The Big Five Personality Test

One of the things I teach is Personal Adjustment, which is a poor name for what the class really is: a class in positive psychology. Yesterday, I covered traits and happiness. The whole thing about that is that we have personal genetic traits which might influence our happiness.

One way to measuring enduring traits is the Big Five Personality Test, which has been tested for correlation not only to the traits measured but to happiness. The Big Five mentioned in the title measures five dimensions (see picture below):

Some of these dimensions are linked to happiness as follows (Judge et al., 2007):

Higher openness to experience correlates to higher happiness
Higher extraversion correlates to higher happiness
Higher emotional stability correlates to higher happiness
Agreeableness and conscientiousness do not correlate to higher happiness

In other words, if you score low extraversion (i.e. score as an introvert), you will experience less happiness than someone who scores high in extraversion — and half that gap is unchangeable; it is a trait you have that won’t go away.

The good news, though, is the other half (on average) of that gap can be changeable. By pushing your comfort zones, you can recoup some of your happiness in openness and extraversion. By learning to manage emotions, one can increase emotional security.

So some people are happier than others, but it’s possible to approach a higher level of happiness through self-work, and that’s a good thing.

If My Cats Were Authors

Someone posed the question on Twitter: “What would your cat’s autobiography be titled?”

There are four cats running the household so I came up with the following:

Me-Me: It’s All About Me-Me
Chuckie: No, Skritch RIGHT THERE
Girlie-Girl: Confessions of a Grouchy Cat
Chloe: ZOOM! The Adventures of A Lucky Kitten

My readers met Me-Me yesterday: she loves paying attention to her favorite human because her favorite human loves paying attention to her. Weebles (as we call her) is 11.

Girlie-Girl (or Girlie, or Twirly Little Whirly Girl, the calico, is our oldest cat at 14, which is 72 in human years. She grouses at me when I pet her; she grouses at me when I don’t.

Chuckie (aka Chuckie Monster) is a long lean orange cat of three years. He’s mostly settled down into a mellow lounge-around-the-house cat except when he gets into mock fights with the youngest of our crew.

Chloe (Little Girl), the youngest, is 10 months of age. She still has the zoomies and pounces on things, has almost learned to open doors (the lack of opposable thumbs is the only thing saving us all). She’s a tortoiseshell.

This is Girlie, the oldest (Calico in front) and Chloe, the youngest (tortoiseshell)

I probably write too much about my cats, but that’s because I love my cats, and because they’ve asked me to ghost-write their autobiographies.

Guest Blog from Me-Me (Weebles) the Cat

I’m hanging out with my human. She sits on the cushie place with the light box she stares into and moves her fingers in patterns. Sometimes I sit beside her and beg for pets; other times I sit behind her and clean her hair.

She always sits at her place, and I consider it my place too because she’s there. Sometimes the other human (the one who walks loud) walks by with something foul-smelling in a tall dish. Notice I said “foul-smelling” and not “fowl-smelling”. I like “fowl-smelling”. I don’t understand the tall dish with the loop on the side nor why my human drinks out of it. I tried once and got my face stuck in it.

Oh, there’s other cats. I don’t pay much attention to them because of my undivided attention to my human. They don’t pay much attention to me, even the spotty black demon who joined the household most recently. I have another sister who tries to sit in the same place as I do, but she takes one look at me claiming my space and plods away.

It’s naptime now (it’s always naptime) and so I need to curl up into a comfy space now.

Looking at the Clouds (when there’s nothing else I can do)

I am still on pain medications because I’m still in pain. I cannot be trusted to operate machinery — cars, forklifts, and maybe even this computer. Is typing under the influence a misdemeanor or a felony?

I would like to do magnificent things today with writing — continue revising Reclaiming the Balance (fantasy romance with a female and non-binary main character), contemplate what I should send out for querying, play with the short stories that have been sitting in a metaphorical drawer. But my thought processes look like this today:

Today, I would like … this music is putting me to sleep … oh, look, that song is called Northern Town … I haven’t heard “Life in a Northern Town” in ages. Let’s play it … what was I doing again? I was typing … Why was I typing? Oh, my blog? I don’t know if I want to write this blog today … Let’s listen to some Bread …

It’s like the world is too big and I want it to be tiny right now, a blanket fort with warm milk and familiar music. Writing is part of that big world outside that I feel ill-equipped to deal with. This is not me, not really. If I have any free time, I want to write.

Right now I just want to curl up under my blanket and follow my thoughts into the clouds.

#PitMad

I will be participating in #PitMad again on Thursday.

#PitMad is a semi-annual Twitter pitch contest for writers. Writers pitch their books in one tweet, and they get three tries to tantalize agents and publishers with their pitch. Hopefully, an agent/publisher sees a pitch they like and send a request for a full manuscript, which is the first step to a pathway that may lead to traditional publishing.

I have three different books I will be pitching right now, and I hope that I will have luck this time. I’ve rewritten the pitches from past #PitMads, so they’re fresh and new.

Here are my pitches:

Adam and Lilith, star-crossed lovers in a 6000-year-old play, meet again at the brink of apocalypse. Humanity’s fate rests on a collective of pacifists facing immortals and their armies. Lilith’s life is at stake – and if she dies, so do all women on earth. #A #F #FTA

Anthropologist Anna Smith crosses the war-torn remains of the US to chase a legend. Amidst attempts on her life, Anna finds her past entwined with the story she found. Who she is – old and new – could be the key in stopping genocide. #A #F

Dr. Jeanne Beaumont’s life escapes logical, scientific notions – there’s a monstrous vine in her lab and a man half her age courting her. Josh Young sees his crush naked in a vision of a riotous garden. Together they find things don’t have to be logical to be true. #A #R #CR

#PitMad happens four times a year, so there’s plenty of times to participate.

Sorry I didn’t write yesterday, but I have been struggling with a catastrophic tooth infection (as in half my lower jaw) and I’m on hydrocodone to deal with the pain.

In short, I am seriously out of it.

I thought about leaving the typos in here to show how seriously out of it I am, but I can’t stand leaving spelling and grammar errors in a piece, so I’m revising errors as I go along. Believe me, there are many errors happening.

I hope to be out of pain soon, after which I’ll see whether I have any teeth left from this.

Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast

I have once again discovered my favorite internet radio station — Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast. The station pumps out lowkey ambient 24/7, and I like to play it all night as background music to sleep by.

I first started listening to Sleepbot in the late 1990s when I had first moved to Maryville and I was racked with chronic insomnia. (I should note that I was much later diagnosed with bipolar II, which explains the periods of insomnia). I would lay on the floor with my laptop and listen to the vague waves of music. I don’t know if it ever made me feel truly sleepy back then, but I would half-sleep, drifting among the motifs.

But then there was the wolves. One night I was half asleep again, only to hear wolves howling. Not the pretty howls we think wolves make, but shrieking yelping group howls. I slammed awake, thinking I had dreamed them, but the wolf track was real. I’m not sure why anyone thought that was restful music, but okay.

Photo by patrice schoefolt on Pexels.com

So, it’s years later, and I’ve discovered Sleepbot again using a wonderful iPhone app called Radio Garden (which, as you can see from the link, has an online presence as well). It’s now my nightly serenade and now I fall asleep to it.

Last night, I was vegging out listening to Sleepbot convinced I must have imagined those wolves howling.

I. DID. NOT. IMAGINE. THOSE. WOLVES.

There they were again with the most nightmarish howling by sheer coincidence.

Did I mention I love sleepbot?

Out of Commission Today

Abscessed tooth and pain meds. Sorry.

Happy Half-Price Chocolate Day!

Today is one of my favorite holidays — Happy half-price chocolate day!

I’m only partially joking. The benefits of chocolate are well known —

lowers cholesterol levels
prevents cognitive decline
reduces the risk of cardiovascular problems

Not to mention tastes good.

The problem with Half Price Chocolate Day in the US is that it features American chocolates which are, in a word, awful. They have a burnt-milk flavor and are overly sweet. I am not a world traveler, but I have had good chocolate. Lindt chocolates are pretty good, although aficionados don’t like them so well, calling them bitter. I have had very good Belgian chocolate, and I have had American artisan chocolates (with Burdick being one of my favorites), which are nothing like mass market chocolate. Yet I will sometimes eat American chocolate, especially if it’s half-price.

I would love it if one of you from overseas would email me some good chocolate!

A Whole Lotta Love (redux)

The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it only celebrates only one type of the seven types of love that the ancient Greeks celebrated.

So, those types of love:

Agape – love of humanity.
Storge – love of family
Philia — love of friends
Pragma – love which endures.
Philautia – self love
Ludus – flirtatious/playful love
Eros – romantic and erotic love.

Valentine’s Day only seems to celebrate eros, and it does so in a big, splashy, commercialized way.

I want people to reclaim the other types of love for Valentine’s Day and go out and celebrate them. Galentine’s Day is a good start, for those female friends who want to celebrate each other. But we should be celebrating our families, our friends, our flirtations, the world. Wouldn’t the world be better for that?

If you liked this blog post, please follow me and let me know you’re there! I need a little love!

Odd Things that Make Me Feel Nostalgic

As a writer, it’s good to examine what my personal symbolism is — first, because it may provide universal symbolism for my stories. Second, because sometimes my personal symbolism is so personal that it just confuses my readers.

I feel nostalgic seeing cars driving by in the early morning. It comes from being up very early in the morning as a child when my mom had to drive my dad to a pickup point so he could get to work. Mom would wake my sister and I up early and we would eat cereal in front of the tv watching the hog futures with Orion Samuelson (this is a 1970’s Chicago area TV reference) as it was the only thing on TV. Then Mom would bundle us up for a 20-mile car ride in a blue Buick station wagon, during which we would often fall asleep. The occasional car driving by in the dark reminds me of a moment when I felt the rest of the world was sleeping around me. I don’t know that this image would speak to anyone else.

Another thing that makes me feel nostalgic is antique auctions. I spent several weekends a year in my childhood at junk auctions as my parents searched for treasures. From rain-damp backyards to big, dusty antique barns, drinking small styrofoam cups of hot chocolate and eating hot dogs for lunch. I remember feeling special as very few children got to sit through auctions with their family. I once bought a box of junk for 50 cents and later sold the cookie jar from it (a primitive with blue cobalt glaze) for $9. Is there anyone else out there who would pull up a feeling of boredom and curiosity from the images of a junk auction?

Then there’s my experience with certain rock songs that use harmonica or sax. Think “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” by John Lennon or “Helpless” by Neil Young. I remember the first time I heard the former on the car radio (AM radio) half asleep in the car on the south side of Ottawa IL as an adolescent. The first time I heard “Helpless” was on an AM radio in my bedroom, and I was a few years younger. Very prosaic memories, yet these songs call up a portentous feeling of the past.

The caution here is that I could build these into my stories and believe I am communicating such things as nostalgia, such feelings as isolation or boredom, such universal moments that the reader will experience, but the truth is that these would speak only to me and maybe a rare reader. This is why I have to be careful as a writer to not depend on instant nostalgia to speak for me.