. . . when she looks at her blogroll and realizes that it has become boring and predictable. I wanted to take a break from writing and translating and spend a happy, relaxing hour reading the blogs I follow in my Google Reader. However, it felt like I’d seen all these posts a hundred times already.

Romney is cruel and out of touch, Obama should have been canonized already and if he hasn’t been it’s because of racists and religious fanatics, women are conditioned by society to whine about being held down in everything, every academic (except me) is having a super productive summer, everybody who is teaching this summer hates students with a vengeance, the only acceptable way to be a feminist is to produce meaningless mile-long disquisitions about the special nature of women and the nasty brutishness of men, there is nothing good on television which does not prevent people from churning out endless analyses of every episode of these no-good shows, cats cats cats and dogs dogs dogs always looking exactly the same as if every blogger in my thread owned the same cat and dog, Israel persecutes good kind saintly Palestinians, Palestinians persecute good kind saintly Israel, Montreal is as beautiful as ever, an apocalypse is coming unless capitalism / Socialism / greedy bankers / greedy welfare seekers don’t disappear off the face of the Earth.

This is pretty much what my blogroll is like these days. I know, I know, I chose these blogs myself. And it was fun following them. But I feel like I need to add something new and exciting to my existing list of blogs.

So please leave links to your own blog or any blogs you consider worth reading in the comments!

I’m trying to find healthy self-soothing mechanisms for myself but I can’t think of any no matter how hard I try. So I was hoping that my blog readers could help me by sharing the ones they use.

What is a self-soothing mechanism?

Say, you get an email telling you that your article has been rejected. You freak out and do X.

Or on the first day of class you find out that the copy center forgot to complete your order and you now have no syllabus to give to the students. You freak out and do X.

Or you arrive at the airport and discover that all flights have been cancelled due to bad weather. This means you will not make the connecting flight and will miss your conference. You freak out and do X.

X stands for a self-soothing practice. It can be overeating, drinking alcohol, smoking, shopping. Self-soothing practices not only help to deal with stressful situations. They also help to organize one’s existence. A smoker and a drinker always are on the lookout for an opportunity to smoke or drink. Wherever a drinker goes, s/he will always take care to find a good place to drink. The same goes for a compulsive shopper and overeater. This provides a sense of constancy and cohesiveness to one’s life. A compulsive shopper is not just somebody who shops too much. It’s a person whose existence is in many ways conditioned by the need to shop. Or take a weed smoker. It isn’t simply a person who smokes weed. There is an identity, a community, a special language, and a way of being involved here.

This is one of the reasons why quitting things like gambling, drinking, overeating, smoking, etc. is so hard. For hard-core practitioners (as opposed to the occasional ones), these activities fulfill an important psychological function. Just weaning oneself off a physiological dependence is not enough. One needs to find a substitute for the soothing and identity-building part of the addictive practice. To give an example, I had a colleague who was a heroine addict. He managed to quit and instead of snorting heroin he started drinking huge amounts of alcohol and smoking like a chimney. Which, I guess, is healthier than heroin.

So my question is: what do you do to self-soothe? Please share. You will be helping me out enormously.

P.S. I know that sports and all kinds of athletic activities are the best self-soothing practices in existence. But let’s be realistic, people, in my case, this isn’t happening. I can force myself to do such activities but I’ll never find the process soothing.

This is why I like my online course: I overslept today and when I finally woke up I discovered that a student had asked whether the Mayans had a system of taxation. Then, a lively discussion about taxes, whether it made sense to pay them, how long they have existed, what meanings they carried for different people and in different cultures ensued. And it all happened while I slept.

The moral of the story: I need to sleep more.

The Last Psychiatrist produces more brilliant thoughts per minute than any other blogger I know. See the following, for example:

We acknowledge the ideas of prior cultures relied on their context, but we willfully ignore our own immersion in our context. . . This is the problem with omnivores of contemporary media, the people who are constantly reading every magazine that comes out or every new book on X.  Even the best stuff still suffers from its immersion in 2012.  If you want to see things differently, you have to approach them from radically different contexts.

I will put this as an epigraph on my syllabus next semester. Maybe this will prevent students from complaining on the evaluations that I made them read “stuff that was written 1,000 years ago which it makes no sense to read today because it was written so long ago.”

Can anybody tell me if the following is true? Or is it some sort of a joke? Or an exaggeration?

I mean, Maryland, Pennsylvania? That just makes no sense. And how come some states should be allowed to trample the US Constitution in this way?

I’ve read 6 posts bemoaning the decision by Mayor Bloomberg to forbid the sale of big-sized soda drinks in my thread today. Where are the Libertarians who are protesting this kind of barbarity? They care about soda and not about religious freedom? Vile hypocrites and brainless idiots.

This is yet another piece of proof that all of the so-called Libertarians in this country are nothing but religious fanatics.