An infographic on Twitter

I suspect most people who look at this blog - and thank you to all of you who do - don't use twitter. But for those of you who do here's a nifty long info-graphic representing a visual history of twitter.

I love info-graphics on a Monday morning.

Let me tell you about the time I got hypnotherapy

I have a disgusting habit; I pick my nails. I have done it for as long as I can remember and I have been trying to quit ever since I was 15, when I saw my semi-formal looming ahead of me in Grade 11 and I wanted to have nice nails on that oh-so-special night.

I can’t remember if I did have nice nails at my semi-formal but probably not, because despite trying to quit the habit for over 10 years now, I haven’t been able to. It’s not that I don’t want to or I don’t have the encouragement (read: loving nagging) to do so, it’s just a habit that is so ingrained in my system that I can’t.

So, faced with a lifetime of self-hand-loathing I decided it was time to take action and to that end I visited … a hypnotherapist.

SCARY!

When I told people I was planning on doing so, I got 2 reactions. The girls all thought it was a great idea and were keen to see what I thought of it. The guys all made bad ‘clucking like a chicken’ gags. Hypnotherapy is of course, nothing like that. The idea behind it is to access a person’s subconscious and re-program it to reflect the changes a person wants to see in themselves. A lot of people try it to quit smoking, others for anxiety or depression. The process and the purpose may be different for each person but the concept is the same – persuasion of the subconscious to accept a different reality and thereby altering the outwards or visible behaviour or attitude.

There was none of this malarcky.

For me, it was about changing my daily routine. Picking my nails was part of my every day routine, just as much as getting out of bed, making breakfast or showering – all of which I do without much thought, because they’re mostly controlled by my subconscious. Picking my nails is like that. Because it is something I have done since I was a child, my subconscious has it on my list of daily to-dos, something to be done and crossed off, just like my morning shower. So the aim of my session was effectively to re-program my subconscious to cross the habit permanently off my daily list.

The offices of the Brisbane Hypnosis Centre were is an uninspiring building in Everton Park. First impressions when going in were worryingly new-age, with a very hushed receptionist, the scent of incense and orientalesque cushions. My therapist – let’s call her Anna - started by asked all about my habit; when I started, why I did it, when I did it, how it made me feel, why I wanted to stop, what I’m tried to stop it, etc. She then went into quite a detailed layman’s explanation of how the process of therapy should work.

After that, the real process of ‘hypnosis’ began. I got comfy in the huge, squidgy recliner, arms on the arm rests and neck straight and relaxed. Anna started by taking me through an imagination exercise, to relax and start activating the different parts of my brain. She then went into a long monologue in deep hushed tones, talking about letting go and release, telling me that when I’m in that picking-nails situation I will decide not to pick but instead will feel calm and confident and turn my attention to other matters, I will no longer feel the desire to pick, and so on. While this was happening, my body went into a state of hyper-relaxation, like it was falling asleep, suspended above all matter, or like I’d taken an amazing muscle relaxant.

Writing this even a day later, I’m not sure of just want she said. You’re not expected to listen to every word, rather let them be there, part of the experience that you are having, speaking to your subconscious. I did have occasional, clear conscious thoughts but I tried to banish them as much as possible. I do know that she very cleverly used the exact terms and phrases I had used myself to describe my habit, woven in between the tones of ‘floating away’. She also talked about how I would feel in a month’s time looking at my beautiful long nails and about feeling calm and confident. It was all terribly life affirming.

The cynical side of my brain wanted to stay awake through it all – all that hypno mumbo-jumbo, ha didn’t work on me! But if you go in with that attitude of course it isn’t going to work. I have to believe it’s going to work on some level because otherwise it’s guaranteed to fail.

Walking out of the office, I DID feel calm and confident and that feeling is still here the next day. I have gone to pick at my nails once or twice I confess, when I’m distracted by other matters, but each time I’ve stopped myself. I may need to go back for another session or two but I feel very positive about the whole experience. And you never know, maybe in a month’s time I will be glancing down at my lovely nails and thinking how good they look.

My very mild super power

I have a very minor super power. I have the ability to instantly read a personalised plate and see what the hidden meaning is. For example:

54MBA = Samba
Wall481e5 = Wallabies
Jealou5 = Dickhead

That sort of thing.

The concept of a very minor super power was introduced to me by David O’Doherty when watching a Melbourne Comedy Festival Show on TV years ago, and then again here on Spicks and Specks:



I’m sure I have others apart from my amazing number-plate-reading skills, but I’m going to need a moment of realisation before I can properly recognise them and officially deem them super abilities.

We all have very minor super powers. What are yours?

Fashion Dance

A bit of Wednesday afternoon silliness.




Found on Lady Like.

Aftersocks!

Last Sunday night I got some of the niftiest socks ever!

Aftersocks! Care, share, wear a pair

Aftersocks are a fundraising project from the Rural Women of New Zealand. Made locally and with 50% local Merino Wool, all funds raised go to support communities in Cantebury and Christchurch to recover from the Earthquakes in early 2011.

Not only are they for a good cause, they look freakin' cool!

I love my new socks, which arrived courtesy of my fabulous sister in law. Chuck also got a pair, so if you see him wearing them, compliment him on his nifty charity-socks.

If you'd like some Aftersocks yourself, then go to the website and buy some immediately.

B's bookshelf update

On 23 April 2011, I posted – for the first time! Sigh! – my list of to-reads. It’s now 6 months on and I thought I should do an update of how the ‘project’ is progressing.

This is what my original list now looks like:

In Defence of Sin – edited by John Portman
The Heart has its Reasons – the Duchess of Windsor
The Diviners – Rick Moody
Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
The Flaneur – Edmund White
The Subterraneans and Pie – Jack Kerouac
The Book of Revelation – Rupert Thompson
Soul Mountain – Gao Xinjian
Twelve Bar Blues – Patrick Neate
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Harry Potter und die Heiligtumer des Todes – J.K. Rowling

If I’m absolutely honest, I’d forgotten I had some of these books on my shelves until re-visiting the blog post. Also, looking at the list I now have all the very heavy books left. I did start reading The Inheritance of Loss but I got distracted by a much lighter, sillier book. Soul Mountain and The Red and the Black are likewise started but haven’t progressed far beyond the first 100 pages.

I forecast some very thought-provoking Christmas reading this year.

Of those books I’ve read I couldn’t pick out a best or worst. They were all immensely enjoyable, well-written and re-readable.

Book review: One of our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

The sixth book in the Thursday Next Series – One of our Thursdays is Missing – follows a very similar pattern and style to the previous books. A bizarre opening scene leads to a progressively more complex and intricately-woven plot that is explained brilliantly in the final chapters with the goodies getting a satisfying ending, the baddies getting some form of comeuppance, liberally lavished all over with conspiracy theories, evil empires, politics, puns and innumerable literary gags and references.

In One of our Thursdays is Missing, Thursday Next goes…missing…and the plot instead revolves around the fictional Thursday who, thanks to her character/body assimilation looks exactly like the real Thursday, causing confusion to all who meet her. Fictional Thursday must find real Thursday in a matter of days; otherwise the Bookworld will be the scene of a horrendous and fictionally-bloody genre war. Characters and references to the previous 5 Thursday books abound and it’s a delightful for a fan like myself to be treated to so many in-jokes. I love Fforde’s intelligent but off-beat sense of humour, though sometimes I find him just laugh-out-loud funny, such as this paragraph when Thursday visits The Lady of Shallot:

The Lady of Shalott was of an indeterminate age and might once have been plain before the rigours of artistic interpretation for working on her. This was the annoying side of the Feedback Loops; irrespective of how she had once looked or even wanted to look, she was now a pre-Raphaelite beauty with long flaxen tresses, flowing white gowns and a silver forehead band. She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by Reader Expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed of that he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott.

I could believe that some Jasper Fforde readers might get tired of the plot patterns that one sees repeated from book to book. I myself bought One of our Thursdays is Missing many months ago but have only just picked it off the shelf, whereas I once devoured Fforde’s novels as soon as they appeared. That being said, I am not one who is going to complain about Fforde’s now quite usual plot line and style. I love it. I own and have read every novel he’s published and I will continue to purchase them without question. I love the truly bizarre conspiracy theories and plot twists. The strange characters, the gags, the fake ads in the back of the book.

Book reviews compare Fforde to Terry Pratchett or Monty Python and I can certainly see the similarities in the humour and in the construction of alternative worlds that are so beautifully and intricately described you find yourself becoming involved.

For me, the Bookworld is so well-described and so well-known by now that I actually feel bad about putting the book down because the characters are no longer being read anymore. I also get to feel a lovely warm glow of smugness when I get one of the literary references.

I recommend One of our Thursdays is Missing – just read the first 5 books in the series before you begin.