The fine line between genius and insanity

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. Being a genius and all, this is something that greatly affects me. (I kid, I kid!)

No, I was actually thinking about Michael Jackson, which got me thinking about Howard Hughes, which led to thoughts of Rivers Cuomo. (Which is kind of an insane progression in and of itself, but I digress.)

Then I started Googling around, and I found this excellent article: 7 "Eccentric Geniuses Who Were Clearly Just Insane. Among the interesting things I learned: Lord Byron had a pet bear which slept in his dorm room at Cambridge. And, even more bizarre was this hilarious passage about Tycho Brahe's odd behavior:

Let's suppose you were high up in social circles and often compelled to give dinner parties. Let's also say you wanted to impress your high-profile friends and reassure them that their good faith and finances were in safe hands. What would you do?

How about hiring a dwarf, dressing him up as a clown, and without any explanation having him sit silently underneath the dining table for the duration of the dinner? Tycho Brahe did it, and he was a lot richer than you.

Crazy, right? But you kind of have to wonder how many of the world's greatest geniuses were truly mentally off. Think about it: These people were able to create works of art and literature and make scientific discoveries that literally changed the course of history. Could you be a "normal" person and do that? I mean, if you're thinking that far outside of the box that you're coming up with the Theory of Relativity or painting the Sistine Chapel, you're probably thinking that far outside of the box in other areas as well. If you're thinking outside of the box in these "good," genius ways you're most likely doing it in "bad," crazy ways, too. Your brain is probably not working like a normal person's on any level.

I mean, the more I think about it, I just don't know that true genius can exist without insanity.

Of course, the real kicker here is that it doesn't go the other way. In order to be a genius you have to be kind of crazy. Genius probably cannot exist without insanity. But insanity? Can totally exist without genius. All geniuses are probably a little crazy. But there are plenty of crazy people who aren't geniuses.

.

Birthday madness

I had a very interesting birthday this year.

Details to follow. But first, I just have to show off this awesome card my friend made me.

When this showed up a few days ago, I was like, "Wh-what?" The return address said Schrute Farms. The postmark was weird (click the image to see what I'm talking about). Making matters even stranger, I had received this really cool anonymous gift the day before (still don't know who sent that) so I was like, "What's going on here? Why am I suddenly getting all of this anonymous stuff? Is this the same person? Two people?"

Anyway, I finally found out the card was from my friend Laura. Yay, Laura! You know me too well.

(And I'm still trying to figure out who sent the anon gift. I'm being vague, but I don't want to spill too much until I find out who did this.)

And I know I promised details about my birthday, but I'll have to do that post another time. I'm running late.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

You know what sort of bugs me? How there are so many situations in life where you can control the "bad" side of the equation, but you can't do nearly as much to affect the "good."

Like, say you're an athlete and for some reason you become thoroughly convinced that you're cursed or you're jinxed or whatever. Or you start believing very strongly that there's a certain game you can never win, or a certain team you can never beat, even though the stats completely favor you, even though you should have this one in the bag.

If you walk out onto the field and you say to yourself, "We're going to lose this game today. It's over. We're totally screwed. No chance in hell we can win." Then you probably can't win. It's like, truly believing you're going to lose, might be enough to actually cause you to lose. But truly believing you're going to win isn't necessarily going to make you win.

Doubt and insecurity and negative self-talk can almost guarantee failure. But positive self-talk doesn't always guarantee success.

I suppose that's why confidence is important. It's not so much that you win the game with confidence. It's that you LOSE the game with lack of confidence.The same way going into a job interview and having tons of confidence won't necessarily get you the job. But having no confidence will pretty much guarantee that you don't get it. In most cases, having a fantastic interview probably won't cancel out a crappy resume. But a crappy interview will usually cancel out a fantastic resume. It's just so unbalanced. You have almost total control when it comes to failure, but you have limited control over success.

To give another example, although this is shifting topics a bit: Say you're having a bad day. Or, even, a bad couple of months. You've had some crappy, crappy luck, and nothing seems like it's working out right.

And then your friends try -- and try and try and try -- to encourage you, to build you up, to make you feel better. Their kindness and support helps...but only to a point. It takes the edge off, it gets you through, but most of the time it doesn't make you feel miraculously better.

But say someone comes along and tries to make your bad spell worse. Say some jerk (or, especially, someone who is supposed to be your friend) takes that opportunity to really hit you below the belt, to intentionally kick you when you're down. Yep, that works. That works extremely freaking well.

Once again, the "bad" is so much easier to accomplish than the "good."

At least, that's the way it seems....

Can't believe he did it

My friend photoshopped this, and it cracks me up. (Scroll down for previous post if you don't get the joke.)

My ears hurt. That has nothing to do with anything, but it's annoying. More randomness: It snowed here last night.

Doin' my best Angelina Jolie

Yeah, I know, these kinds of pictures are obnoxious.

But for some reason, the cold winter weather is making my lips swell up. Either that, or I'm having some kind of an allergic reaction. My lips puffed up a few days ago, and they haven't gone back down yet. When I went out over the weekend, two people asked if I was using some sort of new lip plumping gloss, and one girl actually wanted to know if I'd gotten collagen lip injections!

.

I think it looks awesome. This is the closest to Angelina Jolie I'm ever going to get. Which is still not very close, but whatevs. Anyway, this is what I did for an hour tonight over at my friend's house: I took some photos of myself "puckering up" for the camera. And then I played around with the color contrast for a bit.
. .

I promise I'm not usually this much of a tool....

.

Worth a thousand words

Have you guys heard of Project 365?

Basically, you make a blog or a Flickr page or whatever, and every single day -- for 365 days -- you take one picture and you upload it. You don't have to write anything, you just have to take one photo every day.

Ideally, you upload it that same day, but it's okay to cheat on that part of it. As long as you get a picture EVERY DAY, you're good to go.

I'm thinking about doing it. It seems like a really cool idea, and even if I forgot to take my camera out with me, I've always got my cellphone.

What do you guys think? Anybody tried this? Anybody interested?

Weekend recap

I usually don't blog about what I've been up to, but I thought I'd go that route for a change.

It was a good weekend. I started things out by heading to a friend's house to watch I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, which turned out to be a very boring and crappy movie. But we had a great time, anyway -- laughing, talking, making bad jokes about Garfield. (You had to be there.)

Saturday evening my family and I had a little mini-watch party for the Memphis game. We ate chicken wings and cheered as the Tigers beat up on UCF. Okay, so "beat up" isn't really an accurate description. That game was waaaaaay too close for comfort. Heavy sigh. I miss last season. But at least we got to see CDR interviewed during the halftime. In case you didn't know, I have a teeny, tiny bit of a crush on Chris Douglas-Roberts. Love him.

And, btw...something totally random. My sister has never heard of UFC. Like, had no idea what it was. How is that possible????

After the Memphis game, I drove, like, 35 miles to hang out with a friend I haven't seen in a while. A group of us played Wii until the wee hours of the morning. (Yes, horrible freaking pun, but I couldn't resist.) It was good to see everyone and catch up again.

In between all of that, I managed to work out three times, get some writing done, and watch half a season of Big Love on DVD.

Good times.

Worst '80s video?

Once upon a time, my friends and I used to have 4-million-and-1 inside jokes about Rod Stewart. It would take too long to explain, but we could seriously find a way to turn almost anything into a Rod Stewart joke.

The man is just the root of all evil, I'm telling you.

I mean, just look at this video! I realize this was made in the heyday of '80s badness, but c'mon! This is especially tacky and annoying, even for the era.

The plan

I read an interesting article recently. (I wish I could find the link, but I can't.) The article concluded that, in the blogsphere, if you don't post something new every day (or close to it) you become obsolete.

No updates = no readers.

More updates = more readers.

That makes perfect sense.

But what surprised me was that someone conducted a study and they discovered that bloggers who post extremely brief updates -- like 1 to 3 sentences -- every single day have a much bigger readership than people who post lengthy updates every week or so. So even if you're going to write only one sentence a day, that's still better than nothing.

So that's my new plan. I'm going to attempt to post a new blog every single day, even if I'm only posting one sentence.

We'll see how this goes....