Nebulous Mooch

These days I’m terribly into hypnotherapy. I used to be quite a hypnosis sceptic. It just didn’t seem plausible to me that you could make someone cluck like a chicken every time you snap your fingers. My only exposure to hypnotism was from television shows, but I did work in a health clinic owned by a hypnotherapist before and some of my best friends have been hypnotized.

A friend of mine got hypnotherapy once. Her experience also led me to believe it was a load of hogwash. She said that the whole time the therapist was trying to hypnotize her an ice cream truck was driving around the neighborhood playing ice-cream-truck songs. It was so distracting that she couldn’t go into a trance. Finally, she pretended to be hypnotized so she could leave.

My mother also had a friend who used hypnosis to stop smoking. She still smokes.

Now, you understand my scepticism, don’t you?

Recently, I started watching hypnosis videos on YouTube and I’m completely fascinated. I don’t have a television most of my entertainment comes from YouTube.

There’s this thing you can do called instant induction. From what I’ve seen on the YouTube videos to put someone into trance via instant induction all you have to do is grab them and say sleep in a jarring way. We’ve been trying it around the house. So far neither of us has gone into a trance, but I’ve been scared half to death on several occasions.

Since our instant inductions weren’t working out, I decided to try watching videos about how to put someone into a trance. One night, I was engrossed in watching one of these videos with my husband. When I paused the video to as something about it, I was shocked to discover my husband was in a trance. I kept hitting his leg and saying, “Stop messing around and open your eyes.” He kept trying to open them, but couldn’t. Finally, I hit him enough times to snap him out of it. I’m still not sure if he was lying or not. Anyway, here’s the video.

I meant to post this a while ago, but I kept forgetting. I used the bathroom in a restaurant not to long ago and this was the sign in the toilet stall.

About two weeks ago, I watched a fascinating documentary. It was about these Swedish twins named Ursula and Sabina Eriksson who hurled themselves into traffic on the motorway in 2008. The story is quite long and involved so I’m not going to explain it to you in detail. In brief, they ran out in front of speeding cars, but miraculously survived. When discharged from the hospital Sabina stabbed a man to death and then jumped from a bridge onto another busy road. She broke both ankles and fractured her skull. You can read all about it here.

Anyway, when she was prosecuted for her crimes she received several psychiatric evaluations. One of her diagnosis was that she had a puff of madness–meaning she was mad for a short time, but now she’s fine. Can you believe that? You could use that excuse for almost anything.

“Sorry, about that. I just had a puff of madness.”

“You didn’t take me seriously when I said that, did you? I was having a puff of madness at the time so I really didn’t mean it.”

If she could get only five years in jail for killing a man because she had a puff of madness, I should be able to get out of a few small mistakes using the same excuse.

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of apartment running. My apartment running days are far from over, but now I’ve added a little something extra to my exercise routine–sprinting. Sprinting is fun, wildly exciting, and very good for you. Here’s the deal.

We have two types of muscle fibers in our bodies. There are slow twitch muscles and fast twitch muscles. Fast twitch muscles can further be divided into two categories: fast and superfast.

The average person stops using their superfast muscles once they enter adulthood. You use your superfast muscles because you stop doing super fast exercise. Children run all over the place as fast as they can all the time. When was the last time you ran as fast as you could? When you were chased by a dog? If you’re not afraid of dogs, you probably haven’t run as fast as you could since your were twelve. That’s okay. You’re not alone.

The average person’s muscle breakdown is about 50% slow, 40% fast and 10% superfast. An average sprinter has this muscle percentage of 40% slow, 20% fast, and 40% superfast. The average person who does aerobic exercise has 55% slow, 40% fast and 5% superfast. That’s right aerobic exercise actually depletes the amount of superfast muscle you have.

Why should you care? I’ll tell you why. Superfast muscles cause your body to produce growth hormone (HGH). HGH stimulates cell production and cell regeneration. In other words, it helps keep you looking and feeling young.

The problem is the only way to develop your superfast muscles is to participate in superfast activities. Speed reading doesn’t count.

We’ve starting sprinting three days a week in a field near our house. If you decide to do this make sure you warm up well before you start. The first day we tried sprinting my husband ran two steps and pulled a muscle in his thigh. Luckily, he’s married to a massage therapist.

We do a little jogging before we start to warm up. Then we run as fast as we can for 30 to 60 seconds 3 to 4 times. You should take a 4 minute break in between every 30 to 60 second burst. By the end of it we’re exhausted, but I have to say that it’s great fun. Give it a try. You might like it.

When my husband isn’t working he usually goes with me to church on Sundays. This past Sunday he was working. When he got home I told him that people asked about him at church. He immediately picked up the guitar and started singing this.

Not too long ago I mentioned that I was planning on making videos. Since then I’ve been agonizing over what to do exactly for those videos.

When I woke up this morning I had something in my eye and that was all the inspiration I needed. The resulting video was supposed to be funny, but ended up being a little scary.

Don’t stick your finger in a pot of boiling water…

Most people should know this, but seeing as I just did it myself I thought I might pass this useful tip along. I’ve learned from experience. You don’t have to do the same. Just take my word for it.

Here are the pictures from the awards ceremony. Unfortunately, the pictures of the tap dancer were all out of focus.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like the idea of getting an award. Yeah, it’s nice to be appreciated for something you’ve done well, but I could do without the whole awards ceremony thing. I think it’s because of the traumatic experience I had in third grade.

When I was eight I entered a fire prevention contest. I had to draw a poster to help educate children about fire safety, and my poster was one of the winners. A fire truck came to the school to pick me up. The firemen came to my classroom and announced that I’d won and they were there take me to the award ceremony. My whole class went outside to see me off. It should’ve been very exciting, but it wasn’t. A few weeks earlier, I had gotten a very unfortunate haircut.

On the way to the fire house one of the firemen referred to me as “he” and I didn’t correct him. At the ceremony when my name was called to get my award, some boys in the front row loudly exclaimed, “It’s a girl,” and all I wanted to do was run out of the room, but I couldn’t. I spent the whole rest of the day holding back tears. Since that day I never wanted anything to do with award ceremonies ever again. Well, until the other day that is.

My husband was nominated for some jazz award. I’m so terrible because I don’t even know what the award was.

Anyway even though we usually behave like hermits, we decided to go to the ceremony/jam session. Though my husband was nominated he never got any kind of notice or invitation to the ceremony. He only found out about the ceremony because he did a gig with the person who nominated him the day before.

The awards looked like someone had sawed off a couple of table legs and painted them gold.

When they read the list of nominees not everyone’s names were on the list. People were yelling out from the audience, “What about me. I was nominated too.”

The person who announced the award left a list of the nominees and who voted for whom on the stage. Of course, everyone who was nominated got a good look at it during the jam session. It turns out that the nominees who didn’t get their names read out weren’t on the list because no one had voted for them. That’s a drag.

And, the best part of the whole evening was watching a twenty minute tap dance routine done on a carpeted floor by a guy who only knew three moves. Classic, as my husband would say, just classic.

I’ll post pictures from the evening tomorrow.

If you have files on your computer that you might need in the future, but you’re not quite sure where to store them don’t keep them in your computer’s recycle bin. My husband emptied my recycle bin for me not to long ago. He thought he was doing me a favor, but I actually needed some of those files. Oh, well. You live and learn, apparently.