In the last year or two, one way I’ve been coping with depressing news headlines has been to bury myself in “nice soothing murder mysteries.” They somehow seem less frightening than real life. And since I favor mystery series that transport me to another place or time, they’re also educational. Whether modern Venice, southern France, […]
We recently attended a lecture on Long Island shipwrecks at the Mystic Seaport Museum, and took in the related Lego exhibit while we were there. Then we went to a Mystic Schooners baseball game. It struck me that these widely divergent fields of endeavor have all developed phrases to describe easily avoidable mistakes. In tennis […]
A psychology professor named Angela Duckworth wrote in the New York Times about a phenomenon she calls situational agency. She means that willpower is not what works to get yourself to resist temptation, or to do something you know you should. Instead, successful people create a structure around themselves that minimizes the need for willpower. […]
Dick Van Dyke recently celebrated his 100th birthday and the flurry of publicity has been a bit annoying. Everything from mainstream media to people posting that they met him once, all trying to claim a piece of this beloved performer. Nonetheless, some of the insights from interviews with him are useful. Everyone asks, of course, […]
A recent Facebook post by a friend introduced me to the word meliorism. It’s defined as the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. She was feeling very discourage and, given recent events, was understandably no longer convinced this was true. Nonetheless, I prefer to remain optimistic. Perhaps foolishly so, but […]
Some ideas seem to get recycled regularly, perhaps because they actually make a lot of sense. This one harked way back to my corporate days. The terminology was different, but the intent was the same – to help you focus on what really matters. A recent article in Entrepreneur talked about the idea of a […]
Frighteningly enough, the name that keeps coming to mind for me lately is Margaret Atwood. Her Handmaiden’s Tale and similar novels about not-to-distant, very scary futures have been running through my head, try as I might to ignore our dysfunctional and divisive politics. The notion that behavior for which we’d send a five-year-old to his […]
The tumultuous atmosphere around the U.S. election made me decide a getaway was needed to save my sanity, and the more distracting the better. Luckily, there are safe, easy places to travel where I can’t speak or read the language, saving me from constant “breaking news” that merely adds stress. Since romance languages are familiar […]
On rare occasions, I have created commissioned paintings – meaning somebody specifically asked me to paint a certain subject. It’s not something I do often, or seek out, as it’s far more stressful than simply painting what I feel like creating. When people request a specific painting, I feel a tremendous obligation to get it […]
Being a great believer in challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone and stretch my brain, I took a class in palette knife painting last month. It was apparently part of a self-improvement kick, as I also took a refresher class on perspective drawing. I figured it would be useful both for the […]
