My apologies for the apology

One thing I have learned from reading about SBC blogs (as opposed to the blogs themselves) is that some people get awfully annoyed when bloggers post excuses about why they haven’t been sewing lately. To the effect of:

No one cares if you’re busy! Sew when you can, post when you can, forget the stupid schedule!

That’s not an actual quote, but I think it’s a fair summary, and it’s also a fair point. Dear Readers, if this describes you, avert your eyes. (Except for the last two paragraphs.)

It isn’t so much that I’ve been busy as that my dining table aka sewing space has been booked with actual, like, dinners. As in, I had guests for two weekends in a row, meaning that the dining table had to stay empty and the room fairly neat. Horrors!

Though, actually, it was pretty fantastic. This Thanksgiving I had several friends over, one of whom is new to Canada, and it was so lovely. I now want to do this every year. Plus, I got to use my fancy dessert plates and tea cups, which doesn’t happen often enough.

And then the following weekend was another meeting of the Dragon Tea Society, wherein some aunts and uncles came down, and we ate little sandwiches and pastries and drank tea. I won’t bore you with the details, but my Aunt Sue wrote about it on her blog, for those of you who may be interested. Frances got out her collection of hand-sculpted oven-bake clay dragons and her mounts of dragon stuffies and reveled in her role of Dragon Mistress. And who wouldn’t.

At any rate, it’s all been fantastic and so much fun, but I am itching to cover the dining table with fabric and cutting mats and patterns and the serger once again. This weekend!

In the meantime, I offer you this non-sewing related link: a Sci Am article about the importance of negative emotions.

Why? Because the more I think about this in my dotage (ahem), the more it seems to me that all of our emotions–positive and “negative”–would only exist if they had served an evolutionary purpose. Nature isn’t in the habit of giving us traits that get in the way of survival and reproduction. It bugs me (negative emotion) when I see people trying to wash away every trace of anger, dislike, irritation, fear, etc., because they’re “not good for you,” “irrational,” “dangerous,” “negative” or what have you. No. No, they are not. If they weren’t good for us, we wouldn’t have them. I say, be negative–and apparently, so do the experts.

Negative emotions also most likely aid in our survival. Bad feelings can be vital clues that a health issue, relationship or other important matter needs attention, Adler points out. The survival value of negative thoughts and emotions may help explain why suppressing them is so fruitless. In a 2009 study psychologist David J. Kavanagh of Queensland University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues asked people in treatment for alcohol abuse and addiction to complete a questionnaire that assessed their drinking-related urges and cravings, as well as any attempts to suppress thoughts related to booze over the previous 24 hours. They found that those who often fought against intrusive alcohol-related thoughts actually harbored more of them. Similar findings from a 2010 study suggested that pushing back negative emotions could spawn more emotional overeating than simply recognizing that you were, say, upset, agitated or blue.

(This scholarly paper digs a bit more into the various theories of the evolutionary psychology of emotions.)