Rainy Day Blog Roundup

• Cyn, who's recently abandoned this blogspot ghetto for the hipper WordPress crowd, has a great post up along the lines of something I've been meaning to write: Link.
  

  Happy people

  April 19th, 2006

  Been reading Kathy Sierra's post on how negative people can be bad for your brain. It's worth a few minutes to read if you can.

  Got me to thinking who I spend time with and how I've possibly mirrored other's emotions. I think of myself as a pretty happy person overall. Not to say I haven't been unhappy at times or pissed off, or agitated, stressed-out and what not. It's also not to say that I haven't been sad, dark, worried, critical and perhaps a tad over-sensitive…BUT…I think it would be safe for me to say my natural disposition is a happy one.

  Over the years there have been certain people I've had to purposely stay away from after learning that my mood(s) or actions have been seriously affected in a negative way because of this mirroring we do with each other. Like how if you spend enough time around someone with a British accent you will end talking like them. Spend enough time with a negative person and the result is the same. We've probably all been 'brought down' by a sad sack and we've probably brought a few down with us as well.

  Go read the whole thing, and the linked article as well. The upshot is that negativity is bad for your brain, and it's notoriously contageous.
  
  Here's what I wrote in response:
  
  

  I’ve learned over the last little while that people who’s goal in life is to cause drama and misery are the most boring people around. Every conversation isn’t an opportunity to share what you both know, it’s a contest to see who’s emotional buttons can be pushed the quickest, and it’s boring and predictable and stupid.

  It’s very freeing to come to the conclusion that yeah, the world can be a pretty awful place, but I’m going to stick my thumb in its eye and not let the state of the world affect how I think and interact. Your brain is your own private pool to swim around in, and what you put in it matters (I love bizarre analogies almost as much as bad puns. hee.

• Gord has one of the consistently best-written blogs around, unfortunately he doesn't update much, but his posts are always worth checking out. Today he posted an article, Retro Eating, about the paradox of modern food shopping, that the cost of food seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of extra processing it's gone though. That we have to pay more for unadorned and unprocessed food is one of the more dystopian signs of things to come.

  Maybe age has changed my desires away from bigger and faster to appropriate and efficient. I do not need a 5000 square foot house and I do not need a thirty-six ounce steak--especially if the house is built with engineered wood that leeches toxins and the steak was slaughtered in an abattoir that processes animals so fast that the feces cannot be washed from the meat before it is packaged.

• And finally, Rob Lantz's kid is going to be in for a surprise when he gets old enough to use the web. Link.