Weekly Checklist 12/31/22
It’s been a while since I have sent you all my newsletters and weekly blog. Life took over. My 92-year-old mother broke her hip during the Jewish High Holidays back in September and her progress has been slow, and there have been trips to Long Island There has been some relationship changes I will share with you. I started teaching in person for the first time in three years at Antioch, just at the time that I have retired from my Core Faculty position, which the enclosed blog addresses. I took a trip to Guadalajara with three close gay Latino friends that was life-changing. I am busy improving my Spanish and my editorial team is pleased with the work on I doing on my latest book. But during this period of time, between Christmas and New Years, I wanted to get back on the saddle and reach out to you with my updates and also hopefully a helpful AskDrDoug Checklist of some of the important “tips” out there for improved living I’d like to share with you.
Number 1
I would like to call attention to the website of long-term friend Beth Lapides who is a comedian and a performance artist. I met her forty years ago when I was a doctoral student in English at NYU and she was best friends with my soon-to-be performance artist boyfriend Tim Miller. She has stayed on the artist lane that we were both on as author "So You Need To Decide" Best Comedy Books of 2022 - Vulture. "A potentially life-changing treasure!" Variety. She is also the founder, director and producer of “The UnCabaret Creatrix: Comedy Central.” She has appeared on “Sex and the City,” and NPR. She also has moved into some therapeutic work as a Coach/Muse/Consultant at The Infinite Creator. Check out her helpful blog on New Year’s Resolutions. https://bethlapides.substack.com/p/taint-misbehavin?utm%5C_source=profile&utm%5C_medium=reader2
Number 2
As we are getting ready for the New Year, I’d like to share with you some incredible findings in the area of health, aging, and reverse aging and the work of Dr. David Sinclair. Australian biologist and academic known for his research on aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He co-wrote the book Lifespan: Why We Age, and Why We Don't Have To is a non-fiction book authored by Australian-American biologist David A. Sinclair and journalist Matthew LaPlante and published by Atria Books in the US in 2019. But for more up-to-date learning about what to do, how to eat, what supplements to take, and how to be more proactive about tracking our own bio-data, and revolutionizing the whole way medicine will be delivered, check out his You Tube sites. They are a wealth of knowledge. Just doing a few things, eating a bit less, and taking a walk after eating, has lowered my blood glucose levels and shed a few pounds in a few weeks: [https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidSinclairPodcast?app=desktop]
Number 3
I was recently in Guadalajara, Mexico with some close gay Latino friends and we spent a night in a rural area owned by Dr. Enrique Lopez where he is creating an “eco-village” with his architect brother, Ramon, but that is for another blog. For now, let me say that when this Bronx-born city boy, gazed up at the clear nighttime sky, I was overcome with awe at the Universe’s vastness and the role my particular form of consciousness might be playing. I recalled how fascinated I was in astrology as a child, when my only exposure to the skies were visits to the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan. The New Yorker recently turned me onto the “Pale Blue Pod” podcast, “a show that attempts to make complex conversations about the Universe feel intimate, emotional and profound. In it, comedian Corrine Caputo turns to the astrophysicist Moiya McTier with her most pressing questions about comets, and physics; no question is too big and small.” What a fun way to learn about the Universe in which our consciousness was born!
Number 4
I can’t recommend a new find I have found for those of you who either want some entertainment or an interested to Learn Spanish in the most delightful of ways. If you go to “Butterfly Spanish” on You Tube, your life will never be the same. Our teacher is “Ana,” and she is a cross between Sophia Lauren and I Love Lucy with her commentary and delightful way of teaching us everything we want to know about Spanish, from the basic stuff you need to know to start a conversation, to all the grammar, and to a delightful introduction to the buoyant, generous, ribald and even Revolutionary Mexican ethos. A must-see, even if you don’t need an update on your Spanish.
Number 5
I am often quite reluctant to watch TV shows about therapists because, well, as a therapist myself, the challenges, and also the intimacy, not to mention sometimes the delicate unraveling of thought from emotion, is, well — don’t get me started. However, I was delighted by the Documentary, “Stutz” is a personal project Hill’s therapist, Phil Stutz, and the “tools” that Stutz has developed and imparted. This guy Stutz, I like, reminds of a salty NYC Jew/Shrink and has the ideas about engaging patients and not just letting them talk themselves into a dark hole that resembles how I teach my students how to work.
Using Stutz's voice as a guide and line animation to recreate the diagrams Stutz draws on notecards for his patients, we learn about “The Shadow,” “Life Force,” “The Snapshot,” “The Grateful Flow,” and more. Says the burb: “These are techniques that require close-your-eyes visualizing but are filled with surprising pathways to navigate sadness or an anxiety. They have to be heard from the source and seen with Stutz's drawings to be best understood. Instead of putting them all into a book, we have Hill’s transformational documentary.”
