We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams
Incremental Steps to Happiness
This week was my first week back to work and I’d forgotten how utterly and completely draining this job is on a mental and emotional level. But, week one in the books. Week two includes a meeting with HR about the retirement process and a return to my “normal” schedule. This idea of normality and how draining work was this week had me doing some thinking. My normal response to stress is to eat comfort food and too damn much of it. So, I returned to work and ate a ton this week, so my blood sugar and weight are also correspondingly up. The way I’ll deal with both, is the way you approach any goal or deal with any problem successfully, and that is incrementally.
No issue gets solved all at once, at least, no personal issues. So the best way to address change that is needed, is to take it step by step, incrementally. So for me it has meant this weekend just trying to do better than I did yesterday. So each day, I’ve walked a little more, ate less carbs and did more self-care types of things like some self-massage, meditation, using my shakti mat, writing and a big one for me, music.
This simple process of doing a little better today than you did yesterday has a lot of benefits. First, it’s not hard, no matter how badly you did yesterday, and in fact the worse you did, the easier it is to do better today. The big secret is to string together a nice stretch of days in a row so that you are able to see the gains. This works no matter what issue you’re addressing and this includes happiness. Happiness is a process and a state of being. I don’t know anyone who lives in an eternal state of happiness, we all have down days and down times. We’ve talked a lot on this blog about all of the various ways of raising our levels of happiness. We’ve discussed gratitude, self-care in all of it’s forms, spending time in nature and as always, making sure the basics, food, sleep and safety are all taken care of first. So on any given day, on any of these fronts, we can do a little bit better each day.
So a short and simple message tonight, don’t beat on yourself, just endeavor to do better today than you did yesterday and you’ll have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be. ~ Douglas Adams
Happy Three Pizza Day!
During my last week of freedom from work while recovering from my heart surgery, I spent the day walking in San Francisco. I spent some time at the Cal Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park, The Haight and made three separate pizza stops including a new place I’ve wanted to review for a time.
My first stop of the day after a three mile walk up from BART was the California Academy of Sciences. I really like this place, mostly because of I love planetarium shows and they run three different shows every day, so yes, I did three planetarium shows. I also want to give Cal Academy credit for having True Moo chocolate milk in their cafeteria, without a doubt, the champagne of chocolate milks.
They have a new exhibit on for the summer, about a dozen animatronic dinosaurs, including a pretty huge T-Rex and Brontosaurus type dinosaur. If you’d like to see videos of those check out my Instagram page at @michael_rev_kane. Cal Academy has a mix of old school museum rooms and more modern features like the planetarium, I always find the Africa Room to be a bit depressing with it’s majority of stuffed critters, but the live penguin exhibit is always a hit with the munchkins. One small but interesting visit is the earthquake room where you get a taste of both the Loma Prieta and the Great 1906 quake. I always find the 1906 quake experience to be amazing, and they only put you through it for one third of the time the quake actually lasted. The one stuffed critter I do find amazing there, is the mount of the last living California Grizzly, a chance to see this extinct species up close.
The planetarium shows were amazing as always, I love their little planetarium. The aquarium is ok, it’s actually probably way better than I give it credit for, but when your 90 minutes from the Monterey Bay Aquarium it’s hard to be impressed by anything else. One really well known feature of their aquarium is their giant albino alligator in their Southern Swamp exhibit. Of course, I’ve often wondered if it was actually alive, every time I’ve been there it’s in one place and never moving. So it was a rare treat this time around as I got to see him actually swimming. They also have a several level rainforest experience and honestly all I ever care about is the highest level because that’s where the butterflies hang out and there’s a ton of them and they’re gorgeous and occasionally even land on you.
Below is a gallery of some images from Cal Academy.
After leaving Cal Academy I strolled through Golden Gate Park and over to the Haight, it’s the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Grateful Dead, so the Haight’s been hoping for a bit this year. There were even a couple of old style deadhead touring buses and heads around the neighborhood. Some pictures below from the Haight:
The beauty of my route this day was that rolling through the Haight I would pass two pizza places, an outpost of Tony’s Slice House, which I’ve reviewed on the Pizza Page, and a place I’ve been meaning to get to that gets a bit of press, Escape from New York. Finally, the walk back to BART would take me back past Gioia Pizza, the best NY slice in San Francisco and pictured at the top, couldn’t wait to take a bite before I took the photo. Tony’s Slice House, an outpost of Tony’s Napolatana in Little Italy, is always a bit disappointing to me. Tony Gemignani, the owner, is maybe the most decorated and awarded pizza maker in America and frankly, a pizza at his restaurant is amazingly good. At the Slice Houses though, the experience just doesn’t translate, I think because the slices sit and don’t hold up that way. I was lucky on this stop to get a pepperoni slice from a pie that had just come out of the oven, so much better than normal. The one thing they do absolutely right is their pepperoni is super high quality.
I’ve seen Escape from New York Pizza end up on several best NY pizza in the city lists so I’ve been curious about getting a chance to check it out. The good, it feels like a NY pizza place, pizzas on display behind a glass counter, celebrity signed photos and posters on the wall, and even the we don’t give a shit about you attitude of the employees. Hell, right down to the overflowing garbage cans and the crappy soda machine. The pizza looked good and it was fine, it would be an average slice in NY, grade it out at a “C”, compared to the slice at Tony’s that would be a “B” and Gioia that would be an “A”. If you’re in the The Haight and hungry, definitely worth it, although walking a half block further to Tony’s would be better, assuming you can get something fresh out of the oven. Some images below from Escape from NY Pizza.
All in all a great final walking day in the city before I go back to work. Lovely weather, a great walk, about nine miles and a day full of pizza is always a happy one. ~ Rev Kane
Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. ~ Vincent Van Gogh
Impact of Small and Ordinary Happiness
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately has been inspired by my recent experience with people during my heart surgery recovery. I am not someone who has a lot of faith in humanity. I’ve talked a lot about this in regards to trail angels and hikertrash on the Appalachian Trail. My hike on the AT was one of the few experiences that really gave me faith in humanity. In general, and lately watching the political situation in America, I have very little faith in humanity.
The one place that humanity shows up, is during the big things. So people generally ignore each other, can be rude to each other and incredible entitled and self-centered until the disaster hits. We see this all of the time, in LA recently with the fires last year, the hurricane in Western North Carolina, always after an earthquake people rally around their neighbors and community. It’s the same with people, people will treat you like shit most of the time, but when someone has cancer, or gets injured or undergoes heart surgery, people rally. Honestly this is really sad to me.
People always complain that the world is cruel and unkind and daily they feel run down by the way people treat them. So the message I want to get out tonight is that we can all make this better. Simply by the small and ordinary acts of kindness and happiness. If we would all just take the moment needed to be nicer and kinder, the accumulation of those small acts could lead to a much larger thing, a kinder and a happier world. So you’re assignment, should you choose to accept it, do five small things every day that are kind and happiness creating gestures. These are small things, holding a door open for someone even if a person isn’t close behind you, letting someone into a traffic lane, giving a random small gift to someone, buy someone a cup of coffee or a muffin, or even just make an effort to say something kind to someone that you wouldn’t ordinarily say. If we all do this, if we all make this effort, we can all have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves. ~ Viktor E Frankl
Rev Kane’s Wild Ride: 90 Days
First a comment about the author of tonight’s quote, Viktor E. Frankl, his book, Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the greatest books ever written, it is a book I actually think everyone should read. The book reminds me of the story of the orange from a post I wrote, possibly maybe my favorite post, Remember the Sweet Things. Something else I recommend everyone should read and listen to.
On May 7th I had open heart surgery, as part of the recovery process I was put on a three month medical leave, that leave has ended and it’s back to work on Monday. I’m actually less excited about returning to work than I was to undergo the surgery. While going to work has little chance of actually killing me, it will kill my soul and that may be worse. The problem with my job is that it’s 90% people management and I work at a place where accountability has never been a priority, or hell, even a reality, particularly for faculty. As such, a lot of the people I manage are extremely entitled and selfish individuals. They honestly don’t seem to care about the emotional impact or stress they cause on anyone else, they are only concerned with one thing, what they want in the moment. As such, my job is incredibly stressful, I’ll also be returning to a brand new boss and a brand new president. Happily, so far I’ve heard good things about both of them.
So Viktor E. Frankl’s quote really resonates in this situation. First off, I can change the situation, but not immediately. So the challenge facing me this Monday, is to change myself in terms of the role, which means reducing my stress. This means that in order to preserve my own sanity and keep my stress in check during my continuing recovery, I need to approach things differently. I’ve always tried to find solutions that met multiple interests, that effort increases complexity and makes things more stressful, usually for me. So I need to simplify and operate on the highest level value in my job, and only that level, what’s best for students. In doing so, it will almost certainly mean I will have to be much harder on my faculty, but at the end of the day, when it’s what’s best for students it’s infinitely defensible. It will mean that people will like me less, but that’s never been a huge concern and leads to the second piece, I can change the situation. As such I’ve started a full job search, primarily on the East Coast where I hope to be, in the next few years, fully retired.
I have to admit rising levels of stress this week as this deadline has approached, my blood pressure has even increased to the point of going back on one of my medicines. But I have also made an effort this week to grab those last little bits of happiness before going back to work. I’ll be doing some posts over the next week or so talking about these, but I’ve spent some time in San Francisco, I went to a Giants/Pirates game, my littlest sister came into town, I had a three pizza day, went to the Asian Art Museum and the Cal Academy of Sciences. I’ve also done a ton of cooking, I made my first ever Beef Wellington and it came out really well. I’ve even just made a pot of gumbo for my work lunches this next week. I also got cleared for everything by my physical therapist, did my first chest workouts with weights and even did a nine mile walk.
The recovery from my surgery went way better than I had hoped it could have, I was ahead of schedule the whole time and had none of the major set backs or complications most people have. I had a lot of anxiety going into this, one person I know after the surgery ended up in a coma for a time, my best friend growing up died from the surgery, another friend had some other complications. Happily I avoided all of those things. There were some really scary moments, some extremely difficult mental challenges, a whole lot of fear, I kept almost all of that to myself, except for the night it was really bad and I had some crazy symptoms that lead me to calling 911, getting my first ever ambulance trip and a couple of hours in the emergency room. Obviously, everything turned out ok and it seems to have been just a fluke event not really related to my surgery.
The biggest things over the last three months have been my connections and relationships with people. Most of the people I expected to show up did, a few surprisingly let me down, but in general people were great. I had twenty different people who visited, came over, did grocery and pharmacy runs, moved my car for me, gave me rides, helped me move things around my apartment, hung out in the first few days while I showered and provided great company. You know, up until the point where the raging introvert that I am just had too many people around and had to really reduce my interactions. But I’m incredibly grateful for the support and caring they provided. I was surprised by the level of support, happy about it, and have thank you gifts for all of them.
So, not sure there’s a point tonight other than the quote by Frankl, I think that’s the lesson I hope people will pull from this post. And seriously, read his book, it’s truly magnificent, maybe keep a positive thought for me this week and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams. ~ Oprah Winfrey
A Happy Week
So it’s week twelve since my open heart surgery, Thursday will officially be a month and next Monday I return to hell, I mean work. I am not looking forward at all to returning to work, to the drama, the incompetence and just plain managing folks who don’t do their job or care about students. The good news, they’re a small part of the overall faculty and staff, the bad news, is their noise and the stress and work they cause far outsizes their small numbers. More on this below.
So I’m really enjoying my last days before I go back to work. This past week I attended the Pirates and Giants game with a couple of friends. Partially as a thank you to one who really was there for me during my time off, also to check off a tiny bucket list item, sitting on the first row at a major league game. The picture above is from my seat at the game. Even more exciting, as a Pirate fan I’ve probably seen ten live games in the last fifteen years and they’ve never won, but they won this one in extra innings. One of my friends treated us all to a great dinner after the game, so a great day, great weather, good company and good food.
My baby sister was in town this week with her husband and my nephew who is about to go to college. So I had dinner with them in the city Friday night. Really wonderful to have the chance to catch up and check-in with my nephew before he takes his next big step in life, and the dude has gotten tall!
I’ve also been doing a lot of cooking. I made homemade tomato sauce, homemade pesto, my first ever beef wellington and a something like a strombolli with the left over pastry dough from the wellington. It was all good but I was especially excited about the wellington, something I love, rarely get to eat and was always a bit intimidated to try and make at home, it came out really well.
Today I had my cardiac rehab physical therapy appointment and it went really well. I’ve been cleared for everything, wearing a backpack, working out, fully stretching and pushing my level of exercise. So I’m really excited, this really clears the path for me to start working out again and fully get my strength back.
Finally, I’m moving on to my next steps. I’ve fully engaged the job search, posted out about it on LinkedIn and even have a couple of conversations about positions coming up this week as well as having a few applications out. So hopefully, I’ll soon be moving on and finally get to leave a job that I have not been happy in for some time.
Finally, my head this week has been thoroughly on the folks who were here for me during this time. Both in person and in spirit, I have greatly appreciated the support and have learned a lot about the people in my orbit, some bad, but mostly good.
So today, eating my Italian pastry creation, munching on homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, getting good news and doing my first resistance workout has made this for a happy day, at the end of a very happy week. Hope you had a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical. ~ Yogi Berra
Happy Day
Today was a really wonderful day, as my time on leave is winding down, trying to do a few last things to enjoy my remaining time off. So today, a couple of us went to the Giants and Pirates game in San Francisco. Checking off a minor bucket list item, seats in row one, right on the field.
Being a Pirate fan is a tough gig these days, I’ve been a Pirate fan since I saw Roberto Clemente steal a home run away from the Mets at Shea Stadium in 1971. But it’s been over forty years since the Pirates have been back to the world series and most years they have a losing record. Currently, they are 17 games under .500. So I didn’t have a lot of hope they would win today and in particular because over the last 20 years I’ve caught live Pirate games seven or eight times. Every single time, including when I’ve flown to Pittsburgh for the game, they have lost.
But going to a major league game is not so much about winning or losing. It’s about a nice day in the sun, hanging out with good people and eating stadium food. So today, we had pretty much perfect weather, a really close game and all the standards, hot dogs, popcorn, cokes, etc….
There was even a cute little two year-old dude who came and sat next to us for a bit, it was his first game. It was awesome, he was chanting for his favorite player when he came to bat and even got to see him close up when he ran down the first baseline, he was crazy excited. Finally, the ball dude (what he was actually called) gave him a ball. Heck of a first game and I’m betting a lifetime Giants fan in the making.
The game went into extra innings and the Pirates actually won! A Pirate coach from the bay area came up into the stands to see some family after the game and we had a quick chat, super nice guy, even got half a selfie with him.
After the game one of the guys sprung for dinner at Hillstones and I had a really wonderful piece of Salmon, finally, ended the day with a lovely bowl of ice cream. Just overall a really nice day, good company, great conversation, the game and good food. Hope you had a happy day as well my friends. ~ Rev Kane
If you’re not the one cooking, stay out of the way and compliment the chef. ~ Michael Strahan
Happy Cooking
So the tiny patio garden is having a good Summer, surprising given it’s been the coldest, wettest Summer heree in like thirty years. My basil has been growing like gang busters and so a couple of weeks ago I cut it down and made pasta sauce with a lot of basil and garlic. It’s a long time family tradition that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago in my piece Happiness and Making Sauce. And the thing is, when you’ve got a lot of basil there are only two options, pasta sauce or pesto. I’m not a huge pesto fan, but I made pasta sauce and still have some in the freezer, so pesto it was.
Not being a huge pesto fan and being a Type 2 diabetic who rarely gets to eat pasta, I needed some way to use the pesto, and I settled on chicken pesto. So I spent the afternoon making pesto and then the chicken pesto in the image above. I thought I’d share the recipe and process tonight. Cooking makes me happy, like photography, it’s something I get really focused with and lost in and the time just slips by, and then of course I get to eat.
So, first a little bit about how I make a new thing for the first time. I go up online and scan several recipes to get an idea of how the dish should come together and then I kind of wing it from there.
The Pesto.
3 cups packed, basil
1/4 cup of virgin olive oil
2 cloves of garlic (probably too much for most folks, I love garlic, one is probably good)
1/2 cup walnuts (pine nuts are the traditional add, but I’m not a big fan, nor do I have any)
2 teaspoons of lemon juice
1/2 cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese ( I actually used 3/4 cup, I like my pesto a little cheesy)
Some salt, pepper and a garam masala (just a couple shakes)
This is definitely a food processor kind of deal, load everything but the basil, chop it up by pulsing it and then add the basil and repeat until it’s well mixed together. If you want it creamier, add more olive oil. You could do this by hand, but it would be a ton of work and would be a bit chunkier I’m sure.
The Chicken Pesto
Chicken Cutlets – I used about five cutlets since this was a test mission. Also, while most people use chicken breasts, I used boneless skinless thighs, I just think they taste better and they’re cheaper.
Pesto
1 scallion
1/4 red pepper
Mozzarella Cheese
Parmesan Cheese
fresh basil leaves
sliced tomatoes
Use a casserole dish, oil the pan. Take the chicken and flatten it. By flatten the chicken it could mean a couple of things. I just flayed out the chick into thing flat slices, but particularly if you’re using chicken breasts you could flatten and tenderize them using a meat mallet. Place the chicken in the casserole dish, chop the red pepper and the scallion and scatter them across the chicken. Spoon the pesto onto the dish and spread it around so it covers all of the chicken. Cover with an equal amount of sliced Mozzarella and Parmesan cheese. Place in a pre-heated 375 degree oven for about 35 minutes. Pull out, place basil and tomato slices on top. I used golden cherry tomatoes from the garden, but any tomato should work. Place the dish back in the oven, shut off the heat and leave the door cracked open for about 5 minutes. You’re just trying to warm the tomatoes at this point, you could even place the basil leaves after this step. Then, let it cool a little and chow down. Happy eating my friends. ~ Rev Kane
I’m not sad about any of my life. It’s so unconventional. It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would. ~ Edie Falco
Moments of Happiness
In the last couple of years in the media there have been a lot of articles taking a different tack on happiness. It’s this idea that in fact pursuing happiness is making you unhappy. It’s the idea that people get so obsessed about being happy, that when they don’t achieve what they perceive as “happiness” then in fact they end up depressed. I really don’t like these articles, I think they miss some really obvious things.
The first thing they missed is that any obsession is almost certainly going to lead to unhappiness. Obsession by definition is going overboard, pushing further than you should, being overly concerned with something. Whether it’s obsessively, gambling, shopping or even obsessive romantic feelings these types of obsessions lead people to doing things that harm themselves. So an obsession with happiness is also very likely to be a bad thing.
The other issue that they fail to discuss in these articles is a discussion about how to define happiness. Part of the problem with searching for happiness, is most people don’t take the time to define what happiness will be for them. Society provides a definition, I call it “the script.” Society says that happiness is married, owning a house, having some kids, working till retirement then fishing a few years before you die. Honestly that has never seemed all that satisfying to me. And of course, happiness is a very individual thing. So for some people, “the script” might be the epitome of joy and happiness but my life and desires are much more unconventional.
So the first thing you need to do, if you’re pursuing happiness, is to define what that will look like for you. Because pursuing a goal, without knowing what that goal looks like is bound to lead to disappointment. So you need to know what that end point looks like. For me at this point in my life, it looks like a house, on a good chunk of land, someone to travel with and time with my nieces and nephews. An opportunity and time to do a lot of things I’ve never had time for and/or have wanted to do but not gotten around to doing. So painting, writing more, learning more about foraging and living a simpler, closer to the land life. Oh yeah and playing with some toys, a metal detector and a really good telescope and of course, a doing some Bigfoot expeditions. I’m working on getting there.
The other mistake I think people make, is thinking that happiness is a single destination. Like many of the things we pursue in life, our happiness goal will change as things change in our lives. Hell, at one point in my life happiness simply looked like being sober, at another time being out of debt, at some points just being with a person I loved. So the endpoint/goal will change over time, the pursuit of happiness doesn’t ever end, it morphs and changes over time. This does not make it some Sysiphean task that is a never ending exercise in hell. So what does it mean?
For me it’s two things, we pursue our end goal of happiness at all times, in reasonable ways when possible and hope to be living as close to that endpoint as much as possible. But equally importantly, we must learn to do two things that are related. First, we need to find joy and happiness in smaller and simpler things and we need to take the time to appreciate and enjoy them. Whether that’s something small and wonderful like walking over a hill to an area full of flowers, laying on a picnic table and watching clouds, or just a really good dessert, we need to be thoroughly present and enjoy those moments of happiness. Not all of them will be small, hundreds of them for me are tied to my little brother. His birth was a joyous day, and not just because the ice storm meant school was canceled for the day, I had always wanted a brother and I was getting one. We were inseparable when he was little, we wrestled and talked and listened to music together. We ran around outside and played like little kids, which he was, I was fifteen years older. But those early years of his life were filled with insane levels of happiness with him. We need to recognize when we’re in those times and truly understand and realize the joy we’re experiencing.
So my friends, define happiness, chase it, but not obsessively. And along the way take time to notice the small bits of happiness you experience and be present for them. Do this, and I promise you more happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty. ~ Rudyard Kipling
A Walking Day in San Francisco
Spent a lovely day walking in San Francisco today. It was a full test of being back to normal, a six mile walk, even if I did avoid the biggest hills in the city. I also rewarded the longest walk since my surgery eleven weeks ago with two pizza stops.
It was a nice walk up from the Civic Center/UN Plaza, up through Hayes Valley, over Russian Hill via Polk to Ghirardelli Square where I took some time to just sit by the bay for a time.
Then I rolled up to Pier 39 and hit Amici’s for my second pizza stop of the day. And finally walked back up the Embarcadero and hit back to the BART Station and home. I love walking in the city, you never know what you’ll see, today I watch a golden retriever go nuts because it encountered a robot dog. Here’s a little set of photos from the walk today.
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ~ Douglas Adams
A Taste of Normality
Today I started week eleven since my surgery, my initial healing period and end of medical leave is the beginning of week thirteen, so we’re getting near the end of my initial healing period. By this point I’m supposed to be fully mobile, walking a couple of miles a day, driving and basically doing everything except doing any lifting over ten pounds and very little with my arms outside the core of my body. I’m doing a bit better than that, I’ve achieved all of that and I’m walking four to five miles a day.
So this week I decided to run a bit of normalcy test as well as take a minor vacation. So I’ve come to Reno for a few days apparently to lose money gambling and eat good food. This was a good test, a four hour drive in the car, sleeping flat in a bed and generally living normally. It’s gone well, the car ride went well, I’ve slept ok and generally it feels like a normal trip to Reno. I also got to lay all of my NFL season bets.
I got some good news today, I will be going off of my blood thinners on August seventh, that also means I get to come off another medication that I’ve been taking in conjunction with the Warfarin. So, six less pills to take every day. I also got my blood test results back and all of my blood metrics have come back to normal. I had my last blood draw as well so normal life is coming at me at high speed. This is something that brings mixed feelings, first, very happy to be getting back to normal and unfortunately it means going back to work soon.
I’d hoped to get in a little vacation but there still are some appointments coming up and it just hasn’t worked out timing wise so I’ll have to settle for some great seats, row one, right on the field, for the Giants and Pirates next week with a couple of friends.
The last big thing for me is that I have my first physical therapy appointment on August fourth so I can start working on getting my upper body strength back. Then I work on flying. Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 