INTERESTING TIMES

These notes from the Oct 15, 2013 Grand Rounds at OHSU in the Psychiatry department. Watching it online, it's about "what you need to know about the new DSM".
( notes )

Another person discovers that having too much stuff is a burden on one's life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

In a recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Though American consumer activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined.

I have enough money in the bank now to buy enough beans and rice for twenty-five years. To the end (sometimes longed for). Why not kidnap Suzy and sneak off to the life of a semi-hermit? A tempting, constantly tempting idea. ......Peace. Simplicity. Order, ceremony and ritual. Voluntary poverty. An end to clutter and this vulgar, stifling, crushing burden of things.
--Edward Abbey

The kitten just brought me a gift. It was the front half of a frog, with entrails hanging and only one leg left. I was in the middle of about a dozen tasks at the moment that I saw the frog. The task most immediately at hand was making the bed. The kitten was very excited, clawing and scrambling under the bed as she likes to do when it is being made. But then she scrambled her frog half into my vision.
( more )

In the last two years I have transitioned my music collection to my computer. Digital music has changed the way that I listen. The ability to play random songs from a host of artists means I have become familiar with quite a few artists that I might have never discovered, even though I had their music in my collection. I sent the core nugget of my favorite CD's to a friend in TN who will keep them for me. I distributed my entire Ani Difranco collection (I had most of her work) to girlfriends, to keep it in circulation. I got rid of the remainder by selling them for two bucks each at my yard sale, and giving away the rest.
( Ruminations on Last Days in Flagstaff )

Out my window to the east there is a magnificent Thunderhead lit up in a brilliant yellow-pink. I've got Prarie Home Companion playing and Garison Keillor makes me laugh harder than just about anybody. Seems like the laughs come easier and easier these days. I'm glad to be getting the hell out of dodge. I have been stuck here for a long time, and I'm getting unstuck. Moving for me is a long slow process of going through everything that I own and choosing what to take with, what to sell, and what to give away. I am going to take only what I can fit in my pickup truck, so all this furniture is on its way out. I shipped a box of CD's to Jeff to keep, and I'm giving the rest of them away. I'm giving my Ani collection to girlfriends because I'd rather that music and message continue to circulate, than be archived in a guy's house in Tennessee. I feel a lightness and freeness that comes from letting go of things....

I'm psyched to go see Michael Moore's new documentary Sicko sometime soon.