Tired Middle Aged Man

Recently, I came back from a mostly relaxing cruise from the Baltimore, MD to Bermuda.  After several days it’s been hard for me to get myself back into the swing of things as I’m constantly in perpetual nap mode and feel like I can sleep 24 hours a day.  I thought I could get myself back up to speed naturally without the aid of caffeine, but no good.  So on a Sunday afternoon I had to intervene and down 3 full cups of chilled coffee (I chill it so I can drink large quantities of caffeine fast).  Furthermore, I tried to get my mind active again by turning on my computer and thinking about something rather intricate.  So I thought about writing what I learned about the use of my cell phone on my trip to and from Bermuda and sharing my knowledge.

So I will start off by stating this.  Having an active cell phone during a cruise can become the most expensive thing you can do on any vacation in a foreign country, even if you never make a call.  If your cell phone is capable of receiving email and connecting to the internet it’s possible for you to rack upu costs in in excess of a $1000 during the stay of the cruise without ever making or receiving a call!  A simple solution to this is to simply leave your cell phone off completely as soon as you leave home.  But if you’re like me you may want to leave some option of keeping in contact.  Say there’s an emergency and someone needs to reach you.  Or maybe the act of you being out of contact for several days straight could end up with you losing a client.  If you simply leave you’re cell phone off and you’re on a cruise ship then your only option to keep in contact is using your ship’s phone which runs about $8 a minute!  It’s safe to say that the communicating on a cruise ship is probably more expensive than anywhere else in the world, because you’re communicating on a satellite service and you’re completely at the mercy of what the cruise ship company wants to charge.

There is a middle ground of options on ways to keep in contact with the rest of the world while you’re on a cruise without the risk of super high roaming charges, but there is no single best answer.  I thought I’d outline some options I found on my recent vacation cruising on a Royal Carribean ship to Bermuda using an iPhone and trying to allow my dog boarding service to contact me if my dog gets sick, or allowing family members traveling in China to reach me, or allowing the body shop thats fixing my car to contact me to authorize repairs as needed. So here we go in terms of options to consider to avoid getting unexpected nightmarish phone charges.

1) Turn off cell phone and keep it off. This is the simplest option, but you can never keep in contact.  As long as your phone remains off you will incur no charges.  But do not think you can just turn on the cell phone periodically and avoid costs.  For example, if there is back log off missed text messages or email while your phone was off, the moment you turn your phone back on you could get hit with a bunch of charges as your cell phone gets caught up on those missed texts and email.  If you are not able to live strictly by keeping your phone completely off on your vacation then you want to read further.

2) Turn on Airplane mode and keep it that way. This is strictly for iPhone users.  It allows you to continue to use your iPhone to listen to music or use Apps without worry of being charged.  It’s almost the same as turning off your cell phone as you will not be able to send or receive calls, and you will not be able to use WiFi for internet.  But do not think you can just turn off Airplane mode periodically and avoid costs.  If you are not able to live strictly by keeping Airplane mode on your entire vacation out of the country then you want to read further.

3) Make sure data roaming is off. This is mostly for smart phone users.  On the iPhone you can go into settings to keep data roaming off.  This is normally the default setting.  I did a recent test on light use of my iPhone and if I had data roaming on during my cruise I estimate I would have racked up over $900 in charges as my iPhone automatically got updates on my two email accounts and my Facebook account.  Note that with data roaming off you will not be able to use the Google Maps or many GPS Apps on your iPhone as they depend on constant connection to the internet.

4) Use call forwarding.  Did you know that if your cell phone is on, then if someone calls you and you don’t answer YOU CAN get charged a bundle for that missed call?  If you don’t answer your cell phone it will go to your voice mail. If that caller chooses to leave a message you will get charged for every minute of that voice mail message at the roaming rate, plus possible additional long distance charges per minute.  On my cruise that amounted to around $3 a minute.   And after paying that amount you can’t even listen to your voice mail without paying that same $3 minute to listen to your voice mail.  Ka-ching Ka-ching Ka-ching.  Don’t bother contacting your phone company about disabling your voice mail.  They can do this but then your caller will listen to a message from your phone company that your voice mail is disabled and you will pay for every minute of that message that tells your caller that you voice mail is disabled.  The best solution is to enable call forwarding on you cell phone.  Call forward to a local land-line telephone number.  Then all calls to your cell phone are intercepted before they ever reach your cell phone and you can never get charged roaming fees for the missed calls.  Furthermore, if that local land-line telephone number has a voice mail or answering machine then here’s a way for people to leave a message for you at no cost to you. Oh one more thing– on your voice mail or answering machine don’t let them know you’re away on vacation as it would tip off potential burglars that it’s safe to rob your home.  Finally, do note that call forwarding is technically not completely free.  Call forwards on your cell phone get treated as if you were at home using your cell phone to make a call to the number you are forwarding to.  That’s why you only want to call forward to a local land-line number.  If you subscribe to a monthly cell phone service plan then call forwarding time just counts against the allotted minutes in your plan.

5) CAREFULLY CONSIDER if you want your Text messaging service on or off. If you generally DO NOT get many text messages, then text messaging may actually be a very good and economical way of communicating with family.  On AT&T roaming rates are 50 cents to send a non-picture text and 30 cents to receive a non-picture text anywhere in the world and on a cruise ship.  BUT IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS AND FAMILY WHO LOVE to send you lots of text including picture texts (which generally run $1.30 per text), then you may want to TURN OFF texting service to your phone, because the moment you turn your phone on during your vacation your phone will connect and receive all missed texts, keeping you up to date on texts, and charging you for every text whether you want it or not.  Your normal texting plan will not cover these roaming rate texts.  If you really want to commit to lots of texting then subscribe to an international roaming texting plan.  For AT&T if you pay $50 a month your covered for 500 texts.  However, if you subscribe to such a plan note that you probably wont get the full 500 text allotment.  Instead you’re account will be charged some prorated percentage of the full $50 and you’ll only get a prorated percentage of the 500 texts.  This is just how the billing works. To disable texting you will need to call customer service and have them remove texting service from your account.  So you will want to do this before you leave on your trip.  Once you return then you can call back and have them turn texting back on.

****** Below are more advanced options to consider  ***********

6) Consider using email to keep in contact. If you’re willing to work a little harder to communicate, then look for ways to communicate by email. The key thing is to finding internet service.  If you have a laptop, iPhone, iPad, or some other internet device you should look for free or low cost WiFi (wireless internet) service.  If you don’t have anything then you can look for a local internet cafe and rent time on a computer, and use a web browser to access your email.  However, it’s better if you can bring your own laptop, iPhone or iPad, because you can better control costs by connecting to WiFi long enough to download all your recent email messages, quickly disconnecting from WiFi and reading your email offline when you are not being charged.  When I was on the Royal Carribean cruise ship they offered both WiFi service or rental time on a computer for about 65 cents a minute.  This is not cheap but it’s much cheaper than $3 a minute for cell phone service or $8 a minute for the cabin phone use.

7) Consider paying for voicemail service. If you are planning to use option 4 and 6 above, then you also want to consider paying for a voice mail service.  I did this myself as it gave me peace of mind.  Once you’re willing to work a little more and spend a little more, this opens up more options on keeping in contact economically.  If you make use of call forwarding to avoid getting charged for missed calls while your phone is on, you can make use of a paid voice mail service to take messages for you and send them to your email.  You can usually get a voice mail service like this for around $7 a month.  You pay them the $7 a month rate, and they give you a local phone to which you can call forward to take voice messages.  If you already pay for a Skype online phone number then you can use your Skype’s voice mail service. You may ask why pay for voice mail service when your cell phone comes with voice mail.  Because with your cell phone voice mail you will pay a bundle for roaming fees (read my description in option 4).  A separate paid voice mail working with your cell  phone call forwarding will NOT incur roaming charges and you get the added benefit of being able to listen to your messages where ever you can get email.  Listening to voicemail by email is a lot less expensive than calling in to listen to your cell phone’s built-in voicemail. There are even voice mail services that will type out a transcript of the voice mail in the email.

8 ) Use Skype over WiFi to call people. If you can get ready access to free or low cost WiFi service, Skye is possibly the best way of communicating.  With Skype you can have video phone calls with anyone else with Skype for free, or make or receive phone calls from any phone anywhere in the world for very low rates.  You can make Skype calls from your laptop, iPhone, or iPad.  However, DO NOT expect Skype to work well on a cruise ship.  The cruise ship’s WiFi is generally not fast enough to support good quality voice calls, and please DO NOT EVEN think of turning on data roaming and using the cruise ships cell phone provided data service for Skype.   I managed to get a few lucky minutes of somewhat choppy phone calls on Skype using the ship’s WiFi, but in the end I think the cruise ship blocked my Skype service over their WiFi as I was probably chewing up too much bandwidth.  So eventually my Skype no longer worked.  I’d say Skype is only good for WiFi service you find on land.  So for me when our shipped was docked in the Bermuda it was possible to find a local WiFi service where one could use Skype.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find this out until I was about to leave Bermuda.  HERE’s a tip just for those cruising to the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda (also known as Kings Wharf).  In the Dockyard there’s a lesser known WiFi place called “Internationally Connected” near the Dock Yard Pastry Shop.  As of the writing of this blog, “Internationally Connected” is located on the 2nd floor of a small building and they charged about $5 for 30 minutes of high speed WiFi.  This is great for economical use of Skype as well as for options 6 and 7 above.

******** Even more advanced options to consider.  Probably not worth investing time here unless you plan to stay in a particular foreign country a lot.  ********

9) Buy a prepaid SIM card for your cell phone. If you can get this to work you get the ultimate in economical and convenient communication.  I’d only consider trying this if you plan on spending a long time in a foreign country.   There’s significant risk it may not work. Firstly, it won’t work with all phones.  GSM phones use SIM chips.  CDMA phone like those from Verizon and Sprint don’t.  Also there are currently two different sizes of SIM cards: the regular SIM and the micro SIM card.  Most prepaid SIM cards will be of the regular SIM size.  If your phone only takes micro SIM cards you’ll need to invest in a micro SIM cutter so that you can trim down regular SIMs to fit in a micro SIM slot.  Finally, your GSM phone may be locked to your cell phone carrier so you would need to invest in unlocking service.  Are you getting a headache listening to my explanation?  That’s why it may not be worth trying this.

10) Rent or buy a prepaid cell phone. This avoids all the complications involved with a SIM card described above, but now you have to contend with paying for the cell phone itself.

**** Finally some considerations on the easiest but most expensive option ********

11) Just use your cell phone. This is by far the easiest but most expensive option.  You can actually make and receive phone calls anywhere on a cruise ship and probably anywhere in the foreign country you are visiting.  I have to admit all the above other options can be really inconvenient and take up a lot of valuable vacation time, so paying the extra for the convenience of using your cell phone as is, may be worth it.  Also on a cruise ship this is the only way to call someone as attempting to use Skype on a cruise ship is likely to fail. Even I had to use this option to call family members traveling in China.  IF YOU are going to ever consider this PLEASE do read option 4 describing the importance of enabling call forwarding on your cell phone. Some things to keep in mind if you are going to actually use your cell phone to make calls.  Your phone company may offer special international roaming rate plans if you’re willing to pay an extra subscription fee.  However, I’ve found that for many countries they offer little discount over standard roaming rate plans.  For example with AT&T without a roaming rate plan calls in Bermuda were $2.29/minute but if you subscribed for $5.99/month you get a discount rate of $1.69/minute.  Finally, the special international roaming rate plans don’t cover your cruise ship.  The rates are strictly regulated by your specific cruise ship.  On the Royal Carribean cruise ship with AT&T as my carrier the set rate was $2.99 a minute regardless of what plan you are on. I suspect that for all the cell phone carriers the rate is exactly the same $2.99 minute, but you should check yourself.

So the above gives you an idea of options to consider before you travel.  You’ll want to plan ahead your options before you travel.  Hind sight is 20/20.  I didn’t fully learn about the best way of using option 8 (Skype) until the final hour in Bermuda before I had to get back on the ship.  But if I had to do this again I would have planned to use option 8 a lot more along with that WiFi service I found in the Royal Navy Dockyard in Bermuda.  In the end I ended up using a combination of option 3, 4, 6, 7, and just a tiny bit of option 11.  I mostly paid the cruise ships 65 cents a minute WiFi rate and in one instance I made very short cell phone calls from my cabin at the expensive roaming rate of $2.99 a minute. In the end I probably invested around $50 keeping in contact while away on a cruise ship for about 5 days.  This is certainly expensive compared to communicating from home, but at least I was not exposed to the risk of a several hundred dollar bill, and it was always possible for someone to call my cell phone and leave a message and have me be able to listen to it and respond if necessary.

I know thinking about the above might give you a headache.  But to avoid getting a surprise thousand dollar bill from your phone company, it’s definitely worth looking thru the above options and planning. Anyway this is probably the most technical I’ve written in a blog, but at least it’s got my brain buzzed up and out of sleepy cruise ship vacation mode.  If you have any questions about the above feel free to ask me by email at wilsoncheung@wakundama.com. Now that I’m much more learned and prepared I can dare say I’ll be able to respond to you within 24 hours anywhere in the world even in the middle of the ocean.

I remember years ago running across this Dilbert cartoon introducing a device called the “Life Suction 2000″.  The cartoon revealed how the boss at your corporate workplace has installed a secret machine into the ventilation system that steadily sucks the life out of employees.  That image has stood in my mind because something about it accurately described a phenomena that I have experienced in the corporate workplace.

There have been many days I can remember waking up early in the morning, not wanting to head into the office.  But once I got going into the hectic pace of the office, I started to feel OK.  I can push thru periods of sleepiness in my office and then my adrenaline kicks in and I’d be back up buzzing away at full speed.  I’m starting on a workaholic roll and once again it’s becoming so easy to stay later and later at the office.  Sometimes I think about stopping back home to eat dinner before pushing to work into the evening, but it seems that a sudden drop in my energy level occurs as soon as I head back home.  Often by the time I enter the door I’m ready to just collapse into bed.

At first blush you’d wonder why I am energized at work and exhausted at home.  I attribute this phenomena to the Life Suction 2000 machine that our IT department has installed at work.  Actually it’s probably upgraded to the Life Suction version 2011 by now.  I have not been able to find concrete evidence of it’s existence, but here’s my theory on how it works.  This machine infiltrates the air you breath with an undetectable gas scientifically indistinguishable from normal air.  This gas acts as a stimulant, boosting your perceived energy level.  You start to become capable of levels of intense work and neurotic brain activity far beyond what you could ever achieve at home.  The side effects are gradually increasing levels of stress and anxiety.  In fact some may say it’s the stress and anxiety that are the stimulant; I mean haven’t you found that if you get really stressed you can’t sleep.  Even if you’re sleepy, when you get stressed, you can suddenly become awake as soon as your head hits the pillow.  This is sort of some of the aspects of how the Life Suction 2000 machine works.

So let’s say your energy level goes on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most energized and 1 being the most depleted.  Say my true energy level at home is a 3 and I’m pretty beat.  I enter the zone of the Life Suction 2000.  I breath the air and suddenly I feel like I’m at a 8.  And as the hours start to fly by I’m still at an 8.  But in reality my true “unstimulated” energy level may be dropping to a 2, but I’m completely oblivious to this under the marvels of the Life Suction 2000.  When you leave the workplace, the effects take about 15 minutes to start wearing off.  So that when you finally get home, you suddenly feel your true energy level and you’re completely exhausted.  If you get a decent nights sleep you may get back up to a 3, but no worries the Life Suction 2000 machine will boost you up to feeling like your at much higher energy levels.

So these past couple of weeks I’ve started to find that coffee is now becoming my Life Suction drink.  It all started with my findings that my coffee machine makes better tasting coffee the larger the number of cups you brew at a time.  I generally only wanted maybe a cup at most, but the best taste only comes thru when you brew 8 cups or more.  However, I don’t like the idea of brewing 8 cups, drinking one cup and dumping the rest.  So I discovered bottling unused coffee, refrigerating it, and adding milk or cream.  Then end result is an excellent tasting iced coffee drink with caffeine effects somehow stronger than when I drank the coffee hot.  The drinks generally taste a ton better than all the premium iced coffee drinks you can buy.  And today I found that when you bottle one of these drinks while they’re hot, they naturally vacuum seal themselves during the cooling phase.  What I mean by this is that when you buy a drink at a store it often mentions that it’s cap should be depressed to show that no one has opened it.  Well my home made coffee drinks look like professionally sealed drinks, caps depressed and vacuum sealed!  You turn the cap and it pops to let you know it’s never been open … and the drink tastes so good … so good …. so so good.  … Oh excuse me  I’m getting a bit off track.  Pardon my excitement on the topic of making my own iced coffee drinks.  It’s the effect of drinking too much coffee.

So the last few days I’d say I’ve been working longer and longer hours, feeling more and more drained and overwhelmed.  But what has been pulling me thru more is my great tasting iced coffee drink, my Life Suction drink.  The other side effects is that I feel less and less hungry.  If I’ve skipped breakfast and lunch and feel exhausted and famished, a good gulp of my coffee drink, and my hunger disappears and I’m awake and alert again.  And then when I get back home I can work and work up till midnight, go to sleep with a restless caffeine charged buzz, wake up with a struggle early in the morning, skip breakfast, grab a fresh bottle of chilled coffee drink. I start drinking and my energy level is back up and I’m clicking away at full speed again.  I almost don’t feel like doing anything but spending the rest of my waking hours stuck in front of the computer screen doing more work on and on and on.  Some part of me does feel exhausted and its only when I’m doing work that I feel alive.  It’s a bit scary.

You know I also thought about this Life Suction 2000 machine.  In some ways it resembles the concept of the machines in the movie “the Matrix” that use humans as batteries.  The machines feed our minds with comforting dreams, and in return we willingly but unknowingly let it suck the energy out of our bodies.  …  Oh I better be quiet!  I think there on to me.  Oh oh it’s Mr. Smith … I oh oh oh..  Help help.  I’m feeling terri ri ri ri …. just fine! I’m feeling great.

I’m think about curtailing a bit on my coffee drink.  But man … it actually tastes so so good.  Mmmm mmm mmm.  Did I tell how neat it is when the cap pops when I open my bottles? Want to come over and try some of my coffee drink?

So over the weekend I had gone away to a Core Energetics “personal intensive”.  In some ways it was a bit like a small retreat to one of those spa’s to help you lose weight and get more physically fit.  Except in this retreat the goal was to become more psychologically fit.  Those of you who have been privileged enough to have attended the Barbara Brennan School of Healing are familiar with the personal process sessions.  A “personal intensive” is in some ways just a personal process session that lasts about 2.5 days.

A general description about Core Energetics is that it works with trying to move and release stuck emotional energy by loosening up where they stored within the body.  It starts off with some discussion to try and push your buttons or bring you back to a painful memory. Then it continues with heavy physical exertion beating the crap out of large pillow while simultaneoulsy saying how you are feeling in terms of any past anger, fear, and hurt.  At times doing this can result in a very cathartic emotional release.

For me I came out feeling an indescribable rejuvenation.  It was a rejuvenation that was different then say going out to a relaxing tropical island getaway.  Because when you simply escape to a relaxing environment you inevitably come back feeling the stress of knowing you must return to whatever you tried to escape.  With the personal intensive the rejuvenation was more “organic” and so the transition from vacation life back to normal weekday work life also seemed “organic”.

In my personal intensive my goal was to find a deeper understanding of myself.  A group of about 9 facilitators/practitioners teamed up to work on my psyche.  I did my best to reveal anything I could possibly think of for all to hear.  The facilitators would team up to try and find and push my buttons, but in a way that felt safe.  In fact I tried my best to work with them to have my buttons pushed, because its in my buttons that I find the doorways to healing.  And during some of my sessions I was quite surprised to find myself vomiting air, purely on emotional release.  At one point I was asked to do a relatively simple Yoga-like exercise and I was triggered into a sensation of indescribable pain and fear. For a brief period I was brought into absolute agony, screaming at the top of my lungs.  But once this happened there was this deep inner smile welling up within me.

I was smiling because I came to be broken and freed, and in many ways that’s exactly what happened.  I was a very satisfied customer.  Within a day I was totally spent physically and emotionally.  My body was becoming so sore all over.  I started to have difficulty sleeping as I my dreams were flooded with more phantom facilitators that would take me through more sessions.  They broke me.  Or rather as my facilitators would probably say: “I broke me, they only facilitated and provided a safe and loving container for my break down”  And then they spent about a day and a half gently putting me back together, healing me with exercises to start implanting new memories of a much happier childhood experience to sit alongside of some my scary, hurtful, shameful or missing experiences.  So now it was like I could survey my past memories and choose new possibilities to my past experiences to better effect my presence in the here and now.

In one exercise they brought me back into the sensation of being in a deeply unconditionally loving womb.  Intellectually I was still an adult, but emotionally I had yet to be born and I have never felt such comfort and security in my life.  The sensation was of tentacles or umbilical cords connecting with me kind of like the tentacles coming from the tree of souls in the movie “Avatar”

I was blindfolded so I couldn’t see with my eyes.  But I could see with my heart, my body, my ears, my mind.  It was beautiful.  It was safe. Every  sound that I was making as the infant was being echoed in a humanity of souls (my facilitators mimicked my sounds) lovingly mirroring my emotions, and lovingly holding me.  This was a moment that I can’t get enough of.  I was told that this very spot of complete security and love resided in the same “void” area of where by deepest fear and pain resided.  This is something I believe, yet sort of boggles my mind to have such opposites sitting so close together, all suggesting that it’s a matter of my perspective and choice that determines whether an unknown “void” part of me that I’ve never been to feels “terrifying and painful” or “fluid and safe.”

On the last few hours of the final day of my weekend they put the finishing touches on putting me back together with a body massage that words can not accurately describe.  All I can say is it was so loving, so compassionate, and so real. And when it came to me having to drive 3.5 hours back home, I was actually OK.  Well much better than OK.  They tore me apart and lovingly put me back together.

So last week I got to attend the 30th anniversary of someone at my work place.  That’s 30 years working for the same company, kind of a rarity these days.  And so then I asked the person how long they had before they qualified for full retirement benefits.  The person shared with me some information which ultimately revealed I was just under 10 years till qualifying for my pension. This may sound like a long time, but it’s actually close enough to start playing a spin on my future plans.  This is when “good news” sometimes feels like “bad news” because it creates choices neither of one which is obviously better than the other, and such choices can be both good and bad news depending upon how well you can accept being given the choice to create your future.  Responsibility and options can be perceived as both good and bad.

You see I’ve been attending BBSH (Barbara Brennan School of Healing) with the expectation of graduating and starting my own private practice and being able to leave my corporate job.  But here’s the interesting situation that may occur.  You see from what I’ve been told by the time I graduate from BBSH I will be about 5 years away from qualifying for my pension.  And so I might actually find myself in that position I thought was never a remote possibility. I might become one of those uneventful workers that decides to stick it out to qualify for that financial security at the end of the tunnel.

This reality stirs up a bunch of feelings and critical voices.  The harshest voice has shame and says: “Oh Geez you don’t want to be known as a lifer.  Come on Wilson, what a disappointment, you were supposed to have made it big when you were 30.  Man I never thought I’d see you sucking wind to join the herds of the many cowards that were afraid to make the leap and stuck it out for a pension.”  A less harsh voice says:  ”Man we always thought to don’t even think about qualifying for pension, that was for really really old people”  Finally, a new voice says:  ”Hold on now Wilson this has to be given serious consideration.”

I’d say that one thing that has definitely started to change since I’ve attended BBSH is that my ability to sustain myself in a world that can be rather cold and superficial has increased.  So the irony of an education that might enable me to pursue a full time life as an energy healer also is opening doors to a full time life even creating beautiful healing space no matter where I am.  I mean many graduates of BBSH never go into practice, and I’m finding even those who do, they may eventually branch off into something that’s no longer energy healing.

So in the end it’s all very wierd.  The possibilities of what I will be doing 10 years from now could be anything from a full time energy healer to just another corporate employee nearing his retirement.  It’s now all about options, all actually positive options, but part of me is a bit disturbed because options means I have to choose and having to choose can be very uncomfortable and quite scary.  But I think there’s a good part of me that’s starting to get the message that the when you are in the sweet spot of the good stuff, it’s also the area where things feel most uncertain and unpredictable.

So at the moment I can see strong certainty of hitting this sweet spot of uncertainty and unpredictability. And I can accept the obvious good of it all and embrace the “bad” of the fear and critical voices in my head.

It’s all good.

So I’ve seen this billboard for the past several months mentioning that the world will end on May 21st 2011.  If you search the internet you’ll find plenty of sites talking about the end of the word, such as this one from Business Insider.  For me I’ve been so so busy at work that the idea of the end of the world sounds like a really good and well needed vacation from life.  I mean if things don’t suddenly stop I have to face the horror of more tension filled meetings and deadlines in the coming week.  To be fair I think I’ve been getting a bit of the hang of my current job working as a Black Belt Project Manager, but I could sure use a break and the end of the world is certainly a break.

But honestly I didn’t hold my breath keeping my hopes up for this to come.   And probably like many of the rest you, you find this another thing to chuckle and make jokes about.  So did I until I stepped outside and enjoyed the fantastic weather today!

One the morning of the day this World is supposed to end, I started on a typical walk with my dog and was struck even stunned by the fantastic weather.  The sky was absolutely clear of all, clouds, and quite blue.  The Sun was absolutely intense and brilliant and this red flag in front of my apartment was not just red, but now shimmering brilliant red with the crisp sunlight reflecting the threads of its fabric.  I never knew the threads in this large red flag had a smooth enough finish to actually shimmer like that!  The air, the breeze was crisp.  It was stunningly beautiful.  Maybe even surrealistically beautiful.

And then I went back upstairs and stepped out on our balcony to meditate and soak in the beautiful morning.  I sat down and my dog followed me.  I sat down in lotus position and just marvelled at the natural sounds of life in contrast to the abstract intellectual world of web conferences, emails, spreadsheets and reports that make up my work week.  I thought to myself, “Man today is just so so SO beautiful!”  My dog just sat beside me and meditated with me.  She was enjoying the Sun too.

Maybe after an hour just sitting in this Sun, I started noticing some whisps of clouds starting to form above my head.  And so I broke out of lotus position and started lying down with my head staring straight up at the sky.  I watched this whisp of clouds rapidly molt, transform, move, appear, evaporate and reappear.  If you were someone else watching me you might have thought I was “spacing out”, but I’d say I was more just having my head in the clouds in the truest sense.  It’s been maybe more than 20 years since I’ve ever lied down and just gazed at the clouds, marvelled at their shapes and just wasted hours of the day away, like there was nothing really to do.

And so I though: “End of the Day,  Haaa, Really!”  I mean this is about the exact opposite of the End of the World.  Nothing menacing at all.  Everything absolutely glorious, relaxed, calm.  All was truly well, even better than well!  A bit more like Heaven.

Then I thought: “Wait a minute  …. a bit like Heaven?  Hmmm.  Heaven?  Hmmm”.  In a world that has seem so turmoiled to pop into a reality where this picture of my dog summarizes the day.  Notice how menacing the day looks, NOT.  Notice how stressed and agitated my dog appears, NOT.  It’s more like Heaven.

Calm Dog on a Beautiful Day

What if this is Heaven?  Then maybe the World actually has actually already ended?  Like maybe just after you blinked your eyes to fall asleep a cataclysmic event occurred far beyond our wildest imagination.  Our part of the Universe blew up in an instant and so fast we couldn’t even see destruction coming.  Like some kind of Hyper Super Nova blew up humungously faster than the speed of light and in the blink of the eye we were vaporized faster than the pulses in our head can travel in an inch and so death and destruction was shockingly painless and unnoticeable.

And so after death we are all waking up.  Well actually I can’t speak for all of us, but at least for my perspective and all the people I could see from my balcony.   So you might be thinking, this sounds all far fetched and I’m off my rocker, but bear me out.  Could you not entertain the possibility of an instantaneous destruction?  And if so then if this did occur and occur so fast, we’d all have skipped the scary and miserable part of seeing our imminent death and destruction and jump straight to a heavenly existence.  And so I really couldn’t complain about today.  I’d wish every day were like today.  It was in the grand overview of my life, like being in Heaven.

And let me walk you a bit further down the “rabbit hole”  What if every moment we are instantly destroyed and the next instant we pop into a new existence.  What if the end of the world is every moment!?  So like in all moments just prior to the end of the world, you think of treasuring every precious second prior to your inevitable death and destruction.  But then you are reborn the next instant only to face the next end of the world.  And so every moment is very precious.  To be sipped like whatever it is you’d associate with Heaven.  And so in a round about way the message of the end of the world is just one more step towards a message of simply being so grateful of the now, of simply taking the time to be in the present.

So you’ll be seeing more signs about another day as the actual End of The World.   So instead of criticizing them for making so many predictions that never come true.  Why not criticize them for not declaring enough the predictions that have so secretly come true.  They should be coming out with signs that the End of the World will come the next second, and the next second, and the next, and the next ….

But if this is starting to feel too heady and philosophical for you, that’s OK.  It’s just a beautiful day today, and my head is in the clouds.  I think I’ve got a bunch of back-to-back meetings lined up for Monday, but for today I just can’t seem to get worried about them.  I’m just wasting the day away talking to you much about nothing, or nothing about much, or maybe I’m simply relaxing.  So in the meantime consider taking a couple of minutes to watch this video of some clouds I took in this moment of a beautiful day.  Click the picture of the cloud to watch.  Peace!

It’s been a few weeks now that I’ve actually not worked thru the weekends.  I think the nice weather has been enticing me to just lie, sit, walk or stand in the sun light.  The days of Summer are long and great.  And although the longer days could allow me to work longer hours, they only seem to entice me to take shorter days.  In my darkest work-a-holic days I was putting in 100 hour weeks and lied to my co-workers about how many hours I was actually working, because I was too embarrassed to be working so long.  I was working as long as physically possible, until my head would fall into the keyboard and it was clear that I was typing gibberish and then I’d push myself to wake up as early as possible, hype myself up with strong coffee and do it again and again and again all in response to fear of being yelled at for not meeting everyone’s high expectations.

But now I’ve faced the fact that everyone’s expectations are actually unrealistic.  As part of my training in the Barbara Brennan school I see a therapist regularly.  Therapy typically helps you accept the fact that your perception of reality is largely how we choose to perceive them.  And so something that is scary or terrible often only gets that way because we choose to judge it that way.  However, everytime I describe my long work hour situation to my therapist, he actually points the problem with corporate work life rather than me.  He’s dealt with many other clients that are getting overworked and doing so willingly for fear of losing their employment in a time where its generally hard to find employment.  According to therapy the expectations made of me at my work place are very unreasonable.  My predicament of working long hours is understandable when just a year ago I was so close to being layed off only to be rescued by a crazy workaholic job.  However, here’s the kicker, in the end it is my choice to work the long hours, even if it’s doing so under implicit cohersion by my supervisors.  I could choose to risk losing my job in an attempt to get needed rest and preserve my health.

I remember a couple weeks ago attending a company sponsored safety meeting and the topic was health.  And I failed miserably on questions related to exercise, recreation and sleep.  You see my company takes safety seriously enough to fire you if you’re unsafe.  And yet my company has high expectations that require me to work unhealthy hours to meet them.  But if I work unhealthy hours I’m implicitly being unsafe.  As I looked at my peers, including some of my newer supervisors taking leisure time or having time to exercise, I recognize that although external events of a work place with unreasonable expectations is very real, the choice to react in fear and give up my personal boundaries, of health and safety is my own.  And that choice is actually an unreasonable choice to make in an attempt to satisfy an unreasonable demand.  The reasonable choice is to not satisfy and allow for the disappointment of those unreasonable demands.  The healthy choice involves disappointing others, while still having empathy for that disappointment.

I’m more now taking a deep breath and gathering the courage to work less hours and potentially disappoint people.  I gather the courage to face people who will get angry and vent on me for failing them in some ways or taking the blame for their predicament, because I wasn’t on the ball in pushing the pace of my projects.  And so what’s at risk is really just me experiencing lots of disappointment and starting to feel like a failure, and incompetent worker.  There’s also a slight fear that someone else may be assigned to take over some of my responsibilities if I’m perceived incapable of doing my work.  But part of me recognizes that someone taking over my work would actually be a healthy response.

So for me in the face of unreasonable demands, I am starting to make frighteningly scary yet reasonable choices.  I know I will feel the disappointment of others and that’s what makes it frighteningly scary.  So the personal work for me is to not to tie my personal worth to my work performance.  I must start to embrace and know and feel my true worth regardless of how disappointed others become with me.  In fact my true worth has nothing to do with what I achieve or accomplish, it is actually simply tied to my mere presence as a unique beautiful human being.

So in these past couple of months I’d say that one thing I’ve noticed that’s changed is my fear of my workplace is lessened.  I mean I remember getting a phone call at my office a few weeks ago and some ultimately tells me my work is total shit, and he never liked it before I even got started on it.  Maybe it was from being chastised verbally so much that I got numb, or maybe I was simply just surrendering and letting go.  But what I remember was accepting that my work was shit and listened as the person on the other end of the phone talked himself into supporting my project although with great reservations.  I was a bit beside myself as I observed how much I wasn’t too phased by the ranting and complaining over the phone.

So now a couple weeks back from another week at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing and I’m finding myself bouncing back and forth between not so interested in my workplace or just tired of my workplace.  But it’s not exactly me being defeated, because there’s a bit of an element of me just feeling OK, regardless of what people think of me, or more importantly what I think other people think of me.

My job title is a Six Sigma Black Belt.  I supposedly lead two demanding projects.  The Black Belt normally evokes expectations of tough, but I’m not tough.  Rather I think the title of Black Belt for me allows others I lead to be tough with me.  But maybe this is all OK. Maybe it’s actually better than OK.

Or maybe I’m currently delusional and you’ll see me ranting in my next blog post (which at my current rate of posting might be for several months), about having no idea what I was writing about in this blog post.  Or maybe I’m currently just writing aimlessly for the sole purpose of recording a blog post in a rather stagnant blog.

Peace man

Well this is hardly an interesting blog, and I’ve been probably the only reader.  That’s pretty bad.

If I was in my early 20′s I might be clicking away trying all kinds of things with lots of reserve energy.  But I think what happens is that with time you inevitably seek out the things in life that can truly sustain the core essence of you. When you’re younger you have more time, and more physical bounce in your body that you can tolerate ventures that look nice on the outside but drain you on the inside.  But after some time if you can’t find some key things to sustain you, your “youth” reserves run empty and you become tired in you middle ages. So me being tired is also a sign of inevitable awakening, a having to let go of superficialities, and a deepening in with the realness of the present world.

Anyway,  I lot of my time has been invested in my work as a student of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing based out of Miami.   As of this time I’ve been to the school 3 times now and have done energy healings on 12 clients with generally positive feed back from my clients.  I also don’t seem to have too much problem finding clients.  So with me being only 1/8th of the way thru my schooling and feeling this level of success, it feels encouraging that in 4 years I might actually be able to stop my corporate job and work full time as an energy healer.

There is one catch though to that conclusion.  Currently I don’t charge clients because I’m still a student.  So when it’s free that’s one less reason someone won’t turn you down to be a client.  But just the same it’s still a big deal that someone wants to be a client even for free, because energy healing the Barbara Brennan way is a bit of an intimate form of therapy, as it’s a bit like seeing a psychologist and a massage therapist for about 90 minutes straight.  So I find that some people, usually more men, are uncomfortable with this.

The other thing to consider is that at my current pace I only have time to see on average 2 clients a month.  So it’s hardly a challenge to drum up business if you only need to get 2 clients a month.  So I can’t say I really tested the waters of how well I could find enough clients to give me a steady sustainable income comparable to my current salary and benefits.

But alas I’m still a freshman so I feel little expectations.  And what’s more encouraging is that when I do healings I actually gain energy.  I can go into a session a bit emotionally disturbed and almost not wanting to do a healing, and then a few minutes into the healing I enter the zone, and soon I’m in awe and surprisingly the client is feeling so much better and relaxed.  So it’s like we both get healed from the healing.  This stuff is great!

Up until about 6 months ago I would have said that it was a breeze selling an iPhone on eBay.  It’s such a hotly contested item, that usually no one will even see your listing until it has only a few hours left before going off auction.  That’s because there are so many iPhones being sold.  And they all end up going for much more than you would think.  They sell for so much of a premium that you could almost run a business buying new iPhones and reselling them on eBay at a slight profit, even with the penalties the cell phone company will hit you with for not getting a contract or canceling a contract.

Well I just put up my 1.5 year old iPhone 3GS, it sold for a whopping $405, but the buyer is not responding to my requests to pay.  A little further research shows they just became members of eBay only a few hours before they placed the single winning bid. Oh no! Not again.  It sounds like yet another prank or fraudulent buyer.  It’s a bogus bidder.

I just started reading about how one person sold his iPhone, received payment, sent out his iPhone only to have the buyer complain that the box was empty with no iPhone.  The buyer complained to eBay.  EBay stepped in, sided with the buyer and took away the money from the seller and returned it back to the buyer. And the buyer didn’t have to return the iPhone because as he claimed, the box came empty.

I have to admit I start to get angry when I hear that kind of news.

Well my workplace has managed to push the right buttons to make me work 15 hour days and work on weekends.  I think one week I probably put in 100 hours!  Sucks!!

But I have to stress my job really has the right buttons to push on me to make me dance fast, really fast.  I’m in a job that gives me lots of responsibility and lots of visibility by people in high places.  You know that saying of “when someone asks me to jump I ask how high”?  Well at my work place I feel like it’s more like “someone asks one of my many bosses to make Wilson jump, and they ask how high”.  So why do I willingly jump for others moreso than I’ve ever done before in my life?

Well like I said it’s a matter of pushing the right buttons. My job already pushes the button that makes me feel important.  And anything that touches on someone’s self-esteem is a big button pusher.  The other big button to push on me is to yell at me and bitch at how disappointed you are in such laziness and incompetence.  That’s not pushing my button, that’s sticking a red hot poker up my rearend.  Ouch!  And I will jump real high and dance so fast for you.

So for the moment I take some time out of my busy schedule to put an entry in my blog.  This is sad.  It’s been almost 2 months since my last post.  And yes indeed a lot has happened.  But I have no time to write about it.

One big thing that’s happened is that I’ve applied to go to Barbara Brennan’s School of Healing located in Miami, Florida.  Some people have called this school Hogwarts because in many ways it’s the closest thing to being a accredited institution that teaches you how to become a psychic healer extraordinaire. When you’re in the school, don’t be surprised if you hear adults screaming like kids in a playground next door, loud banging noises or a teacher telling you that your energy field is leaking out the back left side of your head.  To an outsider it sounds like Hogwarts but when you’re in the school you understand that the screaming is really just advanced psychological therapy at play.  I mean during our normal adult lives we will at times find ourselves screaming and losing our cool, except that we do so with deeper voices then when we were kids.  This school understands that the roots of our emotional expressions of pain go back to childhood wounds and so the school goes back to the childhood roots, the core essence. So in the school there are no mature act-like-an-adult expressions, there are often expressions worthy of a 3 year old.  Pure raw emotion, uncovered, fully vulnerable.  And afterwards humane healing.

So anyway I’ve been to only week of school and I’m supposed to go back in December. In the meantime I’ve got lot’s and lot’s of work to do at my paying job.  And my school has given me lot’s of homework and reading assignments to do if I’m going to pass.

Anyway, I can finally celebrate.  My friend’s old iPhone 3G is officially sold, all money collected, and no complaints from the buyer.  I feel vindicated proving that it is possible to sell a used iPhone, even one that is defective and two generations old.  It is possible to circumvent fraudulent buyers on eBay, by having patience and determination.  I can declare that if you are an owner of any model iPhone in any condition it will sell on eBay and you may be quite surprised how much you’ll get for it.  Furthermore, if you own an iPhone in good condition you can get more for it than you paid for.  Which oddly means two things: if you ever want to upgrade to the next generation of iPhone, you can get it for free!  And if you really want to try you can buy a new iPhone 4, break your contract and pay penalties to AT&T and still sell it for a profit on eBay.

So I was one of the first iPhone owners when the original iPhone came out years ago.  I used to be thrilled about each upgrade in features and performance.  But when the new iPhone 4 came out, the thrill just wasn’t there anymore.  Other friends that owned iPhones would get excited about the new model and I just couldn’t get excited.  I mean I swear even if it had 3D holographic displays, I wouldn’t get excited. I guess I’m just not that excited with gadgets, anymore.  The recent bad publicity with the iPhone 4 having antenna or proximity sensor problems sort of caught my attention.  So after watching the rest of the general public get iPhone 4′s ahead of me and hearing 100% of the people I’ve talked to in the end become completely satisfied with it, I started to think about upgrading my iPhone 3GS.  The biggest reason for me was not the features but the financial incentive.  The upgrade would initially cost me $299.  I’d get a phone that is a faster and has a brand new battery. But then I’d be able to sell my older 3GS phone for more than $300 on eBay!  And because Apple got mixed into a big antenna media fiasco, Apple also gives me a new case valued at $35 for my iPhone 4 for free. If I hold back from upgrading, my 3GS starts to lose resell value and I won’t have owned the new iPhone 4 long enough to qualify for the discounted price when the next generation iPhone comes out in 2011, and I don’t get a free case.  So oddly economics pushes me to buy the latest and greatest.

Now as far as the phone itself.  Yea it’s the best iPhone to date.  It’s got really great battery life.  It has a really crisp display, video phone capability and a really great camera.  But when I think of these things I yawn in boredom.  So what.  While the video phone feature and how well it’s integrated with normal cell phone calls is actually a very impressive technological feat, I find people aren’t inclined to use it. I mean most people don’t really care to show their faces during a cell phone call.  Most of us attention deficit people like to reserve our eyes and hands for multi-tasking like watching TV, walking, holding things or even driving while talking on a phone.

So while I pooh pooh all the greatest features of a really very good electronic device, the iPhone 4, I should also pooh pooh all the supposed faults that Consumer Reports complains about.  This phone is supposed to lose reception and signal strength if you touch one part of the phone.  There’s even YouTube videos showing where to touch to get this featured defect to work.  Well this “feature” of dropped calls doesn’t seem to work.  The iPhone 4 behaves like a normal phone.  Touch the supposed weak spot and nothing happens, the number of bars don’t budge, phone calls work and don’t drop. Wrap your hands around the phone and the phone works.  Hold the phone up to your face while talking and nothing bad happens.  No dropped calls.  No mysterious mute or pushing of buttons.  The iPhone 4 pretty much works like a phone. Ho hum.

The iPhone.  The thrill is gone.

It never ceases to amaze me.  But so often I have something important to do that requires me to look up something on the internet, or login and settle something thru the internet.  But as soon as I get into a browser, some kind of news headline appears and then I get sidetracked.  I peruse for a few seconds and whatever I was supposed to do originally gets forgotten.

I remember I was supposed to do something, but it gets forgotten.  I swear I’m at a state sometimes when I’m uncomfortable or bored I have this urge to pull out my iPhone to checkup on my email, or if nothing interesting is on my email, I need to read thru the news headlines on the internet.  And then if there are no headlines of interest or I’ve checked so often that the headlines have yet to change, I then start searching for more interesting things. I start interactively day dreaming with the internet. I dream about buying something and start “window shopping” and doing consumer comparisons. And then maybe a tangential thought pops up and I start browsing in a different direction forgetting even my original day dreams.  And before long a couple of hours have flashed by.

And then maybe a day passes and I start to realize I had something to do and look up.  I go back on my computer or iPhone, get back on the internet, something interesting pops up and triggers other thoughts and then my memory goes and I struggle to remember even after walking away from my computer or iPhone.  And if I remember, I’ll go back to the computer ready to look up something and then whammo another interesting headline appears and I lose my memory once again.

So I start to think is this internet thing a bad thing.  I have visions of more people being placed into a trance with their conscious minds glued to the internet.  Their self esteem becomes now dependent upon that trance feed of drama that exists in some reality that’s outside of their own personal life.  Remember the movie “The Matrix” where the character Neo wakes up out of his pod and sees that everyone is actually living a virtual life but are connected to a big Matrix machine that hooks up to your body and drains your energy.  Each person becomes a willing and content participant as a human battery for the Matrix because the Matrix feeds back a virtual reality of materialistic existence in their heads.  And so in a way I have this vision that the internet is like this Matrix but the connection is made thru the eyes.  In theory we all have he choice to disengage and disconnect, but it gets hard to do.

People tend to think of the internet as this massive repository of information, but I wonder if the amount of information on the internet is much much smaller than we perceive it to be.  I mean when you see global headlines an news that’s only a handful of events that doesn’t include the many thousands of people a day that go thru struggles, victories, losses, achievements, failures, starvation death, recovery, and rescue that receive little to no attention or notice.  What percentage of significant important things in your life every day find it’s way to the internet? Or maybe I should ask when you browse the content on the internet (casual browsing, shopping, research, facebook, twitter, myspace, etc) how much important space in your life does this content take?

I put forth the concept that the internet puts up the illusion of a lot of information, but in fact it’s maybe fractions of a percent of the information out there.  In the end it’s the judgement of search engines (google, yahoo, bing, ask, etc), people sometimes paying the search engines to get their websites ranked higher, people being willing and able to put the information on the internet, the constant competition of many trying to put the right keywords on their website to be noticed, and finally you being able to have the time and patience to know how to coax the search engine to find out about things you don’t already know.  Go ahead and try and search for something specific on the internet  you don’t know that you don’t know.

But in the meantime you can just glue your eyes to some LCD display, be it your computer or your mobile phone screen.  Check on your text messages.  Check if someone has called you.  Check your email and more and more check on the internet.  Can you break the trance.  Does the trance make you forget things, does it make time fly by really quickly?

So last week I was so happy to get this used iPhone sold on Ebay. This is the 3rd time I’ve tried to sell this same iPhone.  It’s been about a 3 month effort to sell this iPhone.  Part of me feels like chucking this iPhone out the window, except for the fact it’s not my iPhone.  I’m doing this as a favor for a friend.  It was all part of a help someone else out and feel good effort.  But this helping out is getting really ridiculous for me.  I’ve sold 3 other iPhones no problem on eBay, but this iPhone seems cursed!!

A couple of weeks ago the buyer was a fraudulent buyer and got canned by the eBay fraud center a couple days after the person won the auction without making a payment.  Then this time, I was so excited when I got notice of payment from PayPal right away.  With my prior iPhone sales I’m used to immediate ASAP payments, and so this was looking good.

Then I got notice from PayPal that this was paid by a check and so I needed to wait a week for the check to clear.  I think, “Hmmm?  Oh well that’s OK.”

Then Ebay says the buyer is not registered.  I think, “hugh?”  I try to contact Ebay’s customer live chat support and I end up being #100 in line with well over an hour to get thru.  I give up.

Then I try again and have a tough time getting to the live chat again.  Ebay sets up all sorts of hurdles in your way by trying to have the system answer your questions with a list of possible answers and withholding any email or live chat options. So the only way you can get thru is to give it a question that stumps the automated system badly.  Even if you don’t get your questions answered, you need to convince the system that it hasn’t answered your question.  It’s not enough to just stump it, you must ask questions of sufficient severity to convince it to give you the option for a live chat.  So this time I started to convince eBay system, and somehow it responded that it cancelled the transaction, closed the case and refunded my money. This was not what I wanted.

Then with further effort I am able to chat with eBay customer service.  They then tell me that some unusual issues happened that resulted in a legitimate buyer becoming unregistered.  I spend over an hour chatting with the customer support person, who originally encourages me to ship the iPhone, despite this uncomfortable feeling.  After an hour they conclude that it’s impossible to salvage this legitimate transaction and even though payment is coming to me, that events have already been set in motion that will reverse the payment from my account.  NOOOOO!!!!

Then the customer service person stated I should abandon this whole transaction and start all over again. I shouldn’t bother waiting for the buyers check to clear, because even it does clear, it will eventually be cancelled by PayPal when it works it way thru the PayPal process and all payment will be reversed. AhhhhhhAAAA!!  The customer service person apologized for my frustration.

I’m really getting dragged over the coals in experiencing all the different kinds of things that can go wrong with selling on eBay.

So after riding on a bit of a high I found out our bathroom scale was misbehaving. Yesterday I weighed myself several times and I was clearly at between 169 to 170 pounds. I swear I even moved the digital scale and reweighed myself to make sure.

Later some people congratulated me. Then I moved the scale to the kitchen and weighed myself. I was 188 pounds.

I went to work today after a full week of vacation. This evening I stepped on the scale again, 190 pounds. Sigh!

Oh well. My legs are slightly fatigued from all that running, I know Ive eaten less. And in the end it turns out Ive always been the same weight.

Drat that scale! Its a digital scale, that has always been very accurate until this past week. Im trying not to let this discourage me from continuing a good trend of eating lighter and exercising regularly. But with my day work taking out pretty much all of the extra time I had when I was on vacation, I find myself oneself more inclined to eat more as I readjust to getting my body used to being very sedentary so that Im able to plan and organize meetings, read and write reports, emails, and presentations. I find when I have difficulty focusing on complicated work issues and complicated politics, I tend to snack more or drink more caffeine. Today I consumed half a pound of chocolate or perused the internet to keep me emotionally motivated. Instead of eating and browsing, I would rather have napped under a tree.

I really do miss taking vacation.

The last time I wrote I swear I weighed nearly 190 pounds.  But today I was a bit stunned to find I tipped the scale just under 170 pounds! Honestly, I really wasn’t intent on a rapid weight loss, but more to get an handle on what I recognized at times as a bit of emotional eating.  I almost wished I could blog about this weight loss as it was happening, but it happened so fast and sort of unintentionally.  I mean almost a year ago I went on the NutriSystem program and was losing maybe 2 to 3 pounds a week and it was emotionally very tough and agonizing as I strained with huge will power to stop eating beyond the tiny allotted portions.  A year ago it felt like if I cheated and ate an extra almond I’d be penalized with a small weight gain for the day.

So what happened recently, that I lost so much weight?  Well I think it all started a couple weeks ago I made a conscious decision just to take a full week off from work to just stay home, cleanup, catchup, do whatever I want or do nothing at all.  I remember announcing at work that I was going to take a week off for vacation. People at work asked where I was going.  When I said nowhere, it almost felt everyone was looking at me wierdly and that I should have said something like: “Oh, I’m going to travel thru Europe or we are going on an exotic African Safari …” because I guess that would be so much more conversationally exciting, but no I was just hanging around home, dull as it may seem.  But to me it was a wonderful prospect.

So strangely I found myself on vacation popping out of bed at sunrise, just a bit prior to 7 AM and going for short careful jogs.  I remember last weekend running very gingerly on a well padded track at a local high school.  And my knees were nervously sore at times so I had to adjust my pace and carefully hobble along.  The key thing I focused on was on NOT getting injured as I was definitely overweight, out of shape and in my mid 40s.  So maybe on a Saturday I’d jog only a mile and stop because I felt my right knee getting sore.  Then on Sunday I’d do the same, being sure to slow down if needed to stay soft when my feet hit the ground.  And then I don’t know what quite happened but I guess because I was on vacation with lots of spare time I sort of never took a day off from my running and started increasing the distance I ran and at times started to also get faster.

The other thing that happened was that my appetite seemed to get way dampened.  I mean I’d end my early morning runs feeling this deep down exhaustion that had me still catching my breath 20 minutes later on my drive home from the high school track. And  when I felt that exhaustion I was not very hungry.  I mean it’s like that emotional boredom eating that naturally occurred before disappeared as a result of the post-excercise fatigue.  I would sort of force myself to eat some breakfast, which happened to consist of large quantities of organic strawberries.  I had a ton of organic fruit that I knew would go bad in a few days if it wasn’t eaten and so I filled myself up with fruit and felt quite full.  However, there were a couple of times I ate something like an egg, leftover hamburger with cheese, a hot dog, or a sausage, and once I did that my appetite started to shoot back up. It was like certain fat laden foods, were very well capable of putting be back into that emotional state where I wanted to eat more, because it tasted good, and I couldn’t help myself.

So I remember early this week just stepping on the scale and seeing my weight at around 185, and I felt satisfied that I was doing my part to just moderately keep my body healthy.  Then a couple days later I saw it drop just below 180 after a run and thought it was just mostly water loss.  Last night I snacked on chips with hummus, ate a couple of  big juicy ribs, some chicken nuggets, had a couple of beers and a bit of wine and a raspberry tart.

But somehow today something wierd and surprising has happened.  This morning I ran for on the track, starting off very gingerly to protect my knees and ended up running 4 miles at a pace that felt faster than I’ve run in maybe ten years!  I felt great.  And then I stepped on the scale and it showed 169.1 pounds! Wwwah? Strangely though I don’t seem to look any thinner appearance wise.

So in retrospect I can attribute this to the impact of having the luxury of a solid week of taking time off from work so that I have the time to exercise, eat and rest at my own pace.  And I guess how they say exercise has an effect of increasing your energy, well the added energy snow balled everyday to allow me to get up earlier in the morning, sleep harder during nights, and run faster and longer during my exercising and want to eat much less during the day. I had more time to take afternoon naps and just relax, breath and enjoy life quite possibly the way I would if I was retired.  This is nice!

Anyway I go back to work this Monday and won’t have the time to run as long as I had been these past 10 days.  There will be no afternoon naps.  I wonder if I will be running at all?  And then will my appetite start to rise again?

More and more everything we touch either is a computer or is heavily touched by a computer.  At first blush we tend to think of computers as that laptop or desktop thing with a keyboard, mouse and screen.  When we first dealt with computers we might have been surprised or disappointed to find out they can at times fail, freeze up and crash.  But we accept this as OK, the norm, get used to doing the reboot and continue on with our lives.  No use crying over a blue or black screen of death, nothing’s going to get me down, got to keep on moving.

A few months ago I was intent on purchasing my first GPS navigation system. I know they sold GPS apps for my iPhone, but I wanted something more reliable. I wanted something more tried and true tested than any app on my iPhone.  When I went shopping I was pleasantly shocked and surprised to see price of GPS devices dropping so low.  I device that retailed for $500 was being sold on Amazon for maybe $200!  My goal was to get the best and most reliable dedicated GPS system. I did my research and determined that the Garmin Nuvi GPS were regarded as the best and since the prices were so discounted I ended up going for the top of the line Nuvi that retailed for nearly $500, but was discounted to around $200.  It had voice command features, and was highly touted for excellent GPS signal reception and fast route computations and rerouting.

So the Garmin Nuvi has been great except when it freezes up.  Wait a minute, it feels like a computer with a keyboard and mouse that you expect to freeze up at times.  Wake up call.  I realize this is a computer, and at times it feels like a computer with very buggy software.  So I check on Garmin customer support and I’m instructed to update the software on the GPS. I do so, and still at times this GPS freezes up.  I do some research on the internet and I’m shocked to find that many people complain about this GPS freezing up at times and actually lots of models of GPS devices from Garmin and other manufactures freeze up at times.  So what this means is that when you use a GPS to Navigate it can silently just stop, give you the appearance it’s working and you won’t notice somethings wrong except if you glance on the screen and notice nothings changed and you’ve long since missed your turn.

I mean I was initially upset that this top of the line GPS from Garmin was becoming very unreliable so I started to search for a better GPS.  And you know what?  I wasn’t able to find convincing proof of a better GPS system. Whether you purchase a GPS on an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid or shop around for decicated GPS system, they all have some incidences of freezing up at times.  From my reading I did notice people mentioning that their older GPS system was much more reliable, suggesting that the newer systems are getting fancier, more complex and less reliable.

The final bit of disillusionment settled in when I read a rave reviews of my top of the line Garmin Nuvi.  It’s considered the best in performance.  Then I read one customer review giving it good ratings but mentioning that it sometimes freezes up.  But that customer wasn’t fazed at bit.  He loved his Garmin GPS and felt it was not too bad to expect to keep checking if his GPS is freezing up, and if so, yank the battery out of the unit so it shuts down, reinsert the battery, start it back up, re-enter his destination and then continue navigating.  Hugh!?  This is acceptable?

“Why yes Wilson” says my Garmin GPS.  ”Your complaints are appearing to be highly irregular versus my ratings. I suggest you reduce the oxygen level reaching you’re brain. You’ll get a bit light headed but I think you come to be more satisfied.”

I also just read the headlines about cell phone manufactures suing a state over the requirement for cell phone manufactures to report radiation emission strengths of cell phones.  The argument is that there is no solid proof that cell phone radiation is harmful to humans and so this information is going to unfairly penalize the cell phones with higher radiation output, when radiation output is not harmful.  Hmmm?  So if we just sort of hush hush on the radiation output, and then crank up the output, now the cellphone with the higher output is going to perform better in keeping it’s connection with cell phone towers.  We as consumers will all be happier, right?

“Why yes Wilson” says my iPhone. “I must agree your behavior is not very mainstream consumer friendly.  I believe you need to reduce the oxygen level going to your brain, possibly take some sedatives to dull your senses a bit as well.  Trust me I’m your iPhone.”

My Gamin Nuvi: Yes trust your iPhone, trust me.  We’re the best and coolest things out there.  Without us where would you be?

Me: Yeah but what about this iPhone antenna problem and proximity sensor thing I’ve …

My iPhone:  ”Shhh Wilson.  Calm down.  These are all just normal anomalies that happen at time, nothing serious.  Now start repeating that mantra that I told you that always helps and is helping millions of other cool gadget hungry people still waiting in line to get an iPhone.”

Me:  I wa wa wa want an iPhone.  I wa wa want an iPhone.  I want an iPhone.  I want an iPhone. I want an iPhone.

My iPhone: That’s better. Now get in line and buy the new iPhone 4.

My Garmin Nuvi: Hey did you see the new model of me that just came out?  I’ve got that sleek iPhone look now and new multi-touch LCD screen with pinch-to-zoom.  You’ve got to have me.  So why don’t you buy me in my latest model.  You’ll like me much better this time.  Trust me.

Me: But will you still have the freezing up problems in the newer …

My Garmin Nuvi: eh eh eh. Shh sh sh.  Now repeat that mantra again.

All is well and we just all accept trading in just a little bit more of our lives for the advancement of technology.

So recently I went on vacation to Niagra Falls, on the Canadian side. I spent several days in one of the nicer hotels overlooking the famous Horseshoe falls.  During this recession, the hotels were doing their best to offer special perks, reduced rates or special room upgrade offers to attract tourists.  One of the perks was a daily free breakfast buffet.

For much of my life I guess I grew up thinking “free, wow, whoopee great”  ”free food, wow”. “free buffet … wooah better eat up and stock up and take advantage of the situation.”  I had driven up to Canada and so the first morning in my hotel room, I found myself feeling more like I just wanted to sleep in.  I mean it was well over a 7 hour drive and I was feeling kind of exhuasted and would rather sleep in the morning and eat maybe a late lunch.  But alas there was the free breakfast buffet that would end around 11 AM, and eating a late lunch wouldn’t be free.

And so like a dog helplessly unable to resist free food, I woke up and made my way to the hotel restaurant at about 10:50 AM, ten minutes shy of closing time.  And to my amazement the place was a packed madhouse as I guess hundreds of other guests had the same idea.  So maybe the analogy was more like hundreds of helpless sheep or cattle being herded into a breakfast buffet, unable to resist passing up their complementary breakfast buffet that came with their nice hotel room.

And this is where I got to see basic human nature come thru in the buffet mentality.  I got to see how a buffet may be a powerful illustration how we easily get caught up in a cycle of massive waste for the purpose of saving money.  We think we are missing out, we don’t want to pass up opportunity because it may never come up again and we’ll regret it or get criticized for it, so we’d rather seize, corner, hord and then in our own privacy throw away and waste opportunity then to risk taking just what we need.

I started off with the attitude that I was going to be healthy and not stuff myself.  I mean I’m in my mid 40s, I don’t excercise that much and so I don’t need to put on more pounds.  So I ended up grabbing probably a dozen pieces of bacon, some sausage, pancakes, muffin, various fruits, scrambled eggs and freshly cooked sunny side up eggs, containers of yogurt, some cereal, a few containers of milk, lots of french toast.  Needless to say I was way over stuffed. But as I looked around the hundreds of other free breakfast buffet diners I saw the same thing.  And so I did what any senseless human would do in a buffet I went back into the buffet serving area for additional servings, most determined to pick out that favorite piece of food that you can best manage to down when you’re already full.

Everyone had a server that brought out drinks to your table.  Our server suggested that we take some food back to our hotel room because they would just throw away the uneaten food.  Oh No!  But at the same time Oh Yes!  I mean Oh No because that instinctive part of me as a child and my parents telling me to not waste food comes thru.  And Oh Yes makes part of your mind think “buffet bonus rounds”   Now you can overstuff your self without limit.  So some people pocketed a few muffins or fruit back with them.  But then a few were less subtle and brought back trays, with plates, filled with food back with them.  So I took a substantial amount of food with me, smiling, feeling satisfied that I got my fill of breakfast buffet and had not left any opportunity go to waste.  The hotel room had  a tiny refridgerator that could store some persishable foods.

It wasn’t until the second and third days of getting the free breakfast buffets, that I could snap out of this buffet madness mentality and start appreciating the benefits of just eating what I need or even eating less than I need.  After the second day of bringing back unfinished food back to our hotel room, I realized that the prior days unfinished food was still mostly untouched.  On day one I had maybe 2 containers of yogurt in the fridge and on day two 4, and on day three now 5 so in this quest to hord and not miss out on opportunity my body just was unable to consume as much as my mind felt I deserved to be able to eat.  It’s like a little voice says: “hey you spent a lot of money for your hotel room and it includes a free breakfast buffet so eat up your money’s worth.”  But in this buffet madness situation I really appreciated how “having more becomes lesss”  Beyond a certain point eating more, no matter how much “free” it is only reduces my satisfaction and only starts to detract from my happiness.

By about the 4th day of my vacation and getting used to this breakfast buffet, I found myself calmer and just getting a breakfast I might normally get if I was just ordering food at a normal a la carte breakfast. Because I realized I am already privileged and I will continue to have plenty of opportunities to eat even after this buffet is over.  In fact I’m privileged enough to afford paying for food to the point that it will be very challenging to not become increasingly overweight.

But what I realized is that in some ways much of consumerism in America, be it food in a buffet, food in a super market, shopping for anything during sales, and discounts, or shopping in a wholesale clubs like Coscos, BJs, or Sam’s has a lot of the buffet mentality weaved in it.  I read that supermarkets on average make about 1% profit on the stuff they sell.  That’s because a lot of stuff goes bad and is thrown out.  But somehow, someway some economic geniuses figured out that it’s more profitable to lower the price of things to the bare minimum and make it up in huge volumes of sales.  The same geniuses realize that it’s better that you error on the side of overstocking and having waste than to run out off an item and miss out on a sales opportunity.  A lost sales opportunity is bad.  And waste is not so bad because you can have clearance sales or at least get tax right off.

So in the business of being the most successful and profitable business, although it doesn’t seem to quite make sense, somehow someway, it turns out that part of the formula to being successful is to run your business like a buffet.  Offer huge quantities at reduced prices, even at a profit loss if necessary and realize that substantial waste is part of running a successful business.  And we as consumers mostly love it, because we get deals deals deals and can buy our way into status more and more economically than ever.  But like a buffet maybe some of us at times pauses to look at the wasteland of discarded computers, cellphones, old TV sets, packaging, plastic bags, plastic silverware and of course lots of excess food.  Some of us reduce this waste a bit and keep it stored in our homes as pack rats,  some of us store the excess food in our bodies so we become overweight and then some of us just give up and just accept that’s it’s mature practice to go to a restaurant, order food, eat maybe half of your food and then throw the rest away.

So is this buffet thing a bad idea?