verboten

news you can’t use: 17-jul

In honor of Google rescinding their real name policy after three years, I’ve been doing a lot of hand-wringing about the name under which this newsletter appears. I’ve spent many years on the internet carefully crafting unidirectionally permeable walls around my various identities so I’m comfortable. The name I chose had to make sense in a variety of contexts (from-name on the email, sig of the email, as a byline in combination w/ the title, okay for medium & tumblr, etc) but not screw up any of my weird walls, and after all of that I eventually decided on…. “pam.” Which happens to be my name. Hi. Nice to meet you.

[Especially here on medium, where none of that actually makes a difference!]

Now that that vital update is out of the way, if you’re wondering what the internet thinks about the end of the nymwars, I like to think this MeFi comment pretty much sums it up:

Inigo Montoya: Offer me circles.
Google: Yes!
Inigo Montoya: A reversal of your real names policy, too, promise me that.
Google: All that I have and more. Please…
Inigo Montoya: Offer me anything I ask for.
Google: Face computers, self-driving cars…anything you want!
Inigo Montoya: I want Google Reader back, you son of a bitch!

So say we all.

At any rate, all that fluttering about names threw me off my morning routine, which is an integral part of being a more productive person. Other tips include having a “personal system” (lol) and not checking email in the morning, but I don’t really want to read bullet points. I want to spend time with this excellent chart of famously creative people’s routines.

I’m downright Kafkaesque. Goody. That said, maybe genius is overrated and what you really need is syphilis! Then you can work it into your novels and die all tragic and insane, like artists from time immemorial. Although creativity doesn’t discriminate; it’s tied both to genius AND to madness. It’s a “mad-genius paradox”! I love a good paradox.

On one hand, only 14 out of 155 creative types suffer any symptoms of psychopathology […], and two-thirds have no chance of madness […]. So creativity links with mental health. On the other hand, the top creators run a very high risk of having the symptoms. So creative genius links with mental illness.

Actually that article is not particularly worth reading if you’re actually interested in creativity and the brain; this one, by a psychiatrist & neuroscientist who spent a lot of time with Kurt Vonnegut (who, according to the above chart, got up at 0500 ughhhh), is a million times better (and much longer).

For years, I had been asking myself what might be special or unique about the brains of the workshop writers I had studied. In my own version of a eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. To test this capacity, I needed to study the regions of the brain that go crazy when you let your thoughts wander.

And I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s basically what this newsletter is for me, I think. I read something somewhere and tug on the string; what comes loose? THE FRAY. GET IT. I am both awesome and the worst, sorry. Here is an article on being a better online reader, which is a thing I am reasonably okay at, but getting better at with practice.

Anyway! In news news, Captain America is black now (which he has been before, don’t forget) and between that andLady Thor, the bigots are apoplectic and I’m loving it. I’m not loving the fact that another Malaysian Airlines flight has crashed, or maybe been shot down, over Ukraine. Things in Ukraine are going super well for everyone, so Obama imposed some more sanctions on Russia that mean Americans need to stop buying AK-47s. Americans should also stop buying almond milk, which is basically “a jug of filtered water clouded by a handful of ground almonds” (but so delicious); stop building wasteful inefficient bathrooms; and stop taking the Myers-Briggs personality test, which is worthless in all ways.