Me all over the dang place plus sleep, birds, and really big computers
Although it sounds like a good spy movie plot, these are separate items
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My vulnerability, blasted out on left end of the dial stations nationwide
So a few weeks ago, I appeared on the podcast My Unsung Hero, which is run by my friend Laura Kwerel and the good folks at Hidden Brain. The show features short, true stories of people who have made a difference, without a lot of fanfare or glory, in someone’s life. This week, that same story ran on NPR’s All Things Considered and was super popular, so much so that it ended up atop the ATC website that day. Not Biden, not Putin, me.
I kind of love the url for it: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/18/1092708129/career-hero-podcast-depression. Career, hero, podcast, depression. It’s like some doomed biographical haiku.
The story is about when I worked in software customer service and my friend Jane in the HR department there told me I didn’t belong. She said I should be making my living doing something creative. I had never believed that myself but hearing it from someone else, someone I liked and respected, allowed me to believe it. I’ve been doing professional creative work for 24 years since. In real life, Jane’s heard this story before, because it’s in my book. I told her it was on the radio this week and she was super nice about it but I gotta think she’s thinking, “Okay, YOU’RE WELCOME, no cut it out.”
Okay, THEN I was in AARP
I did this list on McSweeney’s a few months back and it became weirdly popular. It’s all about sad dad bands like Wilco and The National and what they indicate about the sad dads who love them.
That popularity led to an invitation from one of AARP’s publications to write about when bands, both sad dad and otherwise, play tours and shows of a single album, songs performed in sequence. And this week, that appeared.
The last time I saw Wilco in concert was a few years ago, at the Palace Theater in St. Paul, where I live. As I sat there before the show, IPA in hand, I looked around at the crowd and then whispered to my wife, “I’m all over the place here. I’m hundreds of these guys.”
And it was true. Receding hairlines, beards, flannels that have been in rotation since the last millennium — I was everywhere. Generation X, which has long embraced alienation as a fundamental tenet, found fellowship.
Is it a little weird writing for AARP? Being the age for AARP?
Yeah, of course.
But, as I said to a friend, if the nation’s most powerful lobbying organization wants to pay me a pile of money to write about Wilco, I’m not going to say no.
We’re sleeping more but worse and we’re messed up
I guess it’s not a shocker to find out that sleep quality and quantity has a direct effect on mental health but it’s nice when there’s solid research. This time it’s out of Boston where Brigham and Women’s Hospital looked into pre- and post-pandemic sleeping.
The study found that in June 2020, most participants slept for longer and timed their sleep more consistently than before the pandemic. On average, participants got 15 more minutes of sleep each night.
The study found that though participants went to bed later than before the pandemic, they still slept for longer periods.
But not all participants had better sleep during the pandemic, the study found. Some participants experienced the opposite effects.
When it comes to mental health, about 20% experienced anxiety or depression symptoms, about 30% experienced burnout, and about 20% reported an increase in substance use to cope with stress.
Ultimately, the study found that participants who slept less than six hours a night pre- and/or mid-pandemic, as well as those who slept at inconsistent times, were more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and burnout symptoms.
Oh. Oh no:
Oh no!
Here’s the thing I always feel, though, still, since I was a kid: WHAT IF I MISS SOMETHING COOL?
Sometimes it’s the birds’ fault I can’t sleep
Or at least that I can’t sleep past like 5am sometimes this time of year. It’s those jerks the birds. I live near the Mississippi River (HEARD OF IT?) and birds like to migrate along the river because it’s basically a buffet of bugs. A bugfet, if you will. You won’t? I understand.
Here’s a website where you can track how many birds and what kind are migrating through where you are. In Ramsey County, where I live, we apparently had 548,200 birds passing through last night. Which explains why everything is such a mess. AND! I also learned that we’re entering peak season for the YELLOW-RUMPED WARBLER.
via kottke
Caution, these facts are somewhat interesting. They are not amazing:
The most powerful supercomputer in the country is working on children’s mental health
And presumably other stuff too
It being so big and all
Summit is ranked second globally and first in the U.S. in what are apparently rankings of supercomputers. It’s being used to, uhhhhh, compute? massive sets of data around mental health.
“We are working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory … to develop the first decision support tool capable of analyzing all of the many significant factors that can set a child on a course toward becoming an adult with severe anxiety, depression or suicidal ideation,” Pestian said. “We are working to train [Summit] how to weigh a massively complex set of factors—which will combine data about an individual’s genetic traits, medical history, environmental exposures, demographics and other social determinants of health with their speech patterns, body language and other behaviors.”
“From this, we seek to calculate a child’s mental health trajectory, much like the curves used in a pediatric growth chart that show where a child stands relative to norms for weight, height and so on,” he continued. “Ultimately, clinicians, counselors and others would be able to use this information to decide when and how to intervene with services that may prevent early mental illness from carrying forward into adulthood.”
This computer is so big and powerful, it can run TWO games of Minesweeper.