Blizzard Prep

[jesse_the_k]

Since I don't have to go anywhere and I have internet & food at home, blizzards are all snow-day and no headaches. (Except: boo hoo my pool is closed.)

Our local news station is hosting a live blog—more of a moderated chat-room—where one of the reporters is announcing all the closings and various folks are reporting in on snowfall amounts and roadway conditions. It reminds me of a telephone party-line.

In other news: reading two fabulous books.

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own by Sandra Blakeslee & Matthew Blakeslee and Beyond the miracle worker: the remarkable life of Anne Sullivan Macy and her extraordinary friendship with Helen Keller by Kim E Nielsen. Brief: READ THEM THEY ARE GR8! More to come.

In conclusion: 35 minutes in the sun makes me happier than 20 minutes. Who knew? Last year 25 minutes made me manic as hell. I want consistent and predictable mental illness, please? KTNXBAI.

Comments

[sasha_feather]

Those books sound awesome.

[wild_irises]

I liked The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, except for the knee-jerk lack of fat acceptance, and some of the tone. But I learned a lot. The other one sounds awesome.

[jesse_the_k]

Yes, some of the fat discussion made me cringe. (I'm only done with the first third, so more dismal explorations probably await me.)

OTOH, the detailed exploration of how some people's body image is at such variance with their actual body was intriguing. Unlike the airy hand-waving that accompanies most brain-chemistry discussions -- anti-ds work due to unspecified changes in one of 6 possible hormones -- the body-map and body-schema stuff is reproduced input-A yields output-B science.

For example, the proposition that anorexics have impaired body perception, supported by evidence that they can't accurately estimate the size of their limbs, points a way to treatment that doesn't involve deep psychosexual exploration. The Blakeslees report a researcher foreseeing the day when "anorexia as an escape from femininity as expressed in fecund body type" joins "autism comes from refrigerator mothers" in the burn barrel of over-enthusiastic psychoanalytic theories.

I also learned about the yips and other occupational dystonias with less poetic names. (Human bodies are truly unpredictable.) The chestnut that blind people compensate with sharper hearing has some basis in reality. Sighted people use one part of our brains for visual processing; if unused by a blind person, the "extra" processing power is parcelled out to other senses. More neurons devoted to a task can mean better discrimination.

(Damn, and I'm not even writing the review yet. I'm reading it on CD, and the narrator is pretty good -- definitely great words to shovel by.)