#swottiness

But I just found this idea I really, really like on a Hermione post I just reblogged right before this. Oh well. :)

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

Of perhaps particular interest to @bpick:

Old Wolf writes:

"A New Zealand evolutionary psychologist, Quentin Atkinson, has created a scientific sensation by claiming to have discovered the mother of all mother tongues. 'Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plotted the number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, when significant) against the distance between the place where the language is spoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world (abstract). The relationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central or southern Africa, and that all modern languages do, indeed, have a common root."

Reader NotSanguine points out another study which challenges the idea that the brain is more important to the structure of language than cultural evolution.

I wonder how this takes into account language isolates like Basque, or Ainu. Are they not considered "modern"?

Hoarding TV shows are perhaps my guilty pleasure. But as a psychologist the intrigue me to no end. It's the development of a new disorder, slowly being realized by the APA (both of them) and the DSM. It's like being back, over half a century ago, when psychologist began to organize and debate ensued. Back when DID was still MPD and hysteria still diagnosable. It's just enthralling to see the progress in action.

Abnormal psychology is outside my trained purview, but I do have some education in it. Hoarding was only discussed in passing during one laboratory class, but my nerdy friends and I have often spent mindless conversations over post-class beers discussing the psychopathology of the disorder.

Often it's described as an extreme extension of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, tied in closely with depression and anxiety. But after watching an episode this afternoon (not the above video), where a woman, Laurie, claimed "it would feel like you really didn't care much for me," in response to the unknown end of a doll she hypothetically gave to her therapist. "If he had said he'd take care of it, I'd given it to him right there on the spot. But he said he couldn't answer what he'd do with it, I couldn't stand it." 

In this instance, I believe hoarding shows its complexity. It is interaction between the compulsion to acquire and the obsession to keep that prevent hoarders from moving forward without help. But it's also misattributions and cognitive distortions, often brought on by an acute traumatic experience, that generally start the behavioral change. 

What Laurie's statement reveals is an extreme form of projection. She sees that others do not value her, when she, in fact, has little value for herself. She projects her desire to feel loved onto others, through, in this case, the doll and the therapist's love of it. Her conduit for her defense mechanisms is all of the stuff she hoards, which she also uses to introject from. The objects she has are always there for her, and they never make her feel sad or hurt her, they are her "safe haven" as she calls it. In this way, the fact that none of her family comes around because the hoard is a problem she introjects this as she is the problem. They do not love her, so she does not love herself, thus starting the projection cycle again.

This combination of projection and introjection often manifest into projective identification:

In other words, the patient both projects internal objects and gets the person on whom they are projected to behave like those objects, as if the target person has those same introjects.... The "self-fulfilling prophecy" quality of projective identification was once explained to me as a natural consequence of a person's being disturbed enough to have avery primitive ways of perceiving reality, short of psychosis. A woman who is invested in staying anchored in reality will feel less crazy if she can induce in someone else the feelings she is convinced the other person already has. 

Laurie elicits the responses of not coming around and lack of loving remarks from her family by continuing to hoard. And she continues to hoard because her family continues to avoid her. This entwined nature, seen in OCD and the anxiety-depression cycle, needs intense CBT, and--dare I say--insight to help remove oneself from the loop. Without proper help, any step forward will be three steps back as soon as a hiccup occurs, because the root of the cognitive distortions will not be known.

Then again, that's only my slightly-educated opinion.