How do you like your neurotransmitters?

Serotonin is my friend. As is acetylcholine (which, if I remember right from The Introvert Advantage is the neurotransmitter that introverts use a lot more of). All those neurotransmitters that let me feel so deeply and variably, alternatively fascinate and frustrate me.
I enjoy learning about the neurotransmitters, how our brains regulate them, how the things [...]

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Permission to Be Stubborn

One of the more bizarre things about how people perceive me is that I can look both (1) like a pushover and (2) obstinately stubborn.
The first observation is explained, I think, by the fact that I have a very wide tolerance for things and so there are many times I just don’t care either way. [...]

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Why I’m not Anti-Intellectual

Because if I had to reject everyone whose brain thinks and communicates in ways that are different than mine and which are hard for me to understand, I’d miss out on gems like this post from Ancient Hebrew Poetry, “Why I am Not an Atheist”. The whole post is brilliant, and I hope you’ll go [...]

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TV Deprived

[If you find my rambling on and on about my kids dreadfully uninteresting, I hope you'll just skip to the end and watch the video, because I'd hate to think you missed out on this delightful and very eclectic video because of all my words!]
When my children are with me, we never watch TV and [...]

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Nets are Nice

…a FREE downloadable book for children about malaria and the role of mosquito nets in prevention.
This book by Gary Edson, with a forward by First Lady Laura Bush, is published by Malaria No More, in conjunction with Scholastic.
The Malaria No More campaign also has an informative ten minute video about malaria, its history and [...]

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Random Malaria Miscellanium

The second of three posts in consideration of today being World Malaria Day. Follow this link to post one (with a vivid photo of malaria in action).
~The malaria parasite goes through several different stages in its life cycle. Inside the human body, it divides (multiplies?) in nonsexual ways. It reproduces, sexually, though, inside the body [...]

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Malaria

Those are a couple of your poor red blood cells exploding (or are they deflating rather limply?) from malaria. The oxygen that the blood cell carries has been paralyzed (maybe disabled? destroyed?). And it’s not getting where it needs to go. A body not getting the oxygen it needs in the liver and brain is [...]

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Contrastive Beauty

Here are two photos which have recently set firing the beauty-appreciation neurons in my brain.
This one is from a garden in South Carolina.

And this is from South Africa.

The description that went with this photo made it even more beautiful to me:
For trees that grow on mountaintops near Cape Town, South Africa, wind can be [...]

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Grant us wisdom…

…grant us courage.
Those two words are repeated in each verse of the hymn “God of Grace and God of Glory,” which we sang at the end of church today.
In the first verse, the song seems to be a corporate prayer from and concerning the church.
But as I sang and repeated again and again the line, [...]

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God is Not Good…

…on my terms.
This is a thought that has come at me from different angles today, as I’ve read two very different books. One is actually so small as to barely be considered more than a booklet–Understanding Who You Are: What Your Relationships Tell You About Yourself, by Larry Crabb. The other was written in 1972, [...]

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