Chaos Theory

Are Disney Villains Going Extinct?

Good points from Lindsay Ellis.

Improv comedy, being the "cool girl," and dating.

(Washington Post)

I feel bad posting this because I should be heading off to improv myself now, but what I am doing? Blogging. You can guess what post I'm putting together again tonight even as I put these out. Gah. Shame on me. When will this end?!?!?! 

Anyway, back to the article:

"It turns out my dedication to being a “cool girl” shot me in the foot. Nobody wants to date someone who’s not into it. Dating is expensive and exhausting. It’s not worth doing unless both people are invested.

I stopped worrying about saying something funny and instead, discovered the second universal truth of improv: communicating something — anything — that is true. For example: “I’m unhealthily obsessed with ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ ” “Going off ADD meds is liberating and crippling at the same time.” “I’m afraid that I’ll never have a functional relationship.” People relate to the truth. That’s what they find compelling. And that last statement? Yeah, that’s the type of vulnerability you can sneak into a scene without people realizing it’s about the real you and not just a character you’re playing.

In improv, you’re making it up, which is both always true and never true. Worried about being found out? That’s not going to happen. Instead, you’ll be met with either uproarious laughter or hushed attention as the audience thinks, “How does she know my soul?” 

That’s exactly how people react when you say vulnerable stuff on dates. And I found that out during an epic year using everything I was learning in improv when I went out on dates. In that year, I dated more people than I had in the previous five put together."

It's kind of a coloring book

The Bloggess's new book (Washington Post)

“You Are Here” is a hybrid of art, self-help and memoir. It also makes sly fun of all those things. This is the same Jenny Lawson, after all, behind the Bloggess, the same woman who used a stuffed roadkill raccoon named Rory as a way of talking about her struggles with depression, anxiety and ADD.

On one page of her new book, she asks readers to write down five outrageous things they’ve done, “at least one of which is a lie.” Elsewhere, she suggests that you “build your dreams around you. Then build a pillow fort around your dreams. Fill it with cats and books and wine slushies. Then build a fiery moat around your pillow fort, filled with acid and razor blades, because people are going to want that fort. And your dreams, maybe.”

The book, subtitled “An Owner’s Manual for Dangerous Minds,” comes with perforated pages, so you can hang up your creations on the fridge, above your desk or perhaps on that pillow fort."

Can You Blend in Anywhere? Or Are You Always the Same You?

“Self-monitoring gets at a fundamental difference between people, on whether your view of how to handle social situations is to fit yourself to the context and to play a role versus, whether you view it as finding a way to do what you want, express who you are, show other people your true inner self,” Snyder told Science of Us."

I am apparently a high self-monitor. 

"I asked Snyder if it’s possible to go from one to the other: If you’re naturally a high self-monitor, but wish you could drop the act sometimes, is it possible to train yourself to become a low self-monitor? To Snyder, this question is almost irrelevant. Most people don’t want to change. Most people think their way of being is the best way."

Ask Amy's anniversary

This is pretty sweet.

Grief does not work that way, Batman

"Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down in front of him when he was 9 and he travels the world and becomes this amazing [crime fighter]. ... That's ridiculous — he would have grown up to have been Gotham City's most annoying slam poet. That's what Bruce Wayne would have been. He would have been up there reading his horrible poems."

Dying wife writes marital ad for her husband

New York Times. Also printed here.

 

"But how did we get to the point where the notion of soul mates became a joke?"

Aline Brosh McKenna (who also wrote the screenplays for The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses), told me, “You can construct a soul mate narrative for kind of anybody.”

Child-Free People Inspire Moral Outrage

"Couples without kids were seen as less psychologically fulfilled, and inspired greater moral outrage. Gender didn’t make a difference.

The reasons for the outrage are quite thoroughly acculturated, she explains. Children learn to identify with the nurturing behavior of their parents, a 1961 study found, and so violating that gets into some deep, knee-jerky psychological territory. Similarly, people do everything because their friends do it, and so seeing your friends popping out humans makes it look like the thing to do. Maybe that’s why, for decades, not having kids has meant regularly fending off questions of “Why don’t you have kids?”

Massive Brain Scan Study Reveals 4 ‘Biotypes’ of Depression

"All that number-crunching yielded four different “biotypes” of depression. They were differentiated from each other (and the control group) at a neural level. Brains whose humans had more depressive anxiety had reduced connectivity in brain networks associated with fear and understanding negative emotional stimuli; people with anhedonia — or difficulty feeling pleasure — had hyperconnectivity in brain areas associated with reward processing and motor control.

The results also sliced fascinatingly across other conditions. The researchers found that while none of the 39 people in the analysis with generalized anxiety disorder met the clinical criteria for depression, a full 69.2 percent of them “were nevertheless classified” as belonging to one of these four depression biotypes — suggesting an overlap between conditions."