a wolf angel is not a good angel

How fun! An estimate of how much I am spending in electricity for a load of laundry, or a computer (ha, 2.5 hours a day and 200 days a year), or whatever. It does not tell me how much my heating is likely to cost in the winter, though from differences in electricity bills, I’d say about a dollar a day. Interesting: a window air conditioner would cost less than I imagine. I also figure I should fiddle with my hot water tank, at least during the summer. Though I keep thinking, look, all my electricity (which covers everything — cooking, heating, hot water) costs me 50$/month, spread out over the course of the year (oh the joys of having electricity not based on any sort of fossil fuel). Does the dollar I’m going to save every year even matter?

When did England finally lose all the areas in France they occasionally held?

New York Magazine recently had an article on happiness and the learned optimism/positive psychology guy, Martin Seligman. I think this is a problematic idea in general — there’s of course nothing wrong with being happy (or content, anyhow; I think of content as a day to day state more than happiness), and it’s more pleasant to be content than not, but a lot of this work seems to be problematising unhappiness more than it already is.

We already — at a societal level — think unhappiness is a Bad Bad Thing, and needs to be Fixed Immediately With Drugs. And I’m not disagreeing with this, at the extreme. But everyday unhappiness is normal. Things aren’t always perfect. Sometimes unhappiness is a clue that things need to be changed. Sometimes unhappiness is a normal response to bad things happening. And you need to either deal with bad things happening — which takes time — or make changes. Sometimes the change that needs to be made is a pill. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s making the hard changes in your life — moving, quitting the job, whatever. Sometimes, it’s accepting that you need to grieve and grieving instead of fighting and rushing it. (A lot of these ideas are also covered in a book called The Right to Feel Bad, which is an interesting discussion too.)

As nice as it is that depression is finally a real illness (mostly), it’s also bad, because it pushes certain solutions over others, and gives some blame to people who don’t use those solutions. (For instance, look at the piles of comments I get from people telling me to just take pills already. If you’ve not read enough to know that I’ve tried a lot of them and they don’t work (except for Paxil: when you’re awake only 2 or 4 hours a day, you don’t have time to be depressed!), then maybe you’re not the person to be giving me that kind of advice.)

And this is a problem with the learned optimism stuff. You can just choose to be an optimist! The book is clear that you need to choose optimism at the right times and pessimism (aka realism) at the right times, but very little else that discusses these issues are clear about that — which leads to all those pessimists, what is WRONG with them, why don’t they just choose to be happy?

But I also wonder, what do we mean by happy? Seligman seems to mean (or perhaps seems to have meant) doing something that we enjoy, having connections in the world — the happiness as a side effect (what I consider contentment, mostly). But his critics seem to suggest he means happiness as a light, everything is good and will be good, no need to change things idea, and I wonder if a lot of the popularisation of this has changed there. Happiness like that seems to be false, gilding a pile of garbage and pretending that’s all there is. This goes back to what I said earlier: if you’re always happy, something is odd. No one’s life is perfect.

The other side of this is the romanticising of madness. But then, can I track creativity and unhappiness together? Is it just that we think of a few of the recent artists who were brilliant and insane, and assume they correlate? I don’t know. I hope not: what price art?

I did the happiness test, of course. I am around the 20th percentile in all the groups, with a score of 2.something. I am somewhat wary of some of the results — ooh! atheist! lose happiness points! — and the questions are poorly asked or answered. I do not know what that means.

via Ms. Pigpuppet

I am trying to convert .avi files to .mp4. Mostly they work fine, but there are a handful that just don’t seem to convert right. I can’t open them in RealPlayer or iTunes. I’ve tried converting them with a few different tools, to no avail. And the .avi files are fine. What gives? More importantly, how can I fix it?

Parents ran into parents of an old friend from elementary school. Here’s to hoping that I get up the guts to call her, and that we have something in common. I could certainly use more friends locally.

I took a break from watching Veronica Mars while I was in Maine, and now I am obsessively watching it again. I have seven episodes left of season 2. I also have a pile of books I am looking forward to reading. Am I taking equal times, reading and watching VM? No. I cannot wait until this season is done (in part because I want to know if my guesses about the ending are right — I was dead wrong in guessing who killed Lilly Kane and who raped Veronica last time).

Taking a leaf from Lucy’s book, I’ll get back to blogging (most of) what I read, in groups of five.

The Art of Detecion, Laurie R. King.

Murder of a collector of Sherlock Holmes paraphernalia, fifth in the Martinelli series (starting with A Grave Talent).
Disappointing! When I read her not-Holmes series (which I prefer, though I even more prefer her standalones), I want it to be about, you know, not Holmes. The story-in-a-story idea worked particularly badly, too.

The Cold Moon, Jeffrey Deaver

A serial killer who leaves clocks at the murder sites, and a murder made to look like a suicide. Some large number into the Rhyme/Sachs series (starts with The Bone Collector).
Exactly what you’d expect. A reasonably interesting, adequately written book. Some irritating discussion of introversion/extraversion.

Claire’s Head, Catherine Bush.

A woman with migraines goes in search of her missing sister, who also suffers from terrible migraines.
In a sad continuation, this one was also disappointing, but in a better way. Her earlier book, The Rules of Engagement, was very very good. This was good, but not *as* good. Though it was very readable, kept you hooked until the finish.

Here Be Dragons, Sharon Kay Penman

The history of Wales and England during the reign of King John.
Fun! I am very into British history. I’m waiting on ILL for book two (my library owns only book three). If this is your thing, I also recommend Margaret George’s Autobiography of King Henry VIII.

Guilt By Association, Susan Sloan

A woman is raped and forced to hide it when no one believes her.
I enjoyed this a lot. Silly and stupid? Sure. But easy to read, enjoyable, and reasonably well-written, except for this woman’s poetry — if someone is supposed to be this phenomenal poet, make sure the poems she’s written are not atrocious. Luckily those were few.

Happy three years blogging to me. How things have changed from the very beginning. But I’m still as insane about my cats as always.

I am hoping that this is more of the blogging about lost things makes them reappear. Because when I got back to Montreal: no cat! I’ve been back for about 36 hours. There’s been one big rainstorm. No cat. She’s not at the SPCA (they have a picture) and . . . I don’t know where she is. I’m still at my parents’ house; I refuse to leave until she returns. If she returns.

Come back, cat. Please.

Update: She’s not back, but I saw her briefly in the back yard, before she ran away again when my father opened the door instead of letting me be the one to open it (he was told not to! why would he do that?). So she’s around, if not yet *here*.

Update 2: Back! She’s so LITTLE. I forgot how little she is.