Fake that Smile!

July 15, 2014

picasso_lafemmequipleure1937_lThick ground fog and a deep quiet this early Tuesday on California’s north coast in a typical weather scenario for the area — misty wet until about noon, then sunshine.
And in the mid-60s, which is nearly 20 degrees cooler than just a few, scant miles inland.

Worse piece of shit: “That ought to be our top priority for spending. Not food stamps, not highways or anything else,” Cheney said. “Your No. 1 responsibility as president is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. [Obama] is the commander-in-chief and he’s absolutely devastating the United States military today.”
The Dick makes us sick.

And why always lead with the bad news firstBut the more you do it, the easier and more natural it becomes.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman‘ found here).

Hence, This Dick. A horror that just won’t go away.
In surfing the news sites this morning, all bad and not getting any better — Jon Stewart nailed it last night: “Things are so fucked up in our world, that the two happiest places in the world are Germany and Cleveland!”

Yet, smile, and mean it!
Fake it and pay! We’ve all know the world is a bit brighter when the corners of your mouth turn upward — but sincere…
Smile like you mean it:

A new study (two years ago) led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity.
But workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts – such as a tropical vacation or a child’s recital – improve their mood and withdraw less.

“Women were harmed more by surface acting, meaning their mood worsened even more than the men and they withdrew more from work,” Scott said.
“But they were helped more by deep acting, meaning their mood improved more and they withdrew less.”
While the study didn’t explore the reasons behind these differences, Scott said previous research suggests women are both expected to and do show greater emotional intensity and positive emotional expressiveness than men.
Thus, faking a smile while still feeling negative emotion conflicts with this cultural norm and may cause even more harmful feelings in women, he said, while changing internal feelings by deep acting would gel with the norm and may improve mood even more.
But while deep acting seemed to improve mood in the short-term, Scott said that finding comes with a caveat.
“There have been some suggestions that if you do this over a long period that you start to feel inauthentic,” he said.
“Yes, you’re trying to cultivate positive emotions, but at the end of the day you may not feel like yourself anymore.”

How many of us feel like ourselves, anyway?
History is more future than past — say what?
A story last week on Apple’s Time-lapse mode in Camera for its iOS 8 also has this weird, and more than a little frightening paragraph — via Pacific Standard:

Two of our greatest cultural fears, gentrification and climate change, will be instantly visible in time-lapse in ways that even sequences of photographs, those juxtapositions of before and after, couldn’t accomplish.
Just play the video or drag the slider to watch as sea levels rise, hurricanes rage, or glaciers melt.
Front-facing cameras gave us selfies, but adding time-lapse to our phones will make this kind of photography even more popular.

Amazing how we can selfie the end of an age.
Smile when you blurt out some bad news right off the bat.

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