The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

The New Year's resolution: return to the Pacific Northwest

Somehow, without deliberately planning it, my adult life has assumed a pattern in which, every decade or so, I pick myself up and relocate to an entirely different region of the country. I spent the 1980s in Boston, the 1990s in Seattle, and since 2002 I have resided in San Diego. And now, at the dawn of 2012, life is arranging itself so that I shall be relocating again, this time to Eugene, Oregon.

Each of these residencies came about through multiple reasons, and involved multiple goals, a number of which did not succeed as I had hoped. But in each place, I went through various processes of self-discovery and transformation, some of which probably could have happened anywhere, but all of which were definitely catalyzed by people and events I could have only encountered by being where I was, when I was.

Just so with my time in San Diego, and decision to leave it. I had come down to San Diego as an escape from the big corporate environment I had succeeded rather too well at getting integrated into by the end of my time in Seattle. I was seized with a feeling of living a life designed for somebody else, with somebody else's values, and desperately wanted and needed to finally do something that I loved.

Well, I came down here ... and some of those plans did not work out as desired. Part of the problem was that I was still dogged by lifelong personal issues that were sapping my strength, the key to which I finally received a couple of years after my father's death in 2003. Some long-held family skeletons were finally let out of the closet in the wake of that death, and suffice it to say I began to fully grasp the nature of the familial monsters that had been living in my head and holding me back. Essentially, I came to realize I had post-traumatic stress disorder from a childhood full of psychological abuse and bullying. This realization, while majorly enlightening, was far from the end of the matter; in dealing with its impact on my life, I have suffered a number of setbacks, and I may well be sorting pieces of this out for many years. But after finding a new resolve last June to do the things I needed to do to heal and get more fully healthy, I feel like I am finally on my way.

And then of course, there has been the recession. At first I thought I was actually in a good position to ride it out--unlike a lot of other people, I had already drastically downsized, was used to living frugally, and had what I thought were skills that would stay in demand. Little did I, or a lot of people, realize just how profoundly unemployment would gouge California, and Southern California, in particular--suddenly the market was flooded with people with my skillset all scrambling for whatever job openings or freelance work was to be found. I finally did get a toehold in some new online work, but it was downright scary for awhile there.

Meanwhile, a friend I had met online kept urging me to get the hell out of expensive, high-unemployment California and join her in Eugene, where the unemployment rate is a little lower, the cost of living a hell of a lot lower, and the culture, frankly, a lot more suited to my leftover hippy leftist values. And the more I looked into doing this move, the more I discovered that the network of friends I had been quietly building online was making its presence, and willingness to help, known to me. I began to feel like I was doing one of those trust exercises, where you fall backwards and trust that others will catch you. I became filled with the conviction that I was being caught, and held, in a way I had so needed a family to catch and hold me. I became convinced that whatever happened on this new leg of my journey up to Eugene, I would not be allowed to fall.

I am also, partly from necessity and partly by choice, taking this latest move as an opportunity to further simplify my life. There was a period a couple of years back in which I had to move my home in San Diego three times in the space of 12 months, and it became a dreaded and expensive chore to get all thesematerial goods packed, hauled, and unpacked. And I didn't even think I had all that much anymore! But it was still more than I could do alone. When I began to look into moving my stuff to Eugene, and saw the astronomical price--way more than the replacement cost of said goods--I decided, enough. Everything must go. Like Thoreau, I was going to simplify my life way the hell down to the barest essentials. If it does not fit in my car, or in a couple of boxes at most of stuff I will ship ahead, it's not going. The books I love but never read, the clothes I've bought that I never have occasion to wear, the boxes of papers there is no earthly reason for keeping anymore--out out out. Even the furniture... functional enough, but furniture can be replaced and thrift stores abound. Away with all of it. Sell it or donate it or shred it, but however it gets done, just get it offa me. Even just talking about it I feel a burden off my shoulders.

So I have no idea what life has in store for me once I get to Eugene. I'm sure there will be more ups and downs, more cases of things not succeeding as I had hoped. But I have the strangest sense of optimism. I feel like I am achieving whole new levels of personal authenticity, of living the way I want to live as opposed to some lifestyle and values designed by and for others. And even if I do find myself in situations where I have to conform to others' values, I feel sufficiently settled in my values within my own head that external forces can no longer sway me. I know where I'm going, and that's a marvelous feeling.

My return to healthy weight management

I really was going great guns for a couple of years there. Took off over a hundred pounds, got a lot more mobile, a lot less bothered by pain, rediscovered the joy of dancing--and the ability to dance for nearly an hour without stopping ... So what the hell happened? And what am I doing differently?

Well, what I realized happened in hindsight was that I didn't have the right kind of support. Sure I was blogging about my weight loss program like crazy--but it was lone-ranger blogging, and almost despite my best intentions I got overly invested in being the Healthy Weight Loss Hero. It became challenging to my pride to talk, in this very public medium, about the troubles I was starting to have--not only with food, but with other areas of my life, some of which I will still refrain from going into in detail here because of matters of privacy.

What I needed--and what I was seriously lacking--was a confidential, even anonymous support venue where it was okay for me to just let down, be a mess, and vent about all sorts of things that were deeply upsetting me, both on the weight loss front and in other areas of my life. I had started off my previous weight loss adventure with something of the sort--a weight management program through my HMO. But it was a finite-duration program, and then finances forced me to drop the HMO, and that was the end of that. (Yes, as I think I mentioned earlier, financial/employment insecurity was another of the issues that began to drag me down.)

So now I was on my own with the weight thing, and everything was looking good, but two landmines started to mess with things. One was that, as I got closer to my goal weight, I began to hit the Dreaded Plateau. This is where a person doing weight loss reaches an equilibrium between their calories in via food and calories out via activity level. There was actually nothing wrong, at least on paper, with the quantity and quality of food in--in fact, cutting it much would not have been healthy. But I was running headlong at last into the ever-neglected exercise part of the picture. Yes, I could dance all night--but I only did it one night a week. Not enough.

The other landmine that got me was more insidious. It was my lizard-brain, which I had once boasted so egotistically of having tamed, sneaking up on me and almost literally biting me in the ass. See this article by James Thornton for the most succinct explanation I have yet found of the triune brain model of human consciousness and the lizard brain's role in it. The superfast capsule: while we humans have our vaunted neocortex in which we reason, plan, and set goals, it exists side by side with less rational brain structures that are the seat of emotions (the limbic system, the so-called dog brain), and of basic "primitive" survival instincts (the lizard brain). I like to say that the lizard brain is in charge of the Four Fs: fighting, feeding, flight, and ... let's call it fornication.

I love the following paragraph from Thornton's article so much I'm going to quote it here:

Have you ever wondered why you reach for that pile of hot greasy fries while you tell yourself you are on a diet? The answer is that you have three brains, and the older brains were wired to put on weight long ago when food was scarce. Your old brains are not easily controlled by your fancy new brain hardware that reads diet books."

I had believed I had mastered my lizard brain in the area of weight management through the strength of my commitment to a new way of life. Unfortunately, I was in denial about the holes in my commitment--such as my never having gotten the exercise part of the project on a firm footing, and having lost a strong, unconditionally accepting support system, as opposed to one in which I had ego-investment in looking like I had my act together. And then I started having life troubles... disruptions to job, finances, living situation ... and without the right kind of support, my resolve began to crumble, and the lizard slithered out of its cage going "danger danger eat like crazy" ... and it only took a year for me to completely undo all the progress I had made.

The resulting Slough of Despond was seriously Not Pretty. In fact, I can only blog about it objectively now, having put the worst of it some three to six months behind me. But I did climb out of it, and part of how I did it was by finding a community that offered the right kind of help--the confidentiality/anonymity, the specialization around weight management issues, the practical tools, the unconditional acceptance, the optimum mix of tough love and unabashed cheering section. It happens to be SparkPeople.com -- and no, I'm not going to tell you my username on there. But I do want to let you all know that it exists, and that it is no-cost--which means it does have a bunch of ads that can admittedly get a bit annoying; but the resources it offers, and the huge and active community in its forums, are worth braving a few obnoxious ads.

So--I have returned, a humbler and hopefully wiser person, to this project of taking care of my health through good nutrition and sensible weight management. I still have a long way to go--again the exercise part of the program is lagging, but I am taking baby steps in that direction, so to speak. Mainly I'm making sure I am asking for help, taking advantage of the fact that I now have a safe online space where I can let down when I'm feeling like a screaming mess, without fear that it is somehow going to be held against me. Because those are the moments that are going to torpedo my precious weight management plans and any other plans I have going for getting my life back together.

 

Is it possible to return to innocence?

 

The imagery of this video suggests simply turning back time, which is a fantasy ... and which I honestly don't want. But the lyrics suggest a return to what the Zen Buddhists call "beginner's mind," which ... well, which I am not so good at. But I want to be better at it, and I think it is possible for me to be that. And maybe that's what beginner's mind is, anyway.

 

I've been feeling this song a whole lot lately. Mostly I've been hearing it in my head in the a capella nigun form we sang together during Shabbat services at the havurah I belonged to in the Boston area in the 1980s. There seems to be a lot of return going on in my life right now, both profound and prosaic:

• After majorly falling off the wagon of my healthy weight loss adventure, regaining all the weight I had taken off and then some, and re-inflicting on myself all the accompanying chronic pain and restricted mobility, I have as of this past June once again returned to a healthy weight loss regimen. Hopefully, this time I will do it with a lot more support, and a lot more humility.
• After going on two years of under/unemployment and scary financial times, the kind so many people have been facing these days, I am slowly pulling myself out of the hole via a job I landed in March, and returning to some modest sense of financial security.
• After the emotional slough of despond caused by those first two items, I am slowly returning to my more normal cheerful self.
• Perhaps because of these changes, perhaps for other reasons yet to become clear to me, I am returning mentally to memories of my childhood and youth, trying yet again to sort out the family-of-origin psychodramas and maybe make some peace with them.
• And there are other returnings going on, but these are already plenty to start with, yes?

In any case, when I saw that NaBloPoMo's theme for this month was "Return," I knew I needed to sign up, return to this long-dorman blog of mine, and make the commitment to blog every day and see what came up. Of course not every post I'll make in September is going to be about return--but as they say in so many writing programs, when you simply make the commitment to show up at the page every day, you make it possible for interesting things to wind up on that page.

Oh, and it hasn't escaped my notice that the Jewish High Holy Days, with their major theme of teshuvah (literally, return), fall at the end of September this year. Whether I will literally return to a synogogue or havurah this year, or perhaps make a more personal journey of slichot (reconciliation) on my own, remains to be seen. But there it is, waiting to be explored.

The song, by the way, was written by the famous Singing Rabbi and pioneer of the baal teshuva movement, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and is performed in this video by his daughter and protege Neschama Carlebach, with the Green Pastures Baptist Choir under the direction of Reverend Roger Hembrick. The lyrics:

Return to what you are,
Return to who you are,
Return to where you are born and reborn again

Return again, return again,
Return to the land of your soul
Return again, return again,
Return to the land of your soul.

Packing to move: how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways

Once again I am packing in preparation for moving, and once again I am loathing it with every fiber of my being. I don't think it's only because I've moved so many times in recent years--something like three times in the last 12 months alone--though that surely doesn't help matters. And I don't think it's only because, as I've gotten older, the amount of effort involved has increased. In fact, with this latest move I actually have very little to pack because I never really unpacked all too many of my belongings ... but I'm hating it anyway (and obviously procrastinating by doing such things as playing around with my blog).

Nor has moving been less traumatic for me when I've had other people helping. i remember once when I was simply moving my stuff from one bedroom to another in a multi-person household, and one of my roommates volunteered to whisk all my stuff from one room to the other for me. Well he started whisking--with breathtaking rapidity. And suddenly, for reasons I could not explain, I began to feel overwhelmed, even panicked, until I found myself bursting into tears and begging him "stop stop stop!" And I could not bring myself to say out loud, to his bewildered face, the reason for my alarm that popped into my head: you see, this was a fellow who could be extremely absent-minded and careless about his own belongings, and here he was moving mine, so quickly that I couldn't keep track of where things were winding up, and the lack of control over my stuff was freaking me right the hell out. Nevermind that, given it was just another room in the same house, all of my stuff would turn up in the new room sooner or later. It was the feeling of loss of control over my stuff that was getting to me.

And I think that's at the root of all my hatred of packing to move. I'm excruciatingly slow at it, because I want to make sure that everything goes into boxes in such a way that I can find it again sooner or later. I think I'm even unconsciously trying to memorize where each item was stashed. And I still have a really hard time letting other people pack for me. Realism--and my cranky back and joints--have dictated that I have people actually move the boxes and furniture for me, but you better believe it's a huge exercise in self-talk for me to let go and let these other people do this. I've finally discovered the joys of hiring professionals to do the heavy lifting--yeah, it's not inexpensive, but the psychic cost of my trying hard not to freak out at well-meaning friends who drop a desk is much higher.

With all the moving around that I've done, I hadn't thought of myself as a nester--not like, say, this one friend of mine in Boston who had lived in the same (charming but tiny) apartment in the Fenway for literally decades before buying a house with his extended family. But apparently I do a different kind of nesting--I nest in place wherever I happen to land. And I think I do it all the more fiercely because I have moved so often--I get to a strange new place, I start making it psychically home swiftly and profoundly.

And boy do I flip out at personal space invasions! This has been particularly hard in recent years as finances have dictated that I've had to live in roommating situations. Roommates who barge in on me in the bathroom without knocking, who just invite themselves into my bedroom when I'm working, even though I only had the door open a crack, who blare the TV in the living room so I can hear it in my room, who put their stuff in my designated shelf in the fridge, who insist on talking my head off in the morning when I stumble into the kitchen for my coffee, even after I've explained to them multiple times that I am not a morning person and to please not do that... arrrrg. I was heavily considering some really distant and or iffy neighborhoods this move around, just to find a studio apartment I could afford to live in solo.

Fortunately, this time I think I've found a roommate who is genuinely on my wavelength about personal space issues--not to mention one who I genuinely enjoy to hang with when I do want to hang, and who has decent human interaction skills. And my room is of a nice size, and has all the makings of a really cozy nest ...

But first I have to get all my crap over there so I can start feathering that nest. And it looks like the remainder of my belongings are not going to jump into those boxes on their own, so ... time to quit fiddling around with the blog and get the hell on with it. Deep breaths ... happy thoughts ... you can do this, Ducko ... okay, let's do this thing. Urk.

ObOntopic "green" thought for NaBloPoMo: another motivation for improvement of the long-term money/finance/employment situation--so that one day I can in fact afford a decent solo apartment in a decent neighborhood. Not asking for a palace, mind you--a nice little studio with something resembling a full kitchen will be just fine. Just that even that takes more folding green than I have coming in now ... so on with the work of job-hunting too ...

Greening up my world yet again

I've been trying to re-kickstart my life for the past several months--only this time my life-motor seems to be having a bit more difficult time than usual turning over. I think at least some of this is due to the crappy economy--it's a little harder to revamp the work and the living situations when the regional financial weather makes the choices a lot harder. I confess I'm also finding it just a tiny bit harder turning the physical health habits and mental attitude around--one gets a little older, a little tireder, a little more "oh hell, not again?!?" ... especially in light of the economic weirdnesses.

But I've also had the Fate Goddess hand me a couple of lucky windfalls recently, for which I am incredibly grateful -- one of which includes a new living situation which I will be moving into over the next couple of weeks -- so I want to take advantage of that momentum, and see if I can turn a bunch of other stuff around.

Blogging's been a tool for that kind of self-motivation thing for me in the past, so I went and checked out National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) to see what this month's theme was. And interestingly, it turned out to be "Green." Now, NaBloPoMo allows one to be very liberal in interpreting their themes, and I could already see several interpretations that could fit my current situation.

Green is the color of growth and renewal, and one could definitely say that I am currently in the situation of re-greening my life once again. Green, to be much more literal, is the color of vegetables, and one thing I desperately need to re-green is my whole healthy-eating regimen, which has frankly been in the trash-hopper for so long that I've basically put back on almost all the weight I took off a few years ago.

And a third, pragmatic interpretation of green is ... the color of money. I continue to work at fixing The Job Situation--especially since I am in the process of letting go one job position that is just not working out. So I need at the very least to replace that job, and ideally to acquire a more long-term career solution.

So--green things green things! Every day on this blog for the month of August. Cheerleading the need for more green in my life, on all these levels and probably a bunch more that will occur to me as I go along. Let's hear it for the power of green!

Some self-affirmations, my way

I often feel a little uncomfortable with the affirmation thing--and I don't think it's because there's some deep-down-inside part of me that believes I don't deserve success or happiness or abundance or whatever. I think it has more to do with the types of happiness and success I've seen mentioned in a number of affirmation lists I've run into. I actually saw an affirmation on the net the other day that read "I climb the corporate ladder with ease." Ugh. No. My personal vision of success does not include any corporate ladders. Nor does it include six-figure incomes or a large beautiful house (cue that Talking Heads song here) or any other such overly materialistic tchatchkes.

Further, I think it's unrealistic to expect that one will never have upsets and crises in one's life. Shit happens, and often enough on a totally random basis, so there's no point in asking "Why me?" when the answer is "Well, why not you?" This kind of stuff is capable of happening to anybody.

But I do want and need some affirmations in my life, because there are indeed some things that I feel lacking, and I do believe in inviting the universe to provide the opportunities to get those things.

I deserve a serene, secure, and fulfilling life.

I do not have to be perfect, by anyone's yardstick (including my own) in order to merit a serene, secure, and fulfilling life. For all human beings are imperfect by their very nature, and I am fully human. But I also have more than enough positive qualities to merit the life I desire. I may not be perfect, as the old joke goes, but parts of me really are excellent.

I have a lot to offer the world.

When trouble comes my way, as it will inevitably do, I have the strength, resources, and allies to meet those crises and surmount them. The universe never hands me anything I'm not capable of handling.

The existence of crises in my life is not a reflection on my qualities as a human being. Crises come to everyone sooner or later.

I am in the right place. I am doing what I need to do. I am putting in the footwork, one foot in front of the other.

I am open to what the universe is trying to show me. I am teachable. As someone once said, luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. I am doing what I need to do to be prepared when opportunity knocks. And opportunity will knock. It is always knocking. Maybe not in the guise I might be expecting, but I'm open to recognizing opportunity in whatever form she chooses to take.

Someone else once said that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. I am making up my mind to be happy today.

Oh yeah--and one last one: "She who laughs, lasts."

School's out, so now: "Why a duck?"

I have made it through the final throes of my first semester at Mesa, and so far things are looking good. I don't have my official grade from my intro-level Japanese course yet, but my sensei assured me I would pass--which is a relief, because that course was definitely kicking my butt.

But perhaps more importantly for immediate economic prospects, I completely and totally aced my multimedia web design course, and am now re-equipped with the latest state-of-the-art tools and techniques for modern web design.(I had been down this road before, several years ago when hand-coding in HTML was the state of the art; of course the art, as happens in high tech, has moved on several light-years since then.)

In any case, I'm going to start buffing up the resume to see about landing some better part-time work, and building the ol' portfolio to see if I can land some freelance assignments. And part of doing the latter would be to design a website to advertise myself (and also show off my design sensibility).

But here's the thing--my design sensibility, and also my whole philosophy of life, includes a decided streak of rebelliousness against the kind of mainstream corporate vibe I see embodied by so many designed websites out there. I can certainly do that look, no problem; but the question is, do I wanna?

Or maybe a more pragmatic question is, am I willing to live with the possible consequences of NOT doing that look? Because I suspect a certain demographic of customer needs that look in order to feel comfortable in entrusting their business to a vendor. So if I go with the no less professionally-designed but more whimsical look I'm contemplating, I might be turning off that business.

On the other hand, I might just be turning on the kind of customer who shares my allergy to over-corporateness, and who might appreciate a more hang-loose attitude in design as well as in business relations. I do have a gut feeling that there's a huge amount of competition for the corporate-vibe demographic. I also have a gut feeling there's rather less competition for the alternative demographic.

So--especially since all this is going to cost at first is a domain registration and several hours of sweat-equity, I think I'll go with my whimsical approach and see how it flies.

What is that approach, you may be wondering? Well, it's ... just ducky.

For some years now, I've had a running mental joke about my up-to-now fictitious enterprise named "Whyaduck." The inspiration, of course, is from that classic Marx Bros. routine from the movie The Cocoanuts, in which Groucho and Chico are checking out a map, and Groucho points out a viaduct, and Chico "mishears" him and responds: "Why a duck?" This leads to existential silliness about why not a chicken or a horse or what have you that would have your average philosophy major rolling on the floor. Well, it had me doing so, at any rate.

So ever since then, due to my longstanding "Ducky" nickname, I have laughingly called my "business" things like "Whyaduck Unlimited" or "Whyaduck Productions" or other random things. I even had a little logo--this cartoon fluffy duck with glasses I used to use as my signature logo when I drew cartoons in college. Oh, and I had a slogan: "That's Why A Duck!"

Now, though, I'm thinking of going for reals with it--registering the domain name whyaduck.com and creating a business site for Whyaduck Webworks. "We know web design like the back of our foot! That's Why A Duck!"

Is it really too silly a duck to fly in this crappy business climate? Or would it actually attract attention for being so different from the flock of look-alike cookie-cutter uninspired web business concepts? I dunno--and maybe someone might comment on this post and give me a really good reason for not doing it this way, a reason I hadn't thought of. But right now, the idea is really making me smile, and maybe that's the best recommendation it could possibly have. Stay tuned for further developments.

Heat wave survival mode

Thank God, the sun has moved sufficiently across the sky that there is no longer oven-hot air blowing into my bedroom/office. Not that I haven't been working steadily all day through the oven-bake-cycle portion of the day, but it's been a kind of endurance thing, a deliberate ignoring of the sensations of sticky skin and sweat-dampened hair, a hunkering down and getting on with it while physically moving around as little as possible.

And now, glory be, there is actually a refreshingly cool breeze blowing in my window, and even though it's also making the film of sweat on my skin feel even oilier, I'm greeting it like a long-lost friend.

Meanwhile I have the radio on in the background, tuned to the Los Angeles AM news station because its frequent time checks keep me on-pace while I work ... and today the station's also been reminding me of folks who are having a lot nastier time than me right now. It's the fires again. The soundbites from emergency personnel and on-the-scene reporters and displaced residents crowd one upon another, flogged by the studio news anchors in between the usual round of commercials -- augmented by an announcement from one of the big insurance companies that they have agents standing by in case of loss. Somewhere behind that slightly surreal barrage of reportage are some very hot and sweaty--and also frightened--homeowners, and some even more hot and sweaty -- and fiercely determined --- firefighters.

Was it only a few years ago that I got to experience this fire emergency thing a good bit more up close and personal, during the Cedar fires? And I was still a good five miles away from the actual fireline. But that unnervingly hellish sullen red sky, the choking ash-laden air, really put the fear of God in me. What we've done to the ecosystem to make these fires into the disaster-movie beasts they have become ...

But enough of that. I'm not going to fix global warming and natural habitat destruction and water supply depletion all on my own by fretting at it. And the pile o' work isn't getting any shorter. So: motivate, motivate. Detach from fretting about the past and future, focus on the now, and get on with things.

Like the next item on the agenda: finishing packing to move across town. Yet again. Sigh ... I hate packing to move even more than I hate super-hot weather ... but no, don't even go there. Just get on with it and get it done. And be grateful you're only packing for a move, and not flinging your valuables into a car and taking off like a bat outta hell for a Red Cross shelter. This too shall pass.

P.S. Some more heat-related music.

State of mind about 24 hours ago, and also now

Metaphorically rather than literally speaking