Singalong! The Middle by Jimmy Eat World

This song came out while I was in high school, and I called it the CAPP song. This probably makes zero sense to almost all of you.

Explaining the joke: CAPP was a class taught in high school in BC. It stood for Career and Personal Planning, and it was the mash-up health and life class where we would learn about the dangers of smoking, STDs (as they were called then), and peer pressure, as well as take the occasional career aptitude test. So The Middle was totally a CAPP song because it's all about believing in yourself and being yourself and self-esteem and all that CAPP gold! Plus, the music video is basically an underwear-clad peer pressure/abstinence morality tale.

Although do you think the video's message of all the "cool kids" being in their underwear is undermined at all by fact that the band (arguably the coolest people there) are also fully clothed?


THE MIDDLE
by Jimmy Eat World

Hey, don't write yourself off yet
It's only in your head you feel left out or looked down on.
Just try your best, try everything you can.
And don't you worry what they tell themselves when you're away.

It just takes some time,
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be alright, alright.

Hey, you know they're all the same.
You know you're doing better on your own (on your own), so don't buy in.
Live right now, yeah, just be yourself.
It doesn't matter if it's good enough (good enough) for someone else.

It just takes some time,
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be alright, alright.
It just takes some time,
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be alright, alright.

Hey, don't write yourself off yet.
It's only in your head you feel left out (feel left out) or looked down on.
Just do your best (just do your best), do everything you can (do everything you can).
And don't you worry what the bitter hearts (bitter hearts) are gonna say.

It just takes some time,
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be alright, alright.
It just takes some time,
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be alright.

Giphy


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Learning! Roundup: Safe Cycling, Us vs. the World, Zombie Brain Cells, and More!

Photo by Joel Estrada.

Safe Cycling

A study on how drivers act around cyclists shows that the best way to keep cyclists safe really is to keep them in separated bike lanes. Oh, and that drivers pass female cyclists closer, and more dangerously, than male cyclists. That's fun.

Us Against the World

Want to feel like you and your coworkers are really on a team? Apparently, you just need to work in an industry with a lot of external competition. The bigger the external threat, the more people on the inside will cooperate and share with each other.

Kill the Zombies, Save the Brain

New research on Alzheimer's and dementia has shown that it might help to kill off "zombie" brain cells throughout life. Those are cells that are all used up, but won't kill themselves (which I guess cells often do when they get worn out?). Their accumulation in the brain may contribute to dementia later in life.

Just a Little Change

If you need to get people on board with a change, it should go better if you let them know what will stay the same. Painting a glorious picture of an exciting future is all well and good, but people are afraid that they'll lose whatever values or identity they currently share with you if all you focus on is the change.

Conversations with Toddlers

As more of my friends' babies are growing into toddlers, I can affirm that trying to have a conversation with a toddler is kind of impossible. It seems easier for the parents, who have learned some of the meaning behind their kid's random babbling. This is a good thing because new research shows that having lots of little conversations with your toddler leads to better language skills and higher IQ later in life.


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What Counts as Ruining a Life, Really? (A Totally Random Question That Has Nothing to Do With Current Events)

Photo by Pedro Gabriel Miziara.

For no particular reason, I would like to take a moment to discuss what does and does not qualify as "ruining someone's life."

Ruining a life, I would argue, involves taking whatever level of goodness exists for them at this time (career, friends, family, physical and mental wellbeing, a home, some semblance of hope for the future) and ruthlessly destroying at least two of them. Like, decimating them. Right?

Like, if you lose your home, but still have your career, community, wellbeing, and hope for the future, you are going to go through a very rough time, but your life isn't ruined.

However, if you lose your home AND your family, one could make an argument that, while you may have hope to rebuild one day, your life is pretty much ruined. But not irrevocably! You can still get your life back one day!

You'd probably have to lose at least HALF of those things to have your life be ruined for good. (Or the subject of a VERY inspirational movie about the strength of the human spirit after you experience Job-level catastrophe and still turn it around.)

On the other hand:

Probably, we can all agree that as painful as it is to be denied something you want, that is not "ruining" your life, right?

So, for a TOTALLY RANDOM EXAMPLE, let's just say you're a very successful lawyer who has worked for presidents and everything. I don't know your personal life, but let's just assume that you love your wife, your home is nice and you even have some friends and pretty good health. Maybe things are difficult sometimes, but you are generally pretty good with how things are.

Probably, being denied a spot on the Supreme Court of the United States (again, completely random and hypothetical example), couldn't be accurately described as RUINING your life, right?

Right?


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This Week (Not Quite) In Church: Everybody's Got Problems

Welcome to the series wherein I share my takeaways from church. The things that, I think, are beneficial to all of us to know or think about, whether or not we believe in any church-related things.

I think that church can teach things that are beneficial to everyone, whether or not we believe in church-related things.

This week I didn't make it to church, but I will share something that has struck me since I started attending: everyone has problems.

It sounds obvious, and it is kind of obvious, but how often do we wonder what the other people in our lives might be going through?

Once I started going to my church, I became a part of what was then called a life group. That's a small group of people who meet weekly to invest in each others' lives, share, learn, grow, care for each other, and so on. It's pretty great.

Every week we would talk about prayer requests, and I learned very quickly that this small group of wonderful, fun, smart people all had some significant problem in their lives. It was a big eye-opener to be reminded every week that people who I would have otherwise thought pretty much had it all together.

Every once in a while in church services, someone will be invited to share their story with the congregation. Again, I am usually struck by everything going on beneath the surface of that person's life. Time and time again, I forget how much can be hidden from day-to-day view.

So this week, let's remember something we all know but often forget: everybody's got problems. Whether they are worried about being evicted, their sister who stopped talking to them, a severe family illness, job loss, or something totally different, everyone has a worry in the back of their brain, chewing away at their thoughts.


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Inspiration! Roundup: Life Lessons, Chairs at Play, George Orwell's Decent World, and More!

This Week's "I want to go to there": Two things. One, I have been low-level sick for almost a week now. I would really love to not be sick at all anymore and just be all happy and free like her! Two, a part of me just wants to go and shave my head. But I'll never have the guts.
Photo by Kim Carpenter.

32 Lessons

Here's a lovely list of 32 little lessons from the Do Lectures. Most of them aren't revolutionary, but they are good reminders. Right now I want to remember lesson #25: "what we nurture will grow" - in our hearts, in our minds, in our skills and talents and lives.

Chairs at Play

I do choreography sometimes, but there is a New York choreographer with the title Choreographer for Inanimate Objects. That is kind of incredible. Her name is Madeline Hollander and she worked with artist Urs Fischer to create this art installation of dancing chairs.

Image from Colossal.

A Decent World

“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.”
― George Orwell

Corpse Drawing Game

I've never played this game but it seems pretty fun! You and at least one other person draw a person bit-by-bit, but without seeing what the other person did. So you draw the head and neck, and then fold the paper to hide it just showing where the neck ends so they can draw a torso that joins up. You wind up with fun stuff! I wanna play this! People call it the corpse drawing game, which is a bit morbid, but I'm okay with it.

Trunk Filmmaking

Yeah, okay, it's an ad for the new MINI, but I don't really care. This stop-motion animation by Nix & Gerber of astronauts camping in space is too lovely to ignore.


The World, Revisited

Look here for a map of the world, drawn with each country's size distorted to show the size of its population. It's fun to see the world in a new way! Also, I get a kick out of how tiny Canada becomes, considering it's the second largest country.

A Prayer

(The words of Mary Oliver.)



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Recommended Read: The Truth About False Rape Accusations

Photo by Soragrit Wongsa.

Exhaustingly, sexual assault keeps being a topical thing to discuss. Not only because it keeps happening, but because people keep thinking that it's "not that bad" or "didn't really happen" or "someone else's fault" or that being held responsible for their actions will "ruin a rapist's life" and that's "unfair."

One of the things that keeps coming up is the notion of false accusations. That a woman is making it up to get something - attention or revenge - while ruining the life of an innocent man.

So here's something that's nice to know: what is the actual research on false accusations of rape and sexual assault? Hey, look! Someone (Sandra Newman) looked into it and wrote an article about the actual patterns of false rape accusations.

SUMMARY: there is no pattern or predictability to who will be a victim of rape. Victims are a very sad grab-bag of race, class, gender, age, sex, and everything else. There are, however, clear and predictable patterns to who will put forward a false rape accusation, the reasons why, and the outcomes of that accusation.

First, who: most often false rape accusations come from teenagers trying to get out of trouble with their parents (who admit the truth later), next up are people with histories of criminal fraud, erratic behaviour, and a penchant for lying.

Second, why: it could be personal gain (the charges are dropped once the purpose has been served, like a prisoner claiming he was raped to get moved to a different cell); severe psychosis that leads a person to believe that they have actually been raped (these stories often change drastically between, and within, tellings); revenge (not a scorned lover, but revenge for other purposes); or to get out of trouble (like infidelity or a teenager caught having sex).

Third, the outcomes: rarely do false accusations even make it to court before the accuser admits the truth or (in the case of psychosis or other extravagant fabrications) is revealed to be lying.

Note: it is not uncommon in the revenge or personal gain scenarios for a woman to be coerced by a man into making a false rape accusation. Also, rarely, if ever, do any of these cases involve the "drunken and regrettable hookup" or other such "grey areas" people like to talk about.

Read the whole article, though! It's got a lot more background information that is VERY INTERESTING AND USEFUL TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO AROUND SAYING THINGS ABOUT FALSE ACCUSATIONS!


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I Have Found a Vastly Superior Explanation to the Extrovert/Introvert Situation

Photo by Pineapple Supply Co.

I am a super-extroverted person. As you probably know, the prevailing explanation everyone has for what that means is that I am a person who "recharges" or "gets energy" from being with other people, unlike introverts, who get their energy from being alone.

This explanation has always seemed mostly accurate but also lacking to me. The accurate part is that I do mostly feel energized by spending time with other people: I prefer to work in an office or coffee shop where other humans are also doing things than at home by myself; if I spend a whole day without seeing anyone, I start to feel kind of bummed out and lonely; I will often leave a party or hang out with friends feeling super jazzed about life (once I manage to force myself to leave).

However, if I am truly exhausted, I do not want to go to a party. At some point, I do just need some time to myself to relax and just "be". Sure, I may require way less alone time than an introvert, but I still need a night off once in a while. I also don't feel energized by every social encounter. Sometimes, other people are just plain draining, even my favourites.

Sure, you could explain that by saying I'm just not that extroverted, even though spending 12 waking hours without seeing a person makes me feel supremely bummed out. But that also doesn't quite seem right.

My partner, who is super introverted (aren't we a pair!) is another sort-of-fits-but-not-quite to the classic explanation of introverts simply needing time to be alone. It became clear pretty quickly in our relationship that it wasn't just alone time he needed. Sometimes he would have (what I consider to be) a TON of alone time and still feel like he couldn't socialize. Sometimes being with just one or two other people that he knows well (which is supposedly introvert socialization gold) was still exhausting.

Sometimes, I realized that I couldn't use some formula of time spent alone to understand when he would and wouldn't want to be with other people because it involved more than JUST the amount of time he had spent socializing and how many people were there. (I say I realized this "sometimes" because I keep forgetting and having to re-realize it.)

Enter the new explanation: introverts and extroverts have different sensitivities to stimulation.

In this explanation, extroverts are not very sensitive to stimulation and thus require more of it around to feel like we are at a baseline. Without higher levels of stimulation, we feel sad, lonely, and low-energy, so even if we aren't with people, we are more likely to do things like put the radio or Netflix on in the background.

Introverts, on the other hand, are more sensitive to stimulation and so more easily feel overwhelmed and anxious by everything going on around them and prefer quiet environments. They are unlikely to want "background noise" or to be able to tune out a noisy bar and focus on the conversation with the person they are there with.

This explains SO MUCH MORE than just asking someone where they get their energy!!!

First of all, it encompasses ye olde energy argument pretty easily: of course, an introvert is going to feel more drained by going to a party! There is so much stimulation! Their brain has just been stabbed repeatedly by music and lights and the noise of everyone talking as well as all the socializing, and they need to go heal those wounds! And of course, an extrovert is going to be desperate to hang with friends at the end of a day! They are feeling sluggish and understimulated by this boring world!

It also explains so much more than that!

Case in point, my relationship:

Silence feels oppressive to me and relaxing to him. I listen to talk radio every morning while getting ready, and he retreats to the bedroom to have some relative quiet. I prefer to have music, podcasts, or other "background noise" on at all times around the house, he gets overwhelmed by all that noise. If I'm working on something relatively mindless, I will do it in front of the TV because it comforts me, he can't even imagine trying to work on anything with a TV show on anywhere within earshot.

When we went camping for a week in relative quiet, I started to feel antsy, needy, sluggish, and sad. On that same trip, when I put on a podcast for a while in the car, I felt instant relief to have an external voice fill my mind.

Yes, we are an Odd Couple, but not just because I want to have friends over every day and spending a day in the office is all the socializing he can stand! It's because of our baseline sensitivity to stimulation!!!

What about you??? Did this explanation just crack your brain open??? Or did you already know it and you're wondering where the heck I've been??? Or do you think it's total bunk???


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Cute! Roundup: Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, Baby Otter Testing the Waters, a Rhino in the Snow, and More!

Every once in a while, I actually sit down at my piano and play something. Gertie likes to sit with me.

Piano time with Gertie the cat is pretty adorable.


OTHER CUTENESS:

Last week we looked at adorably hilarious instances of wildlife photographers being interrupted by animals, now we have the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards!

Continue, please.

Family portrait.

Did you know that baby otters don't like the water?

Have you heard of animal enrichment? It's when zoos give animals toys and puzzles to keep their instincts sharp. Also, it's super cute because you get to watch a rhino play with snow.

A puppy named Atlas, who loves to watch Disney movies.


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Singalong! Roundup: Let Me Blow Your Mind by Eve (ft. Gwen Stefani)

Whenever I hear the first few notes of this song I just want to dance! But first, we need to learn the lyrics so we can SING ALONG while we dance!


LET ME BLOW YOUR MIND
by Eve (ft. Gwen Stefani)

Uh, uh, uh, huh
Yo, yo
Drop your glasses, shake your asses
Face screwed up like you having hot flashes
Which one, pick one, this one, classic
Red from blonde, yeah bitch I'm drastic
Why this, why that, lips stop askin'
Listen to me baby, relax and start passin'
Expressway, hair back, weaving through the traffic
This one strong should be labelled as a hazard
Some of y'all niggas hot; psych, I'm gassin'
Clowns I spot em and I can't stop laughin'
Easy come, easy go, E-V gon' be lastin'
Jealousy, let it go, results could be tragic
Some of y'all ain't writing well, too concerned with fashion
None of you ain't Giselle, cat walk and imagine
A lot of y'all Hollywood, drama, casted
Cut bitch, camera off, real shit, blast it

If I had to give you more, it's only been a year
Now I've got my foot through the door, and I ain't going nowhere
It took a while to get me here, and I'm gonna take my time
Don't fight that good shit in your ear, now let me blow ya mind

They wanna bank up, crank up, makes me dizzy
Shank up, haters wanna come after me
You ain't a gangster, prankster, too much to eat
Snakes in my path wanna smile up at me

Now why you gritting your teeth?
Frustration baby you got to breathe
Take a lot more than you to get rid of me
You see I do what they can't do, I just do me
Ain't no stress when it comes to stage, get what you see
Meet me in the lab, pen and pad, don't believe
Huh, sixteens mine, create my own lines
Love for my wordplay that's hard to find
Sophomore, I ain't scared, one of a kind
All I do is contemplate ways to make your fans mine
Eyes bloodshot, stressing, chills up your spine
Huh, sick to your stomach wishing I wrote your rhymes

If I had to give you more, it's only been a year
Now I've got my foot through the door, and I ain't going nowhere
It took a while to get me here, and I'm gonna take my time
Don't fight that good shit in your ear, now let me blow ya mind

Let your bones crack
Your back pop, I can't stop
Excitement, Glock shots from your stash spot
Fuck it, thugged out, I respect the cash route
Glocked down, blasters, sets while I mash out
Yeah nigga, mash out, D-R-E
Back track, make that, E-V-E
Do you like that? You got to I know you
Had you in a trance first glance from the floor too
Don't believe I'll show you, take you with me
Turn you on, tension gone, give you relief
Put your trust in a bomb when you listen to me
Damn she much thinner know now I'm complete
Still stallion, brick house, pile it on
Ryde or Die bitch, double R, came strong
Beware, cause I crush anything I land on
Me here, ain't no mistake nigga it was planned on

If I had to give you more, it's only been a year
Now I've got my foot through the door, and I ain't going nowhere
It took a while to get me here, and I'm gonna take my time
Don't fight that good shit in your ear, now let me blow ya mind

Giphy


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Learning! Roundup: Star Fusion Power Will Save Us All, Read More Poems, Eat More Dairy, and More!

Photo by Alexander Andrews

Star Fusion Power

There are people working hard to recreate the kind of fusion power that occurs in stars right here on earth. If they succeed in making it commercially viable, it could basically solve climate change and save us all.

Read More Poems

Here's an interesting tidbit: according to new data released by the National Endowment for the Arts, Americans are reading fewer novels, but more poetry.

Eat More Dairy!

Milk excepted, all other dairy products have been shown to protect against death, in general, and specifically cardiovascular-related causes of death. This is all part of science's slow realization that saturated fats aren't actually that bad for us, and it's very exciting. Bring on the cheese!

BDSM and Pain Empathy

Here is an interesting area of study: levels of empathy for other people's pain in BDSM practitioners. While most people in this group do not differ from control groups in their responses to seeing pain, specifically female submissives have less empathetic responses to pain in others.

Bird Languages

Birds speak multiple languages! Some birds can actually learn the meanings of the calls from other bird species. That is super cool.


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This Week in Church: Religion

Welcome to the series wherein I share my takeaways from church. The things that, I think, are beneficial to all of us to know or think about, whether or not we believe in any church-related things. It's been a while!

I think that church can teach things that are beneficial to everyone, whether or not we believe in church-related things.

This week in church, we talked about religion.

It seems a little on the nose for something to talk about in church, doesn't it? This was the first week in a sermon series about religion, so I guess buckle in for a lot more of it.

The first thing we did is (re)define religion, not as a series of beliefs that you check off, but as a way of living. For this context, at least, religion is a practice. It's active. It's seen and heard, not because you talk about your beliefs all the time, but because you live out their meaning.

Then we jumped into a concept that has come up before: that everyone is worshipping something with their lives. In this particular context, that notion emerged to state that our combined actions, conversations, and activities form a pattern of being, or a story, and that story reveals our particular religion.

Basically, it begs us all to ask a question, no matter where we stand in terms of religion: "if I were religious, what would my religion be? Not by what I say I believe, but by how I live my life day-to-day?"

It's an interesting question. It forces you to question and critique your stated values compared to your actual patterns of being.

What are the stories of your life, and what do they mean?


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Inspiration! Roundup: Bandaloop, Cancel It, Love is Real, Jupiter, and More!

This Week's "I want to go to there": This made me giggle and that was nice. More bizarre moments and giggling.
Photo by Filip Mroz.

Bandaloop

Have you heard of Bandaloop? It's a VERTICAL dance company! They dance on the sides of buildings, and it's crazy incredible. I can't imagine the daring and vision that caused anyone to even try this in the first place, but I love it.


Cancel It

More from the brilliant Seth Godin:

When a project appears to be in limbo, in a permanent holding pattern, where sunk costs meet opportunity costs, where no one can figure out what to do…

Cancel it.

Cancel it with a week’s notice.

One of two things will happen:

A. A surge of support and innovation will arrive, and it won’t be stuck any more.

B. You’ll follow through and cancel it, and you won’t be stuck any more.

It costs focus and momentum to carry around the stalled. Let it go.

Of course, your brain could sabotage this if you know you're actually cancelling it in the hopes that you will go for option A. But maybe it'll work? It's worth a try! What feels stuck?

Good Things Will Happen

This makes me feel a little safer inside my heart. It's nice.


From Adam JK.

Jupiter

NASA released some new pictures of Jupiter. They are STUNNING. Also, a bunch of news sources shared them with headlines about the "unearthly" pictures of Jupiter, which I just find kind of... funny. What else did we expect from pictures of planets that are not earth?

But seriously, look at those blues!


Scary Emails

“Send one scary email today. A scary email is sending an email to someone who has no reason to say yes to what I’m asking or who will certainly reject me. If you got one, send it. Start and start small.”
— Amena Brown

More Than Books

The New York Public Library (the same brilliant institution that recently started releasing classic novels in Instagram stories), is now lending out ties and other professional accessories for job interviews or other important occasions. Guys. I love how NYPL is thinking outside the box of book lending in such useful ways.

Flower Flashes

For more cool New York-based things, a group of florists in New York City are creating magic by installing huge floral arrangements in unexpected places around the city.



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Let's All Boycott Data Plans for Travel

Photo by rawpixel.

I just read an article encouraging everyone to buy international data plans when they travel. I took umbrage before I even clicked on it.

One of the wonderful side benefits of travel, aside from the obvious things like experiencing a different culture and seeing famous things from National Geographic in real life, is getting away from day-to-day life and expectations for once. You're away. Having an experience. You can't be expected to engage with mundane trivialities of life at home via text or otherwise! (It sounds highfalutin, but it's also true.) Having a fully-functioning phone with data kind of destroys that bliss.

The article's argument was mostly safety-based: if you get stranded or into a dangerous situation, you'll be able to pull up a map or call for help.

Okay, so safety matters. Safety, as I tell my boyfriend as I strap on my helmet and reflective gear before hopping on my bike, is sexy. (Obviously. You have to be ALIVE to be sexy, and safety keeps you alive. Thus sexy. Duh.)

But how likely is it that your phone is going to save your life, really? First of all, it's not like you can't use your phone without an international data plan, it just means it will cost you more. Too much for casual use, but probably just the right amount for emergency use. Also, does everyone not know that you can download maps of areas in advance so you don't need data to navigate? That's at least 75% of the problem!

Also, haven't people been travelling for all of human history without data plans? Why do we suddenly need them just to survive the mean streets of London? They were WAY meaner back when Jack the Ripper was on the loose.

I realize after writing that paragraph that I am making the exact same argument some anti-vaxxers make: "people lived without vaccines for thousands of years!" The response to that argument, of course, is that many of them didn't live. They died. All the time. Or got so sick they were permanently disabled. From illnesses we now consider really straightforward because we cure them by sticking a needle in our arms.

So are international data plans the new silver needle delivering a vaccine of connectivity? Are they saving lives? If I don't get on board with this, will I be an anti-science crusader for outmoded causes of death and dismemberment? Or can I keep advocating that we let our phones turn into pumpkins that are only useful for telling the time and taking photos? (In between wifi hits, of course, I'm not a monster.)

Plus, the more people start travelling with data plans the weaker the "I'm travelling, I cannot be expected to answer the group chat" argument gets. To loop the vaccines back in, it's technological herd immunity. Avoiding life while travelling only really works if we all do it. So let's stay on board the wifi-only train and keep the "vacate" in our "vacations."

I am fairly confident that these international data plans aren't saving lives so much as enabling the "insta" in Instagram. This may be valuable, but it comes at a cost! That cost is all the group chat notifications you are getting all day long happening while you try to look pensively at the Mona Lisa.

Oh, and just to respond to the "why don't you just turn your phone off if you want to disconnect?" argument: first of all, that means I have turned off my watch and camera. That's silly. More importantly, though, if you are such a master of self-control that turning off your phone sounds reasonable to you, then good for you. I am happy for you with your nutritionally-balanced diet, consistent bedtime, and perfect control over phone use. I am sure you read all the terms of service before downloading the new iTunes update, too.

In the meantime, let those of us who are not superheroes enjoy the peace and quiet that comes from crossing a border into roaming territory!

Thank you for your time.


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Singalong! Save Tonight by Eagle-Eye Cherry

Are you leaving tomorrow, and don't know how to tell your beloved that you are going away, but you wish you weren't, and you'd like to make the most of your one last night together? Bam! Here's the song for you!


SAVE TONIGHT
by Eagle-Eye Cherry

Go on and close the curtains
'Cause all we need is candlelight
You and me, and a bottle of wine
To hold you tonight (oh)

Well we know I'm going away
And how I wish - I wish it weren't so
So take this wine and drink with me
And let's delay our misery

Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone
Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone

There's a log on the fire
And it burns like me for you
Tomorrow comes with one desire
To take me away (ohh it's true)

It ain't easy to say good-bye
Darlin' please, don't start to cry
'Cause girl you know I've got to go (oh)
And Lord I wish it wasn't so

Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone
Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone

Tomorrow comes to take me away
I wish that I, that I could stay
But girl you know I've got to go (oh)
And Lord I wish it wasn't so

Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone
Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone
Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone
Save tonight and fight the break of dawn
Come tomorrow - tomorrow I'll be gone

Tomorrow I'll be gone
Tomorrow I'll be gone
Tomorrow I'll be gone
Tomorrow I'll be gone

Save tonight

Giphy


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Learning! Roundup: Vegetarians in France, Serena Has a Point, Cisgender Kids' Attitudes Towards Transgender Kids, and More!


French Vegetarians Could Save the World

It's always nice to be able to blame someone else, and if you're not French, you can now blame global water issues on the fact that the entire country of France is not vegetarian! Sort of. What we do know is that if the entire country banished meat, then one million litres of water would be saved, per person. That's pretty good.

Of course, the statistic holds for every country: an entire nation going veg would cut water used to make food by 33-55%. So it's really on all of us.

Serena Has a Point

In case you were wondering whether Serena Williams is right when she claims racism and sexism came into play with the penalty, science says she probably was. Black women are more likely to be sexually objectified and seen as less than fully human by white people. It's a cognitive bias that displays itself in a lot of different ways, and certainly could colour a referees likelihood of enforcing rarely-enforced rules and doling out greater penalties.

Cisgender Kids' Attitudes Towards Transgender Kids

The first study has emerged looking at attitudes of cisgender kids towards their transgender peers. (If you don't know words in that sentence, google away! I'll wait.) In the study, cis kids were "introduced" to a group of children via picture, learning their name and gender and whether they were transgender or not. Then they said how much they liked all the kids, and gave them a gender. The results show a few different things: cisgender kids do like other cisgender kids a little bit more; if they attributed the transgender kids the gender of their natal sex (denying their transgender identity), they liked them less; and that kids' penchant to like people of their own gender more stuck across categories, so cisgender girls liked all girls better, including the transgender ones.

So far this is holding up the fact that kids, at a particular stage in development, become little gender police and are kind of jerks about anyone who doesn't conform. Will it change over time?

Hallucinations That Aren't All Bad

When we think of schizophrenics, we tend to think of a lot of negative stereotypes. Well, a new study has been released talking to schizophrenics who have positive experiences with the voices in their heads. For these people (and I will emphasize, for these people, not everyone -- this study isn't trying to be prescriptive), when they stopped fighting the voices and engaged with them, they became positive influences in their lives. Not so positive that they are singing kumbaya all the time, but positive enough that they are no longer certain they would want to give up having them if they could magically "get better."

The Gender Pay Gap and Achievement

There are a lot of potential explanations for the gender pay gap. One of them, according to a new study, is a motivation to achieve. Apparently, men are more achievement-oriented than women, in general, and this could account for a small percentage of the pay gap.

A few things to note: one is why women are less achievement-oriented (maybe it has something to do with the values that are socialized into us) and the other is that, according to this study, it accounts for about 5% of the pay total pay gap, so this is potentially one of many factors.

One Native American Stereotype Debunked

The stereotype of Native Americans being alcoholics has now been shown to be wrong. Today, Native Americans drink less than their white counterparts.


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Do You Really Want to Be Immortal? Really?


I don't want to die anytime soon, but I like knowing that one day I will no longer be alive.

For some reason, I feel like I am the only person in the world who does not want to be immortal. Everyone else seems to love the idea of living forever, but for me, the concept is just tiring. Also, a logistical nightmare.

An eternal life as a human on earth has so many practical issues associated with it. You'd need to find some way to just be rich otherwise you'd constantly be stressing about having a home and feeding yourself, and retirement sounds daunting enough to plan for let alone the rest of time. I think everyone just assumes that if they lived forever they'd be some sort of super-cool, super-sexy, super-smart, super-rich vampire or something, but that is not necessarily the case. You would just be you, but still alive after everyone you loved died.

Which leads me to another thing: everyone you love would die, over and over. Every time you love someone, you would lose them! This might seem like an opportunity to be this sort of rogue loner who wanders in and out of situations as they please, but I think it's really an opportunity to feel more and more isolated and turn into a bitter person with no connection to humanity. That's what makes supervillains.

Also, what is happening in terms of physical ageing? This is very important, both for getting by in the world and how much you're able to enjoy yourself. I don't think it's ageism to say that a thousand-year-old body might be hard to live in. If you're some sort of immortal vampire or whatever, then maybe you will be healthy forever, but at the cost of drinking blood and killing people, which is only fun to imagine from a very emotionally-removed, dark-humour-type place.

An eternal life in heaven or any afterlife is a bit more chill, depending on what you believe happens there, but still. After 5,000,000 years all the harp could really start to grate on you, and even the most exciting activity gets boring eventually. The one comfort about the afterlife is that perhaps you start to perceive time differently and forever doesn't feel like forever anymore.

I think the main problem is that people don't think about how long eternity actually is. They imagine living forever to be like adding a hundred years to do some more cool things. They imagine a really extended vacation in heaven. IT'S SO MUCH LONGER THAN THAT!!! I mean, come on people! We have a hard enough time picking people to marry or careers to pursue because we don't want to be stuck forever having made a bad decision! And in this case "forever" means 30-50 years!!! That's not really forever!!!

In conclusion, if you read ANY vampire stories (or Harry Potter) you will know that a super-long life is just boring and hard and usually turns you into a monster because you get so bored and hardened. If that's what you really want for yourself, well, I guess I am afraid of you now?


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This Week in Church: Doing Things, Not Talking About Doing Things. Doing Things.

Welcome to the series wherein I share my takeaways from church. The things that, I think, are beneficial to all of us to know or think about, whether or not we believe in any church-related things. It's been a while!

I think that church can teach things that are beneficial to everyone, whether or not we believe in church-related things.

This week in church we talked about doing things, not talking about doing things.

According to this week's sermon (and I do agree), Jesus wasn't generally going on about what we should believe, but what we would do instead. He was really into participation. In Jesus' class, it's all participation marks. He was trying to start a new way of life, not a philosophy.

It's not about sitting around and thinking about being good, philosophizing about goodness, or anything else. It's about doing the things that are good.

This week in church we talked about storms.

ALSO, Jesus talks about weathering storms. Getting through the hard times in life. And how you're going to be much better at it if you have been PRACTICING the different things he taught.

So maybe if you are well-practiced at compassion, generosity, reconciliation, forgiveness, humbleness, and living in COMMUNITY you will be better prepared to get through the rough patches in life than those of us who just sat around chatting about those concepts.


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Inspiration! Roundup: An Ancient Future, Pippi Longstocking's Confidence, Going Nuts, and More!

This Week's "I want to go to there": This looks like a nice sleepy time. Also, I am writing this within 10 mins of waking up, so maybe I just want to go back to bed?
Photo by Lauren Kay.

An Ancient Future

This made me giggle. I honestly have no idea what it is, except hopefully an art site posing as a fashion site where they have made a "Genius" Collection, "creating clothing and consumer experiences for the digital age." It's called 5 Moncler Craig Green: An Ancient Future. I am confused and delighted.

Moncler.

Confidence

“I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do it.”
– Pippi Longstocking

(via Swiss Miss)

Enough

I was quite taken with this short video of people letting go and giving into their random desires.


On Getting Over Yourself and Doing Things

“I have no other choice. I am going to do it and, by the way, nobody’s going to do what I’m doing because the art inside of me is unique.”
- Delphine Diallo

via The Creative Independent)

Pen Drawings

Artist Olivia Kemp does the most epic pen drawings you have ever seen. Also, she writes on her Instagram about how terrible it is to work without snacks and coffee.


Criticism

“How well you take criticism depends less on the message and more on your relationship with the messenger. It’s surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth when it comes from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success.”
– Adam Grant


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