
5 bills this session to address the high costs of prescription drugs. The
first hearing is set for tomorrow (1/17) at 8:00 am in the Senate Health &
Long-Term Care Committee. You can view the live video at the stated time here.
Also attached are the 2020 legislative priorities for the Seattle/King County
Aging and Disability Services Advisory Council, which includes improving access
and affordability of prescription drugs.
Posted inAdvocacy|Comments Off on Hearing for the cost of prescription drugs
Has anybody kept their
pasta-making machine? Joan Conlon, who
gave hers away, would love to borrow one.
Reward: some spinach/basil pasta with olive oil and parmesan cheese. Let her know at conlonj@colorado.edu if you’re willing to loan her yours.
Expedition
Skyline residents might be interested in the Kaiser Permanente Senior Caucus. Barb Wilson frequently attends these meetings about health at Kaiser Permanente on Capitol Hill. All older adults are welcome. The meetings are from 10:00 to noon on the first Friday of every month, September through June. The location is KP’s Main Building, 201 16th Ave. E., 6th floor. Coffee is served.
January’s topic was Oncology. Jim deMaine spoke recently on the end of life.
Future sessions: February 7: Group Health Community Foundation Overview. March 6: How our bodies react to medications as we age. April 3: Mental Health Program. May 8 (date change due to May Day): Nutrition Program. June 5: Geriatric Update.
There will be transport by Skyline to the meeting on February 7th. If you are interested in attending let Put Barber know (putnam.barber@gmail.com) – first come, first served as usual. (The return will leave Capitol Hill at 12:30.)
Everyone who attends the informational meeting is also invited to attend the meetings of the Senior Caucus Advisory Board which follows immediately. (If you want to stay for that, you may need to return on your own. The #10 bus leaves from across the street and connects with the #60 at Broadway.)
About this blog post
The goal for Skyline.Notices is to increase the connections among people who live at Skyline in whatever ways make sense. Other kinds of announcements that fit with that goal are welcome.
On Wednesdays, Put
Barber will compile any announcements sent to skyline.notices@gmail.com into a list of notices like the ones above,
which will then be posted to “Skyline 725 Happenings” (https://www.skyline725.com/) early Thursday morning. Please include your
contact information in your message and, if f you prefer to be contacted in
some way (text, email, phone, or at a specific time), please include your
preference as well.
Please send anything
you would like to suggest to be included before 5 pm on Wednesdays to skyline.notices@gmail.com.
From Marilyn Webb: Too bad there isn’t a Happy Song for us seniors…..
by Mark O’Connell in the New York Times
The song I listened to most this past year was ‘‘The Happy Song,’’ by the English singer-songwriter Imogen Heap. I didn’t play any other songs by Imogen Heap last year, or any other year. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard any other songs by her. But this song, ‘‘The Happy Song,’’ I played every single day, often eight or 10 times in succession. As music, I could take it or leave it. It’s not great. But from a strictly utilitarian point of view? From the point of view of sheer effectiveness? Surely the greatest song ever recorded.
The reason I play it so much is for the effect it has on my 18-month-old daughter. She’ll be screaming her head off about something — tiredness, crankiness, being left alone for 10 minutes with a father who is incapable of breastfeeding her and is therefore of limited practical use — and at some point I’ll remember that ‘‘The Happy Song’’ exists, and immediately put it on the stereo. The song opens with the sound of a baby’s gurgling laughter, an introduction that never fails to capture my daughter’s attention. The correct description for what is going on here is that it gives her pause.
By the time the music proper kicks in, with its jouncing 4/4 strings and its sprightly whistled melody, she has invariably stopped crying altogether. She turns toward the speakers, tears still rolling down her cheeks, and a smile starts to spread across her face, and she nods her head emphatically, fixing me all the while with a look of intensifying joy that I understand to mean: ‘‘Let us take a moment to appreciate what an absolute banger this song is.’’ By the time Imogen Heap starts singing very plummily about choo-choo trains and aeroplanes and rockets to the stars, the song has worked its affective alchemy on my daughter. She raises a single plump arm above her head, swinging her little hips to some loose approximation of the beat. Once it’s over, she will, without fail, give me a quizzical look and say, ‘‘App-EE?’’ — which I take to mean: ‘‘Is there anything to be said for giving the old ‘Happy Song’ another spin?’’
The slightly unnerving fact about this song is that it was designed with this precise effect in mind. The London ad agency BETC, working on behalf of the baby-food behemoth Cow & Gate, wanted to engineer a piece of music to delight children between the ages of 6 months and 2 years. There’s a video on the agency’s website that documents the creation of ‘‘the world’s first song scientifically proven to make babies happy.’’ During a monthslong testing period, the team — which included both a developmental and a musical psychologist — asked British parents to tell them which sounds made their infants happiest. They then gathered recordings of the most popular of these sounds, which they tested on actual babies, measuring heart rates and facial expressions and vocalizations. The video includes footage of babies wired up to heart monitors, as scientists pore over complicated-looking data-modeling software. The findings of all this research were eventually handed over to Imogen Heap, whose resulting song incorporates many of the sounds — beeping horns, ringing bells, meowing cats — determined to be the most captivating to the most babies.
What we are talking about here is, in some unavoidably literal sense, mind control. And the song is such an effective dopamine-delivery mechanism that I sometimes wonder, as I cue it up for the ninth time in a row, whether I am unwittingly laying down the precise neural pathways in my daughter’s tender little brain that will ensure a lifetime of addictive behavior. There is something creepy, too, about the way the song attempts to achieve its ends, leveraging the emotions of babies to increase parents’ awareness of a baby-food brand. And you wouldn’t have to lean too hard into this interpretation to start seeing the song — which was conceived as a corporate-branding exercise, germinated in a mulch of data and audience testing, optimized for maximal engagement and delivered via algorithmic targeting — as a troubling intensification of existing trends in the production of culture under capitalism. When I think about it like this, there’s a sense in which ‘‘The Happy Song’’ flies in the face of my arguably quixotic parenting ethos, much of which boils down to: ‘‘Keep capitalism as far as possible from the children for as long as possible.’’
But these are also somewhat abstract considerations, given that since ‘‘The Happy Song’’ came into our lives, the total number of Cow & Gate products purchased by either myself or my wife remains zero. Based on this admittedly small sample, the song is far more effective at making babies happy than it is at making adults buy stuff. And that’s what is so joyous about the song: the fact that it works. She’s unhappy, and then the song comes on, and then she’s happy. In its simplicity, it feels like a kind of magic.
The world is a complex and, in many ways, unthinkably dark place, and I am well aware that the window of time in which it is possible to transform my daughter’s unhappiness into joy by playing a jaunty little song is already closing. If the ad agency’s research is accurate, my daughter remains within its target demographic for less than four more months. And it’s the knowledge of this ephemerality that makes the song, and its effect on her, so precious. It won’t work forever, because she won’t forever be so small and innocent. But right now it works. Right now it’s the greatest song ever written.
A weekly newsletter breaking down digital strategy and investments across the political spectrum. Each week, we look at how campaigns are – or aren’t – leveraging smart digital strategies to drive narratives and win elections. You may subscribe to this newsletter if you wish.
The most recent newsletter – “Opportunist-in-Chief”
Last week, our belligerent child of a President took the country to the brink of war with Iran after the sudden assassination of a top Iranian military leader. As the situation escalated, Trump’s campaign immediately went to work to use his Commander-in-Chief optics for political gain, running hundreds of online ads and blasting out text messages to supporters. How is the recent Iran crisis playing out online? We take a look.
But first…
2020, by the numbers
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has spent over $35 million on Facebook + Google since the 2018 midterm elections. On Monday, his campaign launched a wave of acquisition ads thanking himself [ed. – twitter link] for the military strike that killed an Iranian general. More on that below.
Beaver: a game in which one shouts “beaver” when one sees a bearded person
The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following citation for this use of the word beaver:
This amazing game of Beaver … is played … by two persons, and the points are scored as in tennis. Whichever of the two first cries ‘Beaver!’ as a beard heaves into sight, scores. — The New Statesman, 12 Aug. 1922
A resurgence of this game is, we think, long overdue.
The word beaver has since the mid-20th century also been used to mean “to work energetically”; omitted from that definition but theoretically plausible nonetheless is the notion that a bearded person identified in the game beaver might pretend at great busyness in order to escape the attention drawn to them.
Tuesday, February 4th 2020 at 2:00 p.m. “America, Democracy, and 2020: The Crucible,” with David Domke in the Mt Baker Room
This is the first in a series of 3 lectures to be presented at Skyline in the Mt Baker Room.
Lecture Series Overview:The American experiment in democracy is an idea. For nearly 250 years, it has been enacted in some ways that are inspiring and amazing, and it has been enacted in some ways that are oppressive, violent, and devastating. But still, the ideals call to us. Today, the United States has begun one of the most important presidential elections in its history. This lecture series will examine the political landscape as the election begins and the Democratic Party presidential nomination process — both the nature of the voting and the hurdles the candidates seek to clear. Lectures planned for spring will focus on the Republican Party.
These dates and times are published in the CEG Calendar also.
Feb 4: “America, Democracy, and 2020: The Crucible”; 2:00 p.m.
Feb 5: “Roadmaps: How the Presidential Primaries Work”; 1:30 p.m.
Feb 7: “Contenders: The Democratic Party Candidates and Key Votes”; 3:30 pm
By David Brooks in the NYT: Donald Trump is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest. So you’d think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show we’re not like him — that we are judicious, informed, mature and reasonable.
But the events of the past week have shown that the anti-Trump echo chamber is becoming a mirror image of Trump himself — overwrought, uncalibrated and incapable of having an intelligent conversation about any complex policy problem.
For example, there’s a complex policy problem at the heart of this week’s Iran episode. Iran is not powerful because it has a strong economy or military. It is powerful because it sponsors militias across the Middle East, destabilizing regimes and spreading genocide and sectarian cleansing. Over the past few years those militias, orchestrated by Qassim Suleimani, have felt free to operate more in the open with greater destructive effect.
We’re not going to go in and destroy the militias. So how can we keep them in check so they don’t destabilize the region? That’s the hard problem — one that stymied past administrations.
In the Middle East, and wherever there are protracted conflicts, nations have a way to address this problem. They use violence as a form of communication. A nation trying to maintain order will assassinate a terrorism leader or destroy a terrorism facility. The attack says: “Hey, we know we’re in a long-term conflict, but let’s not let it get out of hand. That’s not in either of our interests.”
Comment: My dad, when confined to a wheel chair in a nursing home knew that his situation was far from ideal. He so strongly missed my mom. He got some pastoral help and also benefited from a low dose antidepressant. He still complained but seemed newly capable of finding the glass half-full. Some time later I asked him, “Dad, are you still feeling depressed?”
His response, “No but I ought to be!”
The article below seems quite balanced to me in stating, ” Yes, it’s good to complain, yes, it’s bad to complain, and yes, there’s a right way to do it,”
From the NYT by Margot Bastin: We’ve all done it: Whether it’s about traffic, our boss or our partner’s annoying habits, complaining “is just something we do, like breathing — though hopefully not as often,” said Robin Kowalski, a professor of psychology at Clemson University.
Even though it may come naturally, griping isn’t necessarily always a good thing. Ruminating on negative feelings, and reinforcing them through constant discussion with other people, can lead to catastrophizing, which “is something that can contribute to depression,” said Margot Bastin, who studies communication between friends at the department of School Psychology and Development in Context at the Belgian university KU Leuven.
This can happen because “the more you do something, the more entrenched that path becomes in your brain and the more you continue to do it,” said Angela Grice, a speech language pathologist specializing in the use of mindfulness-based practices and who previously researched executive functions and neuroscience at Howard University and the Neurocognition of Language Lab at Columbia University.
Constantly complaining can be an easy way to frustrate our confidantes, but there is research that shows it can also be a useful tool in bonding and helping us process emotions like stress and frustration.
