I’ve written about Spark a bunch here on Uncorrected. It’s been my iOS and iPad OS email client of choice for many years.

Spark recently moved over to Windows, which was fortuitous because I was already a subscriber. The Windows version was unveiled alongside the 2.0 Spark for Desktop release, which was a marked departure from the original, and widely loved, Spark on the Mac. For one thing, it’s an electron app. Spark jettisoned many beloved features in creating Desktop, and moved to a subscription model.

On Windows, Spark was slow. I’m talking unusably slow, from a painfully long launch to sluggish performance in normal use.

But since a recent update, I’ve found Spark on Windows to be snappy, and the calendar feature is pretty much perfect for my needs.

Manage your email and calendar from Spark for Desktop

Like most people, I like funny things. I like to be funny; I delight in cracking people up. But I’ve always wondered about it, and more broadly in the context of why we like comedians (because I really enjoy a good comedian, thinking of Dave Chapelle and Tom Segurra especially).

The notion that the chorus of the Greek tragedy was a subject of serious philological debate. predates my curiosity about laughter and partly inspired it. I remember reading about The Birth of Tragedy and was struck that this element of a Greek play—a group of performers that spoke in unison—remained a source of intrigue… that its function, separate from the audience’s acceptance of it, was something of a mystery.

So to with laughter, perhaps?

Why do we laugh? What function does it perform? If it even does?

[I]ts principal function appears to be creating and deepening social bonds. As our ancestors began to live in larger and more complex social structures, the quality of relationships became crucial to survival. The process of evolution would have favoured the development of cognitive strategies that helped form and sustain these cooperative alliances.

This article differentiates between two kinds of laughter: volitional and spontaneous. There are audible differences between the two, and people can reliable detect one from the other. But both types fulfill the same need.

In the same vein, but with an added caveat: Laughter is a sign of safety:

“The idea was that laughter was an external signal that can tell the group everything is OK, we can relax. (There is) no need to be anxious or threatened by what’s happening around us. And so this would really be a great survival tool for groups of humans,” she explained.

But what about watching a comedian or comedy with others? Why do we like that?:

This form of (Duchenne) laughter is involuntary and highly contagious (we are up to 30 times more likely to laugh when we watch a comedy video in a group than if we watch the same video alone

Most research on the functions of laughter has focused on the information being broadcast by the person laughing or its role in inducing positive affect in the listener, thereby facilitating interaction or reducing threat

As mentioned above, there is the kind of laughter I was curious about: spontaneous laughter, or what is also called Duchenne laughter (named for the scientist who discovered the physiology of a spontaneous smile). But there is another kind of smile, and a corresponding kind of laughter: volitional. Unlike spontaneous laughter, the telltale sign is the eyes. Interestingly, such laughter is punctuational… calculated, even:

The results were surprising, even to Provine: Less than 20 percent of the real-world laughter incidents he cataloged were in response to anything resembling something funny. Far more often, people were giggling or chuckling at innocuous statements such as “I’ll see you guys later,” “I see your point,” and “Look, it’s Andre!” What’s more, in all of these cases, the person who produced the laugh-provoking statement was 46 percent more likely to be the one chuckling than the person listening. And while laughter might seem like something that can erupt at any point in response to something funny, in only eight of the 1,200 laugh episodes Provine cataloged did the laughter interrupt what somebody was saying. Instead, 99.9 percent of the time, laughter occurred in tidy, natural breaks in the conversation, punctuating the speech like a period or exclamation point.

Applying the prongs of his box to people’s faces, Duchenne evoked one kind of smiling—the voluntary kind, the type of expression we produce when we a grin to be polite. This mannerism, he discovered, involves the face’s zygomatic major muscles raising the corners of the mouth. But Duchenne discovered there was a second variety of smiling and laughing, one that occurs when we find something truly entertaining or funny. This expression was more complex, utilizing both the zygomatic major muscles and the orbicularis oculi muscles that form crow’s feet around your eyes. It’s why people say a real smile is in the eyes. Duchenne was never able to reproduce with his electrodes this second form of expression—now known as a Duchenne smile or Duchenne laughter—and he came to believe it was “only put at play by the sweet emotion of the soul.”

But then, sometime in the hundreds of thousands of years after that, theorized Gervais and Wilson, the other sort of laughter emerged—the non-Duchenne sort, the kind that isn’t dependent on something being funny. As people developed cognitively and behaviorally, they learned to mimic the spontaneous behavior of laughter to take advantage of its effects. They couldn’t get it right—they couldn’t simulate the eye-muscle movements of real laughter and smiling—but it was close. Mimicked laughter was a way to manipulate others—sometimes for mutually beneficial purposes, sometimes for more devious reasons. As Gervais and Wilson put it in their paper, “non-Duchenne laughter came to occur in aggressive, nervous, or hierarchical contexts, functioning to signal, to appease, to manipulate, to deride, or to subvert.”

1. Weber Smokey Mountain 22": Outside of sous vide, my taste towards cooking runs decidedly analog. We bought this smoker maybe 10 years ago and while we don’t smoke meat often, it’s always a revelation. I make spare and baby back ribs tonight and they were slammin.
2. The Virtual Weber Bullet: My dad pointed me to this website back when I got the aforementioned smoker. It’s pretty much the only site I use for smoking recipes. I used the Minion Method for today’s cook, to great success.
3. Outlaw’s Burger Barn and Creamery: Below are pics of the Cookie Monster ice cream cake. Insane.

I changed the rear tube on the Gunnar and took a quick spin around the (admittedly capacious) ‘hood. This was fun and a first of sorts: I haven’t been on a bike at this weight since maybe 5th or 6th grade. Effortless isn’t the word… sinuous perhaps.

In "Wake Up Routine" I shared a screenshot from OneNote of my wake-up routine since I started my new gig. Because I have to wake up a bit earlier to get to work (due largely to an earlier start time), I hit the Concept2 within minutes of rising. Contrast this with my previous routine:

• 6:00 wake up
• Walk dogs and make coffee
• Row

I had a good 30 minutes after rising to drink some coffee (and sometimes house a banana) before rowing. I attribute to this my more lackluster rowing performance (at least compared to my previous efforts): I was up, well caffeinated, and alert by the time I was downstairs.

I added this little twist to my routine in order to get my body and mind up to speed more quickly:

• 15 grams of coffee (currently some leftover emergency Dunkin’ beans)
• 50 grams of water
• Aeropress and chill over night
• Guzzle upon waking

It’s pretty good and seems to be helping me warm up more quickly.

I was listening to the Mind Pump Podcast and in the course of the conversation, one of the hosts asked what everybody’s favorite dinosaur was. He added that this was important. I chuckled about this diversion, as I think most kids (especially boys) have an opinion in this space.

My answer is easy: I always preferred the brontosaurus, now known as the apatosaurus. I liked the idea of a quiet, gentle giant pensively chewing plants in a body of water. This creature always stood in stark contrast to the T-Rex, the aggressive bully of childhood’s dinosaur landscape.

I consider these kinds of preferences a kind of projective test, telling you a bit about the person sharing their preference. I’m not an in-your-face kind of person, and am not likely to (purposefully) rock your world with a phone call or email. I always had a more mild personality, and even at a young age, the apatosaurus drew me in.

And the same host who asked the question? He described persons who answer “T-Rex” to be a “generikid,” a portmanteau I’d never heard but found satisfyingly succinct. The apatosaurus fans among us appreciate this kind of comeuppance.

Bonus: What Dinosaur Are You?

I wrote about feeling your feelings as an important piece in developing a healthy emotional gestalt. Some suggestions for dealing with negative feelings or emotions include allowing yourself to feel them, and reapprising your interpretation of them, to name a couple.

But there is a dark side to feeling, and it involves rumination, which is associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

What is rumination? It is effectively dwelling on a theme or thought.

I found a site by Dr. Michael Greenberg about the topic, and his advice flies in the face of more common "cures" (I’m looking at you, Mindfulness.)

When I talk about rumination, I’m talking about any type of mental engagement with the problem; put another way, I’m talking about shifting into problem-solving mode.  This includes analyzing, mental reviewing, mental checking, visualizing, monitoring, and even directing attention toward the problem.  Crucially, all of these mental processes are controllable.  They don’t happen to us; we do them on purpose.

Rumination comes in a number of insidious flavors:

• trying to figure something out
• directing attention or monitoring
• keeping up your guard
• pushing thoughts away
• using mindfulness (aka "bad distraction")
• engaging in self-talk

There’s a lot to write about Greenberg’s conception of rumination and its consequences, but I want to focus on three aspects: problem solving, directing attention (or just stopping), and the Core Fear.

Problem Solving

This is the root of your suffering if you are prone to ruminating. As mentioned above, shifting into problem-solving mode is " analyzing, mental reviewing, mental checking, visualizing, monitoring, and even directing attention toward the problem" Having thoughts isn’t rumination (you can’t help having thoughts), but trying to figure out what the thought means is. Neither is having a problem or a question. But trying to solve or answer it is.

For Greenberg, this is the cornerstone of OCD (and anxiety): controlling mental processes that you can’t control, while failing to control those you can.

So what processes can you control?

Directing Attention

Greenberg is critical of mindfulness-based strategies because they, by their design, either attempt to distract you or encourage you to stay in problem-solving mode. And his simple exhortation, challenging in practice, is to just stop directing your attention to the problem you are trying to solve.

So what are you supposed to do? Nothing. Greenberg writes that "instead of looking for an antidote, just stop eating poison." To stop ruminating, you don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop ruminating. Don’t direct your attention to the thought. This is where I think the feeling your feelings angle comes in, because not directing attention doesn’t mean thought stopping or trying to force yourself to stop feeling a certain way. You can’t do that. But you can make a simple choice: to not direct attention to the thought. Here’s how.

The Core Fear

Greenberg attributes the Core Fear to Dr. Elna Yadin. Examples include:

• Feeling judged, ashamed, or rejected
• Feeling disconnected, untethered, alone, or abandoned
• Feeling hopeless, helpless, or trapped
• Feeling contaminated, uneasy, or ‘off’
• Feeling inferior, not good enough, worthless, or like a disappointment
• Feeling how I felt when X happened, when I was abused, etc.
• Feeling vulnerable (e.g., to shame, rejection, or harm)

OCD symptoms are strategies designed to help the person avoid ever feeling the Core Fear. For Dr. Yadin, there is one most common Core Fear: being a bad person. (Others include fear of dying, suffering eternally, ruining one’s life, and remaining alone).

This is how I described gardening to Rhonda when she was talking about all of the animals trying to boost her crops.

Serial Sunday:

1. Tonewood Brewing: I’ve written about some of Tonewood’s styles here on Uncorrected before, but have never selected it for a Sunday Serial. Rhonda and I snuck over to Tonewood, as we do, after dropping the boys off at House of Fun. While they shopped, we tried a few beers; I had a 16-oz Block Party, which is a “Modern American IPA.” I was drawn to the Deep End but the Block Party won out; I did try a 10-oz Deep End, which is a Mexican Dark Lager. I was thinking Negro Modelo, which is OK, but this was much, much better. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to taste much after having an IPA first, but even the Deep End was plenty hoppy. Rhonda got the Double-Dry Hopped Fuego, which we both tried on our last visit and loved, followed by a 10-oz Block Party. We got some to go, too; I dropped one of the cans in the driveway when we got home because I was trying to carry too much, and it sprung a leak, so there are only three cans.
2. Dominick’s Tavern:: We have taken the boys and some of their friends here on numerous visits; it is one of our most frequent Camden County stops. The wings here are coated, so caveat emptor. They’re big-ass wings and there are a handful of sauces to try; I usually go for the 911, which seems like a buffalo hot sauce with some hot pickled cherry peppers mixed in. Rhonda got the Fat Daddy sauce, which is a buffalo sauce with bleu cheese and maybe vinegar stirred into it. I tried it once and thought it was OK. They always have Tonewood’s Fuego on tap.
3. Pink pants: I got some.

If there’s one thing I didn’t learn growing up, and I’m making up for it now, is being OK with my feelings. That is, the negative ones. I have waged a nearly fifty-year battle against acknowledging my feelings and more importantly, accepting them. Anxious? Someone, probably me, is to blame. Self-doubt? It must be true, else I wouldn’t think it. Insecure? Must be a personality disorder or a statement of my value to the tribe.

None of those are true, and more importantly, not helpful. This doesn’t mean that you have to feel this way forever, or even long; in fact, just sitting with your feelings is therapeutic.

What is the healthy response to feeling emotions?

“If you’re feeling sad, allow yourself to cry instead of holding back tears,” Viñas says. “If you’re feeling happy, smile and let others know. The sooner you acknowledge the feeling, the sooner you can move through it.”

Feeling negative emotions helps you move through them.

Interestingly, and this shouldn’t be surprising to students of psychology, is that emotions aren’t really designed for the sake of feeling them: they are designed to motivate us. And negative emotions are quickly reinforced by those two most rewarding of behaviors: (escape and avoidance. But outside of some truly awful situations, neither condition is preferable to patiently dealing with yourself.

So why feel them? (Why not escape or avoid?

It is also a cruel irony that while striving to avoid emotions may bring some brief relief in the short-term, it doesn’t really work over the long-term. This is because we really don’t have direct control over our feelings (if we did, we’d all be hanging out in bliss). So when we try to reduce or avoid emotions, we get stuck on the hamster wheel of trying to control something we really can’t. The resistance takes up much of our attention and energy, while the core issues remain. As we say in the trade: what you resist persists.

The first step? Name the feeling. Another step: talk to yourself in the way that you would someone for whom you care. This is because you may criticize yourself for feeling something negative.

An important hack with feelings emotions is to engage in "(reapprisal)." This is because you can’t control your feelings; you are going to have feelings whether you want to or not. (I think this has been my hangup.) Reapprisal involves recasting your feelings in a more positive light. This helps you avoid attempting to express feeling.

What about "bad" feelings?

This is a meta-cognitive take on the topic, but appreciating that your feelings aren’t good or bad is important: they are all able to help you, but experiencing your negative feelings fully [can help you feel less negative emotions](What You Think About Your Emotions Matters (berkeley.edu))… down the road, at least:

Her study supports other research showing the benefits of believing that all emotions are useful and equally valuable. For example, one study found that participants who thought emotions were helpful also reported being happier and having more social supports than those who found emotions a hindrance. Additionally, the more participants viewed emotions as helpful in their lives, the better they performed on a timed reasoning task—which is somewhat surprising, given how often people pit reason against emotion.

This isn’t a screed against reason and logic; those two are still your friends. But you have to sit with your feelings if you want them to teach you something.

I have something of an affinity for novelty; I am not upset when my day’s plans are interrupted by something emergent (usually, and depending upon deadlines and competing expectations), and often embrace the sudden change. I know plenty of people who are not like that, though; they hate anything that is unplanned or an interruption.

Writ large, people actually prefer familiar activities:

In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people prefer old and familiar activities over hedonic ones that are new and exciting. This means people might prefer revisiting a favorite spot rather than exploring a much-hyped restaurant.

"The research is especially interesting because, on the surface, it runs counter to the idea of the bucket list, whereby people tend to pursue novelty — things they’ve never done but have always wanted to do — as they approach the end of life," study author Ed O’Brien of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said in a press release. "Here we find that, at least in these more every day ending contexts, people actually do the opposite. They want to end on a high note by ending on a familiar note."

People Prefer Familiarity Over The Excitement Of Novelty

I have a food and dining bucket list in OneNote, sorted by kind of food, and to some degree, location! We do tend to stick to old favorites, but I’m always game to try something new. I don’t look at a bad experience as something to lament; I consider it a piece of data I benefitted from acquiring. Mostly.

I was not surprised to learn that dopamine causes us to search for novelty…exploring leads you to expect a reward:

You’ve probably heard about dopamine before, and its effects on the brain. It’s often touted as a ‘reward chemical’ or part of the brain’s ‘reward center,’ but more recent research has shown that, like novelty, it’s actually more closely related to our motivation to seek rewards rather than being a reward itself.

Why Getting New Things Makes Us Feel So Good: Novelty and the Brain

So novelty is related to reward seeking.

Seeking novelty, or "neophilia," has classically been associate with troublesome behaviors. But coupled with two other traits–persistence and self-transcendence–novelty seeking leads to greater happiness:

What was the secret to their happy temperament and character? A trio of traits. They scored high in novelty-seeking as well in persistence and “self-transcendence.” Persistence, the stick-to-it virtue promoted by strong-willed Victorians, may sound like the opposite of novelty-seeking, but the two traits can coexist and balance each other.

I worked with someone who used to repeat the cliché, "Perception is reality." I don’t doubt the limited veracity of that statement; that is, for some people, their perception is the only reality. When you’re dealing with other people, it’s certainly worth knowing this truism.

But it’s only half of the story. There is, on the one side, the invocation that all sentient people are called to: bettering yourself. Evolving. And understanding that your perception is not, in fact, reality, but as noted in this video, unique to you. And while it’s debatable what the definition of the truth is, it is certainly not unique to you.

The other side is the persuasion angle, the sales tactic: advantaging your influence by understanding the other person’s perception. This is the crucial difference between perception and perspective.

It is certainly possible to shift a persons’ perspective on an issue. In order to do so, it’s important to understand why they feel the way they do. What are the perceptions and beliefs that are giving them a particular perspective? Once those perceptions are clear you can begin to change their perspective. Heed my warning when I say that people hold onto their beliefs and perceptions tightly so be careful in how you approach them. ¹

There’s no doubt the world would be a better place if we all could move off of perception and move into perspective. But you can’t control other people. You can, though, do this for yourself.

---

¹The Difference Between Perception and Perspective

I was mesmerized by this movie as a child; my mom got a reel-to-reel projector for a birthday party when I was just a squirt and we all watched this.

Amazing notes and examples of the animation from the film.

How Chuck Jones Animated the Mongoose in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

I posted quickly the other night that [I love pears][1]. That’s true, and the post stands. Pears are delicious.

But I like them for another reason.

When I find myself thinking about eating something after dinner (an activity about which I am circumspect, having effectively not done that deliberately as part of a larger weight-loss strategy), the usual suspects fall into my mind: That can of Virginia peanuts in the pantry! Liccorice! A nub of chocolate!

Depending upon what FoodNoms tells me is my calorie balance for the day, I often spring for frozen blueberries, or more recently, a pear. Rhonda loves them, too.

Grabbing a pear isn’t so simple as plucking one from the crisper and chomping down, though. I have a process that involves a few curated steps:

1. Peel the sticker off of the pear: you can’t eat those. I hated this step and sometimes sought to affix the offending decal to the cutting board, until I committed to just trashing it. It takes a few seconds and a half-dozen steps.
2. Core the pear: Rhonda bought a uni-tasker a while back, which is just a metal tube you push into the fruit to core it. It’s pretty efficient and fast if you take the time to set up your aim.
3. Weigh the pear: I like to know how many calories I’m eating. Sue me.
4. Slice the pear: I get a good 16-20 thin slices out of the whole fruit. This goes on a tiny cutting board. Perfect for sharing.

OK, so why enumerate such quotidian steps? I like the routine. Maybe it’s a sign of middle age, or an expression of my overly-active left brain (my brain is a loud mash of language, all day. All day.) It’s a process entirely spatial and physical in its completion. It involves some work and care in its preparation, in contrast with the quick hit of dopamine you get from unwrapping something sugary. It takes a little time before you can enjoy it.

Coffee is like this, for me, too. So many people jam a plastic cylinder in a machine, pull a trigger, and ruefully gulp down tepid brew in a litany of morning ablutions. For my parent, I adore the weighing, grinding, and measuring that goes into my morning jag, via pour over. Good beans, simple tools, time, and attention.