STARTING THE DAY RIGHT

We all know how important it is to start the day right. However, when people talk about starting the day right, they somehow automatically slip into a discussion of food and drink. We don’t normally start our days by eating and drinking, though, do we? We start them by waking up.

The very first weekly challenge of our 13-week plan will help us awaken in a self-loving and psychologically healthy way.

Assignment: go over your night clothes and underwear. Get rid of anything that is tattered, ratty, threadbare, yellowing, stained, looks worn, faded, unattractive, or sad. Just throw it all out.

It’s better to sleep naked than in an ugly, threadbare night dress with a yellowing piece of lace that is torn in one place or pajamas that are missing a button. It’s better to have 2 pairs of underwear and wash them by hand every evening than to wear ugly old pieces that you’d never want other people to see.

The good way to judge if a specific piece is acceptable is to ask: would I wear this set to the hottest, most romantic date of my life that I want to end with a lot of happy nakedness?

Nothing is sadder than people who say things like, “Nobody will see my underwear or night clothes, so who cares what they are like?” They consider themselves nobody, how tragic is that?

If getting rid of all this stuff at once is too harsh, it’s OK to do small steps and throw out one ratty piece a day until the end of the week.

April is the cruelest month because it comes on the heels of February and March. In our hemisphere, this means that we arrive in April after months of very little direct sunlight, suffering from avitaminosis, low energy, excessive weight put on during the limited mobility of the snowy winter, and exhaustion. All of this affects our mental health and makes us sluggish, moody, and sad.

This is why I’m starting a 13-week challenge that will help me get through the difficult months of February, March and April and arrive in May in an energized, healthy state of mind and body.

Everybody is welcome to do the SELF-CARE AND HAPPINESS challenge with me. It will consist of weekly sub-challenges that can be started or abandoned at any point. It will start with easier tasks and grow a little harder, but just a little. Feel free to do all of them, some of them, or none of them. The goal of the challenge is to practice consistent self-care and psychological hygiene.

I warn you, though, that for people who don’t love themselves a whole lot, this challenge might present quite a challenge.

Apart from the weekly challenges that will appear before the start of the week, there will be middle of the week check-ins and unscheduled exercises.

Here are the weekly challenges:

WEEK I: SHEDDING THE OLD SKIN

WEEK II: MEET THE SKY

WEEK III: PROTECT THE FIRE

I use my time at the gym to catch up on my TV watching. Today, I was at one of those stationary bikes that have little TVs attached to them and watched a Fox News program on the 2016 election campaign. The show discussed whether a certain issue should be central to Hillary Clinton’s possible election bid in 2016. I thought I would ask you, folks, as a riddle what that crucial issue was but I realized it wasn’t humanly possible to guess.

The issue in question was the Monica Lewinsky scandal because, apparently, “that was real war on women.”

The idea that Monica Lewinsky should be discussed at length if Hillary decides to run was initially introduced by Rand Paul, another presidential hopeful. His PR team sucks something major (and yes, I could have made many very dirty jokes here but I took the high road). After this comment, poor Rand Paul has opened himself to endless discussions of how Bill’s oral sex act 15 years ago was the most memorable sexual experience Rand Paul has had in all these years. For somebody as pinch-faced and fussy as Rand Paul, this is a dangerous image to cultivate.

I’m not passive and my extremely aggressive attacks on anybody who annoys me are notorious. Still, I don’t hate the word “problematic.” Do you? Do you agree it’s a word for meek women?

Facebook is no treat to blogging, but this is. We need to protest and denounce these kinds of things wherever they appear. We need to save blogging because its power is significant.

We were invited to watch the Superbowl by a local family but we are not going. I’m too afraid of people going all scarily religious on me.

BBC celebrates “the year of the whores.”

Pornographic tiles from the XVIIIth century are too sexy for us to look at in the XXIst. What sexual revolution?

If you subscribe to the Economist, you are wasting your money. That is a magazine written by complete idiots who project their silly beliefs about the US onto other cultures without even trying to analyze how things work elsewhere. Here is a shining example: “The state is one of the chief obstacles to Russia’s modernisation. During the 2000s the number of bureaucrats almost doubled. A quarter of the workforce is employed in the public sector.” And from the same article:  “Although Russia still boasts some of the most entrepreneurial and hardy businessmen, who are determined to succeed and continue to invest, many burn out and leave. Economic activity in the country is waning, mergers and acquisitions are drying up and capital and brains are flowing out of the country.” I could keep quoting because every word of that article is an exercise in complete idiocy.

Some discussions on blogs are even better than the posts they follow. See this: “The women assistant professors complain about the oppression they suffer from second wave feminists who made it possible for them to get jobs en masse. I of course like Kimberlé Crenshaw but I am not at all impressed with intersectionality used as weapon in the battle of competitive misery.” Brilliant.

“There will be no net gain over the long term in manufacturing jobs in the US on in China. In fact in thirty years, there will be nearly no humans working in manufacturing anywhere on the planet.” Exactly. A Bachelor’s degree will be the new high-school diploma. If you don’t have one, you will get lumpenized for sure.

An interesting discussion of what constitutes “making it.” Do you agree that it is not knowing how much things cost?

A survivor discusses what makes people join oppressive patriarchal religious groups.

People at the link are having a hissy fit over the following comment even though it is absolutely right: “There are millions of jobs that are available and others that are emerging that require skills that people don’t have now and if they had them they could fill those jobs.”

Banks prevent people from accessing their own money. Everybody is shocked, but in Canada, with its mafia-controlled banking, this has been the case forever.

Western Europeans are hopeless, my friends. Even the extremely talented Helen Graham ends her new book with the completely idiotic statement that the reasons why ultra-nationalism is on the rise today everywhere in Europe are the depoliticization of the majority and lack of knowledge about the past.

Immigration is not mentioned even as a contributing factor. Graham pretends to have no idea that those who know nothing about a society’s past and are not integrated enough to participate politically are likely to be found in massive numbers among immigrants.

People seem terrified of their own shadow.