Monday Cup Of Links #51 - Covid Upsides, Seaslug Heads, Hindoo History, Dad Self Help
Few history, Much random
Happy Monday!
While it doesn’t matter so much what my life is like, I need to scream into the void, and what better void than this missive that reaches about 200 of you - My life is currently insane and I don’t know how to get a grip.
It’s not so bad as things are for so many other new parents, but I have no idea anymore how to set realistic goals for myself. My day is unpredictable, I want to do all the things at the same time, and COVID doesn’t help matters much. Making time isn’t so much of a problem, but having the confidence to focus on small goals when I do have the time is very very hard. I don’t know when my baby is going to wake, and when she will sleep, and that unpredictability makes it difficult for me to keep focus.
But having a child is a blessing, and brings with it so many gifts - some of which are rare opportunities on some long-standing ambitions. Hence it’s more annoying that I’m not able to get into the mindspace to follow up on those things and see them through.
That said, it seems like the kind of thing I can figure out given some time.
Last week, I found I was getting more interested in archaeological methods. This week however, I find that all the links I read happen to either be incremental improvements like finding something was 45,000 years old instead of 40,000 years old, or random pictures of ancient jewelry and accessories from around the world. So this week is quite light on history. Interesting links, nevertheless.
Onto our links!
When You Have No Idea What Happens Next and We Have No Idea What Happens Next. I came across these two blogposts about how Covid has upended the world, and how it might not all be so bad. The first post talks about what to do now that your idea of the future is all up in the air, and the second one is about the unforeseen upsides of unexpected global events.
Sea slug’s decapitated head crawls around before regrowing a new body. It’s not unusual for insects and worms to regrow body parts after they have been lopped off, but what’s cool about this sea slug is it regrows a HEART. Worms and such don’t even have hearts so them regrowing a body isn’t as big a deal…. But this one regrows a heart and other body parts, and that’s quite a big deal! And the headless body hangs around for weeks too, with the heart beating and everything while the body rots.
Subscribe to the Hindoo History Substack! Vishal Ganesan started going through old (and I mean OLD) newspaper clippings from American newspapers that pertained to Indians, or Hindoos, as we were known in America back in the day. He posted interesting ones on Twitter and Instagram (which I’ve shared before here), but now that he’s seen some overarching and recurring themes, has decided to write about them on Substack. If you’re interested in how America assimilates immigrants, or how the Indian diaspora was viewed in the US, or you’re just vaguely interested in history, subscribe to this one.
Dads deserve better. Stay-at-home-dad and author Shannon Carpenter has this piece describing why he decided to write a self-help book for dads. I’ve read a lot of Shannon’s pieces about parenting, but this one hit home for me. While my husband and I were trying to make sense of the fact that we were now parents, I found no end of resources to help me with this new change in my life, whereas my husband found only a handful of resources, all of which were some version of “you’re the dad, your job henceforth is to suck it up and give mom and kids what they need. Stop complaining, you’re not the one who grew and pushed out a whole damn baby”. That’s certainly not helpful, and certainly doesn’t help with the dread of how our lives are changing irreversibly. The line that jumped out at me was
That’s the problem with so much of the advice out there written for dads. It treats mom as a problem, the baby as an obstacle, and parenting as a distraction. We are better than that, and we deserve better than that.
I’ll be buying Shannon’s book when it’s out in October. I suggest if you’re a parent, you do as well.
Video of the week: Causal understanding of water displacement by a crow. Aesop’s fables are based on FACT.
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