The Scent of a Shrink
Your favorite headshrinker has recently been in cahoots with her technical editor and spiritual shortstop, The Beyonce, regarding how to create the right design scheme for AskDrDing.com. We’ve talked about getting some t-shirts and other schwag printed up to sell on CafePress.com featuring some kind of witty saying plus a giant floating head of moi. Probably with a huge beehive or bouffant hairstyle, sassily throwing the shocker or some serious finger guns.
Then I got to thinking. What if I were to emulate all these stars and celebutards these days who have their own fragrance line coming out? What would The Scent of a Shrink smell like?
I realize of course that to consider such matters is sheer folly. And that no one in their right mind would want to smell like 9 years of graduate school plus post-doc. But what the hell.
The Scent of a Shrink would have a solid foundation of bar soap, with overtones of hastily-consumed Starbucks triple soy latte, unevenly sliced cucumber and celery, chewed-up pens, and breathmints. It will perform respectably well in terms of third-quarter sales, and sparks a nationwide head-nodding epidemic. A year or so after its release there will be a follow-up scent, called I’m Ok, You’re Ok, But that Guy in the Chicken Suit…Not so Much.
This second perfume would smell like cheap vodka martinis, furtively smoked mentholated cigarettes, and a desperate longing for definitive proof of extraterrestrial life, which in and of itself smells much like b.o., dust mites, and ozone. It won’t sell well thanks to an ill-considered marketing campaign targeting Curves for Women frequenters.
Yeaaaaaah, I think I’ll get to work on those t-shirts.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |
Delightfully, Disturbingly Cool
Dr. Ding has had a couple of long days at work lately and currently is sporting a giant throbbing headache. Jeebes, my evil manservant, is nowhere to be found. Alas. He’s doubtless lurching about the stygian depths of his lair, trying to avoid his taskmistress.
No matter. Although temporarily tired and cranky, I am delighted to present for your consideration The Anti-Craft!
Where else can you find an End of Days kit alongside directions for creating an Anarchist’s Nightlight?
Nowhere, that’s where.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |
Rock Out With Your Spock Out
Remember America’s anorexic sweetheart of the grunge era, Ally McBeal?
While Dr. Ding strongly disapproves of the ludicrously unhealthy body ideal promulgated by that show, she does wholeheartedly endorse the idea of having a theme song as being really fucking cool. Not a neccessity, not even all that hugely important, but just a stone gas, honey.
You know, a theme song.
That little tune that plays in the back of your head when you’re kicking ass, be said ass located in the boardroom, weight room, or bathroom. Ok, so I just made that last one up.
The song that’s guaranteed to restore your tattered spirits when life hands you a supersized shit sandwich. That one song that you blast when you’ve got to gear up to cook a strenuous dinner, gussy up to go out on the town and show your ass, or go a few rounds with the heavy bag. And win.
A few years back, I was about to meet the beyonce’s parental units for the first time. Approximately 10 minutes before their arrival, I noticed that my eyebrows were a little uh, shall we say, sasquatchesque. Dithering was momentarily commenced, but, being the woman of action that I am, I pulled the pin and decided to attempt waxing my own brows.
Mere moments later, just as the front door opened, I waxed off over half of my right eyebrow. Suddenly I looked like goddamned Lt. Saavik from Star Trek, only worse. Permanently fucking quizzical. I needed a theme song, stat!
“The eyebrow, she won’t go back on!” I shrieked, futilely attempting to press the remains of my once-glorious brow back upon my stinging, wax-covered face. By now, the in-laws were in the living room, wondering aloud where I was. Holy Jeebus. I needed the laser-sharp mental focus of a neurosurgeon to fix my face and cleverly arrange my hair, and a steady, quick hand to remove the rest of the wax.
My choice of tuneage: Let the Bodies Hit the Floor by Drowning Pool. I cupped (as opposed to sacked) up, hit the play button in my head, rapidly hid the evidence of my rather bodacious transgression, and managed to not die of embarrassment.
What’s your Rock Out theme song? Discuss.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |
Poll Results
Diet Coke! A whopping 19% of y’all are Diet Coke drinkers, followed closely by Diet Pepsi and Coke Zero. I forgot to include Diet Pepsi Max, however, so at some point we’ll have rematch.
What this all means:
The average Dr. Ding reader is probably female, in her 30s, fairly career-oriented, competitive, can be seen as hard-headed or perhaps even stubborn by others but tends to see herself as merely strong in her beliefs, not a huge risk-taker when it comes to relationships, loyal, secretly fond of daytime soaps, enjoys regular-flavored Doritos, likes feeling intense as opposed to relaxed, uses humor to mask anxiety or other unpleasant feelings, more than likely a dog person than a cat person.
Am I even in the parking lot of the ballpark, my peeps? I’ve never tried to base a carbonated soda-based personality profile off percentage data from an internet survey with such a small sample size, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. Now, basing a personality profile off of grain alcohol preferences….easy peasy.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |
Thank youse, dear readers
My evil manservant Jeebes just presented me with the results of yesterday’s blogstats on a silver salver before slithering off to the nether regions of my secret hideout. It’s so hard to find reliable evil manservants these days! But no matter.
Dr. Ding could scarcely believe her pince-nez! Record highs! Thanks all who visited and returned!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |
Affirmations: Cheesy goodness or total crap?
Greetings, darlings!
Have you ever heard of affirmations? These are truly ridiculously positive statements meant to be repeated often to oneself in order to focus the mind on positive goals and objectives, phrased as if these have already transpired. The goal? To improve some area of behavior, thinking, or emotional reaction. Since the unconscious mind does strange things with negative words like no, not, and never, the affirmations are always framed without these.
Let’s say you want to improve your dream clarity. Instead of saying to yourself “I’m going to have no nightmares” or “I won’t have icky, scary nightmares” you would say instead “Tonight I have wonderfu, peacefull dreams, and I easily remember them.” Note the almost sickeningly upbeat focus here. Yeah, I know. Keep reading.
Affirmations work particularly well when kept clear and fairly simple in structure, and when repeated for at least 60 seconds at a go. Try doing them when your conscious mind isn’t paying too much critical attention, i.e. when you’re first waking up, daydreaming, or just before going to sleep. Give it at least a week to ten days to take effect.
Dr. Ding used to think this approach was total crap, invented by a bunch of egghead weirdos with poor therapeutic skills, bent on distracting their patients with meaningless hand-puppetry and Pollyannaish rituals. However, one of the major problems with modern psychotherapy is that we don’t focus enough on things like dreams, goals, fantasies, plans, and imagination anymore. Instead, we get stuck helping patients endlessly reprocess old traumas and “stinkin’ thinkin’” patterns, all the while focusing a whole bunch on what’s going to hell wearing gasoline panties in their lives.
There’s a great old Daoist saying, appropriated and rephrased by everyone from Yoda to Yalom: Be mindful of your thoughts, for they become your actions, and be mindful of your actions, because they create your character, and be mindful of your character, because it becomes your destiny. Powerful mojo which happens to be proving out, from the early workplace lighting studies of Hawthorne in the infancy of the 20th Century, to the fascinating results of quantum physics experiments.
In order to save time, I’ll compress a couple gazillion years of research and thought into a short paragraph. Basically, Hawthorne said that what we pay attention to, changes. Quantum physics says, in effect, that light acts like a wave as well as a particle, but it completely depends on what the observer is expecting. So therefore, it’s starting to look like our thoughts (the action of the observer) affect what is observed. If this act changes what’s observed, then indeed our thoughts affect our reality somehow.
Dr. Ding isn’t 100% sure about the precise mechanism by which thoughts affect or create or act upon reality, and I have no intention of trending off into a futile 1970s bongsucking head-trip on the nature of reality. So let’s just go with this: thoughts are really fucking powerful. If you expect to have people treat you poorly, then this is what you will tend to see. If you expect that you can’t walk after a major accident, then you’re going to have a dilly of a pickle of a time with it. If you think you perhaps don’t really deserve to be content, you’ll self-sabotage in order to keep creating chaos and misery. The list is endless.
The upshot of all this: try talking to yourself more compassionately. Pay attention to what you’re covertly rehearsing in your mind. Are you priming your subconscious inadvertently, out of sheer force of habit, with negative crap? Or are you able to say loving and kind things to yourself and focus your intentions thusly? If you find yourself muttering things like “God, what an idiot” or popping off with a quick self put-down whenever you fail to perform at par, this might be a clue, my honey-honeys. Another clue is if you take a tricorder scan of your social sphere and discover a disproportionate number of Negative Nellies and Charlie Complainers, or folks who just seem to need a lot of rescuing and direction. The whole “Like attracts like” principle was in existence long before Heisenberg came up with the Observer Effect, but that’s a whole post unto itself.
Give positive affirmations a shot. They sound silly and frivolous but if you can get over this, you might find them to be pretty nifty tools to have in your mental armamentarium.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |