Archive for November, 2009

Have you ever been attracted to your cousin? Don’t lie. A recent NY Times article shared an increasing trend taking place all across our great nation. The marriage of first cousins.

Should you be pondering having kids with your first cousin, the article mentions chances are slim your children will be born with genetic deformities common to incest such as spina bifida and cystic fibrosis. Thank God!  You don’t need to feel so badly about the fact that on Thanksgiving you asked your 28 year old cousin to sit on your lap while watching football at Granny’s house. Breathe a sigh of relief. This behavior is happening everywhere. Let go of the guilt you might have been feeling for adding a little tongue to your cousin’s holiday feast. According to the NY Times, you’re actually not a twisted, repulsive, redneck scumbag.

So many strange things happen during Thanksgiving. When around family, our darkest issues, fears, and doubts tend to erupt.  The tumult of puberty, thought to be extinct, rears its ugly head. Insecurities, thought to be locked away for good, bust loose. Is it so far-fetched in the swirling mess of emotion that is Thanksgiving dinner, one might just find their cousin to be attractive?

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Family-driven emotional chaos is not exclusive to Thanksgiving. Each and everyone us has a part of our being snagged in childhood. It’s called infantilism. Best described by Anais Nin, “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

So if you have lingering frustrations from last week’s familial Thanksgiving encounters, go easy on yourself. Hinder and shame that childish part of you, and it will act like the crankiest baby on the longest night. Embrace and nurture that part of you, and the fire of youth, while at times with a bite, nonetheless will forever burn bright.

For more twisted info with inspirational endings, check out my book Yeah Dave’s Guide to Livin’ the Moment

Last week I mentioned the world’s most eligible bachelor, Juanta de Santos de Carlos de Felipe III of Argentina. I had the opportunity to interview Juanta for my blog. (Please be patient with his broken English).

Q: Juanta, you recently called yourself the world’s most eligible bachelor. If I was a woman, why would I want to be with you?

A:  As we say in Argentina, “Yo soy muy grande en todos partes” which in English means “Come live in my heart, it is a mansion of love.”

Q: Juanta, why are you still a bachelor?

A:  I am looking perfect American woman. I still no find.

Q: And what of your personal fortune?

A: I just earned $113 million settlement from royal family when I was run over by Prince’s gay son at trailer park. I don’t know how to spend. I already give $10 million to poor, $5 million to hospital, $3 million to cure cancer,  what else can I do? I need woman to spend my money.

Q:  Juanta, why were you at a trailer park?

A:

Q: Juanta, What kind of woman are you looking for?

A:  Woman who like yoga. Woman who travel and come to my country Argentina. Woman who like wine.  Woman who like cuddle.

Q: And how young or old would your ideal woman be?

A:  I only 24 years old. I think I like older woman. 50 years old? Yes! 40 years old? Yes! 30 years old? Yes!  18-25 years old? Too young!

Q: Juanta…tell me more of what you’re looking for in a woman?

A: Perfect body to me no es real. I like full figured woman. We have expression in Argentina… “Tocar el sol es poner la lengua in la boca de una persona muy borracha!”  which means “I dream of your body night and day, I love you for who you are!”

Being a lover of yoga, Juanta will be joining us on my upcoming Yoga + Wine retreat to Argentina with wine champion and Bliss Flow Yoga founder Angela Gargano.  If you’re ready for a food & wine lover’s adventure of a lifetime, join us this April 15-22 in Argentina.  Visit here for more info.

And take note, Juanta will be with us for the post Argentina journey to Rio de Janeiro April 22-25.

As we round the corner into a new decade, how will we look back on this first decade of the 2000’s? I think it will be as monumental as the 1960’s or the 1940’s. With 9/11, two wars, and the election of an African-American president, some pretty significant stuff took place over the past 10 years. But there are 3 pressing sociological issues that I believe will make or break us in the new decade.  One is obvious, one is gaining notoriety, and the other is still a bit beyond the horizon. Following are these issues:

1. Food

Last night my girlfriend and I had a pleasant dinner of ground beef, a salad, and a nice Cabernet.  Oh so delicious. 2 hours later, we sat on the couch dumbfounded, awestruck, my girlfriend reduced to tears. Why? We just watched the movie Food, INC which shares the sheer horror, abuse, and disgust of the food industry. I’m not gonna lie to you. I love a good burger, a steak, rotisserie chicken, you name it. But after Food Inc, I’m confused. Something has to change. Consider the following:

–More than 9 billion chickens and turkeys are slaughtered each year. As the Humane Society Reports, “They’re shackled upside down, paralyzed by electrified water and dragged over mechanical throat-cutting blades … all while conscious. Millions of birds each year miss the blades and drown in tanks of scalding water.”

–Crated calves are tethered by the neck, pigs in severe confinement bite the metal bars of their crates, and hens get trapped and can even be impaled in their cages. These animals can barely move for months on end.

–90% of consumed meat in this country comes from factory farmed raised animals who are pumped full of antibiotics, hormones & corn all of which are unnatural & harmful to the animals.  Chickens have become so genetically modified to have larger breasts because that is what the American consumer wants, that they are unable to stand up for longer than a few seconds and spend the majority of their 40 day life-span sitting in their own feces.  Unless you get your meat, milk, and eggs from an independent family farm, this is the meat you eat. *

2. Health Insurance

It’s not just the food industry that is troublesome. We all know about the health care crisis. Much of it is caused by greed.  Consider this: 47 million Americans were without healthcare insurance in 2008. However, the heads of the major healthcare insurance companies earned as follows:

-CEO of United Health Group:  $124.8 million
-CEO of Aetna:  $57 million
-CEO of Cigna:  $42 million.

While these executives were padding their bottom line, there were 22,000 “excess deaths” last year amongst Americans between the ages of 25-64 because they were denied health insurance.**  The healthcare crisis is clearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind.  While it seems we are moving in the right direction, try telling that to the families of the 22,000 people who perished in 2008.

3. Endangerment of the Present Moment

While more abstract than the food industry or the healthcare crisis, something we’ll begin to hear a lot more about in the 2010’s is the endangerment of the present moment. As Facebook and Twitter take over and as the iPhone and Blackberry become smaller, faster, and cheaper, our free moments will suffer the sad fate of the polar bear or any endangered species. Is it me or is every waking second spent texting, emailing, websurfing, status updating, tweeting, etc.  I emphasize in my book Yeah Dave’s Guide to Livin’ the Moment that if we’re not careful, entire days go by without one single memory.

Think about it. A normal person, take me as an example, wakes up, gets right on the iphone, answers emails, talks on the cell phone on the way to work, does emails all day long at work, talks on the cell phone on the way home, and returns home to surf the web, play on Facebook, talk on the phone, watch TV. There’s less and less time free of techonology. There’s less and less time to daydream, to actually talk to the person in front of you in line at Starbucks, to lie down for a snooze, to savor life. The busier we get, the less memories we have to cherish. Right now, we don’t think twice about it. But in the very near future, I believe there will be a desperation for the present moment, for richer memories, for the very essence of life.

*http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/force_fed_animals/
**http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml

I’ve received lots of crazy emails but nothing as crazy and vulgar as one I received a week ago. It is a company that makes necklaces of a certain body part. I can only imagine the inventor or artist who hatched the idea. He must have been on a plane, woke from a dream, and quickly sketched down the thought while whispering, “Oh my God Oh my God where’s my pen where’s my pen…this is it!!!!”

What is our world coming to?

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I recently went to a doctor of sorts (more of the witch variety) who gave me some interesting nutrition advice. He said that one takes on the characteristics of what she eats. For that reason, he told me to stay away from birds and fish which are overridden with anxiety. Meanwhile he advised a steady diet of beef to get grounded and manly.  That advice was absolutely contradictory to the advice I got from a nutritionist who said to never eat red meat and that I should stick to a diet of fish and vegetables.

I’m confused! I don’t know what’s good for me, who to listen to, and if I should be a pescatarian, vegan, or burger n’ beer man.  So many people offering so much advice. “Running is good for you.” “Running is terrible for you.” “Hot Yoga is the best.” “Hot yoga is dirty and germ-infested.”  “Yeah Dave’s Guide is freakin hilarious!” “Yeah Dave’s Guide is t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e!”

Now that I think about it, my hat is off to the crazy inventor who went with his gut (if not his loins) and followed through with the vulva necklace. We could all benefit, at least sometimes, from tuning out the conflicting advice of those around us and listening more carefully to the voice within us. And if that voice be just a tiny bit corrupt, well….Emerson said it perfectly:

“But if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil. No law   can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”