Watermark

Good News

The Internet fosters social contact

A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report. 

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.

“There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”

Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers — and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.

It does worry me just a little that even the nonusers network of close and significant contacts is quite a bit larger than my own. Introversion has its downsides.

Via The Power of Many

We don't have to remember everything

According to an Editor's Summary at Nature:

A study of brain activity in subjects performing a task in which they were asked to 'hold in mind' some of the objects and to ignore other objects has revealed significant variation between individuals in their ability to keep the irrelevant items out of awareness. This shows that our awareness is not determined only by what we can keep 'in mind' but also by how good we are at keeping irrelevant things 'out of mind'. This also implies that an individual's effective memory capacity may not simply reflect storage space, as it does with a hard disk. It may also reflect how efficiently irrelevant information is excluded from using up vital storage capacity.

Well, that explains it.

Via wake up!

And most importantly:

Poetry is good for your health

That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock'n'roll, but the new Prozac. [...]

OK, so the rest of the article isn't quite so promising. Still, I'm practicing belief in the unlikely, remember?

Via Dumbfoundry

Year of the Dog

So, we all know it's the Year of the Dog, right?

Are we treating our best friends with the deference they feel they deserve? I certainly hope not.

Who, me? I'm a Rat.

The Artist's Way ~ Week 3: Recovering a Sense of Power

Before I review this past week, I need to talk a bit about the next one. The primary assignment -- the challenging assignment -- for this next week is Reading Deprivation. As in: NO READING AT ALL. No blogs, no books, no newspapers, no magazines.

No blogs.

Well, you see my problem. Sadly, Cameron's argument is persuasive:

For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up . . . It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well . . . We often cannot hear own own inner voice, the voice of our artist's inspiration, above the static . . . For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction.

I do feel -- as I have felt before -- that she tends to ignore lives very different from her own, and I am tempted to insist that I am an exception. After all, I spend most of my waking hours sitting on a bed, reading. Reading is my connection to the world.

But, I fear she is correct, that it is also a distraction -- so I'm going to try this, with some exceptions. Because isolation is a problem for me, I am going to read my personal and blog-related email (which I must do, anyway, since comments on my blogs require my approval to be published.) But I will not sign on to the web communities I participate in, and I won't read 'list' email.

I will continue to post to Watermark -- I have a few posts prepared ahead of time -- but I won't be reading your blogs this week. Some of you may have noticed that I put Chatango back on the sidebar awhile back; if I am online, I'll sign in to that -- but I don't expect that will be often.

ODE Poem

[Another Didi challenge]

MP3 File

Praise be to flowered
flannel that softens
and fades with age.

Praise to checkered
slippers knitted by
elderly aunts from

left-over yarn, thick
slippers to cushion
& warm our wandering

feet. Praise to happy
pom-poms, to antique
lace; praise to hooded,

over-sized robes with
rolled sleeves; floor-
length robes of terry

& fleece. Praise to satin
& silk; praise to clinging
fabrics carefully folded

into ribboned boxes
by hopeful lovers & well-
wishing friends. Praise

to boxers and too-big
T-shirts, snatched from
the closets of intimate

strangers. Praise to high-
heeled slippers & slippers
shaped like rabbits. Blessed

be all that keeps us warm,
alley cats & pomeranians,
cuddlers, snugglers, back-

sleepers, side-sleepers,
spooners, quilted duvets
& comforters: Praised be.

The Artist's Way ~ Notes: Recovering a Sense of Power

Cameron says Life is what we make of it, which is easily said by those of us who have it easy. But I've written about this before, and I don't want to feel angry this morning -- another topic of this chapter -- so let me expand on what I do agree with.

Synchronicity: I suspect this has to do with what we choose to pay attention to, rather than whether the universe is moving to support us. I think we can choose to pay attention to those things that make us unhappy, or to those things that encourage us. And I think that both of these categories are plentiful for most of us.

I also know that, as human beings, we are driven to make sense of the world even if our explanations are mistaken. So if we can choose explanations that both work in the real world, and bring us more balance, joy, and contentment than others that are equally reasonable -- why not choose the first? Social research seems to suggest -- in its early and experimental days, still -- that those who believe, who have faith, who belong to congregations, live longer and happier days than those of us who do not.

Crazy Cat Ladies

Remember this?

When I showed this to my friend Kesa, she counted the cats, and said: That's not enough.

She has nine; these, and one more that is camera shy:

           

           

Mouse over the kitties for their names, and click for larger images -- all kitty photos taken by Kesa Bechard, and messed with by me. Kesa says, by the way, that at nine, you do begin to go a bit crazy (though she seems perfectly sane to me.)

Here we have another Crazy Cat Lady action figure, via Popgadget:

Uploaded by Rakka

 

Want more? Go here:

Friday Ark
I and the Bird
Carnival of the Cats
Carnival of the Dogs
Circus of the Spineless

Seeker Soul

Via Friday's Child:

You Are a Seeker Soul

You are on a quest for knowledge and life challenges. You love to be curious and ask a ton of questions. Since you know so much, you make for an interesting conversationalist. Mentally alert, you can outwit almost anyone (and have fun doing it!). Very introspective, you can be silently critical of others. And your quiet nature makes it difficult for people to get to know you. You see yourself as a philosopher, and you take everything philosophically. Your main talent is expressing and communicating ideas. Souls you are most compatible with: Hunter Soul and Visionary Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

Snapshot 25 January 02006

MP3 File

When I went to New York, to bring
my brother home, he was well
into the wasting of the disease.

He looked like an animated corpse.
He asked me to hold him, to share
his bed -- it had been so long

since he'd been touched, held, by
anyone. And so I did; as I did when
Judd made the same request, years

later. There is something inexpressible
about sleeping in an embrace with a man
you love -- however you love him --

waking in the night to feel his bones,
the nearness of his death, in your arms.
As I write this, I sit in my bright sunroom.

The parakeets sing for their supper; sun
gleams on the snow in the garden. I am
eating a slightly over-ripe apple --

I am contained in life, breathing long past
many of those I have loved. The white
orchid opens. It smells sweet.

small poem

before you came back
i didn't miss you

UPDATE 24 January: We seem to have begun a new poem dance. I'm bringing up the ones in comments; if you'd like to contribute (please do!) just add yours in comments and I'll bring it up, too.

Until I saw and heard,
I didn't know I understood.

Posted by: endment

You're gone again
and I'm unsure,waiting

Posted by: Cathy

you're back
you're here      
-are you?

Posted by: patrick

how did I live
before you were born?

Posted by: Erin

I'm always facing
the wrong way with you

Posted by: Karla

The Artist's Way ~ Week 2: Recovering a Sense of Identity

This past week's theme was Recovering a Sense of Identity. Actually, at fifty-seven, I have a pretty strong sense of identity -- not that reminders aren't helpful. This next week -- Recovering a Sense of Power -- in which she talks about faith, and shame -- is going to be a challenge.

Again, though, all of this, the assumptions behind it, remind me of my privilege, and my limitations. This book is written for those of us with resources of all kinds -- health, time, wealth (by which I mean, our Western standard of living.) It is rich with ideas that are useful, helpful, for us individually, but -- I think -- can be downright dangerous when expanded into the political and economic world we so safely ignore.