I thought September was busy. I was wrong. October brought a different perspective to how busy a month could go. But you’re not here to read the old complaints about work so here I dish a number of eye-opening articles I read this month.

What Depression is Really Like (Brainpickings)

I am neither articulate nor knowledgeable enough to describe the danger in associating the word depression to a temporary state of sadness. And the strawberry core of today’s generation would definitely accuse me of invalidating their condition just as easily as they invalidate my right to speak. Examining sadness and depression from a Google-search perspective may be a lot easier than evaluating oneself objectively and subjecting oneself to professional diagnosis but it veils the need of those who are actually suffering from it–and even worse, those who don’t realize they are suffering from it.

Researchers Translate Bat Talk. Turns Out , They Argue-A Lot. (Smithsonianmag)

“There are bats arguing in the conference room,” is a sentence I can definitely pull off. Apart from that, what makes this article soooo interesting is the possibility of being able to translate other animal sounds. Who would have thought Animal Farm, Babe and Charlotte’s Web aren’t far from happening.

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life (Brainpickings)

“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions,” said Mary Oliver.

If you’ve been lurking in this blog for so long, that I value the five minutes I use for rest, entertainment and learning more than the eight-hour stretch of work I do in the office will not surprise you any longer.

What are the best first lines in fiction? (BBC)

The best first lines Hephzibah Anderson mentioned in the article were pretty much according to one’s preference unless statistic states otherwise. Then again, for that statistics to make sense, every reader in the world would have to have a platform to vote for literature’s best first lines–say, Goodreads? The next consideration will then be the qualitative side of things–what makes the best the best?The article still is quite interesting though, albeit, the title set my expectations too high with the superlative included. Semantics aside, let me offer one interesting first line:

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Why Incompetent People Think They are Great (Curiosity)

Perhaps the perfect example of a person–or fictional character– suffering from this is Gilderoy Lockhart, the obnoxious yet totally hilarious Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher at Hogwarts in Harry Potter’s second year.

So many writers, motivational speakers, philosophers, doctors and may be your very own colleague or boss have tried to address this issue but what remains true is “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Thank you, Stephen Hawkings for that one. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Von who recommended this article to me.

Out of interest, I wonder, how many of those who have read this article actually tried to re-evaluate themselves.

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I want to give a shout out to one special lady, Tina of ArtsyFancy. She is going to hold another workshop at The Village Nook on November 16th. Mark your calendars. ^_^