It’s a little unfair to characterize Sheena Iyengar as a “blind woman”–she would never refer to herself in that way. Her blindness (caused by retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease) is a tiny part of who she is. I couldn’t resist the title for this post, though. She is indeed someone who thinks, writes—and sees—clearly.
Sheena’s mark was made by her famous “jam study,” which I mentioned in yesterday’s post and have probably noted before. The research project, which she conducted as part of her doctoral studies, aimed to figure out where the sweet spot of choice fell: at what point does “enough” become “too much”? The magic number turned out to be around seven. More than that and people started getting confused.
As an example of this moderate approach I give you our kitchen cabinets. They are high quality, with sturdy drawers and doors, soft-close hinges (which make a surprising difference in how I shut them), and solid-wood fronts with a beautiful factory finish. They are miles removed from the cabinets I made do with in my much bigger and more expensively-countered kitchen in our old house. And they cost about half of what we would have spent for the ones you order and then have to wait weeks for.
What did we do in the kitchen? The floor was the first step, locking us in to certain future choices.
I define “downtime” as time that isn’t directed to a specific task or end but is what I do when I take a break from my work. Usually I read something, these days from some news website or the other. Oh for the days when I just read books! That type of thing seems like a distant memory. I used to gobble up murder mysteries by the ton, and when I’d be eating lunch by myself at home and reading I’d keep on eating so that I could keep on reading. (This former habit may help explain why I used to weigh more than I do now.)
I have a book post to write later today, but for some reason this phrase has popped into my mind recently. It’s from a TV show of several years back called Leverage, and we really enjoyed it for awhile until the writing got so bad that we couldn’t stand it any more and stopped watching. But, in spite of all those flaws, it had some memorable characters, among them an ex-mercenary soldier kinda guy named Eliot Spencer who had a lot of facets to him. In one episode the team has infiltrated a wedding that involves some crime figures, and the soldier guy is acting as the catering chef, primarily because he can cook. He gets really into the whole thing, almost forgetting why the team is there in the first place. People are coming and the food isn’t ready! It’s more stressful than a hit job. I actually looked up the quotation above; it’s what he says to another team member when she’s trying to get him to leave the kitchen and get on with their investigation. (Season 1, Episode 7: “The Wedding Job.”)
Well, I just spent at least half an hour trying to find a quotation from the British classicist 
My current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the
If you’re like me you’ve spent the last several weeks reading and watching everything you can about Harvey and Irma, those two most unwelcome visitors to our shores. I feel especially sorry for those who were just starting to crawl out from under the rubble left by Harvey, only to have the nation’s attention diverted to Florida’s woes. As I sit here, safe and dry, it’s easy for me to do a little pontificating about what these storms reveal about the human condition. To be honest, I’m finding it quite difficult to write