Hi Sammi-

Work just got kind of busy so I’ll have to be super brief and circle back on some of the things you brought up..

Went to the Whitney museum in NYC with my daughter for my birthday. A new and very awesome building with one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world and a floor of weird video and media installations dating from the 50’s to now. Then hung out with her and the dog, which is all I need, really. This is the first birthday in a while without my girlfriend, so me with daughter and dog were all I really needed to be happy.

It is interesting about your visiting friend. Friends have a way of confronting us with our own crap that annoys the hell out of us but at the same time rings true somewhere. (Which is even more annoying!) She feels comfortable enough with you to explore your inner world and trudge around in it a little, and this brings things to the surface, which in the long run is good for you, though I’m sure gets up your grill. At least that’s been my experience. So in the ‘zen’ sense, observe what is annoying you about it and why/what it confronts you with… Try not to react from an ego based place, and see what is valid about what she’s saying vs. what she doesn’t understand. I should take my own advice here, I know, but easier to give it then do it…

My feeling is that you are making more progress, i.e. getting more ‘distance’ on your home situation and separating out what is and isn’t ‘you’ in the situation, if that makes sense. I do think that your awareness and looking at things is also a part of the reason the ship is leaving the dock in terms of what picking, cutting etc.. represents for you. It holds less relevance for you now, maybe? I don’t know much about it at all, aside from some incidents with daughter’s friends, but it seems to me the more stuff that comes to the surface, the more ‘mindful’ you are about what’s bothering you, the less of an ‘escape valve’ it will become. Don’t know..

Question- You say your mother doesn’t know about the cutting, but I’m assuming she knows about the picking because she sees?

Your insights into those videos are spot on with some of what I was thinking. The reasons I asked were a) because there’s something called and ‘explainer’ video, that I absolutely hate. Also just hate the word grammatically since it reminds me of when George Bush said ‘I’m the decider’. You might have seen them – they’re often cartoons or a hand drawing figures on a whiteboard. And they often are overly simplistic in a ‘cute’ way, like “Ok, lets pretend we’re all morons, and I’ll explain this to you in really simple terms.’ Once in a while people ask me about them for work and I really have nothing to say because they’re animations and also cause I hate them so much. But these were kind of portraits of people actually doing things, and I thought that could be a good approach. b) I wanted to get your take on EXACTLY what you mentioned which was the ‘hipster’ thing because there was an element of ‘hey, I’m super cool and you can be too!’ I wanted to see if you bought it. I do however think that the girl ‘Sarah’ was for real and really did that stuff, and I did like the result and I don’t think she herself was ‘fake’ but it felt a tiny bit forced in that direction. Nonetheless she and her stuff were cool despite the slightly off-course direction.

Also didn’t like the ‘don’t do humor’ thing either, the resume was kind of contrived.
The voice app was by far the most original.

Hope therapy session is a good one… perhaps getting to the base stuff behind the ‘cutting’ would be more comfortable??

Ok, need to end it here for now. To be continued..

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Driftwood.