Denial, Gambling, Cookies, Anger, Bargaining, and So Forth
No, Kübler-Ross didn't have a secret Cookies stage of grief. I don't think.
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My Podcast Guests Are Musician Judah Akers and, In a Sense, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
Okay, fine, only Judah showed up for the interview, something about Elizabeth being dead for many years. But she’s definitely a huge part of the interview, notably for her most known contribution to psychology, the idea of five stages of dying/grief. These stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) were on Judah Akers’ mind while dealing with some grief that had come into his life from various directions. He lost an aunt and an uncle, one to suicide and one to a possible suicide. His marriage had fallen apart. He was drinking more than he knew was good. And at the bottom, with the encouragement of his bandmate in Judah & the Lion, he made music around the theme of the Kübler-Ross stages. The album that resulted, The Process, is a long one and it’s divided into sections for each of the stages. Here’s a screenshot of what could fit on one screen:
Something that comes up in the interview and I think is important is that Kübler-Ross never intended to be a sequential linear thing where everyone goes through each of the five one at a time. You may experience all five or just some of them, they may come in different orders or repeat. As I say in the show, I think the reason the five stages concept has persisted as much as it has is that it offers, however illusory, the idea that there is a path to completing the pain, that you just need to go through five temporary phases and then it will be over. Not so. But instructive nonetheless.
We also talk about God in this interview, which I don’t do all that often because, as a sort of casual agnostic, I just don’t think about God all that much. Probably should.
You could have a mental health disorder. Or, just putting it out there, maybe you’re fine
I’m beginning to follow the appearance of stories about how maybe all this extreme thought and awareness of mental health conditions could be doing some harm along with the good it is presumably doing.
Forbes has a thing about hyperawareness:
On the other hand, increased knowledge about mental health disorders and symptoms has led to a phenomenon of “hyperawareness.” According to the authors, healthy and natural negative human emotions—such as stress, sadness and anxiety—are now often misinterpreted as pathological symptoms. This hyperawareness can inadvertently exacerbate the symptoms, as individuals may label normal, mild forms of distress as mental health problems.
Granted, this line of thinking could be, you know, an existential threat to my professional life. But I do think it’s interesting and worth exploring further. Like, are you feeling anxious because you have generalized anxiety disorder or are you feelign that way because you’re in a rationally anxious-making situation?
Gambling gets bigger all the time and it’s damaging student-athletes’ mental health
The NCAA’s own website has a report on what the exploding gambling industry is doing to the still young and pretty vulnerable mental states of college athletes.
Just 12 days after North Carolina legalized sports betting, including player prop bets on college competitions, North Carolina men's basketball student-athlete Armando Bacot publicly reported receiving betting-related abuse via private social media direct messages after his performance.
"It's terrible. Even at the last game, I guess I didn't get enough rebounds or something. I thought I played pretty good last game, but I looked at my DMs, and I got like over 100 messages from people telling me I sucked and stuff like that because I didn't get enough rebounds," Bacot said.
Maybe gambling, which continually destroys lives, shouldn’t be permitted to bloom unabated and barely regulated all over the place? I dunno. Just a thought.
C is for Controversy, that’s good enough for me
Acrimonious food debates are fun to have because it’s really just food. It’s food. it’s not politics unless some idiot makes it so, it’s not religion, it’s food. So the “is a hot dog a sandwich” crowd can have their fun, I say.
The latest issue bubbling up is whether a chocolate chip cookie is actually better without the chocolate chips. The logical brain says no, some foodies say yes.
Chipless cookies have no chips to hide behind—the chocolate is “almost a crutch, a cheap thrill,” says Shilpa. She wanted to make sure each component in her chipless recipe pulled its weight. Her challenge became coaxing the most flavor from the three loudest ingredients: butter, sugar, and flour. There’s browned butter with its super toasty milk solids. Not light but dark brown sugar with its molasses intensity. “And, in perhaps the most unusual move, I ended up toasting a portion of the flour in the butter until it was latte brown,” Shilpa says. “It caramelizes the proteins in the flour and boosts the malty, roasty smells and flavors.”
Richard Sarvate on Sleeping with Celebrities
The path from Silicon Valley computer programmer to rising star in standup comedy is not one that’s well traveled. Nor is the opposite path for that matter, where one leaves behind a world of headlining clubs and making specials to write code in a cubicle somewhere. But Richard Sarvate, former programmer and current standup, is a trailblazer. He fills us in on his former life, including why “spaghetti code” became such a problem, and also his near death experience in Puerto Rico that led to his career change. That last bit is a little exciting but don’t worry, it’s a happy ending and you’ll fall asleep.