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.
Showing posts with label tv. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tv. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Apartment. Job. T.V.
My mind has been spinning a lot lately. A lot to learn at my job, an apartment to find (found! it's pretty great, we'll see how the 'hood and neighbors work out), stuff to prioritize in general. Haven't played guitar in a few weeks, which I feel a little bummed about since I was really on a roll and having some nice insights. It's okay, it's still there. Yoga practice has been going pretty well - my new job is pretty physical, which I looooove, and oh lordy do I need to stretch and zero out my body regularly. Yoga feels awesome right now.
So then let's talk about t.v. First, my friend started a sweet blog tearing up some t.v. shows and it's hilarious: http://onlyfifteenminutes.wordpress.com/. Enjoy. This prompts me to confess some t.v. watching. I have definitely been watching some t.v. and feel like I'm on the edge of another round of creating a Firm Policy for my own good. Here is the stuff I am liking:
1. House. Scruffy, sexy, emotionally addled Dr. Gregory House, genius diagnostician at Princeton teaching hospital, banters indecorously with his colleagues about their personal motivations and brilliantly makes what is basic, like, totally meta, with philosophical loyalty to his one unwavering truth: everyone lies. Underplot of the show: someone is sick, they figure it out, they were wrong, the patient almost dies, they figure it out FOR REAL this time, the patient gets worse, they reassess, more almost fatal emergencies happen, the patient is usually saved and House usually realizes something important or falls deeper into his Lonely Man hole. Ha ha, lonely man hole, nice.
2. The Biggest Loser (just the highlights). I like to skip huge chunks of the "substance" of this show and get straight to the obese people crying into the camera. I love this show. I love the people trying to reclaim their lives from the deep, plush couches of their sloth huts where they consume their bagged food and receive their daily programming from the great shining cyclops screen in their living rooms. While my love of this show is part marvel/disgust, it is mostly rapturous uplift in the triumph of the human spirit and excitement about people rejecting the crappy version of life that they didn't really think they could lead differently. It's pretty amazing.
3. The Office. Yes, I got hooked on this in law school, and watched two and half seasons in about three sittings while in stress recovery on winter vacation. Now I like to see what happens. This show has become mostly the story of how total weirdos find love, not just the attractive and normal people that it's obvious to root for, but the real social lame-os. It's a great premise, full of hilarity. I really appreciated this show as ground-breaking for its cringe-humor approach - with an idiot boss in the office serving as the all-purpose deus ex machina for any number of unbearably awkward situations. I'm sort of over it, though, it may have jumped the shark, but I'm not sure. But I must say that the latest episode with Michael proposing to Holly made me choke up a little. It's on hulu for the next few weeks. Enjoy this, also.
4. Sometimes 30 Rock. Maybe Being Erica. Maybe The Simpsons. Maybe the Saturday Night Live clips on hulu. Anything comedy instant streaming on Netflix, even really bad stuff. Basically anything not-too-stressful or upsetting to take me away for a little bit.
So what is t.v. for? It's fascinating - there's so much happening to get all sociological about, especially reality shows (my friend's blog does a very amusing job of cutting the crap on the happenings of the show to articulate the maggot growth beneath the belly of the programs). Ever see that show "My Super Sweet 16" on MTV? Well, young ladies get really excited to have their super rich and entitled lives put on t.v. while they freak out about a party they want to have complete with BMWs for gifts, celebrity entertainment, and magnificent temper tantrums. They think they are important and cool, while really the point of the show is that their selfish, oblivious greed is a circus, and we are laughing at, not with them. So interesting on several levels.
SIGH. But it's all crap, right? Should a contemporary person participate in t.v. watching? Or something that we are forced into having a "moderate" relationship with? For me, t.v. is still basically cocaine - well, maybe more like booze - if I have a little bit, it takes over my head and my life gets scheduled around t.v. watching. I actually sort of love having time all alone to let all my self-improvement crap go to hell so I can watch terrible t.v. without anyone around to judge me. Lordy lordy, okay, I'll come up with some kind of plan for this. Still working on this particular habit of mine. I get so conflicted about it, in a so bad it's good kind of way. Buh.
So then let's talk about t.v. First, my friend started a sweet blog tearing up some t.v. shows and it's hilarious: http://onlyfifteenminutes.wordpress.com/. Enjoy. This prompts me to confess some t.v. watching. I have definitely been watching some t.v. and feel like I'm on the edge of another round of creating a Firm Policy for my own good. Here is the stuff I am liking:
1. House. Scruffy, sexy, emotionally addled Dr. Gregory House, genius diagnostician at Princeton teaching hospital, banters indecorously with his colleagues about their personal motivations and brilliantly makes what is basic, like, totally meta, with philosophical loyalty to his one unwavering truth: everyone lies. Underplot of the show: someone is sick, they figure it out, they were wrong, the patient almost dies, they figure it out FOR REAL this time, the patient gets worse, they reassess, more almost fatal emergencies happen, the patient is usually saved and House usually realizes something important or falls deeper into his Lonely Man hole. Ha ha, lonely man hole, nice.
2. The Biggest Loser (just the highlights). I like to skip huge chunks of the "substance" of this show and get straight to the obese people crying into the camera. I love this show. I love the people trying to reclaim their lives from the deep, plush couches of their sloth huts where they consume their bagged food and receive their daily programming from the great shining cyclops screen in their living rooms. While my love of this show is part marvel/disgust, it is mostly rapturous uplift in the triumph of the human spirit and excitement about people rejecting the crappy version of life that they didn't really think they could lead differently. It's pretty amazing.
3. The Office. Yes, I got hooked on this in law school, and watched two and half seasons in about three sittings while in stress recovery on winter vacation. Now I like to see what happens. This show has become mostly the story of how total weirdos find love, not just the attractive and normal people that it's obvious to root for, but the real social lame-os. It's a great premise, full of hilarity. I really appreciated this show as ground-breaking for its cringe-humor approach - with an idiot boss in the office serving as the all-purpose deus ex machina for any number of unbearably awkward situations. I'm sort of over it, though, it may have jumped the shark, but I'm not sure. But I must say that the latest episode with Michael proposing to Holly made me choke up a little. It's on hulu for the next few weeks. Enjoy this, also.
4. Sometimes 30 Rock. Maybe Being Erica. Maybe The Simpsons. Maybe the Saturday Night Live clips on hulu. Anything comedy instant streaming on Netflix, even really bad stuff. Basically anything not-too-stressful or upsetting to take me away for a little bit.
So what is t.v. for? It's fascinating - there's so much happening to get all sociological about, especially reality shows (my friend's blog does a very amusing job of cutting the crap on the happenings of the show to articulate the maggot growth beneath the belly of the programs). Ever see that show "My Super Sweet 16" on MTV? Well, young ladies get really excited to have their super rich and entitled lives put on t.v. while they freak out about a party they want to have complete with BMWs for gifts, celebrity entertainment, and magnificent temper tantrums. They think they are important and cool, while really the point of the show is that their selfish, oblivious greed is a circus, and we are laughing at, not with them. So interesting on several levels.
SIGH. But it's all crap, right? Should a contemporary person participate in t.v. watching? Or something that we are forced into having a "moderate" relationship with? For me, t.v. is still basically cocaine - well, maybe more like booze - if I have a little bit, it takes over my head and my life gets scheduled around t.v. watching. I actually sort of love having time all alone to let all my self-improvement crap go to hell so I can watch terrible t.v. without anyone around to judge me. Lordy lordy, okay, I'll come up with some kind of plan for this. Still working on this particular habit of mine. I get so conflicted about it, in a so bad it's good kind of way. Buh.
Monday, March 21, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, September 10, 2010
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.
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.
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