Intuition is real. Vibes are real. Energy doesn’t lie. Tune in.
This is actually called thin slicing. Your brain recognizes patterns from very small “slices” of information by comparing them to things you have experienced before. This all happens very quickly on a subconscious level without our conscious mind being involved. So intuition is actually really fast pattern recognition, and it can be very accurate. So yeah, if you have a gut feeling that a person or situation is not good, get the hell out. Your brain knows what’s up.
When I was young – because I’ve always been a big skeptical pain in the ass – I thought that when people were talking about interpersonal “energy,” they were on some Gay Ass Shit.
Years later, after spending hundreds of hours reading studies about intuition and neuroscience and pattern recognition and the processing power of the subconscious mind, I realized that that kind of talk – “she has such good energy,” “you need to read the energy of the room,” “I just got some really bad energy off of that guy” – is a convenient shorthand for the lightning-fast, weirdly-accurate, real-as-fuck subconscious processing of the probability of positive or negative social outcomes likely to result from hundreds or thousands of variables. That “energy” isn’t a tangible thing floating around in the air. It’s your brain updating you constantly with information about your situation. Listen to it. Especially if it’s telling you to be nervous or scared. Your brain is very good at recognizing danger. Let the enormous processing power of your subconscious mind protect you. It’s better at spotting patterns than you are.
“Bad energy” isn’t some hippie shit. It’s your brain setting off a claxon because it knows something’s not right.
DELANCEYPLACE.COM 12/18/12 – WE USED TO SLEEP TWICE EACH NIGHT
In today’s selection – for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected “two sleep” phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:
“Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parchments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ wakes up in the early morning following her ‘first sleep’ and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the ‘first sleep’ on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the ‘first sleep” and the ‘second sleep’ was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn’t always the one long block that we consider it today.
“From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning – the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men ‘do it better’ and women ‘have more enjoyment.’ …
“About three hundred miles away, a psychiatrist was noticing something odd in a research experiment. Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to fourteen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experiment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.
“That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.
“Wehr soon decided to investigate further. Once again, he blocked subjects from exposure to artificial light. This time, however, he drew some of their blood during the night to see whether there was anything more to the period between the first and second sleep than an opportunity for feudal peasants to have good sex. The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at a spa. During the time between the two sleeps, the subjects’ brains pumped out higher levels of prolactin, a hormone that helps reduce stress and is responsible for the relaxed feeling after an orgasm. … The subjects in Wehr’s study described the time between the two halves of sleep as close to a period of meditation.
“Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn’t artificial light – and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows – people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. … [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr’s study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers – not to mention your average physician – have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong.”
This is….wow, this is (somewhat) how I sleep.
In my early 30s I realized the last few hours of my day, every day, weren’t especially productive and I wasn’t even enjoying them, so I decided to really put in an effort to get a full eight hours of sleep, sometimes more, per night. I go to bed sometime between seven and nine, depending on how tired I feel, and I was waking up around 4, 4:30.
Then I started naturally waking up around 3:45 without really meaning or wanting to. Now, very often, I go back to sleep around 5:15 or 5:30 in the morning and wake up around 6:30 to start my day.
When you guys see my comment replies (or reblogs, like this one) early in the morning, I’m literally between first and second sleep and yes, it probably is my most intellectually satisfying period of my day. I’m in it right now.
Interestingly, while I do use a computer in the evening, most evenings especially in the winter, when it gets dark out early, I don’t bother turning on the lights. In winter my plants are in the kitchen (instead of the sunroom) with no windows, which means I have a grow lamp on them, and since my apartment is open-plan, the grow lamp’s super-bright light is all I need for about 90% of what I do. It turns off at 8pm and back on at 3:30am. So frequently the only artificial light I use is designed to emulate sunlight and goes off around the time I go to bed.
This is so crazy and weird, I’m not sure if I want to try going to bed/getting up even earlier and then napping longer, or if I’m dangerously close to taking a vow not to wear clothing with zippers and growing a long beard.
fucked up how cooking and baking from scratch is viewed as a luxury…..like baking a loaf of bread or whatever is seen as something that only people with money/time can do. I’m not sure why capitalism decided to sell us the idea that we can’t make our own damn food bc it’s a special expensive thing that’s exclusive to wealthy retirees but it’s stupid as hell and it makes me angry
bread takes like max 4 ingredients counting water and sure it takes a couple hours but 80% of that is just waiting around while it does the thing and you can do other things while it’s rising/baking
plus im not gonna say baking cured my depression bc it didn’t but man is it hard to feel down when you’re eating slices of fresh bread you just made yourself. feels like everything’s gonna be a little more ok than you thought. it’s good.
bread is amazing and it’s also been sold to us as something really hard to make? Every time I tell someone I made a loaf of bread I get reactions like “you made it yourself???” and “do you have a bread machine then?” I haven’t touched a bread machine in probably 10 years. You CAN make your own bread, folks, and it’s actually pretty cheap to do so. I believe the most expensive thing I needed for it was the jar of yeast. It was about $6 at the grocery store and lasted me MONTHS (just keep it in the fridge.) The packets are even cheaper. destroy capitalism. bake your own bread.
You can also make your own yeast by making a sourdough starter, so that cuts cost even more.
But you have to feed the starter daily/weekly and that means it grows quickly, but there are tons of recipes online for what to do with your excess starter. Cookies, pretzels, crackers, pancakes, waffles, you name it!!
Make it even easier – “No-Knead Bread”. All YOU do is mix the ingredients together and wait until it’s time to heat the oven. The yeast does all the rest.
Here’s @dduane’s first take on itand the finished product. We’ve made even more photogenic batches since.
Kneading is easy as well; either let your machine do it, or if you don’t want to or don’t have one, get hands-on. It’s like mixing two colours of Plasticine to make a third. Flatten, stretch, fold, half-turn, repeat – it takes about 10 minutes – until the gloopy conglomeration of flour, yeast, salt and water that clings to your hands at the beginning, becomes a compact ball that doesn’t stick to things and feels silky-smooth.
Here’s what before and after look like.
My Mum used to say that if you were feeling out of sorts with someone, it was good to
make bread because you could transfer your annoyance into kneading the
dough REALLY WELL, and both you and the bread would be better for it.
Then you put it into a bowl, cover it with cling-film and let it rise until it doubles in size, turn it out and “knock it back” (more kneading, until it’s getting back to the size it started, this means there won’t be huge “is something living in here?” holes in the bread), put it into your loaf-tin or whatever – we’ve used a regular oblong tin, a rectangular Pullman tin with a lid, a small glass casserole, an earthenware chicken roaster…
You can even use a clean terracotta flowerpot.
Let the dough rise again until it’s high enough to look like an unbaked but otherwise real loaf, then pop it in the preheated oven. On average we give ours 180°C / 355°F for 45-50 minutes. YM (and oven) MV.
Here’s some of our bread…
Here’s our default bread recipe – it takes about 3-4 hours from flour jar to cutting board depending on climate (warmer is faster) most of which is rise time and baking; hands-on mixing, kneading and knocking-back is about 20 minutes, tops, and less if using a mixer.
Here ( or indeed any of the other pics) is the finished product. This one was given an egg-wash to make it look glossy and keep the poppy-seeds in place; mostly we don’t bother with that or the slash down the middle, but all the extras were intentional as a “ready for my close-up” glamour shot.
I think any shop would be happy to have something this good-looking on their shelf.
We’re happy to have it on our table.
Even if your first attempts don’t work out quite as well as you hope, you can always make something like this…
can we have more posts like this in future please? this is really useful and could help those who are struggling
So, when my maternal grandmother died, we had to find loving, permanent homes for all five of her cats because otherwise she would have risen from the grave to kill the entire family. We took in Chloe because Chloe was my grandmother’s favorite, and she made my mom promise to look after her. Now my mother treats Chloe like her third child, and the cat is basically plastered to her 24/7 when she isn’t hiding from some imagined enemy like the dustbuster or my dad’s footsteps.
Anyway, we wound up giving the rest of the cats to this couple that runs a joint called Kitty Korner. They try to find loving homes for all the cats they take in, but will care for the unadoptables (read: assholes) for the rest of their lives. That’s great, because one of the cats we gave to these poor women was Tobey. I have no idea why my grandmother ever adopted Tobey. He was a huge schmuck. The most handsome orange tomcat you ever saw, and he loved to crawl in your lap. But if you ever tried to touch him, he would switch immediately into Kill Mode and you could say goodbye to your hand. Needless to say, having him in your lap was awkward. It was like holding a bomb.
Kitty Korner sends us detailed letters every year to give us updates on how Tobey’s doing. Basically, they are status reports on how much of a douche Tobey is and continues to be. These women are saints. I guess they really like cats, because these letters are like a full page of single-spaced text. But more or less, they amount to:
2003: Tobey has a real colorful personality! But, uh, we don’t think he’s suited for adoption yet
2004: Nope, still not suited for adoption
2005: I think this is pretty much a lost cause
2006: WTF
2007: Tobey is trying to kill us and every other cat in the house
2008: Tobey is still trying to kill us and every other cat in the house
2009: Tobey is a vicious dictator and can only find pleasure in the subjugation of other organisms
BUT!!!! The past few years, Tobey has apparently been making steady improvement. And in our most recent letter, we have been informed that he is no longer doing things like venturing upstairs expressly to beat the living shit out of the other cats at Kitty Korner. He will also let you pet him, and when he’s had enough he’ll give a warning nip instead of removing your limb. In fact, Tobey, at a ripe old age of 14, is ready for a new home! With an experienced cat owner, comes the necessary caveat, and like… no kids. At all. Ever. Or other cats, probably. But at least he’s no longer a psychopath.
WE GOT ANOTHER LETTER FROM KITTY KORNER AND WE THOUGHT TOBEY HAD FINALLY KICKED THE BUCKET BUT IN FACT HE HAS FOUND A NEW HOME, AT AGE 16, WITH AN ELDERLY MAN WHO RECENTLY LOST HIS OWN CAT.
I MAY CRY.
2/1/2016: old man Tobey still loving his forever home :’)
Amazing
The adoption story to end all adoption stories. Hey, does Kitty Korner have a Kickstarter anywhere?
The outpouring of love for this post is amazing! I’m going to cry at the office.
They do not have a Kickstarter, however, as a no-kill foster home run exclusively through volunteer work, they always welcome donations and you also have the ability to sponsor a cat. You’ll get detailed photos and status reports on your kitty, and should he or she get a happy ending like Tobey, you’ll be the first to know!
My grandmother was a card-carrying crazy cat lady until the day she died, and she was a big supporter of Kitty Corner. The women who run it are as devoted to rescue animals as she was her entire life. Wherever she is now, she’d be humbled to know just how many people were touched by Tobey’s comeback story.
Bauer-Ross headed back to the Shoppers the next day with her receipt and says the manager offered a full refund, or exchange. She accepted an exchange under the condition that she could open the bottle in the store. When she did, she says it was also filled with pasta.
The flummoxed store manager then snatched a third bottle off the shelf and popped the cap, only to find more dried penne. A fourth bottle yielded a similar result.
ive been laughing uncontrollably about this story for a good five minutes or so
you know at first the manager’s just thinking she took out the pills and added the penne, and when she opened the second bottle in the store his mind just went
it wasn’t her?
My first suspicion would have been she did it too.
I think I am most bewildered by how many people seem to think that you spend the rest of the day reeking of gas fumes if you touch a gas pump. Do they think you pour the gas all over yourself…? Why are these gas fumes clinging to you through your day such that you will not be fit to be around other humans…?
I didn’t even know there were places left that let you pump your own gas.
I didn’t know there were any stations left where people don’t pump their own gas. Every gas station I’ve ever seen has been self-service since the 1970s.
I’ve lived in Central Michigan my entire life and i have never heard of people just….not pumping their gas……i’m so fucking confused.
Oregon: You expect us to pump our own gas like peasants?
Folks, this is why the box set of the Raven Cycle was canceled.
Maggie, I love you, I love your stories and I completely agree with you BUT
I believe that excluding people from art because of financial issues is the same as not allowing access to education. Money shouldn’t be something to keep one from reading and mind that libraries don’t offer the same books worldwide. Maybe these books are accessible in the US or in the UK but it’s improbable that non anglophone countries will have that book. Artist do what they do (I hope) for the pleasure of producing art, money should be a background. I completely agree on the point that artists deserve to get an income from a work they’ve probably lost half a life on but basing an artwork on money is just… terrible to hear? Shouldn’t art trade in sensations and emotions and education?
Yes, if you have the money to buy books but decide to pirate them, then you have no excuses and are taking advantage of a person’s work. If you can’t afford books but still crave them, I don’t think you should feel bad if you pirate them. Access to art shouldn’t be a privilege and I really don’t feel like suggesting someone not to read a book because they don’t have the money for it.
If this was about anything else, I would agree 110% but when it concerns art I think we should be more elastic on judging someone and pointing fingers at people who don’t have the money to pay for books.
“I believe that excluding people from art because of financial issues is the same as not allowing access to education.”
Well, here’s the thing.
I haven’t had a book come out since 2014 because my regular job is as a high school English teacher, and that takes a lot of time and energy and attention. I work in the public high school system. I get paid by the Ministry of Education.
I love my job. I take pleasure in it. I definitely enable people to access education.
If the school said, “Karen, we love your work, it’s great, but our funding has been cut and we just can’t afford to pay your salary,” should I keep turning up and doing the job anyway? After all, if I really loved teaching, if I really cared about educating kids, I’d still be prepared to do all the planning and teaching and marking without any compensation in the form of filthy money, right?
Come on. I want to teach people. I want to write books. I need to pay my rent. If I couldn’t do it with either of those, I’d have to find work elsewhere. I love both those jobs, and I wouldn’t do either if I didn’t, but I can’t live on love.
I spent the last several years too poor to buy new books.
But guess what? LIBRARIES will buy books FOR me.
If there’s a new book coming out that I want, I put in an acquisition request as soon as I know it’s on its way, and let them know what format I want. (I normally go ebook or digital audiobook, because I struggle to get to a physical library branch and find those easier to read.) Then I put a hold on the book as soon as it’s in the system.
Voila! Within a couple weeks of the new book being released, it’s IN MY HOT LITTLE HANDS. And the author gets paid for it. No piracy required.
Libraries like it when you request new books. They have to spend their acquisition budget somehow.
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marshcookie 