Intense Thoughts on Anxiety, Intense Animation on Frasier
Plus: a Senator holds up a dog for mental health? Or something?
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Careful what you wish for. Like if you wish for a book deal.
My guest on the podcast this week is Jason Pargin. He’s an author and a person living with just so fucking much anxiety.
Jason Pargin pounds out books. He’s currently promoting his seventh novel, Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia, which comes out on October 31st. Meanwhile, he’s writing his eighth. His world is about 80% promotion and about 20% writing, he estimates, and he works pretty much every day of the week. Doesn’t have kids, doesn’t have a day job like he did for many years, just writes and promotes. Takes part of Saturday night off and if there’s football to watch on Sunday he’ll watch some of that before returning to his work.
Not that you should feel sorry for him, nor does he wish you too. He is a full-time author, after all, with strong sales, critical acclaim, and even a movie adaptation of one of his books. But he’s doing all this while also dealing with an anxiety disorder that’s been with him since childhood. In his current life and occupation, the anxiety translates into a feeling that he’s never doing enough, never writing enough, never promoting enough, always falling short.
And it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Yes, as I said, he’s been dealing with anxiety since he was a kid and probably no amount of sales or accomplishment would make that go away. You can’t achieve your way out of mental illness, that’s just not how it works. So you can’t really blame publishing when he might be just as stressed working as an accountant. Then again, the life of an author is built on a tower of anxiety: you have so many other people to compare to in terms of production and sales, you have pressure from publishers to always do more promotion, to call in more favors, to push even harder, and it’s never enough. After all, as Jason points out, the job of the publisher is to get the book on shelves at Barnes & Noble or virtual shelves at Amazon and it’s the job of the author to make those sales through relentless access and promotion.
Mostly, I’m excited to have this episode out in the world because it explains the every day experience of living with anxiety in a way that is rare. I think it does for anxiety what our Joel Kim Booster episode did for depression.
Also, because I HAVE TO SAY IT I HAVE NO CHOICE, buy my book!
How to take care of your mental health when following the news feels like viewing Hell itself
It’s a tall order, yeah, to try to keep your mind in one piece while dealing with the news out of Israel and Gaza. But CNN takes a whack at it with some common sense solutions that are good to keep in mind.
“First and foremost would be limit your news intake and your social media,” she said. “I’m not saying, ‘Hey, crawl under a rock and have no idea what’s going on.’ I’m not advocating for that, but I am advocating for perhaps not scrolling through on the social media where there’s no trigger warning. … it’s just a constant diet of really upsetting images.”
Saltz recommends limiting your sources to one or two trusted media outlets, as well as limiting the time you spend on news to 30 minutes a day. “And not having that 30 minutes be anywhere close to bedtime, because it inevitably stirs people up, and they cannot sleep. And the lack of sleep makes them more anxious the next day, so it becomes a vicious cycle.”
Bi-partisan mental health caucus forms in Senate
NBC News has a profile piece on U.S. Senators from both parties who have found common ground on issues of mental health.
Outside of their mutual love for dogs, Padilla and Tillis bonded over something else: their experiences caring for loved ones undergoing mental health crises. Their conversations transformed into action when, a few months later, they launched a caucus that, for the first time, would focus solely on the issue.
“First of all, we’re talking — and it’s something that doesn’t happen enough in America and society in general when it comes to mental health,” Padilla said in an interview on Capitol Hill. “It’s not a red state, blue state thing.”
The group is small, consisting of Democrats Tina Smith (Minn.) and Alex Padilla (Calif.) as well as Republicans Thom Tillis (N. Car.) and Jodi Ernst (Iowa) and the article is pretty vague on what they actually do or want to to do in terms of legislation. But hey, Republicans and Democrats coming together over something - anything - is good news, I guess.
The picture they used at the top of the article is Tillis holding up a dog for some reason.
Frasier remade through a whole lot of animators
Over 130 animators, actors, filmmakers, and even puppeteers joined forces to remake a 1994 episode of the TV show Frasier called My Coffee With Niles. The episode was split into 185 sections, each 6-12 seconds long, and a different animator or filmmaker took charge of each section. Love this...just an incredible array of styles on display here.
This week on Sleeping with Celebrities: comedian Cameron Esposito
Cameron Esposito is a very popular and very funny comedian and the host of the Queery podcast right here on the Maximum Fun network. She has also been to a lot of concerts and while concerts can be noisy, talking about them doesn’t have to be. In this soothing episode, Cameron fills us in on five memorable shows and her five memorable dates for those shows. Is Neil Diamond on the list? Yes. Taylor Swift? Well, it’s mandatory in modern media to talk about T-Swizzle so yes. And who else? Tune in to find out and see if you can stay awake for all five.