Wisdom from Instagram
• At bedtime the 8 yo told me his teacher said: “Think of your mind like a pond full of fish and each fish is a feeling. Try to be the pond, not the fish.” And all I can say is primary school has significantly improved. (Originally a Tweet by Megan K Stack).
Grief and Praise
• Youtube video speech from Martín Prechtel on Grief and Praise. I ended up watching all 3 parts of the lecture in a row. What an engaging speaker. Here is a quick bio from Wikipedia: Martín Prechtel is an American author and educator. From New Mexico, he traveled to Guatemala in 1970. There he moved into a Tz’utujil community near Lake Atitlán. He learned he Mayan language and studied with a shaman named Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy. He assimilated into village life, marrying a Tz’utujil woman and having a family with her. During the extended Guatemalan civil war, Prechtel and his family fled to the United States for safety.
• From his bookThe Smell of Rain on Dust: “Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Thanks Mateo for the video recommendation.
Interpellation
• Louis Althusser (1918-1990) introduced the term interpellation to explain how ideas get linked to each of us, affecting our lives. “Interpellation is a process, a process in which we encounter our culture’s values and internalize them. Interpellation expresses the idea that an idea is not simply yours alone (such as “I like blue, I always have”) but rather an idea that has been presented to you for you to accept.
Divining Rod
• Twitter post with a video clip of an interview James Cameron describing how he learned film technology for about $120 in library printing fees. Here is one of Billy Oppenheimer’s “Takeaways,” that reminds me of the Interpellation idea above.
• When asked what motivated him to read big binders full of information on film technology, Cameron replied, “People seek out the information and knowledge they need…It’s like a divining rod…Nobody will give you the pathway. It’s something you have to find for yourself.” The mythologist Joseph Campbell similarly talked about how reading is like “a divining rod,” a way to find what you are uniquely attracted to and meant to do. “You’ve got to read,” Campbell said. “Find [what] excites you. And if it doesn’t excite you…It’s not yours.”
Lifestyle for blood pressure
• Check out this post from Brady Holmer on the best exercises for lowering blood pressure. He summarizes a recent scientific paper on the topic. Good news: Basically all exercise helped lower blood pressure, especially in people who had hypertension. Surprisingly, isometric exercise lowered blood pressure most reliably. Put down your phone and do some planks and wall sits! From Holmer:
“It might seem surprising that resistance exercise training and isometric exercise training (a type of exercise that doesn’t involve muscle length changes or joint movement, only the application of force) were highly effective for reducing blood pressure, even more so than aerobic training in some instances.Why might resistance and isometric exercise be so effective? These types of exercise are likely to cause the greatest increase in blood pressure during the exercise when muscles are contracted, the core is braced, and blood flow to certain areas of the body is reduced due to vasoconstriction. However, the drop in blood pressure after exercise is also larger in magnitude. This is a phenomenon known as post-exercise hypotension and occurs after all types of exercise due to the release of vasodilating substances and an increase in blood flow, among other factors. A greater post-exercise hypotensive response to isometric and resistance exercise (as well as HIIT) could explain the superior ability of these modes to reduce resting blood pressure.”
Recipes
• Sweet potato brownies – pretty good but needed more sweetener. Use these potatoes.
• Homemade powdered sugar – we had run out of powdered sugar, worked like a charm in the Vitamix. I haven’t tried yet with allulose instead of sugar.
• This carrot cake oatmeal bake turned out pretty good.
• But I messed up this protein cookie dough recipe, forgot the oats! There is a really funny Reddit for people posting bad reviews of recipes they did not follow.
Quotes
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I caught a glimpse of my shadow today. It’s usually so hard to see because it always hides behind me. It’s so much easier to see everyone else’s.
– Damien Echols, Life After Death
