Daily Chai

Fascinating tales of therapy

If you've ever been in therapy, thought about going into therapy, had a friend in therapy, or a friend who you thought needed therapy ... well you get the picture. In an age where we all have at least a cursory familiarity with Freud's theories of psychoanalysis and our language is peppered with psychobabble like "processing" events and "getting closure," we've pretty much all been touched by therapy, whether we realize it or not.

Which is why I think so many people would enjoy Love's Executioner, by Stanford Professor of Psychiatry Irvin Yalom, who provides a rare view from the psychiatrist's chair as he works with patients struggling to lose weight, confront death, mourn losses or just mend broken hearts.

The title, in case you are wondering, is the title of the first story in the book and refers to Yalom's own reticence in working with love sick patients. He explains:

I do not like work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love's executioner.

Sounds rather grim, I agree, but the outcome of that particular story for which the book is named will probably surprise you as much as it surprised Yalom. The great thing about this book is how Yalom is again and again challenged on his own assumptions, surprised by his patients and forced to learn the lesson over and over again that there is no such thing as a text book case in psychotherapy. It's also interesting to see how he is forced to explore his own issues through his patients.

Northwest's shortage of gate agents + elimination of milk in flight does not a happy child make. Nor a happy parent, nor other happy passengers on board, for that matter!

I started blogging once before about my horrible experiences with this one airline that bumped me over the Christmas holidays, even though I had had been one of the first people to check in, and was suffering from a horrible cold to boot. But I never published that entry because I came to realize that flying is just pretty darn horrendous across the board these days, and there's no point in singling out any one airline.

But my recent experiences flying with Susie Q. on Northwest were really unacceptable, even considering today's all around crappy service. Northwest has, in the interest of saving some money, stopped serving milk on all its flights. Notice I did not say it has stopped providing milk for free, because I assure you, I would have been much more understanding about that, more than happy to fork over $5 for a small carton if it meant sparing my one-year-old the sweet airline apple juice on our recent flight from Detroit to San Francisco. 

But you can just bring the milk with you, you say. Or, you can just buy it in the airport. That would be no, and no again. Yes, you can get one small bottle of milk past security, but that is usually only enough for the first hour or two of flying. Our flight originated that day in Bangor, Maine, and even though it was quite late taking off, we still had to wait so long to get off the plane in Detroit while the gate agents made their way to our gate, that I had to run with baby, through the odd nightclub themed undergroun corridors at the Detroit airport, to make my connection, and had no time to do any shopping in the airport. So the two of us are beyond frazzled and after we navigate our way to the one remaining seat in the back of the plane, buckle up, take off, and wait aixiously for the drink cart, I am shocked to learn there is no milk on board.

Like many parents of one-year-old babies, I had not yet even introduced milk to Susie Q. so this was not as simple as swapping Coke for Pepsi. It took her a long time acclimate to this new taste and drink any at all, and on this hot August day (did I mention that they left us waiting for a half hour in Bangor with all the air vents turned off??), I started to worry she'd get dehydrated.

So yes, even though air travel sucks plain and simple, I've flown recently on several other airlines that have provided milk, and provided it for free. If Northwest wants to impose such seriously inconvenient cuts, they ought to warn passengers ahead of time, or at least make sure they have enough gate agents to get connecting passengers off the plane in time that they can buy provisions for their baby in the airport. 

 

Green poetry

This haiku was first published on Grist.org

A frog in water

Doesn't feel it boil in time

Dude, we're the frog!

The Treasure Box Picture Frame

Looks like an ordinary frame when it's empty, but the depth of this Treasure Box Picture Frame from Dennis Daniels makes room for a lot more than photos -- like, say, those beautiful seashells that you picked up from the beach years ago and would really prefer to display than leave them collecting dust somewhere.

I framed some of my old seashells in one of these frames and hung them in my bathroom. Lots of people have liked the idea and asked where I got the frame. They are pretty easy to find online at places like Amazon.com and Shop.com.

Better than wooden spoons

It wasn't until I was cooking one day when my mom was in town that it finally clicked that you weren't supposed to cook with metal spoons.

"Honey, you should get a wooden spoon," she advised.

I did, and even though the wooden spoon did solve the nails-on-a-blackboard sensation that comes with metal-on-metal, they always seemed sort of counterintuitive to me for cooking, since they don't hold up all that well to heat or soap and water. These Tovolo silicon mixing spoonsare much better! Heat resistant and dishwasher safe, and they don't hold the aroma of whatever it is they're stirring up.

One of the things I love about San Francisco

About five years ago when I was unemployed and smelling the roses (and noticing street graffiti too) for the first time in many years, I started seeing on one of my many long leisurely walks between coffee shops that someone was drawing these large hearts all over the sidewalk in my neighborhood. They were about the size of a hand, drawn in bright pink and red and yellow an blue shades of chalk and would appear one morning in front of a neighbor's door, one day in front of mine, another day on the next street over. It was clear the message was not intended for me personally (I wished) and yet it touched me personally, I guess for the simple reason that someone was deliberately doing this with the intent of touching me and a lot of other random strangers in Cole Valley. That is, assuming it was not a graduate student thesis on public art.

Seriously though. You don't see this sort of thing on the streets of New York or Washington DC, or even groovy L.A. And yet, they are always appearing somewhere in San Francisco, which leads me to conclude that it is not just one, or even a handful of people doing these anonymous cheery deeds. A couple years back, all over the streets of the Mission you would see these love messages -- things like "you are the one I've been waiting for" stamped on the streets. Again, too widespread to be intended for any one individual. More recently, I've noticed stickers around Duboce Park that say simply "Parallel Universe." Who knows what they mean, but just the new-agey suggestion that there is another reality out there, maybe closer than we think, comforts and lifts me in the morning as I'm walking to get my coffee.

And now, this. Walking back from the Safeway in Castro the other day, I noticed that someone had scrawled "Look Up" on the sidewalk on Church Street. When I looked up, I was rewarded with this sublime view of graceful sun soaked trees, which I wouldn't have otherwise taken the time to appreciate from down on the gritty ground, as I dodged homeless people and juggled some heavy grocery bags on the back of my daughter's stroller.

And finally, my third and final installment on Yosemite.

I wrote previously about my recent trip to Yosemite with my mother and daughter and how the long drive and the heat, and finally a God-awful hotel room just about ruined things. Until we were allowed to swap out our filthy, dingy, hot room for a truly lovely two-bedroom suite, for the same price of $230 a night, even though a sign on the wall stated that the going rate for our new room was $600. And yes, it was peak season, and yes, we got this room very late in the day. And yes, other people were told there was no room at the inn.

I'm not sure exactly what I have to say about this: how things instantly turned from unbelievably bad to better than I could have hoped for, except that I'm filing this under "general thoughts on life," because I do think there was a lesson there.

Yes, I know that maybe it was just that someone had canceled their reservation at the last minute, leaving this room open. Maybe the clerk had pity on me and my sweaty family. But I also think it's a lesson about expectations and what we settle for and what we can potentially achieve/attain when we don't go through life looking for things that are just good enough, passable, but rather think of the ideal, our wildest dream.

I have to stress how dramatic this hotel swap was. It wasn't like we swapped out two similar rooms where one had air conditioning and the other did not. Our new room was about 1,000 times nicer on every level. I only wished that we had found it earlier in the day so that we weren't so exhausted when we did get there (although, it was quite a nice place to be exhausted!)

It reinforced for me in a larger life sense that:

1) You have to ask for what you want. I was so anxious to get out of the old room that I was ready to forfeit the money I'd already paid. But then we decided that we'd just ask if they could do anything for us.

2) Reality often can exceed your expectations. Too good to be true just doesn't hold up.

3) Things can turn from dismal to very bright very quickly.

4) A larger hand does seem to be at work. Logically, there is no way I could have foreseen this room opening up, being that it was peak season and other people were coming into the hotel looking for rooms and being turned away.

And a bunch of other stuff too. Like, don't assume that Yosemite in July will be a fun vacation for the whole family. And, don't believe those totally false images of the rooms from the Yosemite Web site when booking a room.

They say that all the people who come into your life are there to teach you a lesson. I think they say the same thing is true, by extension for all the events you experience in life. Sometimes, the lesson is pretty obscure. But sometimes it is screaming out.

 

 

  

More on the disastrous Yosemite trip and how pictures, especially pictures of hotel rooms, can lie.

Which hotel would you rather stay in?

If you're like me, you pick hotel number two, hands down. It looks woodsy and cabin-y and cozy, where the other one looks like a place where someone might get murdered (especially since there were a couple of murders outside of Yosemite ten years back). Certainly not the sort of place you'd want to take your 70-something mother and one-year-old daughter.

Well, that just goes to show you how pictures can lie, even when it comes to pictures that hotels themselves who should know better, offer as their own marketing material. Hotel number one pictured above is actually a lovely place to stay and the place where my family moved at the last minute when I made an executive decision that hot summer weather + no air conditioning + incomprehensibly, no screens on the windows that opened out to brazen squirrel and bear and who knows what other wild animals territory did not equal a fun or even particularly safe outing for said family.

Now, I can appreciate that Yosemite has a policy of no air conditioning in hotel rooms within the park. I personally don't even mind hot weather, as long as it is not of the humid, east coast variety. And I like to rough it as much as the next person. But there is a reason for family-style lodging: different members of the "family" (think very old and very young) have different standards of comfort. I can't for the life of me understand that a hotel that charges a not-cheap $230 per night can get by not offering screens on its screen doors, that you essentially have to keep open to prevent suffocation. They warn you not to keep food in your cars because of the bears, then they let you pay to sleep in wide open rooms that provide less protection from the elements than a tent!

Some other things that the room at the dreadful Yosemite Lodge at the Falls did not offer:

-- any adequate lighting. I'm thinking there were two 25-watt bulbs in the whole room.

--housekeeping. This room was filthy.

--a view of the falls. Not even close.

(And, don't believe the pictures in that link. They are LIES!

I would have just stuck it out for the one night we were there, had I not been very worried about my mom, who apparently likes humid heat better than dry heat. I made an executive decision to leave that night, even if it meant that we had to drive all the way back to San Francisco. But after a very snarly desk clerk gave us a hard time when we asked for a refund ("we've been in business xx years and no one else has complained..." yeah, right) he referred us to his super-nice manager who somehow got us into a very lovely room in the very lovely (very dingy photo notwithstanding) Yosemite View Lodge.  

It's not lovely in a five-star-hotel kind of way, but is just what you want when you've been driving all day with a carload of kids or other family members and need a clean, comfortable, cool place to unload everyone. There's a swimming pool here, and because it's outside of the park limits, the rooms are air conditioned. It's also quite a nice layout that the above photo does not at all capture. Not one building but a series of buildings, almost like a little village, where you can walk around, meet other folks and not feel confided to your room. Somehow, for the same $230, we got a two bedroom suite with TVs in all three rooms. No, I don't ordinarily go to Yosemite to watch TV, but let me tell you, it had been quite a day by that time.

 

Something I've realized

The only times in life I've been short on cash, were the times I denied myself.

Can you ever have too many bags?

Maybe not, if one of them is this long, quilted shoulder bag from Utility Canvas. It's so multi-functional that it can work as a (large) purse, yoga bag, beach bag or grocery tote.