Being Erica

Last year a friend turned me on to a Canadian series titled Being Erica. After the second episode I was hooked. The premise? Magical-reality based... our protaganist meets a 'therapist' who helps her grow by going back in time (primarily, but she learns from other things as well) to fix her regrets.

Not only do things not always go according to plan when Erica re-dos her past (or future... or stands still in time), but the consequences of her choices on her life in the present are often surprising.

Hence my love for this show. I suspect we would all like to go back in time to do some things differently. Hmmmm... I'd also like to go back in time to relive an experience or two. And wow. To have a day that I could do anything and have no... well... almost no consequences? I'd sign up in a heartbeat. So. Throwing it out there to the intertubes. Check out Being Erica.

Countdown

I'll be moving to a tiny town in Northeastern New Mexico to start my first 'real' job in early- to mid-January. Now that the pressure of hunting for a job and the stress of not having an income is finally almost over, I've been more than a little annoyed to find myself just as listless, un-energetic, and over-whelmed as when I was waiting to hear if I'd been invited to interview at a site or offered a position.

As I mentioned in my first post, Anchorless, I'm no stranger to moving, especially over the past few years. Aside from getting over my initial disappointment regarding leaving New York, I have actually enjoyed my time in so many different places. In hindsight, one of the reasons this period of my life has been fun as opposed to a collosal pain-in-the-ass was because I had support systems in every area in which I spent time. The primary stressor was being under- or unemployed, and my friends and family have been more than supportive when it came to helping me during this (thank God) relatively short period of joblessness. In a way, not having a lease and, at least for the last three-and-a-half months, a job has allowed me to have incredible freedom when it came to traveling, be it for interviews of for pleasure.

Publishing publicly

Publishing publicly is weird. I have virtually no followers and started this blog for myself. And it's not like blogs have some sort of peer review requirement. That said, I have started four and almost completed two posts that I'm scared to slap up on the intertubes for fear of saying something 'wrong.' Offending someone.

As one of my impending posts is titled You Can't Please Everybody, you'd think that I'd be a little more comfortable having an opinion, acknowledging others may or may not agree, and leaving it at that. I also believe that opinions change as one is confronted with new information (hence the name of the freaking blog), so even if I did change my mind regarding a post, it's not like I couldn't write a new one incorporating new thoughts into my modified belief. Hence my curiosity and annoyance with pausing to post.

It makes me wonder how people with well-traveled blogs do it. But I'm making myself write stuff publicly to learn and grow from the experience. Hopefully the more I do write, and the more I (hopefully) hear others' feedback, the better I'll get. Part of the process.

Ironies*

(Hopefully I’m not pulling an Alanis Morissette with this one…)

Last night I watched a very well done documentary about the Hollywood portrayal of United States indigenous peoples named Reel Injun. Watching documentaries that challenge the history I learned in elementary, middle, and high school is always bittersweet. I love history and love learning about how past times contribute to our present; how we got where we are.  The flip side, of course, is learning that the history I embraced as a child was skewed to present people best described as my ancestors in the most positive light possible: highlighting their accomplishments, downplaying and at times, erasing their failures, and perhaps most egregiously, telling others’ stories for them.

Many of the inaccuracies and downright deceptions about which I’ve learned regarding white or mainstream culture’s portrayal of indigenous peoples are documented in Charles C. Mann’s excellent 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. From reporting lower numbers of the baseline population of indigenous peoples in the Americas in an attempt to downplay the atrocity of the genocide committed in this country to dismissing the accomplishments of the native peoples (ex., bridges and other contributions to architecture, maize, and many other advances), white people’s re-writing of American history has been to our benefit and others’ detriment.

Paradigm shifts

Disclaimer. My knowledge of philosophy and the sciences outside of psychology is a matter of intrinsic interest and is elementary at best. My understandings are still in process, and I’m using them to provide structure for this post. Thus, this is a super-simplistic synopsis of a topic I find interesting and my personal experiences through the lens of that topic. Any feedback regarding misrepresentations of the science in question is welcome.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of paradigm shifts, the name of this blog comes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962.  A friend in college first introduced me to the philosopher when she gave me Kuhn’s book for Christmas. While she was correct that I would enjoy the reading, I didn’t get around to finishing the work until about a decade later. When I completed SSR, I was approximately half way through my graduate program and so used to reading research papers that, at the time, a book about the process of science and theory change seemed riveting in comparison.

Paradigm shifts refer to science's change in attachment to the theories that describe, explain, and predict occurences in our world. The shifts happen when enough contradictory or unexplainable evidence accumulates to challenge traditional theories, in Kuhn's words, normal science. The new findings lead to revolutionary science, described as research attempting to yield new evidence to inform and contribute to the development of new theory that accounts for new and old findings. (There is also a phase termed ‘prescience,’ which describes the state of a field that has no unifying theory to provide a framework for the studies contributing information to the field… such as the field of Psychology before Wundt and Titchener developed the theory of Structuralism.) Ultimately, Kuhn proposed that science, our theories and understandings of the world, is a continuous process. Sometimes the process is characterized by violent upheavals as we attempt to reconcile new information to frameworks that do not always account for them, often ending in new theories that best account for new and old information.