Ingredients

• 2 cups of Skippy Natural peanut butter. I don’t know if the cookies will come out the same if you use another brand, because I only use this one. It’s got a nice texture and flavor, and I like that its made with non-hydrogenated palm oil.
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups of Splenda
• 2 tablespoons of melted butter
• A teaspoon or so of vanilla extract
• 2 or 3 tablespoons of molasses. This gives the cookies a nice depth of flavor with minimal added sugar. I think it also helps them crisp up a little bit.

Procedure

1. Mix all those ingredients together real good! I use a metal flat whisk. It only takes  a minutes or two; the mixture should get thin for a while and then thicken back up.
2. Then, chill the dough in the freezer while the oven preheats to 350.
3. Prepare a cookie sheet with some aluminum foil and a little cooking spray. When the oven and dough are at a good temperature, form the dough into patties on the cookie sheet. They won’t spread out much at all, so make them about the size and shape that you’d like the finished product to be. They should be about a quarter to a third of an inch thick.
4. Bake the cookies for 7 minutes. When they’re done, remove the entire piece of foil from the cookie sheet and let the cookies cool on it for a few minutes to give them a chance to firm up.
5. After 5 minutes or so, remove the cookies from foil with a spatula and place them lovingly on a wire rack to cool and dry the rest of the way.

Voila!

Delicious, tender, crispy, chewy low carb peanut butter cookies. Enjoy them with a glass of milk!

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.

This can’t be real, this endless frightful winter,
only struggling minds
arriving out of darkness, making pictures of life:
making ourselves up out of whole cloth,
pure dream image
and being born to it with no milk,
no breast,
no warm hearth and dancing family
and color and safety—
what there is is what we make and keep,

a candle with no wick or wax,
only fire,
only this,
only invention in endless night,
only us raising roses from dead soil
and sunlight from out of abyss.
Bread is water,
fear is endless,
and all of the struggle that one feels when alone is only
terribly ordinary,
the inevitable sounds of the edges tearing
and revealing that no truth lies beneath the page.
Only life.
Only this.
Only us.

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.

And then the clincher: the streetwise bum comes in off the street for a goddamn coffee break, and a chance to charge his cellphone.

It reminds me of an old American Indian tale. A village elder tells his grandson, “There are wolves in my heart. Two of them. And there is only room for one. They are at war. One is bitter, callous, cynical, manipulative; and the other is pure, honest, optimistic, naive.”

“Which one will win, grandfather?”

“Whichever one I feed.”

You see, there is a basic rule of human-animal interactions: whatever you feed, will breed. In other words, you should only feed something if you wish there were more like it.

If you would like to see more streetwise bums this Christmas season, then go ahead and give your money to a streetwise bum. If you want more goddamn bell-ringers, then give your money to a bell-ringer.

But I challenge you to take a different approach in this season of giving. A more strategic approach. Save whatever money is in your pocket when some human parasite tries to capitalize on your guilt, and instead give the money to the next person you see who you wish you could trade that bum or bell-ringer in for. Maybe it’s a student, a teacher, a secretary. Maybe it’s even a doctor or a lawyer, a nurse or a clergyman, a stripper or a street performer.

Whatever you feed will breed, my friends, so this Christmas don’t feed anything you wouldn’t want coming home with you for dinner.

A message from the Godotian Sainthood. Please fax this.

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.

This continued until I finally threatened to contact the Better Business Bureau and to launch an internet campaign to help other potential customers from making the mistake of dealing with them. The responses that I received were so unabashedly rude that this is now what I am doing. I would not want anyone else to have to spend four months getting relief from an error on the part of a company like the Camdan Grey Essential Oil company.

Now that I research the Doral Florida essential oils provider Camden Grey, I see that others have complained about being double-charged by Camden-Grey, followed by the same sort of abuse that the oil company’s owner subjected me to. It also looks like I am not the only who who has noticed the poor quality of Camden-Grey products. If you would like to help me spread the word about my bad experience with Camden essential oils, please link to this article and the reviews that I have posted elsewhere which I have linked to from this article. It is important for Internet shoppers to look out for each other by sharing both bad and good experiences with one another, so that no one else has the type of bad experience that I had ordering essential oil from Camden Grey.

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.

Wine is like the sauce that god made

I stopped on the way home for some ingredients, including some nice leeks and a bottle of chardonnay/viogner blend. The wine is crisp, juicy and delicious. I used half of the bottle in the soup, and am working on drinking the rest. As you can see from my pictures, I haven’t got a real stockpot to work with, only our 5 quart pot, so for the time being when I make soup. I can’t really make that much. But then, it’s really only the two of us, so usually a pot full of food this size is plenty to last for a couple of days.

I can presently only smell through about one half of one nostril, but the little bit of aroma that is getting through tells me that the suit should be pretty damn good. A good chicken soup is tricky, because you want just enough spice on the tail end to clear your cloudy nose and warm your tired bones, but not enough to give you the sensation that you are eating spicy food. Also, if there is one thing I’ve learned from these past few months of cooking soups and stews, it’s that you can’t be too stingy with your herbs and spices.

Salt is one of those things that takes a moment to learn but a lifetime to master. It is the very basic seasoning, but for me it’s easy to underestimate the amount I’ll need. For some, it might be tempting to go the other way and use too much right off the bat. I think the best approach is to throw in a goodly amount at the beginning, but not so much that you won’t expect to need to add some extra as you go.

When it comes to cooking, I’ve learned to be short on measurements and long on good taste, so my recipe here will not be exact, it is subject to change with every time I make it in the future, and should be altered depending on what you like to eat. But in my opinion, if you follow this recipe you will end up with a highly delicious and extremely low carbohydrate homemade chicken soup.

• Chicken. I’ll bet you didn’t think you were going to get away with making a chicken free chicken soup. For my 5 quart pot, I used about a pound and a half or 2 pounds of chicken. I like to keep things nice and protein rich. I started out by heating a little olive oil in the bottom of my pot, and lightly brown in my chicken while I seasoned it with a tablespoon and a half or so of kosher salt, maybe a half a tablespoon of fresh ground pepper, and two or three nice dashes of Tabasco.
• Once the chicken was looking nice and cooked but not cooked through, I poured in about half of the bottle of nice white wine and allowed it to come to a boil.
• Next I tossed him a big bowl of chopped vegetables. This included four medium-sized carrots, for a nice sized stalks of celery, two stalks of leeks, and six small turnips, diced. I like to use turnips in my soups and stews, because when they are slow cooked, they offer a really nice texture and mild flavor. I find that when you dice them up into nice small cubes, they completely satisfy any desire you may have for potato, rice, or pasta like substances in your soup. All this while being very low carb and a great source of minerals.
• Once the veggies were in, I filled the rest of the pot with a full carton of free range chicken broth, and a little bit of filtered water.
• Next for the herbs and spices, I added a tablespoon or two of dried herbs de provence, probably about a teaspoon of coriander, maybe a half teaspoon of ground thyme, and about a half a tablespoon of smoked paprika. This last ingredient offers a wonderful warmth and depth.
• 

  Don't be afraid of your spices!

  I let this wonderful concoction brew for an hour or so and then went back for a taste. At this time I added about another tablespoon and a half of the kosher salt, as well as a small handful of chopped fresh parsley. And, because I love the taste of good sea salt, I made sure to throw in a healthy pinch of Malden salt.

That’s the whole recipe, as simple as could be. I made a very similar soup just a week ago, when I had the swine flu, and it turned out hearty and satisfying. I feel confident that this next pot will be an equally potent dose of Godotian penicillin, and a delicious one at that. Also, this pot of soup probably holds about eight servings, and I would estimate that each of those servings contains only about 4 to 8 g of carbohydrate.

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:

We’re Eating Very Low Carb

For two weeks we’re going pretty much all-out Atkins-style induction. I’m aiming for 10-15 carbs per day, so most of what I’m eating (Freudian slip! I literally just typed “most of what I’m meating”) is meat, eggs, fish, and greens. I’ve been very suprised at how easy it has been to follow this type of diet! We really haven’t had to change that much, we just cut out all the low-carb bread and chips we usually garnish with, and cut out all fruit except for berries. We’ve also been very sparing with the low carb juices we like to drink, which have about 6 carbs per serving (we like to make spritzers out of them, so for us it’s only really like 2 carbs per serving.)

Today we both have the day off, so we woke up and made a delicious frittata with a crispy cheddar-cheese crust, sweet and hot peppers, onions, and served with salsa and sour cream. We also had a little bit of fresh sliced strawberry on the side. That kept us full pretty much all day. Last night I made some completely low carb mini pumpkin cheesecakes (I’ll post the recipe here), so we each had one of those as a snack. Each one has maybe one or two carbs.

And Letting Our Livers Detox

Probably the biggest dietary change has been this: no alcohol except on weekends. That means no wine with dinner! A major challenge for the wife, and psychotherapists are not exactly known to turn down a drink either! However, we were on our best behavior all week and will be continuing on for at least one more week. I think this is responsible for a lot of the fast results we’re seeing.

And Also Working Out More

Much more. I’ve been doing slow weight training to build up muscle mass more or less once a week for the past year or two. And I’ve been very happy with the results, so I’m going to keep doing that. But I’m also adding in some extra regular-speed exercises to tone and shape the muscles I’ve built. I’m especially focusing on my arms, pecs, and abs. That means a lot of different kinds of pushups, and a lot of bicycle-style ab crunches.

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.

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.

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.

The bulk of my experience there was in providing group psychotherapy and group substance abuse counseling, and one of the major challenges of the practicum was in balancing groups between the needs of highly diverse patients presenting with a wide variety of complaints and levels of functioning. I was also able to work with a number of patients individually in addition to my time with them in group. This allowed for the rapid expression of some fairly powerful dynamics, and offered unique treatment opportunities.

Over the course of the year I was able to do a great deal of individual and group psychotherapy work with patients suffering from severe anxiety and personality disorders. I used this opportunity to develop my skill in the use of techniques such as relaxation, mindfulness training, and visualization. In my final review, my supervisor reported that my work in this area had made a substantial contribution to the program.

I also gained experience in administrative aspects of the intensive outpatient program, particularly in planning and executive treatment groups. As a final project, I designed and administered a series of therapy groups focusing on attachment styles. I provided psychoeducation on the early formation and adult manifestation of various attachment styles, and relating these ideas to recovery concepts such as codependency. Next I provided cognitive-behavioral group psychotherapy aimed at helping patients to recognize the ways that their own styles of attachment impacted their relationships and to begin to approach those relationships in ways that promote increased feelings of security. Finally, I engaged the group in a visualization exercise designed to access and amplify existing experiences of security and adequacy.

I will be receiving my Master’s degree in Counseling after the summer term, and plan on sitting for the Licensed Professional Counselor license. I have only a few classes left to take, so over the next year I will be finishing those up, writing my doctoral dissertation, and hopefully working as a counselor. If you know of any job opportunities in Chicago, please let me know!