See, blogging *is* good for you!

From this post by gmcdavid, a link to this article titled "Writing - 2 Minutes to Better Health".

How much impact can 2 minutes of writing have on your health and well-being? According to one of several articles recently published, much more than you would think.

In the mid-1980s, psychologists first discovered that the process of writing about emotions seemed to lead to improvement in health outcomes, and even in life chances - in some studies, unemployed people found work more quickly after brief episodes of expressive writing. Beginning with Pennebaker's early studies, the research has accumulated, showing an effect (sometimes small, sometimes large) of participating in this particular style of writing.

[...]

Burton and King decided to explore the lower-limits of expressive writing: what if people only wrote for 2 minutes a day, for just two days? On its face, the idea that 4 minutes of writing could have any discernible effect seems preposterous. Yet that's what they discovered. College students (the ubiquitous study group) were asked to write about a traumatic experience, a positive experience, or some emotionally neutral topics - but just for 2 minutes on each of 2 days. People who wrote about traumatic events had more negative feelings, and fewer positive ones, immediately after writing. When their physical symptoms were measured with the PILL (Pennebaker Inventory of Limbic Languidness) six weeks later, those who wrote about traumatic or positive experience - but not the controls - reported moderately fewer symptoms.

I'm not sure it helps all that much, but it seems to help, so here I am.

Productive?? Maybe not

So yesterday evening, rather than do anything actually useful like my sales taxes, I sat down and finished transpose.pl, which automagically transposes lead sheets with chords enclosed inline in [square brackets]. Based on the file extension it either uses "#" and "b", or "\sharp" and "\flat".

Of course, the sales taxes really have to get done this morning, along with paying any bills due at the end of the month (when I'll be out of town). And two phone calls, which still scare the hell out of me, to AT&T about my cell phone service and fiber. The cell phone call should have been made a month ago, and is probably too late now to help with my previous astronomical bill. Maybe even with the current one. My finances suck, and I suck at handling them.

(09:54) Sales taxes done.