GroovyMojo.com

Dumping

Dumping someone sucks almost as much as it does getting dumped.  If you’re a kind and compassionate person, it hurts you almost as much as it does the person you’re breaking it off with.  Because of this, many of us stay with someone longer than we’d like — often years.

Here’s the thing.  You’re not really doing that person a favor.  Staying in your relationship merely to keep him or her happy, in the long run, is only going to hurt them more.  The longer you are together, the more attached to you they become, and the longer it will take them to get over the trauma and move on with their life.

So you find yourself having doubts.  He or she seems serious about you.  Maybe marriage has been discussed.  You may have even thought it a good idea.  Then something happens, and you wonder if you’re making a mistake.

Stop immediately.  Think it through.  Discuss it with trusted friends or family.  If you have sane parents (lucky you!) discuss it with them — they’ve been through it.  Maybe bring it up with a counselor or psychologist, if you have that resource.

Can you see yourself with this person five years from now?  Can you see yourself having children with him or her?  Do you think you’ll be happy?

No?

Stop the relationship immediately.  Don’t let it linger. You owe it to him or her, as much as you do to yourself.  The sooner you break it off, the sooner they’ll get over it, and the quicker they’ll get back into their search for their own special person.

There is no easy way to break it off.  Being you’ve read this far, you obviously care enough about this person to want to let them down easy.  Unfortunately the chances are if he or she is already attached to you, there is no way to let them down easy.  Research (and my own personal experience) shows the best way to do it is suddenly and absolutely.

Think of it like peeling off an adhesive bandage that’s stuck tight and is going to hurt when you remove it.  Peeling it slowly may hurt a bit less, but it still hurts and you’re prolonging the pain.  Pull it off quickly and it hurts a bit more up front, but then at least it’s over with, the pain fades faster, and you can then move on to other things.

There’s no real way to say what would work best in your situation, but generally speaking you should consider writing it out in a letter.  Outline in simple terms why you want to break it off, and explain it’s just as much for their sake as it is for your own, and that there’s no room for negotiations.

Hand the letter to them and stand there while it’s read.  Say you’re sorry.  Fend off any attempts to change your mind.  They’re going to go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.  No telling how long this will take (weeks if not months) but right up front you’ll be dealing with their denial, and possibly the anger and bargaining.

If you’re the tender-hearted sort (being that you’re bothering to read this, you probably are) this is where you’ll be in the most danger of caving in.  If so, you need to make a quick escape.  Either that, or opt to do the less honorable thing and don’t deliver the letter in person.

Here is where I’m going to disagree with most of the “expert” advice out there on this subject.  The goal is to break off the relationship, right?  You’re doing it as much for him or her as you are for yourself, right?  So what is the point of doing the “honorable” thing of actually facing the person as you’re breaking off the relationship if that gives them more a chance of overcoming your resolve?

Really, think about it, the more a jerk you are about it, the more likely you are to succeed. The better you succeed the better for you both.  I’m not saying you should be mean to them or damage their self-esteem.  I’m saying you should consider handling it in such a way that they (and their friends) may label you as a coward.

Consider this scenario:  you try to break it off in person.  She cries, and you can’t stand seeing her cry.  So you cave in, and try to make it work.  Months later you come to the same conclusion, and so try it again, this time by simply leaving a letter.  She shows up on your doorstep, sobbing, miserable, and you cave in again.  Finally much later you still come to the same conclusion and in desperation break off the relationship in a much-less-than-honorable way.  End result: you’ve wasted a good chunk of her life (and yours) because of misplaced good intentions.

What would have been a better way? Buy a plane ticket, change the locks on your doors, change your phone number, and then slide a compassionate but final goodbye letter under her door before leaving town for a week or two.  This would give her time to go through the denial and be deep into the anger by the time you return.  If she’s successfully transferred into the anger stage, she won’t want to see you again.  Later, during the bargaining phase, you will have some distance and hopefully built up your resolve enough to resist it.

Is this cowardly?  Maybe.  Is it the right way to do it?  Probably not.  Is it the best thing for the both of you?  That’s up to you, but I’ve made my argument.  If you’re strong enough to not give in on the first time, then wonderful.  If you are, though, why are you reading this article?  Just go do it.

There’s nothing wrong with being tender-hearted.  It means you’re compassionate.  Unfortunately there are times when you have to save yourself from your own compassion, and this is one of those times.

It sucks when you have to hurt someone.  Just like it sucks when you get hurt.  But you have to be true to yourself, and that’s the final word.

Been Dumped

So you find yourself on the other side of this.

Let yourself grieve.  It’s going to have to come out, so you might as well get it all out at once.  You have to go through those stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. 

Accept that it happened.  That person, for some reason or another, decided that you two were not a good match after all.  Unless there’s a major misunderstanding involved, you just have to trust that person is right.  For a permanent relationship to work, you both have to know it’s right, not just one of you.  So, it was not meant to be. 

Even if it feels like it, this is not the end of the world.  It is a bitter thing to do — accepting that there must be life after this person.  But there is.

You need to resolve immediately to move on.

Lean on your friends for a while.  Not too much, but enough to help you cope.  If you find you’re overwhelming your friends, talk to a therapist (they’re paid to listen). 

Avoid alcohol.  It makes everything worse.  Trust me on this.

You may find you’ve lost interest in everything.  You may also find that since you’ve displaced all your original dreams with the ones you shared with this person, you end up with none.  This can be the hardest part.  If you can’t resurrect your old dreams, start casting about for new ones.

Resolve to continue moving on.  You’ve already tried telling yourself to do it immediately.  Keep telling yourself that.

Also keep in mind that the past does not exist.  No time machine will ever take you back.  The past is gone.  You have only now, and you have to stay in the here and now.  The things you do now will shape your future.  You have to start now in making your future brighter.

That being said, you’re probably in a state of mind where you don’t care at all about the future.  You don’t care at all about anything.  So, start searching for things you enjoy doing, even small things — and as long as they’re not harmful, then revel in doing them.  Do things that give you pleasure. 

Stop dwelling on what happened.  Dwell instead on now, and what you’re going to do tomorrow.

Continue moving on.  Put yourself out there.  It doesn’t matter that your confidence is shattered … fake it.  Everyone else is faking it too.

Move slowly with your next relationship, unless you find someone who is temporary and agrees to be temporary.  If you find that person, get wild with them.  Be safe, but have fun.

Whenever a horrid upwelling of sadness hits you — and it will — immediately remind yourself that it will soon pass.  You’re going to get through this okay.  You will reach a point where you can look back on this with relief that it’s over.  Every day moves you closer to that point.

Continue to not dwell on the past.  Continue to move forward.

You’re going to be okay.

Trust me, you will.

Last year a lovely and talented writer named Jennifer turned me on to Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

Thank you Jennifer.

Thank you.

I’ve had this book for months and I haven’t even finished it. I can only read about two pages before I suddenly have to put the book down, rush over to my desk, and write something.

This book is so unique you can judge it by weight. It’s light, yet it holds more inspiration per ounce than anything I have ever hefted before in my life. It’s like condensed inspiration, slowly and lovingly rendered down to almost pure form.

I know I’ve touted this book before, maybe here, definitely elsewhere, but even if I’m repeating myself it deserves to be repeated. I sometimes wish I’d discovered this twenty years ago, but no. Things happen for a reason. The universe has a timing all its own. Something brought Jennifer and I together one morning at a Starbucks, and I think her gift to me was to tell me about this book. So the book came into my life at a time where I can really appreciate it, and savor it, and let it inspire me one page at a time.

I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who writes. Not just novels, but poetry, business reports, sales receipts, shopping lists … even if you don’t write at all. It teaches you in a very Zen way to appreciate life as it happens.

It’s a writer’s job to notice things. Moments. Instances. If you notice them, you appreciate them. Then you can write about them.

But the real gift here is that you learn to notice them.

Thank you again, Jennifer.

And thank you Natalie Goldberg.

Serves three, or one bachelor for three days.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups water
• 1 TBS margarine
• 3/4 cup frozen onion/pepper mix
• Wal-Mart Great Value Chicken Stuffing Mix
• Wal-Mart Great Value Chicken Flavor Pasta & Sauce
• Idahoan Four Cheese Mashed Potatoes

Bring water and margarine to a boil in medium saucepan.

Add package of Chicken Flavor Pasta & Sauce.

Add the frozen onion/pepper mix because, oh, what the heck. Onions and peppers are good.

Continue boiling over medium heat for seven minutes, stirring occasionally and wondering if it is supported to look so soupy.

Realize you used a 2 cup measure instead of a 1 cup measure, which means there is twice the water that’s supported to be in there.

Panic and search the cupboard for more pasta.

Finding none, throw in the stuffing mix, because — what the heck — it’s been in the cupboard for at least two years now.

Determine that it still looks too soupy to eat, so search for something else you can throw in to soak up the water.

Discover the package of Idahoan Four Cheese Mashed Potatoes and wonder how long that’s been up there.

Stir in the entire package.

Describe over the phone how disgusting it looks to your fiancée. Wince as she laughs hysterically at you.

Take it off the heat and let it congeal as you look up the phone number of the local pizza delivery place.

Right before you dial the pizza number, you take an experimental taste.

Surprise! It’s delicious!

Wash it down with a bottle of Lagunitas Hairy Eyeball Ale.

Life is good.

There are only a few books I can point to and say, “That changed my life.” David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the latest. It’s a very Zen and common sense approach to increasing your productivity and lowering your stress levels, and it has helped me tremendously.

The secret is to organize in a simple way, and empty your mind of all the things you need to do by putting them down on paper or PDA. The point is to have an uncluttered mind so that when you turn your attention to something, you can turn your entire attention to it. The system you set up enables you to not worry about forgetting this or that important thing, which really does lower your stress levels.

It’s made me realize, once again, that the simplest answers to problems are the best and often the most profound.

The book has spawned an entire subculture and influenced numerous websites, my favorite of which is Lifehacker, which I read daily. Lifehacker feeds you a continuous stream of tips to help “hack” your life and make it better, embracing the concept of Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD is how Lifehacker refers to it). They, in turn, pull from a whole group of other sites that are dedicated to the same thing.

If you’re stumbling through life juggling 40 things in your head, and keep forgetting half of them, and never seem to have the time to do any of it — and stressing out because of that — then I highly recommend taking a close look at GTD. It worked for me

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class.

“In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However,” the professor continued, “there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up. “Yeah, right.”

- From our big dusty archive of funny email
(Authors Unknown)

This very interesting article on Nature.com tells the tale of Luci Mori studying the area around his home in Sorbolo, Italy, using Google Earth. Noticing something odd in a field, he zooms in and discovers an unknown Roman ruin!

That’s right, folks, a guy surfing the Internet made an important archeological discovery.

As Indiana Jones said, “Seventy percent of all archeology is done in the library.” Well, now it’s going to be done on Google.

If you are curious about where a famous person is buried, or which famous people are buried in your local cemetery, there’s an online place called “Find A Grave” where you can find out: www.findagrave.com

You can search by person, by location, and by claim to fame. There are numerous other options, including the ability to search for your own ancestors, making this a virtual Google of the dead.

Best of all, it’s free.

If you spend too much time there, though, it starts to get creepy. Maybe that’s just me.

Right up front I have to tell you that this is not legal advice, this is just the experience of one person doing his own divorce. I have to tell you this up front because, especially in Texas, even distributing forms and instructions can be construed as legal counsel. That threatens the sanctity of the lawyer’s domain (and their income) so they come after you with all the fury of someone defending their own children.

Woe to anyone charged with offering legal advice without a license. Remember, most judges were also lawyers. They protect their own, and in my opinion, that’s the sole reason law seems so complicated. However, it’s not that complicated.

If you can keep a to-do list and fill out forms, you have the skills necessary to do your own divorce. When I first started the process I thought I was getting myself in way over my head, but after following through and looking back, it turned out to be nothing. It was simple. My ex and I saved ourselves thousands upon thousands of dollars.

For it to work you need one thing: the ability to agree with your soon to be ex. If you two are so angry at each other you can’t agree on anything, and your goal is revenge instead of the basic separation of your lives, then get a lawyer. You can’t do a do-it-yourself divorce if you can’t agree on the terms of the divorce.

A divorce is nothing more than an agreement in writing that follows legal guidelines. You agree on who gets what, who pays what, who sees the kids and when, and then a judge gives a stamp of approval. That’s all a divorce is. That, and a stack of legal forms. Those you get from the Internet. If you go to Google or Yahoo and search Texas Divorce (replace your own state, of course) up will pop a plethora of ads and links for legal forms services.

For some of them, you pay around $300 and then talk to a paralegal on the telephone. They ask you questions and fill the forms out, then send the forms to you. What I did, I paid less and answered the questions online. They plugged my answers into standard legal forms that were in Microsoft Word format, which they emailed to me. What I ended up with was a set of instructions, and these forms:

• Original Petition for Divorce
• Waiver Of Citation
• Final Decree of Divorce
• Prove Up Script

With the exception of the Waver of Citation, none of these look like regular everyday forms. In other words, they don’t look like a credit application. It’s more like script that reads, “This is who we are,” and “this is what we want,” and “this is how we’d like to do it.”

That’s the key right there. Using the guidelines of the instructions that should come with your forms, figure out between the two of you exactly who gets what, who pays what, and how. When you have this worked out, you can proceed with form filling and filing.

The Original Petition is the one you actually file with the court. For me, it was a simple matter of taking several copies down to the local county clerk, forking over some money, and having them stamp them and assign a case number. I believe at this point you can opt to pay the court to have your spouse served with the papers — most people do that — but because my ex was in on all this and she was in agreement with the terms, I sent her a copy personally along with a Waver of Citation.

The Waver of Citation, if you can get your spouse to sign it and return it to you, tells the court that your soon-to-be-ex agrees with everything that is in the divorce, does not intend to challenge any of it, and in fact may opt not to even appear in court.

Next comes the cooling off period, designed to make you think about what you’re doing, and possibly to change your mind and stay together. This waiting period varies by state. Also, if there’s children involved, you may be required to attend a class for how to deal with children during a divorce. If you have children and you care about them, I highly recommend you attend this type of class even if it’s not mandatory. There are a lot of behaviors which to you may seem natural or even healthy, but which will mess your children up or even turn them against you. Take the class, read a book, do something.

Also during this waiting period, it’s time to go over the details of The Final Decree. You see, in the Original Petition, you’re declaring to the court that you intend to divorce. The Final Decree spells out the terms of the divorce.

That was the biggest surprise to me in this whole process — I’d wrongly assumed the court would dictate to us how the divorce would be. No, it’s you who decide the details, you write the decree. It’s YOUR divorce. You have to follow the guidelines, and the document service will have created a rather generic version for you, but it’s up to you and your spouse to add the details.

The document service should have also created for you a Prove Up Script. You may or may not have to modify this to fit your details, but make sure this is done and you’ve read it over out loud until you’re comfortable with it. This is what you will stand up and read before the judge, the formal request for the divorce.

When the waiting period is up, you contact the court and schedule a trial. I found I could do that over the Internet by filling in a form. In your case, it may be that you have to call, or perhaps even go down to the courthouse.

After you’ve got it scheduled, and the big day arrives, dress nicely and show up to the courthouse with copies of your Final Decree and your Waver of Citation (and/or whatever other documents are required for your state), and also bring that Prove Up Script. In the court, you’ll sit and wait while other business is attended to, and when it’s your turn you approach the bench, read your script, and hand over your papers. If all goes well, and all your paperwork is in order, the judge grants the divorce right then and there, stamps it, and it’s done.

I spent less than $500 for mine.

Good luck!

Every night I go to sleep with a machine strapped to my face, and it’s wonderful.

Used to be that I’d fall asleep while driving so often that I had my kids trained to pull the hair on my arms to keep me awake. I’d routinely fall dead asleep during meetings at work, and even once during a job interview. When visiting friends, I’d always end up dozing off on their couch. I even used to catch myself falling asleep while standing in line.

Coffee only had a limited effect. Herbal stimulants could only do so much. It was bad. I thought I had narcolepsy.

My doctor pegged it, though — she said I probably have sleep apnea. The moment she described what that meant, I knew she was right. People often told me that I snored loud, and then stopped, and then started again. During camping trips my snoring would scare other campers — my friend’s wife even thought I was an angry bear.

Spending the night at the local sleep lab confirmed the diagnosis. When I’d go to sleep, my throat would slowly close and cut off my airway. I’d stop breathing. My lungs would fight for air, which would wake me up only enough to gasp and open the airway again. Then, drifting back to sleep, it would happen all over again. All night long. Waking up every five minutes.

No wonder I kept falling asleep while I was driving. So many times I’d nod off and then come back just split seconds before disaster! It was because I wasn’t sleeping at night.

The solution to the problem turned out to be a machine called a CPAP, which stands for “Constant Positive Airway Pressure.” It’s basically a specialized air pump with a hose and a mask. The mask comes in various designs, all meant to put air into your nose at a specific pressure that’s just enough to keep your throat from closing while sleeping.

Let me tell you, I was very dubious of being able to sleep with what I considered a SCUBA apparatus strapped to my face all night. But being that it was so hard for me to stay awake in the first place, it only took me twenty minutes to drift off even with the strangeness of the contraption. I slept so well that first time, I woke up a new person. Literally. It had been so many years since I actually had a full night’s sleep that when I finally did, I felt like I’d just woken up from a coma. It was amazing.

Even now, years later, I’m awake all day long. I never fall asleep while driving. I don’t snore anymore. I’m a totally different person. The CPAP doubles as a white noise machine, and is usually much quieter than a fan. You can usually get your health insurance to pay for it — mine did, twice. Even if not, you can now find them on the Internet for a quarter of the price they used to cost.

A beneficial side effect I’ve found — and my doctor has confirmed — it may also solve any acid reflux problems you have at night.

I’m writing this to help anyone facing the decision of going with a CPAP to know that it’s not horrible — it’s wonderful. And I’m hoping that if someone else out there recognizes these symptoms, to please go to your doctor before you fall asleep while driving.

I am happy to announce another spin-off site has gone live this evening: GroovyGizmo.com

It’s just getting off the ground, but already we’ve got:

• Coke bottles set to “stun”
• Introduction of the “Wammer”
• Cold beer flying at your head
• And a guy who zooms through the sky like a genuine super-hero

If you’re into gizmos and gadgets, please feel free to go take a look. And, if you’ve got one for us to look at, please contact us.

Thanks!