January 9th, 2010 by David Godot
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After two or three years of messing around with the proportions, I’m pretty sure I’ve finally nailed the perfect low carb peanut butter cookie recipe. It’s difficult to get it right without any flour or sugar, as these ingredients generally lend chewiness and crispiness to peanut butter cookies. But I think the following recipe is about as close as you can get without them, and when paired with a glass of milk they are tremendously satisfying.
» Read more: The Perfect Low Carb Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe
January 8th, 2010 by David Godot
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having some serious trepidation
about the weatherman’s calls for rain
you end up standing alone beside
burning buildings and feeling
merely out of place
you find yourself making myths
about the gooey innards you’d keep rhythm by
when the night goes silent
and your boots become pieces
of the stiff and sleeping ground
you start to wonder whether you may have been
a river or an ocean
full of squishy squeaky struggling life
or whether your forebears had
the good sense to send you
any hidden message about your ultimate bright wet meaning
or some signal that you could
someday make yourself
the stolid limbs of some hardy bush
secure in knowing that they remain connected
to something, somewhere,
when the sun comes out and shows you anything.
January 8th, 2010 by David Godot
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is that we are disturbed,
that this is normal,
all these lonely nights
and private sufferings;
the whole order
of buildings and bureaucracies
are boundaries
around minds perpetually on the brink
of madness, loathing,
stark tears and uncontrollable anger,
all ordinary,
matters of course,
terrifying in their relentless
presence in our lives,
terrifyingly thin protections
against everyday psychosis,
against life that can never be lost
because it’s never had,
against sentences undeserving of punctuation
that we give our commas and question marks
out of nothing more than hope
that the love we imagine
might be more than hunger,
that something is ultimately sensical
in a universe that writhes and pulses with us,
rocks crashing against one another
and order in chaos
and chaos and chaos
and dead emptiness.
» Read more: The disturbing truth
December 5th, 2009 by David Godot
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I had an extra few minutes on my way to see the doctor, so I stopped into my local Starbucks. I wanted to tip the nice art students behind the counter, but I had no cash and so had to pay with credit. I noticed that the tips already in the jar were pretty sad. There was maybe about 85 cents in there at 9:30am on a Saturday. Imagine a couple of poor idealistic young art students having to wake up this early on a Saturday morning just to split 85 cents. As I sat down in the front window, i felt satisfied that other customers would surely pick up the slack for me.
Out on the front corner there was the inevitable bum selling copies of Streetwise. The first thing I noticed was a couple of douchebags in bike-racing tights walk out and hand this guy their change. I thought to myself, “I can’t believe they gave their change to that guy instead of the nice barristas.”
Then I saw the seventeen year old girl with the adult-sized teeth in the child-sized face do the same thing. And the crazy old lady who wore her fur coat into the store while her massive rotweiler thrashed and shivered on the sidewalk in the cold. All these idiots were saving their change for the worthless old alcoholic out front. Practically stealing it right from the mouth of the next goddamn Pablo Picasso.
» Read more: Whatever you feed, will breed
November 19th, 2009 by David Godot
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I have recently had the misfortune to purchase an essential oil product from a company called Camden-Grey Essential Oils, Inc. – If you follow that link you will find the detailed incident report that I filed on ripoffreport.com, which provides a venue for people to complain about companies that have scammed, ripped off, defrauded, or otherwise disenfranchised their unsuspecting customers. I have also posted a review of Camden Grey on ResellerRatings.com to express my extreme displeasure with the poor quality of the products I received and the shockingly rude service I received.
Camden Gray Oils apparently operate out of Doral, Florida, very near where I used to live when I was in Miami, FL. I ordered from them because their web site appeared reputable and they offered a fair price on my favorite household fragrance oil, grapefruit-ginger. The company is apparently owned and operated by a man and woman named Hector and Vivian.
What I received was some kind of cheap floral oil. It certainly wasn’t what I ordered and I have no reason to believe it was a pure or high quality essential oil. I corresponded with the company a number of times over the ensuing three months. All I was asking for was the correct oil which I had originally ordered. They first demanded that I mail them a sample of the oil, and then when I did this for them they stopped responding to me entirely.
» Read more: A Bad Experience With Camden-Grey Essential Oils
October 9th, 2009 by David Godot
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I’m not feeling very well this week. Last week I came down with something I’m pretty sure was swine flu, while Sara Kay was busy coming down with a wicked head cold. As usual, we each let our diseases run their course and then traded off to extend the fun. So now I’ve traded in H1N1 for a good old-fashioned rhinovirus.
Big soup in a tiny pot
I spent the morning in my least favorite class of the semester, and then went over to my friend and mentor’s office to work on planning our schedule for the upcoming Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis conference workshop. By the time I was done there my head just about felt like it was going to fall off, and my nose was running, and of course it was a cold and rainy day in Chicago, so I decided I absolutely needed a big pot of homemade chicken soup. » Read more: Homemade Low Carb Chicken Soup Recipe
September 20th, 2009 by David Godot
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Those of you who know me know that I follow a pretty low carb diet all the time. I don’t eat bread or potatoes or sweets (usually), and I generally manage to stay under 50 or 60 carbs a day.
Even so, when your better half is a sommelier, it gets pretty easy to put on extra weight. This is because the liver is largely responsible for metabolizing fat, and if you keep it busy processing wine it isn’t really able to do that very efficiently.
So the wife and I are following a strict 2-week low carb detox program in order to shed our unneeded fats and get our livers running full-speed again. Here’s what we’re doing:
» Read more: Two-Week Low Carb Detox
August 25th, 2009 by David Godot
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I have decided to create more separation between my personal activities and my professional ones on the internet. This is mostly because the field of psychology is very conservative and the people involved tend to have a lot of misgivings about any personal facts about a therapist being lumped together with their professional presentation.
There is also a benefit to me in creating a separate web space for my professional presence, and that is that there are fewer compromises in the way I am able to represent myself both as a person and as a psychotherapist. In the past I have tried to keep any portrayal of my personal involvements toned down enough that someone looking for my CV would not be confused, while also toning down the presentation of my professional activities so that I don’t end up looking like I’m a shallow and boring person.
So from this point on I will be adding any updates about my professional development and activities within the field of psychology to my new, strictly professional web site over on the Chicago Psychology community web site. You can find me here: Chicago Psychotherapist David Godot.
That will allow me to post here more freely about my hobbies, fun activities, art, etc. I think this will afford me a much nicer balance. This way, anyone who wants to know about me as a psychological professional will have no trouble finding out everything they want to know all in one place, and then if they choose to look into my personal life it’s all right here for the taking. This way you can find out how boring I am with maximum efficiency! 
This will also give me more freedom to just have fun with my personal web site. I can talk about art, products I’m using, shows and cultural events I go to, my web projects, vacations, and anything else.
July 21st, 2009 by David Godot
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For the several years that I have been completing my doctoral training in clinical psychology at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, I have been planning to open my own private group practice once I have received my license. This summer I am preparing to take the NCC exam to receive the Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) license in Illinois so that I can practice at the Master’s level over the next couple of years while writing my dissertation and developing my internship options.
I see my background as a web programmer and internet marketer as being invaluable to my future career path, because the people I respect the most have consistently told me that marketing a private psychotherapy practice is the most difficult part of the business. And people are increasingly finding the services they need by searching the internet, rather than checking phone books, asking their doctors or clergymen, etc. So one of my key strategies for achieving success as a psychotherapist and as a business owner will be to market my counseling business online.
I recently wrote an article for the Thrive Learning Institute about the importance of using the principles of internet marketing to promote offline businesses. This is a topic I may be writing about more on this web site, because it is something that I am and will be working very hard on over the coming years.
June 28th, 2009 by David Godot
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As of Wednesday evening my psychotherapy practicum is complete!
I spent the year externing on the Valeo Intensive Outpatient Unit at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital. Lakeshore is a freestanding psychiatric hospital, and the IOP unit is located a couple blocks away in a separate building. Many of the patients I saw there were transitioning from inpatient care, some were going back and forth between inpatient and outpatient, and some were admitted solely for intensive outpatient treatment.
Valeo is a specialty program that serves gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals, and patients come from a wide range of socio-economic, cultural, and personal backgrounds. Nearly all patients were dually diagnosed mentally ill substance abusers (MISA), with a few patients being treated solely for mental illness and others presenting with primary addictions.
» Read more: Completed My Doctoral Psychotherapy Practicum
