Speaking of 2020... What Are Some of Our Lessons, Big and Small?

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2020 is almost over. Time to start thinking about our lessons from the past year!

I have learned that I will truly always gravitate towards rewatching a show I've already seen over watching something new if left to my own devices--even when I've been left to those devices for a very long time. I need other people to help me branch out!

Also:

When life gets really shaken up I get much better at paying attention to my needs and taking care of myself.

Even during a pandemic when everything is shut down, I will find a way to feel too busy and stressed out about meeting all my obligations.

We truly cannot predict the future, and yet we all have to move forward as if we have some influence over what might happen next.

Sometimes you don't know how unhappy you are until something changes and you feel the joy you've been missing.

The things people care most about come to the surface when the busy life distractions are taken away. (Some go to a protest to try to save lives and others to protect their personal freedom.)

It can be shocking to see how different people in your circle do or don't take things seriously.

The degree to which people don't feel like something is real until it personally impacts them is astounding, as demonstrated by the sheer number of, "this thing is for real" posts after someone they knew got COVID.

What about you? What did you learn about yourself? About your friends? About the world?

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Turns Out I'm Past My Prime (Cognitively Speaking)

Pineapple Supply Co.

Turns out that my last birthday was a big milestone and I didn't even know it: I was exiting my cognitive peak.

A new study shows that our brains reach their "cognitive peak" at age 35. Downhill from there.

What would I have done differently, had I known I was in my peak year last year? Honestly, probably not much, except that I would have also made a lot of jokes about how I was the smartest I would ever be. (So my friends are probably grateful I didn't know!)

Other fun research:

You can measure ongoing/chronic stress levels using your earwax.

If you want to feel good about yourself and build efficacy, you should do the hardest thing first. Contrary to popular belief, we do worse when we start with something easy and build our way up to the hard thing.

If you can get someone to question their prejudice about one group, it will actually help reduce their prejudice against other groups.

Bad news for me: depression and social anxiety symptoms are associated with use of dating apps in women. (Insert teeth-gritting/brace yourself emoji here.) This is correlation, not causation, but I can certainly tell you that I don't feel like my best self after a round of swiping.

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Do you know what I Can't Feel My Face is really about?

The other night (and by the other night, I mean like two months ago, because I have no concept of time) my friends and I were watching an endless video stream of Jimmy Fallon's Lip Sync Battles (as you do), and Tom Cruise pretended to sing The Weeknd's I Can't Feel My Face.

Did you know that the song is not confusingly about how he loves some girl so much that he's so happy he can't feel his face?  That it's actually about DRUGS?  Yes, that's right, it's about how when you're high on cocaine you can't feel your face.

RIGHT?!??

Okay, so if you've ever done coke I guess this is not a surprise for you, but I have not, and so I was surprised.

Live and learn, guys!

(Also, did you know that when you look up a song on Wikipedia the description includes what key the song was written in and its tempo?  I did not expect such detailed information.)

(I don't really like the song, otherwise I would put this fun tidbit into a Singalong! post, so instead I'm just dropping it, out of the blue. But I will share the video in case you don't know what the heck I'm talking about.)

Photo by Jarould

Today I Learned: The Difference Between Dashes

Did you know that there are multiple different kinds of dashes, and that they're different from hyphens?  I sort of did, but really, I didn't until my friend Andrea (I know!  Another Andrea!  And she's even better at being an Andrea than I am!) tweeted about "em dashes" today and I thought "whaaaaa?"

Turns out that when it comes to short lines between words in grammar, you may be using a hyphen, en dash, or em dash and not even know it.

In order of length and coolness:

The em dash is longer and by far the coolest.  It's the one that you would use two hyphens to create (--) and if you have a fancy word processor (read, pretty much any word processor) it'll combine them into one, long em dash.

Em dashes can be used to replace commas, parentheses, and colons, depending on how formal you want to be and how much attention you want to draw to the insertion.

En dashes are a little bit shorter and only averagely cool.  They are used for things like spans of time (1984-2015 -- that's the number of years I've been alive) or to show conflict or connection between two terms (the us-them dichotomy).

Hyphens are shortest and not too exciting.  Use them for compound words, or two or more words that, when combined, create an adjective (she's a simple-yet-opinionated child).

Grammar!  It's fun!

Learn more about hyphens, dashes, and other grammar things on this attractive and informative website, The Punctuation Guide.

Today I learned about being nice to cashiers at Shoppers Drug Mart

Today (and by today I mean yesterday, but time is a mystery, so get over it) I learned that when you return something at Shoppers Drug Mart and don't have a receipt, the employees can't just a) scan the item and issue you a store credit if you have a legit reason (like, say, their contact lens solution burned your eyes), b) look up your past purchases using your Shoppers Optimum Card, or c) do some fudgey thing where they issue you a "voucher" for a new product and pretend the old one never existed.  Nope. 

What do they do?

They have to ask you to try to remember where you bought it, what day you bought it, and if you bought anything else at the same time, and then go through all the transactions from that store until they find the transaction from your purchase.  And they will actually do that for you.

So, you know, next time you need to return something without a receipt and it seems to be taking a really long time, be nice to the person who is literally going through thousands of transactions trying to find yours because you can't remember if you bought it on Saturday or Sunday.