What is Addiction? Why is it Bad? All Your Questions Answered.

I am now an expert in clinical diagnoses! Just kidding, I talk out of my rear end, just like everyone else.

At work we were talking about addiction. I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that processed food is like opium or heroin - you take something whole and innocent and natural, refine and extract and condense it to (one of) its essence(s), and you're left with something extremely potent and usually bad for you. The experience of ingesting such highly concentrated materials is an exaggeration of our normal sensory spectrum. Whether in the form of getting super high or tasting something super sweet, our sense are manipulated by processed goods, and we are more likely to feel addicted to them since our concept of the range of our sensory spectrum has been artificially distorted, requiring repeated input from hyper-ized products to return to the falsely elevated feeling of "good." Personally, this makes a lot of sense to me when I think about spaghetti and potato chips, which I love and have emotional cravings for.

Okay so that's what we were talking about at work. So then I suggested that people become "addicted" to processed foods the same way they become addicted to opium or anything else. This isn't a new concept at all, but it finally seemed really clear to me. And we were talking about the overuse of the concept of addiction, and victimhood culture, and people's relinquishing of their own autonomous decision making power to something they can claim to be addicted to. So this got pretty heady pretty fast, so to back it up we decided to define addiction.

My offering: anything that has a negative impact on one's life that one feels powerless to combat. Seem broad? I think it fits. Habits and routines and practices that do not serve us, and yet we continue to do, I think can be swept under the definition of addiction.

And I think this is useful, because then everything can be given the AA treatment - by which I mean: abstention, community support, and giving oneself over to a higher power. My pal at work said that everyone getting to be addicted to whatever they want makes a culture of helplessness and excuse making. I sort of like the view of addiction, however, that connects us to a sense of our own smallness - we are not all powerful, autonomous beings who just need to try harder, think harder, and do better. Instead, we are tiny particles of a larger, more mysterious set of forces, and sometimes the self-obsessed feeling of addiction/helplessness is an inroad to this more selfless feeling of humble connectedness. Why not, right?

Sometimes I feel like I'm combating my "addictions" one by one, and that my view of myself and my progress toward inner peace is the process of shedding the negative habits that I seem to do without thinking. And I have to ask for a little cosmic help to do it because I'm pretty weak, generally speaking - I'm giving myself 30 days for t.v. right now, which would be from October 9th to November 9th I suppose, and I already fell off the wagon once for 1.5 hours of House on the 19th, but it's still a worthy undertaking - and I need a little Sky God Earth Power or whatever to help me exercise my will. The whole thing forces me to redirect my attention more positively, and I really appreciate the after effects.

So I think that giving attention to your challenges as though they are addictions can be a handy way of thinking about yourself in order to take your obstacles seriously and to be connected to the magical powers of the universe. The end.

Vacation mit Parentzen

So I'm here in Germany on a vacation with my parents, which is a total throwback to days gone by on Cape Cod, chafing against the sand in my bathing suit, eating potato chips, and reading "just for fun" books.

My "just for fun" book for vacation is one of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books, dozens of which have been kicking around the house since I was as little as I recall - at least from my most early literate era (I brought The Brothers Karamazov with me, but I keep re-realizing that I am not much of a High Thinker, so I've put it down 20 pages in in favor of sci-fi-fantasy-humor). Terry Pratchett writes magical fantasy books with a comic twist, featuring lovable and fallible wizards-in-training, very well organized assassins' guilds, and, my personal favorite, death's apprentice named, of course, "Mort." So then, yes. I'm reading yet another of his delightful books, this time about sexism in the magical education system, and it's terrific, of course. And this got me to thinking about magic books and how much I liked them when I was little.

I liked magic books probably mostly because I hoped that my magical powers would be shortly revealed to me by a kindly witch/grandmother who'd been watching and waiting for the right moment to reveal me to myself, and then I would at last be ripped from my longing for specialness into a state of actual specialness. By ten or eleven I thought I had been doing a heroic amount of waiting and figured it was going to happen basically any day now. Oh how long it takes to shed dreams of our own significance.

I read other books, too, with other versions of magical children in them (no Harry Potter for me, though - I feel too old for those, somehow). There's always some version of using one's powers wisely, and that things go poorly for people who abuse their powers. Sort of along the lines of pointing a finger at someone means there's three pointing back at you blah blah blah. The full import of this magical approach to the golden rule didn't really gel for me until well into adulthood. I remember it coming up with road rage - I remember wishing I had the power to pop someone's tire from my car and inconvenience them, or that I could control their speedometer or otherwise use some magic to thwart them. I can't remember if I've blogged about this yet, but one day it occurred to me that if I really were a witch, and I popped someone's tires, then at least three of my tires would pop or some other equally inconvenient thing would happen right back to me, and I don't want that at all. But I would like to affect the meanness in the world . . . . So then, how to exact my revenge without incurring any negative effects? Why, a wise witch will use her power for good, yes? But if "punishing" the "evil" isn't clearly "good," then that changes things - maybe it's less for "good" (which requires a judgment call) and more "in a good way." So instead of wishing for people's tires to pop, I wish in my head that they feel more patient and less stressed out. That way it will hopefully come back to me times three that I feel patient and calm, and that would be very nice. This is a good game to play in all corners of life. It's hard to practice, though.

But anyway, I was reading this Pratchett book and it's about magic of course and one phrase in it was very nice: "Magic's easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There's nothing magical about it." Nice, yes? But I like this because I disagree (yoga stuff coming). In my Jivamukti book the authors say that it's much harder to put something together than take it apart - this makes sense to me - I could certainly unscrew a radio without thinking about it, but put it back together? Yeah, harder, right? And yoga is all about integrating and balancing oneself with oneself - that's the magic that yoga is getting at. It's taking things that are out of balance and pushing them into place. The study of it, the real academic part about it, is learning to identify imbalance, or to see where balance should be underneath all the veils and smoke and fog of life and of the mind. Because it's not easy to tell "what's wrong" and then make it right. Figuring out where things are imbalanced takes a lot of time, and it's easy to get sidetracked or obsessed with correcting one particular thing and then that ends up tipping the scales a different direction, and you need to be shaken sometimes to see that all your effort towards balance is taking you further away - it's a way of mistaking an attempt for balance with what is actually egotism and a desire for specialness.

So the good news that I'm getting from this is that I do have a chance to develop my magical powers, after all. And when I see imbalance at work in the world and how far away from center out efforts can take us, my fantasies about increasing my own specialness have been replaces by my gratitude for my ordinariness. Therefore, yoga is great, and sci-fi-fantasy-humor is great, and Germany is great. You can order beer bigger than your head anywhere you go, and drink it at 10 in the morning and nobody judges.

Headaches.

I get a lot of headaches. This feels particularly unfair when I get to thinking about how comparatively well-behaved I am with my vices. I'm a whole-grainer with a solid yoga habit who BARELY drinks anymore, and I try to get plenty of sleep, usually 9 hours. I should feel awesome every single freaking day. But I do not. I get a lot of headaches, like, at least one a week, and not infrequently two.

I guess I don't mind it that much, it's not so bad, but I could do without it. I throw 1,000 mg of ibuprofen at pretty much everything in my life, and it helps a little, but not always. Yesterday I had a particularly bad one, and 1,600 mg didn't help. So that's interesting. I get migraines, too, and that's a whole different ball of wax, and I have the most supremely excellent migraine medication that is sort of delightful to take - take one, get into bed, try to sleep, and in an hour wake up feeling all soft and light and comfy all over, and then try not to look forward to the next migraine. Well, it's not that good, but it's not bad, either.

Headaches just shut everything down. My mood, my energy, my strength; and there's usually some nausea and blurriness as a bonus prize. So lame.

Here's something else sort of annoying - you know what helped my headache a little bit yesterday? A donut. Someone brought them into work and I had one and I got a little chemical rush from the sugar dose and I really think it sped along the process. It sort of makes me nervous - what's that about? Sugar addiction? Something else chemical? Do I need to "detox" or have someone touch my vibrations and tell me to realign my planetary noodles or something?

Whatever. So I'm going to Germany today!! My parents got a cottage and invited us (me and the Huzband) to come stay with them, and we are going to do that. Maybe I'll have some feelings to blog out from abroad. That'll be fun. I am looking forward to turning 14 again as I sit in the back seat of the rental car while my parents navigate us around a foreign place, and then give up and pull over at the first luncheonette we see for lunch and beer. Thus ended many a school-shopping trip in my youth: "Forget it, this sucks, let's get lunch and go home." Ahh youth.

Positive Job Anxiety! Negative Coping Mechanisms

Another nutty week of existence. Have I mentioned that I love my job? I really do. I wish that I could love my job for about 30 hours a week instead of 40-45, but still, it’s really fun. I love riding around in a big truck with other people who also love riding around in the big truck, and bullsh*tting with the customers, and learning about produce prices and markets, and saying I won’t take the collard greens because they aren’t up to snuff today, look at ‘em, they’re slimey!

So on the list of “personal growth” items this week was: having to confront an employee about behavior, which was pretty intense for me. I lost a little sleep, and it was really interesting to observe my mind in this situation. I couldn’t stop my mind from turning the problem around and around in my head, but I did feel pretty effective about watching the thinker, if you know what I mean (which you do), and I felt pretty yoga-tastic about it, even though I wasn’t successful at keeping the anxiety at bay. And I did have a chance to have the conversation with this person that I needed to have, and it went awesomely, and I feel great about it, even though I had some rough time in my head about it.

So clearly, even though I am pretty happy, I still have anxiety about job performance, for sure – there are a lot of important things that have to get done for our jobs to exist, mainly being: buy produce, put it on the truck, drive the truck to places people will be expecting the truck to be full of produce, and be extremely cheery and rad to people to create a feeling of fun and ease around eating healthy. I will say that in terms of potential work consequences, i.e., how far down you have to fall and how hard you hit, this job feels both more important to do right and less terrifying if I blunder as compared to my legal (CLA) job. More important because I think I am starting to care that the truck be great, not just pressured that people view me as a billable resource like the CLA job; and less terrifying for blunders because every single day is another opportunity to make the truck great, and the cumulative impact of my personal screw ups washes out in the bigger pool of the job. At the CLA job, it felt a little more severe – although screw ups happened and at the CLA job people were really understanding about that stuff, the head trip about making something screw up was pretty rough, way rougher than this job (and might have created expensive consequences). But I feel like the anxiety and challenges at my job are enjoyable; I feel ready for them and like I can handle them and like everyone is a teacher and it’s going to help me grow as a person and eventually as a parent. I finally feel like I’m in the right place at the right time in so far as challenges I need to meet goes. Was I just so freaking over-my-head at the CLA job that I shouldn’t even have been there? Probably. I can’t believe people adapt to that stress.

So on to the next fun bit of information – we got in a car accident on the highway in the truck! Good god if you’ve ever felt an 8 ton vehicle rock from side to side and fishtail on the highway, well, I have too (I was not driving). And it’s pretty scary. We could have tipped over – well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I felt for a split second the possibility of that. A convertible, driven by a 19 year old male (if you can see where I’m going with this), came up super fast behind us and clipped our back end trying to pass us. The convertible spun out and stopped across two lanes. No one was hurt, but key-rice-st it was scary. I called 911 which is a weird thing to do, if you’ve ever had to that, well, I also had to do that, too. The other car needed a tow, but our big truck drove away with a mutilated back bumper thing but fine otherwise.

Again, we were fine and all that, but the emotional impact was surprising. It’s like when you get into a fight with someone and you spend the rest of the day pacing and anxious and reeling in your head. Except after the car accident I wasn’t thinking up good things to say to anyone that would have really zinged them, so it’s actually kind of better than that. To decompress a little, I took the crew out for burgers and beer, on me. And I had half a xanax, so that smoothed things out like you wouldn’t believe (if you've heard my "the day I quit my CLA job" story this might ring a bell, but don't worry about me, it's fine). And after making an appointment with our vehicle service people and trying to go to the DMV to get the accident report, I rode my bike home on the bike trail with no cars around, had some spaghetti (more comfort medication), two more beers, watched Brigitte Bardot movies (which are horrible/excellent), and fell asleep at 9:30pm.

So for coping with this experience – the tingling and boiling in the stomach, the out-of-body feeling, the bowel-loosening - I went straight for the old stress standbys – drinks, tv, and starch. This might have been an amazing opportunity to roll with it yoga-style, but I did not do that. I had beer instead. Man, what an amazing shortcut to mental relief that is. The spinning just stops as your mind gets so deflated. But I am absolutely letting myself off the hook for that. It was An Occasion. I’d be less inclined to treat my best friend’s wedding as a reason to drink than a car accident – after the car accident, I wanted to feel shutdown and tired and wake up the next day with everything over. Happy occasions and everyday life, not so much. I had one good stress-coping event at work (had to talk to employee) and one pretty rough stress-coping event (car accident). So that’s a note about my progress on vice and coping mechanisms.

That’s what happened at work this week, and that’s how I’m doing with stress and life. Forward, back, you know how it is.

Snow. Also, Moderation Schmoderation

Hi, it's snowing. I am not super pumped about that. The nice weather was so very nice. I am pretty ready for warmth.

So here's some thoughts about moderation. I have been pretty much not drinking for a few months now, and it's definitely been a big life changer etc. I don't want to be obsessive about the not drinking, so I don't really have an official policy like Never Again, but it wasn't out of the question, of course. So anyway in accord with my Sure Maybe policy on drinking, I had half a dark beer on Saturday night. Just half - I left the other half on the table all alone with itself as we paid the check. I only wanted half, and that was fine.

So this is great in a few ways. One, declining to consume something even though it is right in front of me isn't really my strongest quality, and the ability to do this on Saturday to me means that yoga is awesome. Being all yoga-sensitive to how I feel can be overwhelming sometimes, but it's ultimately the greatest thing ever. Two, feeling good about this also made me rethink how I view moderation, and I'm pretty happy about it.

What is moderation? We usually treat it as vaguely the mid-point between zero and whatever we view socially/culturally as extreme. For example, if you drink beer, you might think that zero beers is abstaining, and that six beers is extreme. We all understand six beers to be pretty drunk and zero beers to be not drunk. Two to three beers is moderate. We can play this game with t.v. watching, too. Or how much you drive your car, or how much garbage you make. Living somewhere below the boundaries of mid-behavior and no behavior is moderate.

So I think the problems with this are manifold. First of all, just because some behavior or habit exists doesn't mean that you have to adopt a moderate relationship with it. Normalcy and happiness are not contingent upon one's adoption of any one particular social behavior, and declining to participate in something doesn't have to mean that you are "abstaining" from it. Just to be extreme about it here, I do not consider myself to be abstaining from smoking crack. I have no relationship with it because I just don't want to (also I wouldn't know how to get crack, but I bet it's pretty easy). But the more common a behavior becomes the more pressure there is to develop some kind of relationship to it, and then the labels on our behaviors starts to sneak in. This is how we started calling people "non-smokers" back in the day. What?! Seems sort of silly, right?

Second, there is a problem with the measure of extremity. Take garbage, for instance. It's bad to make garbage. Plastic bags live forever and kill dolphins and manatees and it's bad to put them in landfills and we all know it. Oh but wait, since most people throw away a bajillion plastic bags, if I throw away three a week it's not a big deal, right? The relativism of what determines moderation is freaking stupid. One to two drinks per week. An hour of television. Exercise three days a week. These don't really have much to do with how an individual is impacted by any one behavior, and that leads me to the next thing.

We have a lot of guidelines, official-type doctor's-office guidelines, for what are acceptable, moderate, behaviors. Eight hours of sleep. Potato chips once a week. Brush your teeth twice or three times a day. Food pyramid. You know why we have all these guidelines for behavior? Because no one knows how they actually feel. We can't tell. We are so out of touch with our bodies that we can't even tell that industrialized meat is nasty, or that t.v. is making us depressed, or whatever. It's completely weird that people need to be told what is good for them. And then if they subscribe to these notions of appropriate behavior, we get a class of rules-followers who then get to judge people for their choices. "Did you know red wine antioxidants are less powerful than raw grape skins? Agave nectar extraction is soooo bad for the environment! Too much sunshine deteriorates your cell walls! Too little sunshine imbalances your vitamin D!" We have all these things because we don't know how we feel, which means we have no idea what feels good and right.

Which then leads me to my ultimate point: yoga is awesome. Paying close attention to how I feel is really valuable for cutting through all the social crap of appropriate, moderate, officially sanctioned behavior, which I view as being complete crapola. Take my new job, for instance. I make literally one SEVENTH of the money I used to make at my "good" job, but now, I move around all day, I don't take my work home, and the expectations are reasonable. My actual experience as a human being is 100% percent better doing something "lesser" than before.

In conclusion, everything you are told is crap. Do not pay attention to it.

One Yoga Weekend Left

Well this past weekend was the second to last yoga teacher training weekend. Someone asked me today what I'm going to do next, asking, "are you going to do another training?" I thought this was a joke, but it was not. Not that I'm averse to continuing education, it is my favorite way of pulling a large blanket over my head to hide from the world, but I want to let this thing settle in a little bit. Plus, you know how much further yoga information costs? Approximately a million dollars, give or take. Everything is so expensive. Observing how expensive everything is, is a terrible habit, and can lead only to depression.

In other news, my feminism reading is leading me down a different type of observation about myself, besides the usual toxic merry-go-round of my head, I am now enjoying new awareness of my insanities as they pertain to my internalized lady role. First on the docket: dinner.

Dinner time is kind of oppressive. I love to cook, by the way, so that's not really the problem. It's the timing of the whole thing, this family socialization gesture that requires wrangling people into the same room at the same time to appreciate your cooking while practicing their manners. I find that the logistics of being the dinner-maker, as the women in my life have all been, means that I have to proactively worry about who is going to be where and when so that I can executive produce a dining experience that is delightful. This process creates a series of expectations revolving around my terrific dinner-making "altruism" (Germaine Greer's term) that actually converts my gesture into a transaction of sorts: I am the dinner maker, you therefore owe me some kind of reciprocity; if you just say "thanks" and continue on with your life, well then, where is MY I-made-this-for-you in this situation? Altruism is sneaky here; it isn't pure. Plus, contractually this does not stand - I cannot ask for something in return for my dinner-making, which is really a gift. But it doesn't feel completely like a gift, it feels like I am doing "my part," and that I will get something in return. Yes I love cooking, and sharing time with family, and eating delicious dinner, but there is a role-fulfillment that takes up too much of my identity. There is so much ancillary mental effort put into it - preparation, scheduling, cooking, the dining, and then the clean-up - and then what happens afterwards? Does the family go back to what they were doing in their own lives, with their actual preoccupations or work, and I merely continue to be the dinner-maker with no dinner to make until tomorrow?

It's hard to separate oneself from the society of the family space - the feeling of never being along is inimical to self. Once the family society has converged, leaving it requires a shutting of door, a deliberate space of aloneness which now has a seed of exclusion in it which is harder to initiate or feel at ease in than merely being alone. Dinner time always sets the scene for this dissolving of self for me - it's hard to excuse myself from the interacting, and thusly it is the end of day's productivity and self-inquiry, and if that's the case, then I may as well be drunk, too. But I don't like that version of things, it depresses the hell out of me - but I don't necessarily like a version of life wherein everyone in the household makes dinner for him or herself and retreats to their respective incubation spaces in order not to have to interrupt their own projects. Maybe just "dinner-dinner" once a week or something, a la Sunday dinner. Regularly scheduled dinner is so leaden and binding.

This Week in the Life

I'm visiting Brooklyn again, this time with some friends from overseas who are on vacation. I am the mini-chaperone! Well, not really, actually, since they have been running around Manhattan by themselves for two days while I sit around a little bit. It's been freezing cold and tourism is all about walking all the hell around. I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with them yesterday and called it a day. All I care about on vacation is the food and they ate at Sbarro's and the Hard Rock Cafe, so I was thinking I would try to arrange delicious lunch for them on their last day and that will be my contribution to international warm fuzzies.

So in terms of Operation: Self, there's been a little bit of a back-slide with the t.v. - I've seen a lot of t.v. in the last two weeks. I guess I feel fine about it, but that's almost the worrisome part. I should be disappointed, and feel gross, and depressed, but I feel pretty okay. I'd still be more pleased with myself if I had been working on one of my Serious Purposes instead of watching shows, but I'm not feeling like a failure about it. Wait a minute, that might be great news. I do tend to think that I need my anger with myself to change my ways, but lately I feel fine about regimen lapse. I can't get too far away from everything, though - I'll start to lose the thread - but I don't feel like berating myself, and yes, I officially think that's great.

The biggest, simplest, and most important change I've made to my life in the last six months remains my alcohol consumption. Not drinking is the best thing I've done for myself since I started drinking regularly. I had a sip of wine that my overseas friends brought as a gift just to taste, and that was plenty. I had no desire to feel drunk at all - I had a little desire to have delicious wine with my salmon, but at long last I feel connected enough with the cause and effect of alcohol's impact on my body/life/heart/mind to know that I want nothing to do with the feeling that alcohol produces in me. And I feel more interesting to myself without hours of each evening lost to the soft pink sugary blurring and hazing of my head and limbs. I sleep better, which improves pretty much everything in life. I read so much more, which has been a return to myself that I am grateful for. Even if I don't really find myself or write a book or end up with a great job or anything else "important" after this little hiatus from adulthood is over (or at least changes dramatically), wrestling booze into a place where it is no longer a source of fear was well worth it. I wasn't going to be able to do it at the old job. I needed the room and silence and solitude to really practice at the abstinence. So anyway, yes, pleased with myself there.

I think I'm going to do a basic Pilates certification after th yoga stuff is done. My friend who has a Pilates studio upstate does weekend trainings, and there is one happening the weekend after yoga is over. I want to do it since I know that Pilates is good for my particular body issues, and also because I feel more and more convinced that yoga asana should be treated as a series of suggestions. Forget the hocus-pocus about each pose ringing a special note in your cosmic cells, don't do things that hurt - this is something that comes up with things like headstand. The benefits are oversold to the point that it can feel like you're really living half a life if you don't do headstand, and it's just nonsense. Our anatomy teacher said she doesn't even do them; based on the shape of the vertebrae in the neck, bearing the weight of the body on the head just wasn't something she was interested in doing. Humans around the globe carry water jugs on their heads all the time so it's not like it's an impossible and dangerous thing, and I happen to like headstand, but there are safer and more fun ways to get upside down if you are doing it for body/mind health and awareness. And besides, I try to put about 85% of the weight into my forearms and touch my head only very slightly to the ground. Anyway long story short Yogilates is definitely already taken, but I agree that Pilates offers a lot of inroads to the body that are complementary to what most yoga class sequences I've experienced don't really focus on. Hip strength and stability is the main one. Flexibility without strength is not good. So I guess it might not be "real yoga" that I end up feeling best about.

That actually reminds me of a question I asked our teacher about this issue of "what's yoga" - I asked the teacher about whether making things up (like poses) is okay, and the answer was basically that it's fine, as long as I actually do the thing that I'm talking about and don't just throw things out there on whims. Yoga started with something like 30 postures, and now there's thousands, so I think the evolution of yoga allows for the incorporation of different disciplines (although yoga "fusion" gets eye-rolled about, for sure) and can still be called "real yoga." Whatever that means. This is another one of those "how strictly do I have to adhere to be sincere" kinds of questions that I guess I'll be letting take shape for myself.

Not. Ready. For Boozin'.

Man oh man, you know the thing that happens when you pull a muscle and you leave it alone for part of the day but later on you can't help yourself from testing to see if bending it around still hurts? You just have to test the edges of the injury, and this totally makes it worse?

Well I thought I could have a little wine with dinner, and that is false. That was the incorrect conclusion. I should not have had any wine with dinner. I didn't even have very much and I am foggy and headachey and it's not my favorite. The impact of booze on my body is a torn muscle that I must let rest. Wine can suck it. I'm so pissed at wine. I can basically do one Guinness over the course of about 3 hours and that feels great and that's it. Wine, no. No no no.

But I had a super great time! I went with my friend to dinner with her friends, and her friends are funny, boisterous Europeans - bordering on rowdy - who made us blackened string beans and an Asian-style soup with vegetables and sticky toffee pudding. They were good fun and excellent hosts - which also means my wine glass was topped off at every opportunity. It's like some hosts have magical gumby arms that reach behind or above you and you don't even realize you have more booze until you go to take a sip. Sigh. We talked trash about their bosses and the usual stuff like that, and then we got around to me.

Well what did I do? It's never quite as simple as saying I'm studying to be a yoga teacher, since nobody comes out of the life-box studying yoga. Sometimes I don't want to provide any context. Somehow getting into the whole lawyer thing complicates everything, and makes my life sound more glamorous than it is, and I feel a little conflicted about giving the impression that I have any abilities or clue about existing. But anyway we talked about what I'm doing and what I want to do and whether I know what I'm supposed to do, and I got some sassy advice from a tipsy French lady along the lines of "you clearly have no clue about anything but that is fine, keep going, you might not think so but it's actually going pretty well."

So that's good. It's nice to get a little fresh perspective on yourself sometimes from strangers. It was fun. And the headache will go away.

Sensitivity and Alcohol

I think yoga may be making me more sensitive. That's supposed to be one of the things that happens, anyway. It's been about two months now that I've been pretty well engaged with frequent yoga practice and meditation and I think I am noticing a change in my level of tuned-in-ness. Of course, I am at leisure at the moment to pay attention to my feelings and all that stuff because I don't have a job. But I'm going to ignore that factor for a minute here.

I'm saying that I think I am more sensitive lately because I am feeling very much inclined to be more gentle with myself in a lot of ways. Like chewing more slowly. And I haven't over-done it with feeling full in a while, which is something I definitely tend to do (more numbing behavior). I've also abandoned the idea of ever being a jogger. It's too hard on me. I'd rather walk for an hour and a half and enjoy the fatigue that way, and clear my mind and breathe the air. It's just gentler. And this gentleness is in my yoga, too - I'm much more inclined to use props and blankets and bolsters than I used to be. I don't need to be hard-core or over-extend myself to have a credible experience in yoga - I used to really insist on a more intense experience for myself, with lots of push ups and handstands and back bends, but I'm only doing what feels good, and letting myself inch towards more advanced postures. It's more subtle than just getting exercise. And more rewarding, too.

But most noticeably, my jones for booze has been waning for a week or so lately. I spent a week in Brooklyn last week and had too much to drink one night and felt like hell. Every time I have done this I have sworn off booze to myself. But it never lasts and I'm not sure why. I really don't get anything good out of alcohol except for the feeling of escape. And that relief is so empty and meaningless, and impairs my physical self to the point that my mental well being is compromised. I think one expression of my sensitivity is that I get massive hangovers, like super horrible bad bad bad hangovers. Like way beyond what anyone else who drank the same as I did. (This is just how I am, though - my digestion is sensitive, mosquito bites turn into huge welts for me and one swelled my eye shut last year, I have to go to the hospital when I have poison ivy, I need to get 7-8 hours of sleep or things are bad, one cup too much of coffee can give me a full blown migraine.)

Anyway Iyengar in Light on Life says that when our bodies are impaired, we cannot move beyond the realm of the body; when the body is well, we can use our physical selves as the gateway to our more subtle bodies and selves. When I drink I am trying to escape my inner self by impairing my physical self. But what I really want is to access and master and engage my inner self. Alcohol does nothing to advance this for me. I would love never to drink again. I don't know if that is in the cards for me, but we'll see.

Here's the relationship I wish I could have with alcohol:
1) participation in general conviviality with friends
2) meal flavor accompaniment
3) a little warm buzz in my chest and tummy

Here's the relationship I actually have with alcohol:
1) fear and dread
2) passionate delight in the taste and feeling
3) a loosening of caution and sense of moderation
4) feeling of pressure to drink with friends
5) slipping into a sad hole of uselessness for an evening and premature fatigue
6) bad sleep, possible unanticipated barfing and shivering and headaches
7) resentment toward the expense
8) depleted serotonin and mystery blues

Here's the experience I have WITHOUT alcohol:
1) good sleep
2) higher productivity
3) happier digestion
4) steadiness of emotion and sense of wellness
5) highly conflicted feelings of social isolation for not participating in drinking
6) waves of anxiety in the evening filling in the hole where the alcohol would usually glaze over my agitation

Yeah so basically it's no contest. The gentleness I feel like offering myself lately doesn't have room for alcohol. It's not gentle. It's violent, and jarring, and incapacitating, and poisonous. It's an expensive, damaging poison. To me, not to everyone of course. The things that I use alcohol for I would rather use yoga for. Yoga is a calming, centering, rewarding, productive recipient of my energy. Not alcohol. This is how I want to be gentle with myself.

Wagon and Habit

Dear Bloggy Confessional Public Journal: still struggling with my repulsion/attraction to tv and booze. My no-tv rule has been pretty well busted lately ("oh I can just watch a little, besides, all the fun premieres are happening and I neeeeeed to see what is happening!" - this doesn't work. A little tv always turns into four hours), and I had a little too much to drink yesterday for no reason. There was no AC/DC show to have 35 beers with yesterday, just nothingness.

So back to the hard/fast rule idea - I think I shouldn't let myself watch tv in general of course (not that I am so great at that), but also just not watch tv or have wine when I'm alone. But the two things go together so nicely, and particularly when I'm alone! Boooo. But the reason they go together so nicely is because it's impossible to do anything remotely useful after having had a drink, so tv is pretty much it. Well, or a walk I guess. Some people have a glass of wine and read a book, what?! Not so much for me, no way. Anyway, the role that tv and alcohol play in my life is primarily a balm for my solitude. I actually get kind of psyched when no one is around, because I look forward to sliding into my bubble bath of vacuous sloth with no one there to witness my shame. Gross. I judge and hate myself for it but I just want to do it.

Why? Habit? That reminds me of a useful thing from Buddhism, which is confronting our relationship with the things that we don't want to do but do anyway. I completely forget most of the smart things the Buddha center guy said about it, but I remember some stuff I've heard before about stopping your own upsetting behavior. I'm supposed to think about the feeling that precedes engaging in the behavior that I don't like (just like any binge-er). I'm definitely using tv and wine to stop having to feel a certain way - and I think that it's usually that my mind is tired, or can't think of anything to do, or feels bored or lonely. But I must have other activities that fill in the hole where tv watching tends to sit - I mean, here's something I haven't done in over a week: read one page of one book. What the hell? I have books, a bunch of them, all right near me or near the bed that I completely want to read, why aren't I reading them? I don't know. Clearly I don't "want" to read them or I would be. But that's a little crazy, right, since I do want to read them, don't I? I think it's more like I do want to read them, but my state of mind is too agitated for me to enter into the mental state of Reading a Book. There's a transition to be made into a zone. I think what happens when I disregard enjoyable, positive, activities in favor of crappy ones is that I have pushed myself out of that particular zone and lost touch with how it feels to enjoy it, and then I just forget about it as a positive option for myself. And then the habit of tv and a glass of wine just floats into my head and I give myself "exception" permission for "just today" to indulge my unhappiness-provoking habits. I have gotten so used to using certain negative coping mechanisms that I forget about good ones.

I'm definitely trying to inject positive habits into my life, and for sure, for the most part it's been going great. Sort of a two forward, one back situation. I hate the back sliding though, it's discouraging. Makes me feel weak and pathetic. But I can't let self-loathing operate as my main motivator for change, no no no. That's horrible. It's like creating conditional love for yourself. I think it's better to love oneself unconditionally. Sounds better for the soul. I just have to stay clear-headed in the face of temptation and agitation and make deliberate choices in favor of my happiness. Why oh why is that so hard? Why? A little guidepost rule, like no tv/booze alone, is helpful for me - I'll be alone again in the evening very soon of course, and attending to this tiny rule, as opposed to attending to the huge and unmanageable and highly conceptual goal of My Happiness, helps make it manageable. Bleh, bootstraps be pulled. Resolve be hardened. Engage love of self. Throttle resolve.

Enemies of Happiness

Besides stress, two major distractions from happiness for me are:

1) tv/internet
2) alcohol

Holy crissmass how I loathe tv, and yet how I love love love love love it. I love the funny things and the pretty people and the numb bland feeling of nothingness that replaces my baseline agitation/loneliness/despair etc. Man it is such a needle in the vein - and time just slips by in a floating, flavorless paper ship to nowhere. And then it's bedtime. Ah relief. Ah escape.

So that's the upside, which is pretty dark. The downside: self-loathing for laziness and lack of productivity, a general sense of how everything and everyone that is not famous has somehow become irrelevant, a crumby feeling of how much more pretty and rich the rest of the world must be, not that I even believe that stuff, but it's got to be sinking in on some level. So yeah, downside sucks too.

So why watch tv? My conclusion is that I shouldn't. I didn't have a tv for a long time, like 5 years, and that was great. At least then when I watched tv it had to be out of the house, and probably social, and it could end easily because I had to go home. But then stupid hulu and netflix came along to ruin my brain - and my computer, the word-processing email checker, became a tv as well. And I don't self-regulate well with tv, I just want to see everything that's happening and really don't want to turn it off for any reason at all. I have a friend who completely embraces tv watching as a permissible, decadent, occasional sloth-fest, which I can really get behind in theory, but her method of moderation is a little more highly evolved than mine. Even the occasional sloth-fest can tip my resolve over into a week-long binge. Moderation is for people with legitimate self-control, and I don't think that's me. My modicum of self-control is the result of insistent, habitual, obsessive discipline, otherwise it all unravels and I find myself comatose in front of the tv for 5 hours a day.

Same with the booze. So yummy, so calming, such a splash of forgetting as the mind is too hampered to worry for a while. But it also sucks time, and productivity, and is a bar to physical comfort if you over do it (especially the next day), and interferes with sleep, and distances you from your mind, and then the disappointment you feel with yourself afterwards, yuck.

So what to do? Total abstemiousness with alcohol in a way is, I understand, just as obsessive and distracting as its abuse. But I think a hard-and-fast method of regulating consumption is good for me. Some rule besides "don't over do it" is necessary for me, because my feet happily kick sand over that line and blur it to nothingness pretty fast. Usually when I'm having a glass of wine, tra la.

So anyway these are two easily identifiable, external enemies to my happiness that I can actively contemplate my relation to in a way that hopefully aids my sense of well-being and increases my happiness.