Month: December 2013

by Doctor Science

In honor of the darkest day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) (when I started writing this), I’m going to give some advice relevant to a post that’s currently going around tumblr:

The problem with a history of depression and anxiety is that you can never know if you’re “just having one of those weeks” or if you’re sliding back down into those places you swore you’d never go again.

This is not actually true. As someone with >more depression-mileage than most on tumblr (as in, diagnosed and dealing with it for more than 20 years), I can say that no, you *can* know if you’re “just having one of those weeks” or if it’s more serious.

This advice is for people who’ve already been diagnosed with depression or depression+anxiety, gotten a bit better, and now wonder if they’re relapsing, just having a bad week, or whether they’re in a situation where feeling depressed is the normal human thing to do.

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by Doctor Science

As you would expect, I’ve got my own take on Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores. Last week, Eugene Volokh did a series of posts about the case; I made some comments, which I’ll repost here, along with some other information I’ve dug up.

This illustration, like all others I’ve seen and like the BBC production, gets the characters’ looks fundamentally wrong. Dinah is rather cool and bland — not to say boring or plain — in appearance, while Hetty is extraordinarily *cute* — Elliot keep comparing her to kittens, lambs, etc. Jenna Coleman is the look they should be going for. But also [highlight to read]: Hetty is attractively “plump” — enough that no-one realizes she’s pregnant.

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by liberal japonicus

Back when the world was young and Obama was running for president, one of the points, which I uncharitably assume was thought to be sufficient to derail his candidacy and so indicated not a modicum of restraint, but a desire to use only as much mud as necessary, was to highlight his choice of focussing on his father over his mother and suggest (often sub rosa) some sort of indication of a rejection of all things Caucasian. 

While taken to idiotic heights by Dinesh D'Souza in his The Roots of Obama's Rage, the question of why he wrote extensively about his father yet, as Janny Scott, in her biography of Obama's mother, has her quoting second hand that Stanley Ann Dunham noted that her son had only reserved 'one sentence' for his mother might still be on people's minds. While it may be a bit of hubris, I think that I know what Obama was thinking. 

I suppose the same charge could be leveled against me, in that I have written about my mother (here and here) but not anything at length about my father. While it is possible, in some sort of 'all possible worlds' theory, that Obama is, in D'Souza's words 'governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s', there is a more understandable and, I believe, sympathetic, way to look at things, (not that D'Souza shows any ability to actually be understanding or sympathetic). More below the fold

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by Doctor Science

I’m back from our Thanksgivukkah trip to Georgia, to get together with my husband D’s 3 siblings and their children (there are 2 each). We haven’t been all gathered as a family since their mother passed away almost 10 years ago, so this was quite a big deal.

Though they grew up in the Atlanta suburbs, we didn’t gather there — we rented a couple of cottages on Tybee Island for the holiday. Our nuclear family flew into ATL on Tuesday, and back on Sunday; we rented a car and drove down to Tybee.

Neither D nor I had ever been to coastal Georgia before, and I’d only been as far south as Macon (D’s late father’s home town) once.

As I’ve said before, I love seeing how the landscape — the forms of land, vegetation, and houses — changes as you travel. The trip from Atlanta (in the Piedmont) through Macon (on the Fall Line) to Savannah and the Georgia coast is naturally parallel to the familiar trip from central New Jersey to the Jersey shore, but with many interesting differences.

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