A Splintered Mind

This article was originally published at dadomatic.com . Have you read that book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell ? You haven’t? You must not want your kids to succeed. In it Gladwell provides evidence that the only difference between so-so violin players and master violin players is the amount of hours they practiced. The masters put in about 10,000 hours of practice before hitting twenty years old. The so-so players? Only 8000. That’s only 1.466 hours of practice a day, seven days a week for fifteen years. What slackers! If only their parents had driven them from age five on to practice a measly .366 hours a day more — a mere sixteen or so minutes. Learning that I wondered if I had failed as a parent and doomed my children to mediocrity for the rest of their lives. “I’m so sorry, girls! You’ll never amount to anything!” They stared at me slack jawed and wide eyed and I knew that it was true. Clearly they were all brain damaged. “But it’s not too late!” said I. Quickly calculating, I re...

Personal Health - An Emotional Hair Trigger, Often Misread - NYTimes.com This is an interesting article on Borderline Personality Disorder, something I was diagnosed with when I qualified for Social Security Disability in 1995. I have come to believe that the diagnosis was in error since I don't manifest any of the symptoms. I suspect my Depression, Anxiety Disorder, ADHD, and Chronic Motor Tic Disorder provided a cornucopia of symptoms that perhaps confused my psychologist at the time. Also, I'm sure the fact that I was experiencing suicidal ideation contributed as well. What was most fascinating to me about this article was the mention of Dialectical Behavior Therapy – a drivative of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. I don't know enough about it to understand how they differ from one another, but it's something to look into. Oh, hello! It's been a while, hasn't it? I've had all I could do to manage my family life, manage my disabilities, and prepare for and atte...

A different treatment of my new favorite place - using CameraBag Originally uploaded by Darkstream . Such busy weeks these last few have been. I've been busy wrangling contract details with a magazine, rewriting the first three chapters of my novel, saving my marriage, saving the world, dealing with drama, ticking, forgetting stuff, and being thoroughly distracted that I haven't blogged much. Twitter has taken up the full brunt of my creative output. That's a bit sad, isn't it? As I finish reviewing some manuscripts for a writer's conference ( WIFYR ) I'm attending all next week, I thought I'd share with you a photo from my new favorite place. Sitting on that log I happily played my pennywhistle above the roar of the river beyond that fence. What a truly peaceful moment. I hope to visit it again tomorrow. I invite you visit my flickr photo album of Wheeler Farm - a place I've been to for years but recently rediscovered in wonderful new ways....