Every Thursday is Goat-Free Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

New age self help gets it wrong. As an industry, it seems to be of the consistent opinion that if you start feeling better about yourself, good things will happen. This is is a very popular opinion, but it’s backwards.

I ran across a video on the net of the episode Oprah did about The Secret. I’ve heard quite a lot of people talking about it, mostly in very unflattering terms, so I checked it out. The Secret, it seems, is visualization. Fake it till you make it. Affirmations. If you can dream it, you can be it. It’s not a new concept, obviously — philosophical fraternities like Freemasons and Rosicrucians and western esoteric and occult orders like The Golden Dawn and Theosophy have been teaching this stuff in one way or another for hundreds of years, and if you believe their lineage claims, thousands of years. And yes, I’m coming out to say that any group or system or book that appeals to enlightenment junkies will essentially tell you the same thing. The details will be different, as will the symbolism and the method, but in the end it’s all very similar. If you can sufficiently convince yourself that a change in the universe will come to pass, you subconsciously begin behaving in a manner that will allow these changes to occur. The explanations on the mechanics vary widely, but that’s the gist of it.

There seems to be a very big difference in execution, though, between the “traditional” enlightenment systems and the new age self help version. The enlightenment folks will be very quick to remind you that a ritual or practice alone usually isn’t enough to manifest a change the you want, but that you need to prepare yourself beforehand and take action afterwards. If your change doesn’t manifest, you didn’t sufficiently prepare yourself, or you didn’t do the practice appropriately, or you didn’t apply enough follow up. If you succeed, congratulations, you are probably prepared for next time.

New age self help systems, I’ve noticed, don’t work this way. They seem to rely entirely on the method they favor, and don’t have a whole lot of preparation or follow through. This is certainly how The Secret is presented. You just do the visualization, and good things will happen. It gets more sinister then that, though. New age systems have a nasty, cult-like habit of saying, explicitly or implicitly, that any success you may have is due to their system, but any failure you may have is entirely your fault.

Nice, huh? They’re selling wishful thinking that nullifies your personal accomplishments and claims them as their own, while simultaneously negating their failures and heaping them on you.

Do I think they work? Maybe. Everyone needs a filter or a system by which they can view their lives and create some semblance of order or organization so problems can be dealt with and moving on can happen, if only occasionally. Traditionally, this has been a function of religion, with philosophy following a distant, if trendy, second. With our (American) culture growing more secular and cynical over time, those options become less viable, or perhaps plausible, to the individual. Unfortunately, the need is still there, and that vacuum has been filled to bursting by the new age self help industry. It may be quite helpful to some people, but I think that, on the whole, new age self help misses the boat, and here’s why.

Enormous amounts of energy are devoted to the concept of self-esteem. It’s become so prevalent in public education, for instance, that it’s become a joke. (Did you hear the one about the school that banned kids from playing tag because being “it” might harm their delicate self-esteem? Oh wait, that’s no joke.) Somewhere along the line, the idea spread that a person can only achieve if they feel good about themself first. This is bullshit. Self esteem that isn’t grounded in something is hopelessly fragile and must constantly be reinforced externally. Furthermore, it can build a rampaging sense of entitlement. This combination results in truly insufferable people. You know the type — full grown adults who are all smiles and sunshine until you tell them no, and they suddenly transform into a college-educated, tantrum-throwing toddler who missed their nap.

People like this base their self-esteem entirely on other people telling them that they have worth. As long as the world plays along, everything is hunky-dorey. If one of these deluded handjobs is suddenly confronted with opinion that they’re not the wonderful person they’ve been led to believe, however, they have no defense. That negative opinion floats in and nestles right next to all the positive stuff and holds just as much sway as anything else they’ve heard. Someone bearing negativity at you is a profound personal attack when you build your self image on nothing more substantive than “you’re special for just you being you”. (My sincerest apologies to Mr. Rogers.)

The real kind of self-esteem comes from accomplishing things. Doing stuff makes you feel good. This sort of self-esteem grows internally; you don’t need to rely on other people to tell you how awesome you are, because you can instantly recall that feat of awesomeness and tell yourself. It’s also a much more solid form of self-esteem — if you don’t rely on people to buoy your sense of awesome, you’ll be much less vulnerable to other people reminding you how much you suck.

So here’s the simplicity lesson for today: Just do it. (Sorry, too, Nike.) If you find yourself completely crippled by a soul-crushing depression, see a doctor. Otherwise, forget the new age self help garbage and just get started. Find your bills and start crunching numbers. Look at your pantry and plan tomorrow’s dinner. Sit down and write the first part of the first chapter of your novel. Find a box and declutter your kitchen table. Accomplish something. No matter how small it is, it will feel good, I promise, and it will be the first step to successfully completing great things. When you make good things happen, you’ll feel good about yourself.

Note: if this is all a little too… concrete for you to deal with, check out the writeup of The Secret that Trent did over at The Simple Dollar. He comes at it from an entirely different direction, and I can’t disagree with one word he says.

Every Tuesday is Kitchen Sink day at Living Behind the Curve.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you just quit your job? No new job to move on to, no massive emergency fund - nothing but a lot of bills and a handful of dreams. Welcome to my brain. I’m finally accepting what those around me have been saying for months - it’s time to move on from my job.

It is our plan that eventually both of us will quit our dayjobs in pursuit of a simpler lifestyle with passive income and the occasional freelance gig to keep things interesting. It will take money to get to that point, and until today, I was soldiering along, believing that I need this “good” job in order to get to where we want to be.

The part of me that wants to be happy now is getting louder every day. There are dozens of reasons to stay where I am - the benefits, the career opportunities, the stability. Are those reasons just excuses? Ten years from now, am I relaly going to kick myself in the ass because I gave up a 401(k) plan?

I’m not sure what the answer is for me, but I know now that it isn’t here. I’m being held in place by fear of the unknown and fear of failure. It’s time to find out what’s beyond the fear. Maybe it’s a part-time consulting job with my current employer. Maybe it’s back-to-basics tech support. Maybe it’s something completely different. It scares the shit out of me, but I’ll never know until I look.

Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

People who write infomercials are convinced that women are morons. They have to be. How else could they build marketing campaigns built on a foundation concept that, for example, millions of people are wasting untold hours bewildered by a complicated, malfunctioning pair of scissors? Most of this junk is either for the kitchen or for cleaning, and therefore marketed directly to women, and I frankly find it infuriating that an entire industry is built on the asinine assumption that women are too incompetent to do “women’s work“.

Rampaging sexism aside, there are ways to actually make your cooking and cleaning simpler. I’ve collected my favorite tips together for today’s whiter, brighter and cleanly-scented 11 Simple Kitchen Solutions That Really Work.

1. Dani’s dad gave us a pair of kitchen shears for the holidays last year, and damn if they aren’t the most useful tools in my kitchen. I use them to chop veggies for soup, open frozen slow cooker meals, snip herbs and efficiently de-bone whole chickens. I’ve also twice butchered entire 10 pound chuck primals into 1 inch cube-oids with nothing but kitchen shears. If you’ve never owned a pair, go get some. It’ll take a little while, but soon you’ll be constantly finding new uses for them that you’d never considered.

2. Cider or distilled vinegar can be had by the gallon jug at any supermarket for a dollar or two, and until a few years ago, I couldn’t figure out what anyone would do with that much vinegar. I was raised to believe that common vinegar was a seasoning for dark green vegetables, bought sixteen ounces at a time, and sprinkled conservatively on your dinner from small salad oil cruets. I was also taught that you can use vinegar to clean your coffeepot. Since I met Dani, I’ve learned that vinegar not only tastes good, it also cleans floors, polishes glass, unclogs your drains, and kills bugs dead without any nasty chemicals to poison you or your pets. Speaking of pets, it’ll neutralize the pungent odor from what are euphemistically referred to as “pet stains” just as well as those mysterious enzyme sprays. Vinegar is good stuff. Use it.

3. Is your coffee just not giving you the perk in the morning it once did? Are you suffering from tepid, weak, bitter or just plain boring brew? Then get out and get yourself a french coffee press. These exotic little bits of javacrucianism are simply the best devices out there to make coffee with. Over-brewing is the #1 culprit for bitter, sour coffee. A french press doesn’t brew coffee as much as it steeps it, making it much more difficult to extract the nasty flavors from your beans. French pressing your coffee also adds a lot more of the beans essential oils into your coffee, giving it a much more unctuous, almost silky texture, and a wildly rich and complex flavor. If you’re in the market for one, though, be careful; since they’re all fancy and French, a lot of retailers will charge enormous prices for them. Don’t be fooled. Last time I checked, IKEA sells an excellent French press for about 12 bucks. All you need to do is throw some coffee in the bottom, and pour in some water that you get from your nifty…

4. Electric kettle! Yeah, OK, I could just put a regular kettle on the stove and boil it and bam, hot water. It’s not exactly the lowest-tech solution on the block, but the electric kettle is an improvement on the original. They’re lighter, they’ve got insulated handles on the side, and they boil faster. They’re super handy if you need hot stock for a recipe, to deglaze a pan or make risotto with. And have you ever tried to reach inside and clean a tea kettle? I’ve got large hands, and have yet to meet one that has a hole on top big enough to admit mine. And it was built to make…

5. The greatest kitchen crud-busting cleaning fluid known to man: Hot Water. If you soak your baked-on crud with power dissolver and hot water, the crud will lift away. If you soak your dried-on muck with dish soap and hot water, your muck will be a mere memory. If you soak your burnt-on crust in hot water, it’ll disappear. Detecting a pattern here? It’s very unusual that a dish soaked in soapy water will be cleaner than if it was just soaked for the same amount of time in plain hot water. Hot water is also fundamental to my favorite cleaning trick. This is especially good to do if you’re about to replace your sponge. Get the sponge nice and wet, and throw it in your cruddy microwave, right on the turntable. Set the microwave on high for a couple of minutes, carefully remove the now very hot sponge, and just wipe the crud out of your ‘wave with a towel. It works, and you don’t need to worry about cleaning chemicals accidentally staying in there and possibly mixing with your popcorn.

6. A potato masher. The old-fashioned wiggly wire metal kind, thank you very much, as they’re about a million times easier to clean than the usually plastic cross-hatch variety. It’s perfect for mashing potatoes, obviously, but it’s also great for mixing meatloaf, stirring thick sauces, or making lots of different sorts of dough. The next time you reach for your heavy spatula or sturdy wooden spoon, take another look at your masher.

7. Scrubbies. You know the scrubby green back on your kitchen sponge? You can get little packs of just that stuff for, yanno, scrubbing. Do yourself a favor, though, and buy the name brand. I’ve found the generic versions useless. Grab one, and keep it separate from the others, and use it to scrub your potatoes and other veggies. It’s so much easier than dealing with a traditional veggie brush, trust me. They’re also the best solution I’ve found for scrubbing soap scum out of the corners of your bathtub ledge.

8. You know Dani and I love our slow cooker with an unnatural passion. It cooks. It’s fairly easy to clean. It keeps food hot if you’re doing a buffet. It’s great for melting wax if you want to dip your own candles. You can simmer potpourri in there and make your house smell nice. If you put a sheet of aluminum foil in the bottom, add plenty of water, a couple of hefty pinches of salt and about three times that amount of baking soda, then dump grandma’s silver in and set it to cook on high for half an hour or so, you’ll have nice clean silver, too, no polishing needed.

9. Spring-loaded tongs. I shouldn’t have to explain this one. Go watch the Food Network, and see that every single chef AND Rachel Ray uses these flat aluminum v-shaped tongs for everything. They’re simple and cheap, and yet they’re almost never found in the typical American kitchen. Just go get a couple and make me happy.

10. Not just for your dad to do that stupid walrus impression every single time you go out for Chinese food, chop sticks are sorely lacking on this continent. They’re my favorite tool for cooking delicate foods, like eggs and fish. If you need to whisk something but find a whisk is incorporating too much air (scrambled eggs come to mind), use chop sticks. They also work great in a pinch as skewers and corn holders, too. What, you say you can’t use them? Learn. You never know when you’ll be invited to have dinner with the Emperor.

11. Last on my list, silicone pot holders. Remember the last time you grabbed your fluffy pot holders and dumped your spaghetti, but the water splashed back onto the holder and it absorbed the boiling hot water and you burned the Janet Reno out of your fingers? Yeah. Silicone pot holders won’t do that. They also make excellent trivets and keep cutting boards from sliding around, and they’re the second best tool for opening stubborn bottles and jars I’ve ever met.

(The best tool for opening jars and bottles is a probably 75 year old iron mechanical doodad my mom picked up somewhere, and I’ve demanded she state clearly in her will that I get it when she shuffles off this mortal coil. Incidentally, after threatening her with a lease in a substandard nursing home in her old age if I don’t get her jar opener few weeks back, she says she found a replica of it at a small specialty store in New Jersey. I’ve been looking for one for years and never found one like hers. I’m seeing her this weekend, so watch this space, as I’ll probably rattle on and on about The Best Jar Opener Ever next week. It really is that good.)

Did I forget something you can’t live without? Leave a comment and let me know!

Every Thursday is Goat-Free Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

I was a geek anomaly – the one person among my peers that always had an empty Inbox. Every time someone remarked freeing it must be, I shivered. I was slave to my folders.

Every time I joined a new list, or made a new contact, I created a new filter, a new label. Eventually, those folders became so involved and cluttered that I couldn’t find anything, much less know what to do with it when I did. This nasty habit also spilled over into my RSS reader, where dozens of feeds were being corralled in to almost as many labels.

One day, I snapped. I needed to go one step beyond email bankruptcy and find a system that would keep the clutter under control. A few brainstorming sessions later, I did it, and you can do it too.

Here’s what I did:

• All of the existing messages were marked as read. This allowed me to mentally release all those items from my to-do list.
• All of my messages, no matter their age or subject matter, were moved to a “Saved” folder. I can search them if I need to, but otherwise they are out of sight.
• I deleted all of my filters and rules. Any incoming email was now hitting my Inbox directly and could not be ignored.
• Any incoming messages were subject to a game of hardball. If I didn’t gain value from that message, I took 15 seconds to unsubscribe from that service and delete the message.
• When a valuable message arrived, I dealt with it immediately. I moved it to a new general label or left it in the Inbox, starred for later.
• Because I use Gmail to catch a number of different addresses, I created filters by incoming address. My personal mail goes into one folder, my freelancing mail to another, etc. I use those folders as mini-Inboxes, and process each one as I have the time.
• Once a day, I make a point to review my starred items. I may not take action on all of them, but it gives me an excellent idea of what needs to be done.

Traditional email bankruptcy scared the hell out of me, but this process was so useful that I used it to clean up my RSS feeds as well. It’s not terribly time-consuming, and it’s incredibly freeing. I’ve added this to my household spring cleaning list: vacuum refrigerator coils, power-wash the deck, refresh email/RSS. I hope that these habits, in conjunction with common-sense practices like those listed here, will keep me from once again becoming a slave to my mail.

Every Thursday is Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

Recently, I read an article on a simplicity blog that extolled the virtues of living without a microwave. When this blogger looked at her microwave use, she saw that she was using it for heating water for tea, defrosting meat, and not much else. So, she pitched it.

She went on to explain the repercussions of going ‘waveless. Defrosting meat, she said, took a little more planning than she was used to, but she found the experience to be an excellent exercise in being more organized. In heating her tea water, however, there were big changes. Post-microwave, she uses her teakettle to boil water, which has given her a calming start to her day. She’s found extra time to devote to other things while the water boils, and the ritual helps her appreciate the little things in life a bit more than she used to. Incidentally, she also got to develop a much more intimate relationship with her collection of teapots.

I love my microwave, but if I used my microwave as little as she did, I’d lose it too — I can think of so many better uses for that space. My hat is off to her for a decisive move that challenges assumptions all over the place. Rock on!

Oh, hey, one more thing. Microwaved food gives you cancer.

Wait, what?

She goes on to cite some very questionable sources and a BBC article that was later retracted. There were two “studies” done, but they weren’t published, peer-reviewed, or even detailed enough to say what allegedly precancerous gunk they found floating in your body. If you’d like to read more, this is an excellent and exhaustive article detailing the more common claims about the safety of microwaves and the food they heat, along with safety guidelines for microwave cooking.

It’s nothing but Internet pseudo-science, folks: Internet legend based on a grain of truth.

OK, now the link. I didn’t share it at the top because I didn’t want my rant at the bottom to take away from the fact that, before the fear-mongering, this was a damn good concept. Examine your stuff and question how much you really need it. If you don’t, out it goes. It’s one more thing taking up space, and one more thing you have to clean.

Also? Don’t believe everything that you read.

UPDATE! I was pointed out to me that “Johns Hopkins” has a lot to say about how plastic wrap in the microwave releases cancer-causing dioxins into our food when microwaved. They certainly do.