Category: Uncategorized

Happiness Is Being An Aging Liberal

A friend (who also happens to be my most dedicated commentator) sent me a link to a new study on what makes us happy. Now, typically I approach such things with a bit of skepticism. It is, after all, common to see studies touting sample sizes of mere handfuls or studies lasting for very short lengths of time. Not this one, however! This study followed 268 men for seventy-five freaking years. That’s pretty damn impressive, in and of itself. Another impressive fact, aside from the length of the study, was the breadth of it:

. . . measuring an astonishing range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing.

Now that is some thorough research. I’ve honestly never wondered whether the “hanging length of the scrotum” might contribute, positively or negatively, to one’s level of happiness.

Some of the data proves what common sense already dictated: drinking is bad for your happiness, smoking kills you. Nice to have a scientific confirmation for these things, but nothing really earthshaking yet. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that bit soon.

It was interesting to me that “there was no significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150.” It seems a little bit counter-intuitive, but if I might speculate, perhaps this is because the 110-115 range is the IQ most likely to have a decently paying job while individuals in the 150+ range are more likely to pursue intellectually stimulating professions that offer only comparable or inferior salaries. Like I said, this is speculation on my part; the study itself indicates that it is a higher number of “warm relationships” rather than IQ that contributes more towards high income and personal happiness.

For me, here’s the statistic that I found both the most interesting and also the most personally satisfying:

Aging liberals have more sex. Political ideology had no bearing on life satisfaction—but the most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68, while the most-liberal men had active sex lives into their 80s. “I have consulted urologists about this,” Vaillant writes. “They have no idea why it might be so.”

So while my liberal ideology won’t make me more satisfied with my life, it will mean I’ll likely have more sex. And while that might not lead to happiness on its own, I certainly can’t imagine where it’s going to hurt my chances at happiness. I don’t know about you, but this fact makes me feel a certain smug sense of satisfaction and vindication, which is not to say that I felt my beliefs needed vindication. It’s just one of those things.

If you’d like to find out the true cause of happiness, since it’s not a higher IQ or more sex, check out the article.

No Post Today, So Enjoy This Icy Finger of Death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r4cX2EPt2zE

I think the clip speaks for itself. See you tomorrow.

Happy Birthday, Christopher Hitchens

Today is the late author’s sixty-fourth birthday. I wasn’t familiar with Hitchens’ work while he was alive. It was only after a friend recommended his book Mortality that I became aware of Hitchens as anything other than a name that gets mentioned in the same breath as Dawkins and Harris. Mortality was an amazing book; the man faced death the same way he faced life.

Since then, I’ve moved on to the other books in Hitchens’ body of work. Currently, I’m about halfway through Arguably: Selected Essays.

I wish I’d come across this advice from “A Letter of Advice to Young Contrarians” earlier in my life, but I’m glad to know it now and be able to share it:

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

Words to live by and Hitchens undeniably did.

Bookmark Archaeology

Sadly, this will not be a post about recovered bookmarks unearthed from ancient societies, although that would be pretty interesting. In this case, however, I’m referring to the bookmarks in my browser (Google Chrome for life, yo). I try to keep my bookmarks fresh and current and every so often, I’ll take a moment to delete things I haven’t used for a while. This is probably a mental byproduct from my day job, since I have to maintain a public library collection and discard damaged or outdated books from the collection.

However, despite this utilitarian approach to my bookmarks folder, there are a few links that I can’t bring myself to delete even though the sites themselves are long dead. Even worse, I’ll occasionally click the link and browse the dead site for a bit, just in case there’s new life there. Case in point: Elf Only Inn, a webcomic that was last updated in 2008. The last time the author ever posted anything was in 2010 and it was to his blog to say that he wasn’t planning on coming back.

I’m not sure why I keep checking in. If the author ever glanced at his site statistics, I imagine he’d be amused (or possibly disconcerted) that there’s somebody out there still checking in five years later. Is it a vain hope that something I liked will return? Or is it just nostalgia? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to know if anybody else ever does this. So, my question to you: do you have any bookmarks that you check in from time to time even though the site itself is no longer updated?

About That Supreme Court Thing

I shouldn’t have to explain my feelings on this one, so I’ll keep this short.

equality for all

 

Marriage is a basic human right. It’s not a Christian thing or a Jewish thing. It’s not a Muslim thing or a Hindu thing. It’s not a religious thing. It is not a liberal thing or a conservative thing.

It is a human thing.

There is no discussion about this, there is no debate. This is reality.

There is nothing more sacred than love. There is nothing more important than loving one another. If you deny this simple, self-evident truth and you justify your denial for based on the words from some ancient writing? Some book or scroll or tablet? And the words of that ancient scroll (misconstrued or not) are more important to you than loving your fellow person?

Nothing I could write here could even begin to come close to showing you all the ways in which you missed the goddamned point about . . .

Well, about everything, really.

Life’s Funny Like That

I don’t really have much to say tonight for the blog, but I wanted to share this amusing moment I had yesterday in regards to feedback I’ve received on my fiction writing. Brief background for context: I’m currently hard at work editing and rewriting a novel manuscript in the hopes of publishing. I’ve sent it out to a few publishers, but haven’t had any bites yet.

The last publisher I sent it to had a few bits of feedback for me, including “drop the prologue. Nobody writes prologues anymore. If it’s important enough to the story, it’s chapter one.”

Never one to ignore advice, even when that advice contradicts my own experience, I dutifully made the changes and the Prologue became Chapter One. Now we come to last night; I’ve been meeting with a writer’s group for the past few months to talk shop and offer critiques of each other’s work. There was somebody new there tonight and what’s the very first comment she offers after reading my Prologue Chapter One?

“This reads more like a prologue to me,” she says. “I don’t think this should be Chapter One. It should be a prologue.”

At that point, I can’t help but smile. It really does amuse me. Will I change it back? Hard to say; I think it’s ultimately a minor thing to worry about at the moment, especially when I have so many other, larger problems.

Still, I think it nicely illustrates the futility of trying to follow any offered “rules” when it comes to writing. There’s always going to be something or someone who exists in opposition to your rule. Just something to keep in mind.

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Snakes?

St. Patrick’s Day is a holiday that commemorates the unjust and wrongful expulsion of a proud and noble species from its native land. I oppose speciesism and anti-snakeism in all of its forms. I stand up for the reptiles that can’t stand up for themselves, because they do not have legs.

I support this snake wearing a tiny hat. Do you?

Image

Here are 11 other snakes that oppose the rampant anti-snakeism of St. Patrick’s Day.

First Post (Finally)

At this point in the game, I very much doubt that I have any readers. That’s okay. I’m not really writing to anybody in particular. I’m not even writing because I have something particularly important to say. Mostly, I’m just sick of looking at the blank space on the middle of this page as I tinker with the layout and try to tell myself that I don’t need to blow a whole bunch of money on the fancy WordPress packages, that the minimalist look is in.

We’ll see how that goes.

This is my new blog, which I have for two reasons. First of all, I wanted the domain name before one of my relatives managed to grab it. Assuming I ever manage to publish one of these novels some day, how lame would it have been if I’d have to do something like http://www.matthewciarvella.com? Or worse, http://www.matt-ciarvella.com? The mind shudders. My name is already long and unwieldy enough as it is.

So I grabbed the domain name for myself. It’s my first domain name ever; which is sad considering how long I’ve been making half-assed blogs and even more half-assed (quarter-assed?) pages in general? Seriously, I used to tweak pathetic html on Angelfire sites. Seriously. Angelfire.

I suppose I could have grabbed the domain and linked it back to my old blog. On the other hand, that blog was made with Blogspot, originally because of a rhetoric class I was taking for my undergrad. You know what they say about blogs posted on blog spot. Nobody writing on blogspot is writing anything worth reading. No, I don’t know who said that. Maybe nobody? All I know is that I read it somewhere and in a fit of vanity, I moved over to WordPress in a fit of vanity and now here we are.

Actually, it’s not just about the vanity. WordPress has a very nice set of tools associated with it; I’m pretty happy with the upgrade.

I never really knew what the purpose of the old blog was going to be. Like I said, I originally had to write in it for a class; mostly as an exercise to get us writing every single day. I was really into it for a while and liked seeing my post count grow (seriously, five updates a week for half a year will take you places) so even after the class ended, I kept at it for a while.

The problem was that I mostly just babbled about writing or posted incoherent, drunken rants. Shameful.

Even the title made reference to the fact that I had no idea what I was talking about. Mostly, I just liked that cool T. rex picture. Maybe I’ll bring that back.

Anyway, I’ve been working on my novel for the last three hours and I think my butt has fallen asleep. I’m going to slap this post up and go about my business. I make no promises about when I’ll post again.