ChaosGrelim

There’s a lot of hate on widowers and I saw a woman say “You cannot compete with a dead woman.” which is perhaps a reasonable statement to say if he’s constantly comparing you to his dead partner but that wasn’t what the post was about. And I realized “Oh my God, these people genuinely feel like they’re constantly in competition with their spouse’s exes and the ex being dead makes them feel insecure that they cannot best her.”

1) I am widowed. my Beloved Wife of Blessed Memory(tm) died in 2019

2) I got together with my current partner about 18 months later

3) when I am committing acts of Foolishness my current partner loves to gesture at the sky to my dead wife, like "do you see this shit, my liege" and regularly says to me things like "[wife's name] was right about this" when my Foolishness inevitably comes back to bite me in the ass

4) this happens. all the time

more importantly:

5) my current partner is on tumblr

6) they love to incessantly send me posts

WHICH MEANS:

7) they just sent me this post with this commentary:

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

ADHD can have a serious impact on your life and mental health. These are some of the things that were and still are the hardest for me.

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

I’m in my mid-thirties and I have never had sex. I’ve thought about it and could have had one or two opportunities if I put in more effort, but I always decided against it because I just wasn’t into it at the time.

I can safely say that I do not feel I have missed out on anything. I was perfectly capable, by myself, of learning about my own body and boundaries without anyone else there to muddy the waters. The immense pressure that was there in my teens/twenties to Have Sex Just Do It is basically gone. I’m vibing. I’ve got my routine by myself in bed that I enjoy, and that’s enough for me.

And in the unlikely event that I ever decide to have sex with someone in the future, I don’t feel at all like I’m lacking some essential Knowledge or Skill that would “make it good” for someone else. I fully expect to ask my partner out loud what they like and to receive an answer clearly communicated and to relax and have fun. And if it’s a disappointing experience, I’m fine with that too. It is what it is.

Make art, with whatever you have. Use scrap cardboard and tape and build something; doodle in your notebooks, make a beautiful dinner, grow a plant, write, paint your nails. Learn to whittle, to knit, to cut straight lines, to sew, to cook, to run at a problem and not solve it the first time. Learn to try again.

Make things the wrong way.

If it works, do it again, better. If it doesn't, do it again, different. Draw badly. Look at the way the light hits something and try to figure out the colors it makes. Watch the way strangers walk and how the weight of them shifts in motion.

Creating art--beautiful things, ugly things, silly things--is not something that you should be leaving to people who are better at it or can afford the expensive materials or have a deep message or whatever. Do it anyway. Do it worse, do it cheaply, do it just for the joy of doing it. The work itself has merit. The work itself is rewarding. Make art.

She goes down for breakfast but alas!!! The young upstart is completely blocking her path! Time to stand still and yell about it

Nonetheless, despite her troubles...

...she has still managed to have a happy birthday. Congratulations on six years, Malice.

Theoretically I was just supposed to list off the numbers.  Except. Very early I started parsing the figures and give my own analysis.  Apparently engineers and geophysicists got a bit freaked out by a ten year old going ‘It’s not that good, the flow’s really slow compared to last week, and there’s gas pockets really screwing up the flow in the east pipe judging by the pressure report.’

Dad still got that yelled at him at conferences: ‘This is the fucker who used child labour to do well analysis!’

‘Was it wrong?’

They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.

Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.

About a week later, I got a questionnaire, on paper, through the post. As though I were living in 19ThePast. It had a letter asking me to fill it out and post it back. It took me three weeks to buy an envelope. It took another to actually fill it out. When I did, I inserted the questionnaire, carefully wrote out the address on the envelope, stamped it, sealed it, and looked down to see the questionnaire still on the sofa. I had tried to post them back their own letter requesting I fill out the questionnaire. I, for one, consider this part of the diagnostic criteria.

Anyway, I finally sent it a week later, so it took five weeks in all. That was, as I say, three years ago.

Today, I had to go to the doctor for unrelated reasons, and I was like, "By the way. Do we know what's happening with the ADHD assessment? I know it's a long waiting list, but it's been three years and I literally never heard anything back. Thoughts?"

And today's doctor (a different one) pulled up my history to have a little look, and discovered that a week after I'd initially gone in - during the time I was supposed to fill out the questionnaire but was still vaguely trying to remember to buy an envelope - the referral people had responded to my GP and said "She hasn't done a questionnaire so we can't assess her." At which point, my GP was supposed to call and share this with me so we could discuss

He did not.

And then, of course, they did get my questionnaire, and he should have forwarded THAT to the assessment people at that point to advance the process.

He did not.

Which means I have just wasted three years and a week waiting for an assessment that was never coming. The whole thing came to an end. That was that. At no point did that first doctor ever reconsider any part of my case. He was told they couldn't proceed, and didn't even think to tell me; he just thought "Well, sucks to be her" and then moved the fuck on with his life, I presume.

And you know, I don't want to be too damning towards the NHS; apart from anything else, last year I found a lump in one breast, and from the day I noticed and called the GP to the hospital staff going "That's a cyst, let's drain it. You're cured." was... 6 days? No, 5. Start to finish. I called on the Wednesday, they removed it on the Monday. And even that was a delayed time, because of the weekend in between, AND it didn't cost a penny.

Turns out in the instant after I gave my questionnaire to the receptionist and walked out the door - my beautiful, hard-won, twice-completed, and above all essential questionnaire - it somehow vanished from this plane of existence and was immediately lost.

It has not been scanned. It has not been added to my file. It is simply lost. Gone. Missing. A questionnaire-shaped hole in the world. No more questionnaire for Elanor

"I'm so sorry," the doctor said. "I've made them look through every piece of paper in the building, but no one can find it. So, I've printed off another. Come in ASAP - it's waiting behind reception for you, and they've all been instructed to treat it with the utmost care and priority."

So that's tomorrow's job.

Weirdly, I am feeling zen about it. Encouraged, actually. This doctor noticed the problem because, one week after she was told about the three year failure, she herself cared enough to chase it up and so was able to discover the second crack in the system I had managed to find and fall in. Also, she's not posting me another paper copy for me to take five weeks to find a stamp over; she's arranged for me to go and do it in person. She's impressed upon the staff at the surgery that they must treat this questionnaire like it's news from Marathon, so that it instantly takes priority the second it leaves my hands. So like... I actually think that's a positive thing and a good sign that she's actively fighting my corner. Shout out to Doctor Lee, she's a real one