Reading, thoughts and findings today

I watched American Mary last night. I waited to see this since I heard of its production, and it did not disappoint. Review to follow this afternoon.

I'm now more halfway through with Glen Duncan's Tululla Rising. I'm surprised to be enjoying it much more than the first in the series, The Last Werewolf. I was so disappointed in that one, I only starting reading Tululla for speed-reading practice after a friend gave it to me. Tululla's a much more interesting character than Jake, the protagonist from the first book.



I'm a little more than midway through, and I should be done with the book in a day or two.

I finished Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon yesterday. It is a great book on depression. I paid special attention to pages 181-186 about the effects of a parent's depression on children and childhood depression. For personal reasons I paid attention to it. Depressed children and children of depressed parents generally fall behind and don't catch up. They have a higher rate of all kinds of health issues. The long term effects of antidepressants such as SSRI's on children is still unknown.

Solomon talks about medications and their marketing, which keeps on expanding the number of people who might need the medications. Solomon asks whether a problem that affects a quarter of the people in the world could realistically be called an illness. Some people need just four hours of sleep. Should people who need eight be considered partially disabled? That obviously have fewer productive hours in their day?

My decision not to schedule my day anymore initially seems to have been a good one. Yesterday I did the impossible and sorted my bookmarks. I also washed my clothes and did all the dishes that had unfortunately been piling up. I even cooked last night, so now I have a few dishes to do again.

Scheduling your day is good if you're depressed or otherwise have trouble with motivation, but it has several problems. It restrains your unconscious decision-making.  If you're scheduled to do one thing but see something that more seriously needs to be done, you feel derelict if you don't stick with your written plan. And if you commit to a certain amount of time a day, then your mind has trouble assigning a priority to the new task. You may under-estimate the time, or slack to stretch the length of a task. If you're badly off schedule, you have to spend time to write up another one. Worse, it makes you literally into "the man" you're working for. Unlike a real boss, you really can't fire yourself. So, you have all the rebelliousness inherent in being on the clock while being held to none of the immediate responsibility.

I've determined now that I don't have any problem with motivation. For the last three years, I've written every day, all I could. I had a problem with the time it took, and getting it done without neglecting less important things, like cooking or groceries.

The uptick in my writing speed, and the great acceleration in my reading speed both make me feel energized and hopeful.