Sometimes I stumble upon a new way to get my message across to clients. It’s not usually planned.
I’ve been talking with my clients lately about being a whole person and accepting their whole self. This is usually accompanied by large circular hand gestures. Sometimes we talk about a bubble, other times it’s a little more like a Venn diagram. The basic idea that there is you. There are parts of you that you like, are proud of, accept. Then there are the things you dislike about yourself, don’t want to think about or acknowledge. In more serious cases, the parts you don’t even identify as being you. We talk about these things while identified gaps and areas for improvement.
The terminology can use some work. I don’t want my clients to feel like a puzzle missing a piece, like an incomplete individual. Tonight I hit on language that I like and my client responded positively to it.
Think of a linear color gradient going from black to white, the kind you see in most art/photo editing programs. Now imagine there is a row of circles on the gradient. The first circle contains mostly white, the second a mix, the third is black. Instead of being incomplete, you are just becoming more filled in. In this case, black represents something good and white does not represent emptiness. All 3 circles are complete, they don’t need another screw or piece to function. I can see clients placing a circle on the gradient to represent self. The things they want at the black end of the spectrum are not missing. They are close by, mixed in a little in where they are already.

It’s a simple representation and not a revelation.

Telling stories about your horrible, geeky childhood has gained popularity online and elsewhere (see Mortified, Pathetic Geek Stories). I was (am) a huge nerd so I have plenty of stories, some crushing, some funny now that it’s over, mostly pathetic. But I thought it would be easier to start with someone else’s story.
I went to 12 years of Catholic school so I’m good at making fun of Catholicism. I’m trying to find my Buddha nature and stop heckling other’s central belief systems and reasons for living but its hard when there is so much material to work with. I’m waiting for you, enlightenment.

At my suburban, Catholic grade school, it was pretty much the same core group of kids from
K through 8. I always felt like I was at a disadvantage because I transferred in 1st grade. I think some major bonding happened in kindergarten. By 8th grade there were 35 of us, weaned down from 50 or so. We wore ugly uniforms, attended church, had religion class and prayer daily, a couple nuns and priests worked as teachers. No one was particularly enthused by religion. I remember a priest and nun visiting our class around 5th grade asking if anyone thought about joining the ministry and looking very sad when no one raised their hand. Uh, we are just hitting puberty and you are asking us if we would like to live without sex? Not going to happen.
There was one boy in our class, Tim, that was Lutheran. I’m not quite sure why he didn’t attend the Lutheran school down the street but maybe our new basketball net or library with 2 shelves of designated 6th grade and over reading material swayed his parents. Catholicism and Lutheranism are somewhat similar except for differences in sacraments like Eucharist (eat the Jesus communion wafer), Reconciliation (tell the priest you are bad. so very bad) and other core beliefs I’m not going to research just for a blog entry. Being forced to attend mass way too often, communion was the highlight of our sad little mornings. You got to get up, stretch while standing in line and you got fed! Tim had to sit in the pew and look like he was praying to his dirty Lutheran God while we got our Jesus filled snack on.
Kids glom onto any difference, no matter how small and exploit it. So Tim’s life was not fun. We all knew he was Lutheran, maybe it was announced via PA the first day of school because I don’t remember talking to him to gather this knowledge. This was Different and therefore Bad maybe because no one Explained It To Us.
For some reason Lutheran turned into Jewish. Maybe because Judaism was the thing to make fun of as a kid? Those little bastards didn’t realize how popular Jews would be later in life. “That’s so Jewish” was a popular insult even before Tim’s conversion was declared.

Tim was forced into Judaism, mostly by the boys but the girls took hold too. Recess would be punctuated by screams of “I’m not Jewish!” in response to whispers and glares of ugly skirts, knee socks and ponytails. Teachers stared at the little neo-Nazis and told Tim to stop yelling. Some kids tried to build a small concentration camp behind the St. Michael statue.

Of course his Jewish-ness needed characteristics to further make fun of so again, the boys brought it to the class’s attention that Tim was uncircumcised. We were too young to know that in every bad movie and sitcom for the rest of our lives, the Jewish family would be forced to deal with a bris, making it the one identifiable trait of Judaism. Not wanting to be tricked again like with the St. Michael is the patron saint of barbed wire thing, the half of the class that did not use a urinal wanted to know how this information was obtained. The boys, seeing the flaw in explaining examining another guy’s junk in the bathroom, came up with a solid explanation. Tim always used the stall AND was not pooping. Obviously, hiding his foreskin shame and perusing Jews for Jesus literature.

So that is how Tim lived out his grade school days, Jewish, uncircumcised, fearing trough urinals. He might as well have been a leper in the Bible stories we memorized and recited year after year.

I saw Tim a few years ago, wearing a big gold cross pendant.

I’m watching this episode right now and like this clip so now you are going to watch it.

I try not to make fun of my Catholic upbringing often but this time of the year is difficult for me. At Christmas time, everyone points out that consumerism has taken over Christmas and I’m busy stuffing my face with cookies. Easter has a guy that came back from the dead and invited his friends to poke his open wounds, a Monty Python musical to reference and a marshmallow candy that is begging to be microwaved.

For many Easters I tried to come up with the perfect dessert to name Sweet Jesus. No store bought cross cake or communion wafer shaped, raspberry jam filled cake would do. This year I decided to try Sweet Jesus, the alcoholic beverage. It came to me on the elliptical, dreaming about being out and drunk instead of watching the guy in front of me splatter sweat on the Stairmaster.

A Zombie and sangria mix. What better to represent the Easter Jesus?

I modified a basic sangria recipe and the zombie recipe on Wikipedia.

I don’t remember exact amounts for everything but the sangria contained:

1 orange

1 lemon

1 lime

1 bottle of red wine

1/3 cup sugar

some white rum

some orange juice

I let the fruit soak in the rum and sugar and then added the wine and juice. The the zombie:

about a cup and a half of white rum

about a cup and a half of dark rum

papaya juice

pineapple juice

orange juice

a little Triple Sec

You are supposed to add 2 more types of rum but I’m just not that fancy.

I created the drinks in two separate containers, mixed a glass of the two for myself and exclaimed

SWEET JESUS!

Add ice, encourage friends to drink, taking the rest to Easter at the parents. It is a really strong drink, strong like the power of Jesus!

The House recently voted to cut Planned Parenthood funding and eliminate Title X funding. Planned Parenthood is consistently referred to as an abortion center by it’s critics. However, minimal searching results in PP’s 07-08 annual report where a pie chart reports that abortions make up 3% of their services. The bulk of services are contraception and STD testing and treatment. Anyone who has actually looked at services offered by Planned Parenthood locations would see that abortions are not even provided at all locations.

So what if we judged everything by what it did 3% of the time?

Hospitals exist to injure you and most of the time it’s due to negligence or as those evil doctors want you to believe, “a mistake”.

Twitter exists just to publish Justin Beiber’s tweets.

Everyone in Washington DC has HIV or AIDS. Hmm, that seems related to PP’s funding…

All of your restaurant food has spit in it. On purpose.

Women don’t deserve to automatically be considered pre-pregnant by doctors, have laws passed that limiting my control and the choices I can make regarding my own body and watch as elected officials make decisions based on their own personal dogma. Planned Parenthood doesn’t deserved to be recognized for only one type of service they provide. And that one controversial service they provide? It’s really important to a lot of men and women and it’s not something that should put a wonderful agency on the chopping block.

Check the Planned Parenthood site for ways to show your support.

(I looked up the 3% facts! They are real according to the Internet!)

In my unending quest to be a lazy Buddha lover, I Googled up some Buddhist holidays and celebrations. In not too much of a surprise, there are no “Buddhist” holiday traditions. There are Thai, Japanese, Tibetan and whatever other Eastern culture that has real Buddhist roots. I was looking for something universal, pliable and somewhat for show, like a Christmas tree. Instead I get traditions that make me feel fake for even trying to celebrate them.

I know I sound very negative about Western Buddhists but I did manage to find a balance once. See post about my wedding ceremony that I have yet to write.

Baking is much less strenuous on my quest. So here is my journey in making Neen Gow/Nian Gao  or Lunar New Year cake.

I hit up two Asian markets, one Korean and one Thai. The Thai market won for ingredient availability but it’s also a bigger store. I used this recipe. The ingredient I was most suspicious of was “brown candy”. The clerk at the Korean market was confused as me. Then at the Thai market:

What a creatively named candy!

Also some Haribo gummies. I don’t have a steamer so I got creative with the dutch oven and a metal bowl on the stove top.

The bubbles were too strong and the bowl kept moving around so I had the genius idea to flip it over and fill it with water. On top of that went a pie tin with the cake and then the lid. Ta-da! Steamer!

When the cake came out, it looked like this:

Which is how it is supposed to look! The last step of the recipe is to fry each slice which is important if you don’t like that fresh baked clay taste in your desserts.

I also made cupcakes inspired by Nian Gao. They are baked but still have the same chewy consistency of the cake. They felt heavier than the cake and were a lot sweeter. The recipe is here. I didn’t take any pictures because my cupcakes looked very similar to the cupcakes on the site.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Two years ago I tried to make glogg from a package of mulling spices I got from who knows where. They were probably stale and it was horrible. For the 2010 winter holidays of your choosing, I decided to put a little more effort in so I could possibly share wonderful glogg.

So glogg, gluwhein (with or without umlauts) and spiced mulled wine are pretty much the same thing. At Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza, it’s served in a boot mug (sometimes imprinted with the previous year) and its called gluwhein. When I find a recipe online that refers to it as glogg and follow that recipe, it is called glogg.

I used a recipe from user Happy Hat on the SomethingAwful forums. I excluded ginger because I did not have any and added grated nutmeg and cinnamon sticks. I played with some ingredients like water, sugar, rum, almond and raisins based on taste. I used a dutch oven on the stovetop to cook the glogg.

I purchased the spices from Whole Foods. I’ve found that stores where you expect groceries to be cheap, like Jewel, are expensive for spices. Cost Plus World Market and Whole Foods are usually cheaper and Whole Foods has some spices in bulk. The spices are the expensive part of glogg so make it in big batches to use all of the odd spices you may not use anywhere else. (Why did I buy so much nutmeg??) For wine, I bought the big jug of merlot table wine. Cheaper the better.

I took a few pictures of the first batch.

Adding the non-wine ingredients

Peeking in on simmering glogg

I should have taken more pictures of the bottling process but I was worried about knocking over bottles. A friend brews beer and he let me use some bottles, caps and capper. I sanitized the bottles, filled them with glogg with a funnel, spooned in the raisins and almonds and added a label to describe the ingredients.

The finished product

The ingredients and instructions from the forums:

Traditional Gløgg
Ingredients:

6 l red wine
28 whole cardamom (green)
80 whole cloves
4 thumb sized pieces of ginger
4/10 l sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
Grated rind of 2 lemons
Juice of 2 oranges
Grated rind of 2 oranges
4/10 l water
Half a bottle of rum
500g raisins
200g chopped, toasted almonds

Will yield about 8 liters

Soak raisins in rum and leave in airtight container in the fridge for at least 48 hours before using.

The next day, pour 1 liter of red wine in a small pot, add spices, sugar, rinds and juices and water – and simmer for 30 minutes covered – put aside, and leave for 24h
Strain the spiced wine and add to the rest of the red wine (in a larger pot), heat to 80 degrees.

Just before serving, add the chopped toasted almonds, and the raisins, and make sure that everybody gets a spoon with their drink to eat up the yummy good raisins.

Howard Brown Health Center is in danger of closing at the end of the year due to grant money mismanagement by their former leadership. On Howard Brown’s Facebook page, there is a call for stories about personal experiences with Howard Brown. They are taking video and written submissions. Here is my experience:

My first internship in social services was at Howard Brown Health Center on the EXPLORE study.  I talked to participants about personal details of their life. They shared with me because they wanted to help the community. Social work and psychology are not prestigious fields. People go to into the helping fields with a desire to help and find an agency that they feel will allow them to do the most good. The EXPLORE team chose Howard Brown Health Center. They knew who Howard Brown was.

My experience helped me focus my career goals. Now, as a social worker, I refer clients to Howard Brown Health Center for psychiatric or medical services, support and social groups. In discussions with other providers about resources, Howard Brown is often the only name that comes up. Howard Brown understands the need to treat the whole person and offers much needed services for the community.

What goes with an Irish car bomb Halloween costume? When you don’t like beer, Irish car bomb cupcakes. What happens when that cupcake recipe has way too many ingredients that are not already in the house? You make hipster cakes.

I started with this recipe for car bomb cupcakes. These cupcakes sound excellent but filling cupcakes with ganache does not. So I made the cupcakes with a few changes. Instead of Guiness, I used PBR. I didn’t have any sour cream, so I used milk.

I wanted a chocolate frosting, so I went with a chocolate cream cheese recipe. I started with this cream cheese frosting recipe and added unsweetened cocoa powder. We didn’t have whiskey but we did have some Green label! I boiled it so I wouldn’t get any kids drunk. Hot scotch does not smell good. I used about half of a shot. The recipe made a lot of frosting so I piled it on and still had a little left over.

Put it all together and you have PBR and a shot cupcakes!

I finally have contractual clients! Ironically after all of that time getting on an insurance panel, both of my clients have a different insurance provider and surprisingly great out of network benefits. Having new clients with new issues has pushed me to pull some of my therapy related books off the shelf. I’m currently re-reading The Albert Ellis Reader and reading some chapters of the Yalom Reader. Yalom is all about group therapy but there are some chapters about his individual work.

My other news is that I am getting married! I created another blog for wedding related things and I suck at updating that one just as much as I suck at updating this one.  Wedding details are very easy to get caught up in because there are so many details to plan. I’m hoping if I can start writing about the details, I will at least be doing something productive that others can use.