Year: 2010

sunday life: so, defriending is word of the year, but does it make life read better?

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So on Thursday I was stood up by a friend. Her excuse was as flimsy as a philanderer’s promise and it was her third last-minute no-show. Sitting at the restaurant fuming into a ramekin of bar olives I wondered if it wasn’t time to defriend.

3367181479 47624367a2 sunday life: so, defriending is word of the year, but does it make life read better?

It’s a concept many of you relate to. I know this because  “unfriending” has just been deemed Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, and presumably because more than just a few of us are talking about dumping redundant friends. (Oxford debated whether to go with “unfriend” or the social media-speak version “defriend”; proper English won out.) But my question, as always, is whether a decluttering of your black book – like you might a drawer of kitchen appliance warranties – makes life better. Come take a walk with me on this one.

  • Truth is, I have too many friends. Again, you get what I mean. Our circles have expanded, we’re stupidly bogged down in life admin and many of us have become friend whores, accumulating hundreds (thousands?) of friends on Twitter and Facebook. Exerts call these “weak ties”. We had no idea this would happen when we signed up. But that’s what technology does – it moves faster than us. Now, we’re swamped with weak ties.

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do an arm dance on a Friday

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For reasons I’m not entirely sure about, I was transfixed by this – a Youtube post of Gwyneth Paltrow’s personal trainer Tracey Anderson demo’ing her arm workout in the mirror. She made it especially for Gwytneth and on her site Goop GP says she does it when she’s traveling. It’s one of my favourite things … Read more

how to own your cliches (in writing and in life)

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Seth Godin, the maestro of idea generation, posted this musing this morning about using cliches to your advantage.

be your own bridge over troubled waters
be your own bridge over troubled waters

He starts with the wiki definition:

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and re-used the type.

Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose….

The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite.

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Guest post: how to heal auto-immune disease (anti-inflammatory foods) #4

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If you’ve got auto-immune disease, you probably have some bloody annoying issues with inflammation  – swollen feet or hands, skin breakouts, sore joints etc. I do (see the rest of my rundown on my crazy wrestling with Hashimoto’s here). I put up with it for ages. Actually, I whinged about it. But did nothing. 48425_6_468

Only recently I’ve realised that I can actually eat my way back from the angry, red, swollen brink. And so it happened – as it does when you start thinking along a certain path – the info I was after jumped out at me. Chelsea Hunter, one of the editors at WellBeing magazine contacted me with the spiel below. She’s kindly let me share her love with all of you.

Chelsea says:

Food is a joy. Food can heal.

I was reminded of this when I read Sarah’s earlier post about how her body often felt inflamed as a result of Hashimoto’s. Only a few weeks earlier I had read an article written by naturopath Saskia Brown about the foods that can help to ease inflammation in the body – a lovely bit of synchronicity I thought. We both wanted to share Saskia’s wisdom with you. Soo…

Anti-inflammatory foods

There are many foods you can include in your diet to help combat inflammation. Including the right types of fats and carbohydrates in your diet is integral to controlling pain and inflammation. Omega-3 essential fatty acids are very powerful anti-inflammatory agents and are found in large amounts in cold-water oily fish, walnuts, flaxseeds, canola oil and pumpkin seeds.

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where would you like to wake up?Fifty People, One Question

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I watched this a while back. But decided to dig it up again because it’s so sweet. 50 People, one question: Where would you like to wake up? ] Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo. Everyone yearns, don’t they. Although, it’s amazing how many people, when pressed, say they’d … Read more

try this: write serenely

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no need for a caption, really....

My philosophy right now: small, nice, gentle changes to the way you do things can drag you from the biggest of ruts and bored sludges. Little creaky movements to the left or right. Do-able shifts.  Like, sometimes I part my hair on the other side. Or write in a different location (yesterday I hung out at the Surry Hills library). Small, gentle shifts make life feel fresh. But keep it small, otherwise they don’t happen.

If you feel the same way,  you might want to give this little app a crack. Omm Writer is a beautiful, FREE!! download

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guest post: how to heal auto-immune disease (the soy debate) #3

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Confused about soy?

A number of you have asked about soy products, and how they affect thyroid issues, especially in the wake of the whole Bonsoy debacle. And especially because everyone seems to have an opinion on it these days.126164015 60bc33de8b guest post: how to heal auto-immune disease (the soy debate) #3

Naturopath Angela Hywood from Tonic (you can read her first contribution here) posted the below as a comment, but I thought I’d drag it out for everyone to read.

PS. These are her thoughts. Me, I’m still working through what my body feels about it. I love soy chai. It warms cockles.

Angela says:

I’m not anti-soy for most people. However, I do suggest soy be eaten in moderation in a wholefood diet and in traditionally fermented forms (which include miso, tempah, soy sauce and tofu).

However here are a few issues about soy from a reliable, credible whole foods research associated in USA, The Weston A Price Foundation.

•High levels of phytic acid in soy reduce assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. Phytic acid in soy is not neutralized by ordinary preparation methods such as soaking, sprouting and long, slow cooking. High phytate diets have caused growth problems in children.

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declutterer: a vexing perve into lindsay lohan’s wardrobe

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Have you seen this? Somehow a reporter from Insider got to go into LL’s house and rummage through a wardrobe that’s taken over the apartment. There are not enough days left in that girl’s life to wear all those clothes. It’s actually gross. Not the clutter, but the mindless consumption of so much stuff. It … Read more

Sunday life: in which I try a new technique for making good decisions (in love)

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This week I try out “satisfycing” for size.

valentines day

The inspiration for this week’s reflection is the release of Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough, the latest tome to tell women how to score a bloke. Gosh, and there we all were living life according to the 2004 self-help gospel He’s Just Not Into You (the premise: don’t settle for Mr Not Sure Enough).  How wrong can a girl be!

(As a bracketed aside, I wonder if the Mr Not Sure Enoughs can be lured back from the dating scrapheap to become Mr Good Enoughs? They might need to be!)

If you missed Gottlieb’s controversial 2008 article in Atlantic magazine, on which the book is based, her throw-in-the-towel theory is this: women who get to 30 and haven’t found Mr Right should choose a guy who’ll simply “do the job”. Single and now in her 40s, Gottlieb says she wished she’d settled for a “perfectly acceptable but uninspiring” man herself.  How, um, inspiring. Apparently Tobey Maguire thought so; he’s bought the film rights.

Now, I’ll say no more on the topic (if you can’t say something nice and all that jazz). Except to say that this week it inspired me to revisit decision-making.

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