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I used up one of my monthly free New York Times articles reading an extremely short piece about how replacement works better than resistance when it comes to breaking bad habits.  So whenever you get the urge to do your bad habit… let’s say… eat a handful of cookies (what? They’re small!), you do something else, such as get a glass of seltzer.

Except that puts you in the kitchen near the cookies.

Which is bad.

So instead I replace walking into the kitchen with walking around the block.  Instead of eating cookies, I’ve used up five minutes of my day (plus the two minutes it takes me to tie my shoes because I’m terrible at tying shoes) to take a walk.  Walking makes me thirsty so I swing by the kitchen for a cup of water and see the cookies… and the whole process starts all over again.

This isn’t really my point.  My point is that the New York Times made me waste one of my free articles on this advice.  It’s not clever.  It’s not earth-shattering.  By default, if you’re resisting any behaviour you are doing something else, which means you were already practicing replacement.  But now I’m out one article and no closer to resisting the handful of cookies.

Strangely, this piece of advice was in the money section.  I’m not sure how it relates to money because the author never related it to money.

New York Times, I want my one free article back.

I learned from the title of a Forbes article that 9 – 5 was out and 1 – 6 was in.  I was intrigued because I can barely get everything done working 9 – 5. (Or… really… more like 8 – 8, but who is counting?) How would I get the same amount of work done in 5 hours per day?  25 hours per week?

The first part of the idea is sound.  We all waste time doing things that aren’t high priorities.  If we boil down our work to what actually needs to get done, it probably would fit into fewer hours.  Also, if we’re more productive at certain times of day, we should shift our schedule to fit those times.  Someone who is not a morning person may get to work at 9, but may not really kick into high gear until 11.  Why spend those first 2 hours wasting time when you can run errands and shift your work back by a bit?

But then the author lost me when she got to the meat of how she was managing to only work 5 hours.  She delegated.  She pushed off her work to other people, or, as she called it “outsourcing everything humanly possible.”  Well, sure, if I hired someone to do the tasks I had to do, I would have oodles of time because someone else would be doing chunks of my job.  If I asked my co-workers to take tasks off my plate, all I’ve done is move the task to someone else’s plate.

By that token, if I ate out every night, I’d save myself tons of time that I use on cooking.  Ditto for hiring a cleaning service so I can save time on cleaning.  An errand-running service plus a driver to get everyone to their activities.  In all of these cases, I have taken my task and asked or paid someone else to do it.  The task doesn’t go away — it just gets transferred to someone else’s plate, ensuring they have to stick to that 9 – 5 life while I get to enjoy the 1 – 6 world.

THAT feels like a larger time suck — playing hot potato with tasks.  I’m waiting for the next part of the article which is “You could have 10% more money if you stopped outsourcing tasks you can take care of yourself.”  The never-ending financial advice cycle.

There was a Carolyn Hax column this week that resonated so deeply that I left it starred in my inbox so I could keep thinking about it everyday.  The situation didn’t fit my life, but the advice was spot-on… well… for everyone.

The question was about a person who sabotaged his/her brother’s relationship because he/she was jealous.  Things weren’t going well in the asker’s life, so he/she made up a story that the brother’s girlfriend was cheating on him.  It was quickly apparent that it was a lie, and now everything was awkward between them.  The question asker wanted to know how to make things okay between the asker and his/her sibling again.

She explains the root cause of jealousy using a line from Silence of the Lambs — “We covet what we see.”  She explains: “We see people right next to us and interpret their lives as basically the same as ours except better.”  I added the italics because that was the line that made me think all week.  “Basically the same as ours except better.”  Meaning, the other person has no problems, no shortcomings, no struggle.

They’re Melissa without all of Melissa’s challenges.  Except… of course… they’re not.

As Carolyn points out later in the column: “If you hadn’t met her to use for comparison, your eyes might well have rested on another life to covet, someone else to resent as a handy vessel for your general, harder-to-resolve anger at life.”

It’s such an interesting way of looking at jealousy, to know that if it wasn’t this person, it would be someone else.  They are just the vessel, and like other inanimate vessels, we don’t really consider its back story beyond thinking about its usage.  The other person is reduced to the situation or object you covet, their personal story stripped away until they are no different than the drinking glasses in a kitchen cabinet.  Merely vessels to hold water… or our feelings.

It’s a baby-filled world, which is a good thing.  The alternative is the destruction of the human race, so I’ll take my dose of infancy for the good of society as a whole.  But sometimes I need to take that jealousy and pour it into looking at puppies on Petfinder.  Whatever gets you through coveting what you see.

When we went to Montreal, we packed two suitcases.  We checked the larger one and took the smaller one as a carry-on.  The small suitcase contained our toothbrushes and toothpaste, one complete outfit for each person, and our pyjamas.  If the main suitcase got lost, we bought ourselves at least 24 hours without losing anything from our trip.  Hopefully enough time to be reunited with the main case.

I thought I was brilliant for doing that.

I’m probably not, but we’ve been compiling travel hacks like that because we have a bunch of big trips coming up.  My favourite so far has been tips from the CIA.  95% of the statements in the article make me feel as if I am going to be attacked anywhere I go at any moment.  But one idea is brilliant: “What does a CIA agent always pack for a trip? A doorstop. When you lock yourself into your hotel room at night, slip the doorstop under the door to keep intruders from being able to force the door open. The doorstop is effective even when the chain or other external locks give way.”

Isn’t that brilliant?  And scary?  But also brilliant?

On a less scary note, I’ve been collecting disposable shower caps to place shoes inside (so the dirty bottoms aren’t touching the clothes in the suitcase).  And I’m totally mesmerized by videos like the one below.  Who does this?

Do all of your clothes come out wrinkled?  I can’t imagine that they aren’t wrinkled or creased when you unroll them.  If you promise me that they look okay after being rolled up like that for a week, I’ll do it.

And what are your best travel hacks?

There was a great article about adult resilience recently in the Washington Post; namely, “whole-life resilience, that ability to bounce back when upsetting or stressful things happen.”  The author was talking about ways he tried to wrap his brain around normal, everyday stress, though once he dipped into the Pain Olympics, my brain instantly turned to infertility and loss.

He tells the story of a person who goes to a hospital waiting room when she needs to gain some perspective on her own problems.  She looks at the people waiting and realizes that whatever she’s dealing with isn’t as bad.

The author points out that we can’t minimize our own emotional suffering just by pointing out that we would be feeling worse if we were in that person’s position.  We have no clue how we would deal with their pain because it’s their pain.  And, frankly, we have no clue what other factors are at play with their stress or situation.

He writes, “Who gets to judge another person’s suffering? Aren’t there degrees of it that are relative to an individual’s own experience? Does someone really suffer less just because his life has been less fraught, say, with poverty or extreme trauma? ”

He goes on to dissect one of Viktor Frankl’s ideas, stating: “Even small-scale suffering shouldn’t be dismissed outright: It may look like nothing to an outsider, but to someone who is hurting, it can fill all their emotional space.”

Fill all their emotional space.

Isn’t that a perfect description of it?  Regardless of your infertility situation, it’s filling your emotional space.  It coats each one of us evenly inside, even if the amount may be different if poured into another vessel.

But that’s sort of the point.  It can’t be poured into another vessel.  You get your own liquid filling your own emotional space when the stressors pour inside.

An interesting take on the Pain Olympics.