Did you ever know how to build a Tesla coil? by David Godot

It’s not, as it appears,
a single wire wrapped tightly around its base.
It’s actually a number of separate circuits
that are never really connected at all.
But they’re tuned in to the same frequency.
They feed off of each other that way,
like a little planet directing itself by radio,
or like the fragments of a personality.

When he first developed this type of transformer,
Tesla had to keep the whole thing submerged in oil
to prevent those circuits from overheating and melting down.
You have to spread things out more:
you need more space between your circuits
if you want to be able to enjoy the open air.

The discharge from this contraption is,
in many cases, an afterthought.
However, you’ll find that you can really
fine-tune the voltage and directionality
by controlling airflow, capacitance,
and by holding yourself in a manner that is soft yet firm.

Waiting for the breath of life by David Godot

I didn’t have a body so I built one out of scraps,
dragged it over rocks and beat it against mountains
until it was hard and smooth.

And I saw a vision
of earthquakes,
lava,
morbid obesity and sullen loneliness.

I saw the body of Christ as an ice sculpture,
saw wasted sex and empty generations.

I didn’t have a spirit so I stole one out of the wind,
held it captive in a dark room and fed it propaganda
until it was ready to submit and join the cause.

And I saw a vision
of bands and battalions,
drunk power,
angelic laughter,
of poetry and passion in disarray.

I saw the pain of soulfulness,
the way music forgets itself
and dreams dissolve into mystery,
longing.

I didn’t have a voice so I slept with demons,
soaking up their cries a single word at a time
until I had enough for an incantation of my own.

And I saw a vision
of worlds coming together,
a birthplace for gravity and
natural love.

I saw myself drawn with no outline,
a warm bath in the space between spaces,
saw words gather together and take arms.

I didn’t have a history so I invented one,
drew a name out of the waters and a face from the ages
and negotiated the terms of their surrender.

I saw a vision of you,
becoming your dearest wish.

I saw a vision of all of us,
building ourselves up out of dust,
forging our names into flesh.

I saw the truth growing out of nothing,
waiting for permission,
waiting for the breath of life.

When you’re a snow sculpture you end up by David Godot

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 went silent
and your boots became 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.

The disturbing truth by David Godot

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 to
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.

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.

The Perfect Low Carb Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe by David Godot

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.

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!

A Bad Experience With Camden-Grey Essential Oils by David Godot

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.

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.

Homemade Low Carb Chicken Soup Recipe by David Godot

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.

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.

Two-Week Low Carb Detox by David Godot

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:

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.

New Professional Psychology Web Site by David Godot

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.

Planning for the future by David Godot

Photo by: Swisscan

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.