Santa baby

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Based on the title, I bet you expected this to be a post about shoes. It isn’t, but now that you’re all excited, I’d hate to disappoint:

Chie Mihara @ gravitypope

As lovely as these shoes are, they aren’t what you should get me for Christmas.

What I’d really like is an end to street harassment. When I put on a pair of shoes in the morning, I want to be thinking about which pair goes best with my awesome jacket or how far I have to walk that day versus heel height. I don’t want to be wondering whether my pretty shoes are making me more of a target for shit like this.

Hollaback! is an amazing organization fighting street harassment. Help them expand, submit your own stories, or get involved in other ways. Most importantly, especially if you’re a guy, say something when you witness street harassment. You know what’s worse than being followed half a block by a guy telling you what he’d like to do to your ass? All the people around you who pretend it isn’t happening.

I really didn’t mean to buy those shoes

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I usually have great self control, even when it comes to one of my biggest temptations – beautiful shoes. I can go months and months just window shopping, with hardly a twinge of pain when I leave without a new pair.

But all that goes out the window after a bad migraine. As ridiculous as it sounds, I could swear that I sometimes buy shoes by accident during my postdrome. It turns out there might be an explanation for that:

… chronic physical pain leaves people with a perpetual shortage of willpower because their minds are so depleted by the struggle to ignore the pain.

Some scientists think willpower is like a muscle that can get tired, rest, and be trained. Who knew?

Baumeister and Tierney lay out some of the evidence for this idea in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. As fascinating as the idea sounds, I don’t actually recommend the book. The interesting and useful bits are buried under a whole lot of annoying false buildup and fluff.

Plus Minus – On screwing up a presentation

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I gave a presentation at a small conference this weekend on an idea I have for trying to solve a really cool problem. The presentation went really well and conversations with other people at the conference helped me refine the idea and make me more confident about pursuing it. So the informal questions and discussion were great.

But the formal, in-front-of-everyone questions part of the presentation was kind of a disaster. Professor Scary Awesome asked me a question that I’d never thought about before. I initially thought I knew how to answer it. Then I figured out very quickly that I actually had no clue.  And then I found myself thinking out loud instead of stopping and saying, “Actually, I’m really not sure. I need to think about that.”

Oops.