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Laundry Zen...and Harpers...
Feb. 19th, 2007 01:37 pmSpent the morning doing laundry at the local Chinese owned laundramat. Was worried it would be closed, no not due to President's Day, but the Chinese New Year which was yesterday. By the by - happy new year's to everyone celebrating. It's apparently the year of the pig. I was born in the year of the sheep. We looked it up at work on Friday. The sheep seems a tad lame, but outside of being a "conformist" or "follower" (REALLY not) it more or less fits me description wise.
Read two interesting bits from this month's Harper's - the first is by Barbara Ehnrenreich, who wrote Bait and Switch, and is entitled: Notebook: Pathologies of Hope.
The essay is a critique of the self-help guru movement that focuses on The Power of Positive Thinking. Towards the end of the article - the best points are either made at the beginning or end of articles I've noticed.
...there is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you're failing to feel good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unemployed, who, as I found while researching my book, Bait and Switch, are informed by career coaches and self-help books that their principal battle is against their own negative, resentful, loser-like feelings. This is victim-blaming at its cruelest, and may help account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult..
But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering. Far from being a "culture of complaint" that upholds "victims" ours has become "less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year," according to Barabara Held, professor of psychology at Bowdoin College and a leading critic of positive psychology. If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.
I got through my bout of cancer in a state of constant rage, directed chiefly against the kitschy positivity of American breast-cancer culture....
The trick, as my teen hero Camus wrote, is to draw strength from "the refusal to hope, and the unyeilding evidence of a life without consolation." To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one's moves accordingly.
I agree and disagree. I think we need hope, but there is such a thing as overkill. Being a "shiny happy" person or as my old boss used to say a "Stepford Wife". And being overly negative can bring everyone around you down. I also think it is healthy to vent, to rant, to whine, to rage against an unfair world. To do too much of it - can take you over, and again, its a matter of balance. I don't know if the self-help gurus, life coaches, etc truly get this. The fact that we can't put rose-colored glasses on everything. That sometimes you need to say the lion in the grass will kill you, pretty sure, but deadly. I do however agree with her on the whole bit about how we should not blame the victim.
The other bit - which made me laugh was "Stet Offensive - from questions posted on the website of The Chicago Manual of Style, answered by the University of Chicago Press manuscript-editing department."
Q: Is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use of emoticons that includes an opening or closing parenthesis? Should I incorporate the emoticon into the closing of the parentheses (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case;-); simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a double-chin effect:-)); or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (some emoticons are similar:-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i.e., reword to avoid awkwardness)?
A: Until academic standards decline enough to accomodate the use of emoticons, I'm afraid CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you've posed in this note give us added incentive to keep our distance.
Q: O English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? An author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is a sentence that has both marks at the end. My gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.
A: In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.
There are four others, but that's all I feel comfortable quoting within the boundaries of copyright law. ;-)
Read two interesting bits from this month's Harper's - the first is by Barbara Ehnrenreich, who wrote Bait and Switch, and is entitled: Notebook: Pathologies of Hope.
The essay is a critique of the self-help guru movement that focuses on The Power of Positive Thinking. Towards the end of the article - the best points are either made at the beginning or end of articles I've noticed.
...there is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you're failing to feel good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unemployed, who, as I found while researching my book, Bait and Switch, are informed by career coaches and self-help books that their principal battle is against their own negative, resentful, loser-like feelings. This is victim-blaming at its cruelest, and may help account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult..
But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering. Far from being a "culture of complaint" that upholds "victims" ours has become "less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year," according to Barabara Held, professor of psychology at Bowdoin College and a leading critic of positive psychology. If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.
I got through my bout of cancer in a state of constant rage, directed chiefly against the kitschy positivity of American breast-cancer culture....
The trick, as my teen hero Camus wrote, is to draw strength from "the refusal to hope, and the unyeilding evidence of a life without consolation." To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one's moves accordingly.
I agree and disagree. I think we need hope, but there is such a thing as overkill. Being a "shiny happy" person or as my old boss used to say a "Stepford Wife". And being overly negative can bring everyone around you down. I also think it is healthy to vent, to rant, to whine, to rage against an unfair world. To do too much of it - can take you over, and again, its a matter of balance. I don't know if the self-help gurus, life coaches, etc truly get this. The fact that we can't put rose-colored glasses on everything. That sometimes you need to say the lion in the grass will kill you, pretty sure, but deadly. I do however agree with her on the whole bit about how we should not blame the victim.
The other bit - which made me laugh was "Stet Offensive - from questions posted on the website of The Chicago Manual of Style, answered by the University of Chicago Press manuscript-editing department."
Q: Is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use of emoticons that includes an opening or closing parenthesis? Should I incorporate the emoticon into the closing of the parentheses (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case;-); simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a double-chin effect:-)); or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (some emoticons are similar:-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i.e., reword to avoid awkwardness)?
A: Until academic standards decline enough to accomodate the use of emoticons, I'm afraid CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you've posed in this note give us added incentive to keep our distance.
Q: O English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? An author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is a sentence that has both marks at the end. My gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.
A: In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.
There are four others, but that's all I feel comfortable quoting within the boundaries of copyright law. ;-)
