Tag: Mental Health

Updates

February Recap 2016

Geoff W

2016 02-15 Cold FebruaryGoodbye and good riddance February! I don’t generally hate months, but February this year really got to me which is saying something when last year we had snow storm after snow storm. I think the lack of light took its toll.

Usually it doesn’t get to me, but I think because I’ve been sick for more than half of the month I’m just done with February. Thankfully, the days are getting longer and the weather is allegedly looking warmer. There have been a couple of days where I’ve been able to get out and go for a walk. I’ll even say (for now) I’m ready to deal with the allergies over the cold I’ve had this month. BLAH!

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Updates

January Recap 2016

Geoff W

2016 01-22 100K VisitorsI know I start out every monthly recap talking about how hard it is to believe that the month is gone, but we’re already a twelfth of the way through 2016! And next year is the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter. I’m not ready everyone, I’m just not ready.

The Big Blog News of the month is that I passed 100,000 all time views on the 22nd. I’m still impressed, I didn’t think I would stick with this for anywhere near as long as I have. With the scheduled and draft posts coming, I’ve already passed 700 posts and I feel like I’m picking up speed rather than slowing down in my old blogging age.

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Books, The Classics Club

Book 390: The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

Geoff W

This is one of those books that has so much umph in the cultural milieu that it’s a wonder I’ve never read it before. I squeezed it in just in time this month to get a podcast recorded to be released at the end of the month. If you’re in the Boston area and you want to record one let me know! 😀 But, more importantly than podcasting, this book counts as the 43 book of my Classics Club journey. (See, I told you I was still chipping away). I’m so far off target it’s not even funny, but I’m glad that I’m still occasionally reading from my list.

Let’s start with the big to-do about this novel. Maybe it’s not that much of a to-do, but it felt like one. I still don’t know how much of this novel to believe is fiction. It’s very clearly labeled as fiction and yet it is very clearly Plath’s own personal story. I mean her mom wrote a letter to the American publishers saying these are real people and real stories thinly veiled as characters! There is one point where I couldn’t help but laugh because Plath writes Esther, the main character, writing a novel about a character doing the same thing. HOW META CAN YOU GET?! This is the same story being told by three different people all of whom are telling/experiencing the same story.

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Books

Book 363: Her Best-Kept Secret – Gabrielle Glaser

Geoff W

Many of you might not know this about me, but when I have a problem that I don’t know how to deal with my first response is to research it as in-depth as possible. That makes it a bit awkward when I blog about everything I read (this is my reading journal as much as it is your review site). At the same time it’s great because I get to share interesting books, like Her Best-Kept Secret, that I never would have read. And I force myself to explore and synthesize in-depth a lot of topics.

If you see me on a day-to-day basis you’re aware that someone close to me has a lot of problems with alcohol, it’s kind of obvious they are a “she” based on the book title. In reality, I’m not sure it would’ve mattered if they were a she, because after reading “The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous” in The Atlantic I knew I wanted to find out more about non Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) programs and I figured Glaser was a great place to start as she mentioned her book in the article.

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ARC, Books

Book 332: Male Sex Work and Society – Victor Minichiello and John Scott (eds.)

Geoff W

This book simultaneously highlights what is good and what is bad about the white tower of academia. It explores a specific topicin depth, while establishing absolutely nothing, other than the need for more research. I received a copy of this book from the publisher and received no compensation for my honest opinion.

I’m going to start with my frustrations with the book (or academia/academics in a broader context) first and then move to what they did well. What frustrated me most about the entire collection were the isolationist tendencies of the authors. In a move to over-compensate for any sort of collective or global identity (and not Western-wash everything) every single paper started out within the first few paragraphs by using the almost exact phrase of, “due to cultural circumstances, male sex workers (MSWs) circumstances in this country cannot be compared to those in any other country.” The reason this was so infuriating is that there were clearly overarching themes, sexual identity (or lack thereof), technology and public health, to name a few, that Manichiello and Scott picked out and even acknowledged. However, rather than encouraging the authors to use them to tie everything together within the papers across borders and identities, they were used to bridge each of the papers between the papers in editorial asides. Seriously, if they would’ve just taken this as a given, at least 50 pages could’ve been cut out of the book due to repetitiveness.

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