For a Total Change of Heart: Don’t be like Oprah. Be altruistic, sure. Be generous as much and as often as you can. But for the love of all that is decent, don’t jump into something that sounds like a good idea before thinking about it first. Other than a CZ-75 semi-automatic pistol, thoughtful planning is among the best weapons you can keep in your arsenal, and it can defend you against any attacker. If Oprah had done her research, or at the very least thought about the implications of what she was doing, she wouldn’t be in such deep shit with everyone right now.

For a Total Change of Heart: I urge you to find, analyze, and if at all possible destroy those little rituals that add an artificial sense of heightened enjoyment to an already perfectly enjoyable activity. Get back to the roots of it – what was it about that activity that drew you to it in the first place? Why do you go to the movies? It sure as hell ain’t for the popcorn. Would you still go to that bookstore if there wasn’t a Starbucks in the middle of it? Probably. Reconnect with what you’re really after when you set out to have a good time – everything else is superfluous.

For a Total Change of Heart: Commit to a no-buy month, or week, or even day if you’re going to be a pussy about it. Put yourself out of your comfort zone financially, and force yourself to look around and appreciate what you already have. Read, exercise, no-charge events, anything that’s FREE. Even if you’re bored, don’t spend a dime! Money is not a cure for boredom; imagination is. Money only treats the symptoms of a life ill-spent.

For a Total Change of Heart: Identify your addictions, then figure out whether they are actually benefiting your life. Research the hell out of them, and decide if you really want to spend your time/money/energy supporting those addictions. Ask yourself if you could live without them, or if you actually need them in order to survive. Be realistic and reasonable about it. Cancel out all that unnecessary shit you don’t need.

For a Total Change of Heart: Know your values. Level every choice you make against them, and make no exceptions. Your morality should always take precedence over your impulses. Find something worth fighting for and don’t stop fighting for it. That is the ONLY way to inspire real change in yourself and in others.

For a Total Change of Heart: Don’t turn away from what you know your flaws to be. You know you have them. You don’t have to post them up for all the world to see, as I have done here, but you need to at least face them, then try and decide what to do about them. Because if you aren’t constantly trying to better yourself, then WTH are you doing here anyway?

For a total change of heart: Look at your economic woes and put them up against your blessings (family, friendships, spirituality, hobbies, talents). If the economy even comes close to being as important as those good, stable, consistent, REAL things, then you need to reprioritize. No problem will go away if you ignore it, but by shifting your focus, you might find that the problems just don’t need to affect you that much.

Yes, I said it. It’s meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I don’t want to get all hippie-dippy on you, but the truth is, real wisdom and real longevity come from the love we give each other. We are being so blinded by this irresistibly unpredictable “economy,” this ephemeral concept that has no physical reality for anybody, that we’re allowing it to stress us out. And what happens when human beings get stressed out? We withdraw from each other, only emerging from our shells to lash out at the nearest passerby who looks at us funny. We are alienating everyone else in the world, all because we’re trying to cover our assets and pick up the ghostly pieces of some dream that was never real to begin with.

Anything that needs itself to define itself, and cannot be smelled, tasted, touched, seen, or felt with your heart should have its position on your priority list reconsidered.

No, I’m not saying that the economy needs to fall off the priority list altogether. It’s reality enough in the minds of the decision-makers to affect some of us very deeply. It can cause great pain, and rarely brings any real pleasure. So stop giving it so much attention. It is undeserving of our efforts, and as we can all plainly see, our efforts have little effect on it anyway. It is only as real as we let it be.

For a total change of heart: Look at your economic woes and put them up against your blessings (family, friendships, spirituality, hobbies, talents). If the economy even comes close to being as important as those good, stable, consistent, REAL things, then you need to reprioritize. No problem will go away if you ignore it, but by shifting your focus, you might find that the problems just don’t need to affect you that much.

Early in the month, I bought a pair of pantyhose on my way to work. Why? Because the pantyhose I was wearing got snagged on the bus. Big pain in my ass, really. I hate pantyhose. But you know, when it’s too hot for pants and you’re too lazy to shave, there’s little other choice.

The irony of it all is that, after changing into my new hose in the company bathroom, I snagged that pair on my way back to my desk.

Damn you Murphy. Damn you straight to hell.

Otherwise, I did spend around $60 on Father’s Day presents for my husband. I would certainly have made him something, and I may still do that, but I knew exactly what he wants and needs for Father’s Day, and as it turns out it’s none too easy to make one.

Despite those setbacks, I am proud to say that I have not once:

Gone out to lunch,
Purchased any erroneous craft supplies,
Purchased any games or other apps for my iPod,
Spent a single dime on myself at the grocery store,
Stopped at the very convenient convenience store by my house for soda,
Gone to Goodwill (although it’s been hard),
or purchased any unnecessary beauty products (and my roots are showing!).

I anticipate having to spend the following monies before the month is over:

$3 in library fines.

Hopefully that will be all, because any more would require an emergency – and don’t worry, not the kind of emergency that warranted my purchasing cheap-ass hose. I’ve learned my lesson there.

I interview for a job that I know I’m perfect for. I allow the interviewer to glamour me with all the great promises for the future. I take these promises to heart. Every single promise is broken within six months, and I get depressed about my job. I start slipping, making stupid mistakes, because if they don’t care about me, then why should I care about them? Things get worse and worse until finally, in a fit of paranoia and emotion, I quit before they can fire me.

Rinse and repeat.

Here’s another example: my family is spending time with my parents. We’re having a great time. My mom suggests in a truly pitiable tone that she and I spend some time together, “just the two of us,” since we “never do that anymore.” Without hesitation, I swallow the hook and go along with it. Three hours later, we’re both in tears, straight up refusing to communicate with each other anymore. I remember – after the fight – why we “never do that anymore.”

Clearly, something needs to be done about this. But what? I don’t have a clue. To quote XKCD, “My usual methods are useless here,” since Google searches reveal only links to memory retention games. It’s not exactly the same thing. I need to be able to easily recall experiential memories. I don’t have any trouble remembering a grocery list.

I do, however, have serious trouble thinking about those nasty bumps on my journey. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid I’ll remember incorrectly and make an ill-conceived judgment. Maybe I’m just afraid of the memory itself. After all, when I do spend time strolling through the darker parts of my history, I end up wallowing in a really disgusting self-pitying cave for a few days. It’s depressing and kind of ridiculous, but it happens without my realizing it (there’s that damnable lack of pattern recognition again).

The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, journaling. How simple! All I do is write down my experiences, then periodically flip back through my journal so I can keep them fresh in my mind. Ah, but there is a problem, and it’s a mighty one. I absolutely hate journaling. This is evidenced by the long time that has past since my last post here, and will be further evidenced by the very strong likelihood that I will lose interest in this blog altogether at some point in the next couple of months. A preemptive sorry for all my devoted readers (psh).

But something, something must be done. I need to face down these bad experiences I’ve had and somehow forgive the culprits. Forgiveness will be the key, I’m sure of it. If I can truly, with body and soul, forgive the people I feel have wronged me, and then actually let it go, I’m sure everything will be better in general. Maybe by resolving these issues, I’ll be less afraid of them, less depressed whenever I have to think about them. But I do have to think about them, and I have to think about them in a more positive context.

If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

For a Total Change of Heart: Don’t turn away from what you know your flaws to be. You know you have them. You don’t have to post them up for all the world to see, as I have done here, but you need to at least face them, then try and decide what to do about them. Because if you aren’t constantly trying to better yourself, then WTH are you doing here anyway?

No caffeine is also going okay. Not good, but okay. The headaches suck, big time, but they’re blissfully short. I was researching to see what kind of products have caffeine, so I can avoid them, and was depressed to discover that dark chocolate contains significant quantities of caffeine. Now, I’m no chocolate-fiend, but there are times when the only thing that will do it is a nice bar of dark chocolate. I continued my research. Sometimes (okay, often) research about one topic leads to another topic, one you weren’t expecting, but becomes so much more interesting to you. This is exactly what happened to me.

I was horrified to discover that there is a strong association between chocolate and child slavery. See, most of the chocolate in the world is grown in the Ivory Coast, where there have been hundreds of confirmed cases of young boys being tricked into slavery by cocoa growers, who then beat them, force them to work without pay, barely feeding them, and then dumping them when they’re “spent,” scarred and homeless and friendless, left to fend for themselves against the world. As I clicked link after link, I came to realize that this was not just one guy’s paranoid delusion. More and more reliable sources confirmed what I had been reading, and I became more and more disgusted with us, with people, for allowing these things to happen right under our noses, just because we “can’t live without chocolate.”

Long ago, I began to boycott the diamond industry for its inhumane and insanely manipulative business practices, but admittedly it’s a lot easier for a lower-middle-class receptionist to boycott the diamond industry than the chocolate industry. Turns out that Hershey’s AND M&M Mars use chocolate that comes from the Ivory Coast, and the problem over there is so prevalent that you can bet money that your bag of M&Ms only exists because some kid was stolen or purchased from his family and tortured into picking the beans that made the chocolate.

Well, that just about did it for me. I don’t get on my high horse about many things like this. I don’t just go around boycotting things and making a big stink over them. Something has to be really disgusting in order for me to get in my shit about it. I don’t really have a problem, for instance, with the porn industry, or even with prostitution. I’m not going to boycott Starbucks just because they have a separate line for women in Saudi Arabia. But for me, this chocolate issue qualifies.

I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to figure out what my values are, and I’ve been able to piece together, through many internal arguments and much internal debate, a few hard-and-fast rules by which I will live my life. Not supporting the blatant, heartless exploitation of innocents for the sole purpose of obtaining a profit with low overhead is one of them. And I intend to avoid chocolate from now on: not just because of the caffeine content, but because I will not support an industry that so pointedly ignores the very basics of human life and interaction in pursuit of money.

For a Total Change of Heart: Know your values. Level every choice you make against them, and make no exceptions. Your morality should always take precedence over your impulses. Find something worth fighting for and don’t stop fighting for it. That is the ONLY way to inspire real change in yourself and in others.

Fortunately, it’s also been beneficial. It was helpful when I quit smoking marijuana. It was quite useful when I quit drinking all forms of alcohol. I was very thankful for it when I quit smoking cigarettes last September. When, in January, I quit eating meat I found it incredibly comforting. Finally, I stopped drinking caffeinated coffee a couple of months ago, and so far I’m having more trouble with that than with anything else I’ve tried quitting in my life.

Yes, quitting coffee is harder than quitting cigarettes.

I know, I know…go online and you’ll find study after study that “proves” that caffeine sharpens your focus and improves your output, that it can guard against certain diseases and disorders, and that it’s a “healthy” stimulant. But the nature of a stimulant is not healthy…caffeine’s purpose is not to be good for you. Caffeine’s purpose is to unnaturally alter the way your brain works so you can push your body harder than it needs to be pushed. It’s like a gun; yes, it CAN be used for self-protection, for recreation, and for brandishing in a threatening way to get what you want, but it only has one real purpose in life, which is to kill living things.

I did my research; I found neutral articles (like Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks) that explained the chemical nature of caffeine. Now, it’s been a while since high school chemistry, so some of it was over my head, but the general idea is this: caffeine is not natural, and it does sly, manipulative, unnatural things to your brain and your body. It’s addictive as hell, and it is, to echo the sentiments of many strongly disliked anti-caffeine criers in the scientific community, just as harmful as any other psychoactive stimulating drug. I’ll even stretch my neck out a little more and say that the reason it’s even legal is because the very large majority of the decision-makers in the world are addicted to it.

I thought coffee would be enough, so I started there, gradually reducing my intake like many articles suggested. Then I was drinking only tea, and I was very self-congratulatory about that. I thought, “Later I’ll get rid of all caffeine. But drinking tea is fine for now!”

This morning, I overslept. When I woke up, I frantically called the office and explained that I had slept through my alarm and I would be in ASAP. When I got to my desk, I was still exhausted. I immediately rushed to the break room for a cup of tea. Upon slogging it back like a maniac, I began to feel the effects of the caffeine right away. My heart began to race and my muscles began to twitch, but I noticed something very strange. Even though my body was going like I’d just run three miles, I was still sleepy. The caffeine had done nothing to actually give me that “woken up” feeling. And I further realized that I always felt this way about caffeine. So why was I still drinking it? The answer: addiction. Plain and simple. Clearly, as described in above paragraphs, I have an addiction problem. Perhaps I’m addicted to addiction. Whatever the case may be, I was continuing to ingest a substance that does me more harm than good simply because I am addicted to it.

So I made the decision, at 10:15 this morning, June 3, 2009, that I would quit caffeine cold-turkey. I washed out my mug and gave it away, retaining only my thin plastic cup (insufficient for the hot caffeinated beverages found at work). That cup will come in handy when I’m tossing back glass after glass of water as I frantically try and flush this nasty caffeinated feeling out of my system.

Sudden? Sure. Rash? Maybe. But every other time I’ve successfully quit doing something I didn’t want to do, be it reasonable or not, it was because of a sudden, rash decision I made based on current feelings. Everyone has their own method for quitting stuff, and I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

For a Total Change of Heart: Identify your addictions, then figure out whether they are actually benefiting your life. Research the hell out of them, and decide if you really want to spend your time/money/energy supporting those addictions. Ask yourself if you could live without them, or if you actually need them in order to survive. Be realistic and reasonable about it. Cancel out all that unnecessary shit you don’t need.

I recently wrote about giving up Book Club lunches, and that inspired me to look into other things I might be wasting my time/money/energy on. For instance, I’ve been trying to sew my own clothes for basically my entire life. Turns out, I’m terrible at it, and I don’t have the patience to improve. So…I gave it up. I quit. I took a long hard look at it and said, “No, I don’t need you in my life any more than I need to eat at Jimmy John’s every Thursday afternoon,” followed by hasty apologies to Jimmy John, who actually does make the best gourmet sandwiches in the world.

In turn, I began to focus on the hobbies I truly enjoy, the ones that were being neglected in favor of my fruitless endeavors behind a sewing machine: knitting rather immediately came to mind, and I’ve since created a few little masterpieces that I’m quite proud of. Running is another big one, and I’m really quite excited about improving my pace. Reading is also a big deal for me, as I have a reading list that just reached page seven. Finally, writing, which I don’t think I could stay away from if I tried really.

This decision made me even happier when I realized that three of these four hobbies are COMPLETELY FREE. Even knitting can be done frugally, if the many articles on the topic can be trusted (and I don’t see why they couldn’t). And so I thought, why not just go ahead and make a commitment out of this? For at least one month I can avoid spending unnecessary money on myself. I only need to set a few parameters for myself, and I’ll be good to go.

The Parameters:

1) Obviously, things like bills, rent, and other necessities (such as my $30 monthly bus pass and my $10 prescription medication) won’t count as “unnecessary expenditures.” Both of the parenthesized items will be purchased later today anyway, so I won’t have to worry about either of them for the rest of the month.

2) Food will be tricky. I love food, and not buying any will probably hurt a little. But I have TONS of stuff sitting around for “emergencies” that I can use throughout the month. I have bags and bags of beans and grains, canned and frozen veggies, various flours for baking bread and making tortillas, a small stash of Ramen noodles and EasyMac, cereals, salsa, pasta, and other such sustenance. No, it won’t be 100% healthy, but it probably won’t end up being any worse than what I eat when I spend normally.

3) Purchases made by my husband will not count, because I can’t control him or what he does with our debit card. Thankfully, he’s a bit of a tightwad himself, so I don’t think I’ll have anything to worry about.

This is not going to be easy for me. This will definitely be a challenge, in fact. And I don’t even have a spending problem – I think “retail therapy” is a load of crap, and I feel guilty on the rare occasion that I buy clothes or shoes new instead of used. But it’s a good idea, and one I’m proud to leach. Hopefully it will help me to see just how necessary or unnecessary the expenditure of money is in our society, and in my life. I am also hopeful that it will have an affect on my daughter, whose impressionable little mind has already begun to cry out, “We need that!!” whenever she sees the Sham-Wow! commercials.

Take a look at www.thenonconsumeradvocate.wordpress.com and browse – this is the exact kind of mentality I’m talking about here, and I think I love this woman. Also, she’s a Star Trek: Voyager fan, and so I’m doubly happy to have found her. I’ll update this blog regularly with my progress throughout the month of June.

For a Total Change of Heart: Commit to a no-buy month, or week, or even day if you’re going to be a pussy about it. Put yourself out of your comfort zone financially, and force yourself to look around and appreciate what you already have. Read, exercise, no-charge events, anything that’s FREE. Even if you’re bored, don’t spend a dime! Money is not a cure for boredom; imagination is. Money only treats the symptoms of a life ill-spent.

However, something odd has happened in the last few months. While in the beginning, lunch was “whatever you could get,” it slowly morphed – as these things tend to do – into an opportunity for everyone to splurge a little. Now, every week, we squabble a bit before agreeing on a place we all would like to eat, and then we go and get food to bring back to the office. Sometimes it’s crazy cheap (like the small cafeteria in the AA building next door) and sometimes it’s a little more expensive (like this one time when we went to La Madeleine – bad idea). But what it boils down to is:

We have taken a shared activity that is COMPLETELY FREE in its natural state and turned it into something that damn near requires that money changes hands every time we get together. Not only is that not economical, it’s also not necessary. Book club shouldn’t be about food – it should be about the books. And yet, going out to eat has become a big part of what we do every Thursday.

Last night, my husband and I were discussing our finances (we’re going on vacation next week) and he politely requested that I not participate in the purchasing of lunch food during book club this time around. I began to protest, but was firmly reminded that we truly do need to hang onto every penny we have in preparation for our trip. So I sullenly agreed. This morning, while getting ready for work, I was still sulking and pouting about it. “But I always get lunch with the group! Everyone’s going to be going out except me!” And other such whiny bitchings. I was SO MAD while I was making my peanut butter sandwich that the less immature side of my brain forced me to stop and look at myself for a second.

I was being a total baby, and why? Because for one week, I wasn’t going to be able to participate in a “ritual” that has nothing at all to do with books. And I joined the book club because of the books…not the possibility of food. So I said, “Fuck it!” and decided that everyone else’s eating habits wouldn’t – couldn’t – affect me anymore.

Of course, that got me thinking about all the other useless rituals that we cling to so strongly in this world. How many times have you heard someone say any of the following (or anything similar)?

“But we’re at the movies! We HAVE to buy popcorn!”

“Every time I go to the bookstore, I always stop and get a coffee at the Starbucks inside.”

Perhaps you yourself have uttered similar declarations from time to time. But really, how important are these little “rituals,” especially when you’re already doing something that is fun or special by itself? Must we tack on additional tasks (particularly ones which involve “treating ourselves”) when the thing by itself, unadorned, is treat enough? Have we really turned into such self-pandering, self-absorbed, me-me-me assholes that even when we’re already treating ourselves we have to do it some more to make it feel “extra special”? Why don’t we see special things for what they are? I mean, you can wrap a present in the most beautiful wrapping paper in the world, but once the paper is gone, it’s forgotten in lieu of the gift itself. Similarly, I cannot wrap a fulfilling book club meeting in a sandwich wrapper and expect that the lunch will be the thing I take away from it. It would almost be offensive to think so.

And as it turns out, I did have a good time without going out to eat. In fact, we had a particularly nice lunch, and nobody really seemed to actually care what anyone else was eating, least of all me. The food was good (I knew it would be, because I prepared it myself), the conversation was better, and the book we’re reading – The Time Traveler’s Wife – is turning out to be excellent. And that’s what it’s really about, in the end.

For a Total Change of Heart: I urge you to find, analyze, and if at all possible destroy those little rituals that add an artificial sense of heightened enjoyment to an already perfectly enjoyable activity. Get back to the roots of it – what was it about that activity that drew you to it in the first place? Why do you go to the movies? It sure as hell ain’t for the popcorn. Would you still go to that bookstore if there wasn’t a Starbucks in the middle of it? Probably. Reconnect with what you’re really after when you set out to have a good time – everything else is superfluous.

Now, my personal viewpoints about KFC, the consumption of chicken, and the factory farming industry aside, this is not a bad deal, and as Treehugger.com pointed out, it’s hard to knock down the lady who’s trying to give people free food.

That said, this was a totally fucked up idea, and has turned into a “public relations nightmare” for Oprah and her show. Why? Two reasons:

1. As the animal rights activists have been pointing out ad nauseum ever since it happened, Oprah has done some pretty interesting (if not inspiring) work to expose the conditions of factory farming (including Tyson, the company from which KFC gets its chicken, and one of the most disgusting offenders of animal abuse in the industry). She also went on a 21-day vegan “cleanse” in the spring of last year, extolling both the physical and the spiritual virtues of eating a cruelty-free diet. Because of this work, she was named PETA’s 2008 Person of the Year and honored and congratulated by animal rights people all over the world. And now, as though none of those things had ever occurred, she’s suggesting – nay, advocating! – the consumption of factory-farmed chicken from a company notorious for its cruelty to animals. Oprah apparently thinks we all have really bad short-term memory, because I don’t understand why else she would agree to anything like this.

2. Apparently, many KFC franchises were expected to eat the cost of the free meals which is simply not practical, and in a lot of cases, impossible. Some franchises claimed that they didn’t even know about the coupons until customers started flooding their store waving the coupon about like a winning lottery ticket. And when these customers were necessarily turned away like freeloaders at a soup kitchen, did they eat there anyway? No. In most cases, they went elsewhere. In some cases, they stamped their feet and pouted. In a few cases, they RIOTED.

My God, we really are just a bunch of children, aren’t we?

Here’s the thing: I don’t actually blame Oprah for any of this. It’s very difficult for me to believe that she’s some evil mastermind trying to figure out a way to make a quick buck. Now, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s exactly what she is, but I actually believe that she’s mostly genuine in her intentions. If she were not, she wouldn’t still be as popular as she was ten years ago. The masses can be kind of dumb, but they tend to catch on to things like this after a certain amount of time. I truly think that this stunt is the result of her marketers being overeager dumbasses.

But even if that’s the case, Oprah, as a sponsor of humanity (yes, dramatic, but not inappropriate), had a responsibility to consider the logical conclusion of this idea before signing off on it. She has a responsibility to do her own research, just as we all do.

So, for a Total Change of Heart: Don’t be like Oprah. Be altruistic, sure. Be generous as much and as often as you can. But for the love of all that is decent, don’t jump into something that sounds like a good idea before thinking about it first. Other than a CZ-75 semi-automatic pistol, thoughtful planning is among the best weapons you can keep in your arsenal, and it can defend you against any attacker. If Oprah had done her research, or at the very least thought about the implications of what she was doing, she wouldn’t be in such deep shit with everyone right now.

n.

A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.

Paradigm shift

n.

Acceptance by a majority of a changed belief, attitude, or way of doing things.

Revolution

n.

A radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure.

Renaissance

n.

A revival of intellectual or artistic achievement or vigor, often a necessary component of culture creation.