The Before and After Speaks for Itself

As a slightly tech addicted docomo customer I wanted to keep the rock solid signal docomo provides even in the hinterlands of Japan. As the negotiations began back a few years ago between Apple and the mobile service providers in this country, I watched in dismay as they set up something with softbank. I spend a good portion of the year out in the countryside and am well aware of the softbank customer disclaimer, “I’ll see if I can get a signal and call you when I get there.”

I waited for iphone to get set-up with docomo. There were rumors but nothing happened…so I waited some more and waited a few months more until I couldn’t take not having a smart phone anymore. One chilly evening in December I found myself in Yodabashi Camera buying a blackberry and switching over my account from the pricey Sharp 906i touchscreen mobile with a 5mg digi cam I had been using. Over fancy camera features, I wanted wifi. I wanted to sync with my google calendar, contacts, and gmail. I wanted to stop beating my way through the Japanese language only i-mode websites and have full web browsing. I wanted a twitter app, wordpress app, evernote app, and flickr app. Basically I wanted my phone to catch up to web 2.0.

I’m a big mac fan and a sucker for the bells, whistles, and endless app options for the iphone but I am having a great time with this blackberry bold. While I imagine I’d get used to the iphone touchscreen, the tactile nature of the keyboard is a real bonus. I have also found enough available for me to get it to do almost everything I want it to, including sync podcasts from itunes. I am more than a bit annoyed with how long it is taking Skype and RIM to come out with Skype for blackberry but it probably won’t be too much longer now.

While I like it’s overall appearance, I did find the full black look a little unimaginative. Coveroo out of San Francisco, California has a whole heap of battery cover solutions to pimp out a blackberry. Mine now resembles something of a college dorm tapestry which I’m pretty happy with. It’s not an iphone but I love this device and in addition to all the web 2.0 stuff, it does radical things like make phone calls wherever I happen to be.

Basics – You put in a question and Aardvark sends it out to people who can help you. On the flip side of that, what are you an expert in? Aardvark also enables you to help people with questions that you know the answers to. It basically relies on that age-old joy of helping people out and maybe to a degree showing off what you know. After all, most everyone likes to at least be asked…

I’ve been working with aardvark for about 6 months and it isn’t invasive. I get a question every week or two and I try to respond intelligently. I claim not to know much but I know something about living in Japan (having been here 9 years) and a bit about fitness. Most of my questions seem to fall into those two niches and the answers aren’t hard to come up with.

So today I got this question from a guy in the US. “”What’s the best way to get rid if man-boobs sans surgery? Push-ups? And if so which form works best?” Tell me your heart doesn’t go out to a dude trying to rid himself of man-boobs so I wrote back.

Dear Aardvark,

There are no magic pills for this. Push-ups will make the muscle underneath whatever fat you are storing stronger but won’t address the issue directly. This is a common misconception in fitness like doing sit-ups to get rid of belly fat.

There are a few things to know…

One is that everyone’s body stores excess energy in fat. You actually need it because the human body can only store approx 800 calories in the blood. Everyone’s body stores fat in different places. For some guys this results in a big ole beer belly, back fat, or for others man-boobs. What you need to do is get your metabolism up (try cycling for burning off calories, hard to beat it), help your body burn off the fat by staying hydrated (drink water), and eat less food/more often like 6 small meals a day of modest portions ie not putting in enough calories in a single sitting where you body will need to store it in fat.

Then work on building some muscle tone like doing push-ups or sit-ups or lifting weights whatever. Muscle tissue burns energy just sitting there so not only will the exercise it takes to build muscle burn calories but having better muscle tone will enable you to burn more energy even when you aren’t doing anything at all.

Those efforts combined will get rid of the man-boobs, bro. Good luck.

In return, I get the satisfaction of helping a stranger during my morning break at work and will probably take my own advice and get out for ride after work.

Click to join Aardvark

One potential impact this holds for counselling is that we are possibly more attuned to each others’ subtle shifts in mood but further removed from an actual experience of each other. This mode of existence may leave a therapeutic domain that relies on such fundamentals as empathy and understanding deficient in the millions of opportunities to practice and hone these skills.

Bergum & Dossetor (2005) proposed that:

While not obvious in this short quotation, this comment was primarily a response to a detached pathological view of therapy work. I offer that it is also a useful response to an expanding interpersonal culture with increasing rates of interaction but arguably decreasing intimacy. To me, the idea of deep and meaningful interaction is akin to “presence” as pointed to over two thousand years ago by the questions of Lao Tsu in the Tao-Te-Ching.



Can you coax your mind from its wandering
 and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
 supple as a newborn child’s?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
 until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
 without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
 by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from you own mind
 and thus understand all things?

Counsellors must work to be more and more helpful amidst a decline of certain forms of intimacy.  A look at modern day idea of embodiment against a backdrop of a Taoist interpretation of presence offers us meaningful direction and insight into where we should be placing our emphasis.

Bergum, V.,  & Dossetor, J. (2005). Relational ethics: The full meaning of respect. Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group.

Lao, T. (1995). Tao-Te-Ching (S. Mitchell, trans) Retrieved June 01, 2009 from Academic Brooklyn, academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/ taote-v3.html. (Original work published 6th Century BC)

We were given the following case study to analyze:

A female client presents to you with some apprehension regarding a fairly new relationship. She has been dating and spending time with someone that she thinks might be worth a longer-term commitment. On the one hand, this person shares many of the same values and beliefs as your client. The two of them enjoy time together watching movies, taking walks, and eating out. They also share some core beliefs about religion and education and the value of on-going self-development. Your client says that she is really developing feelings of fondness and caring in the relationship. On the other hand, your client is worried because her last relationship started well but ended badly and unexpectedly. She describes the last relationship as starting in much the same way, and after a period of closeness and intimacy, her last partner left unexpectedly. Now she fears that this may happen again and is scared that her reluctance to connect further might be a kind of “catch-22″ – she fears going deeper because it might fall apart, but the fear of going deeper might be the thing that leads this relationship to fall apart.

Here is a graphic depicting how the information can be tracked using Keeney’s gallery approach.

Taking this further, yesterday I entered my notes from sessions with clients into a hosted form very similar to this sample immediately following or during session. (Don’t mind the Japanese formatting on the form, its because of my region) Try punching in some details into the form. Go ahead… I made a sample to goof around with, you can’t hurt anything. The button at the bottom should say “submit” but reads in Japanese for me here so I’m not sure what you’ll see exactly.

Once information is entered into the form it automatically gets put into this spreadsheet. Obviously the spreadsheet with my client notes on it is password protected so that only I can view it, but for this demo I hosted the form so you could see how it works. I put in the “Pierre” information just so it wouldn’t be empty.

I can keep a weekly or daily log using the spreadsheet and it gives me an automatic time stamp. Like any spread sheet it enables me to sort the data by name etc as I want. We use a separate database at work but it wasn’t hard to cut and paste the content from these cells into the fields at work.

What suggestions or feedback do you have? Do you think this would be useful for you? We have wi-fi everywhere and heaps of bandwidth. I am on a MacBook so it is dead simple to open and use wherever I am. It might not work without that infrastructure..other issues?

Keeney, B.P. (2001). Improvisational therapy: A practical guide for creative clinical strategies. Guilford Press.

This photo post is the product of a new tool I am trying out. First it was introduced to me by Brian Lockwood our IT Director at school. It is really very cool so he deserves all kinds of credit for spreading the word on this. This free product enables you to send photos via e-mail to be instantly uploaded to your various blogs, tweets, and via flickr to facebook pages etc. Incredible!

The site is www.posterous.com you create a free account using your mobile phone e-mail address (if you want to send images from your phone to everything).

Posterous recognizes your mail addy and automatically downloads attached files which it in turn is set-up to forward to your different blogs and profile pages. It is dead simple and works!

Next I want to try out some text and see where that gets me…

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