Stirring the Pot Read Online Free Page A

Woodpecker. I’d also rather have someone
else
tap on a certain body part while I focus on pleasure for a while, if you know what I mean.
    And then there’s rock climbing, a challenge I put myself through recently that was decidedly less relaxing. I’m not sure why I thought this kind of outdoorsy, roughing-it thing would be any more enjoyable than, say, that fire pit in Zimbabwe, but I’d heard you can get a rush from the danger, so I gave it a try. I do not recommend it. No high, just PTSD.
    Even without the snow-covered rock face and terrible weather conditions like you see in a North Face ad (because this was an indoor facility), and even wearing a harness that had been tightened, checked, and re-checked, I could only get myself to the first level of the climbing structure—about ten feet off the ground. Rock climbing takes upper-body strength, but more than anything, it takes
balls
. I thought I had them. Apparently not enough. I couldn’t force myself to climb any higher and told the instructor she was justgoing to have to build me a little platform and hoist my meals up in a basket. With lots of coaxing (something tells me that my kind of paralysis was not new to them), the instructor talked me into letting go of the support beam I was clinging to and allowing her to lower me down via the ropes and harness. I will say that
that
part of the program was cool—I liked the feeling of briefly floating in space. There are simpler ways of getting that kind of high, though. And it’s now legal in several states.
    Last but not least (and no doubt not last, either), there’s my attempt at the twenty-one-day Complaint Free challenge. A self-help guru named Will Bowen thought this one up, arguing that complaining is manipulative, reveals low self-worth, is physically and psychologically unhealthy, alienates friends and family, is addictive, and stops us from realizing our dreams. Seems like kind of an overreaction to a mostly harmless little complaint, don’t you think? I would argue that as addictions go, complaining is pretty G-rated. Complaining doesn’t cause tooth decay, liver disease, or bankruptcy. Just saying.
    But I’m game and open-minded, remember?
    The basic idea is that you wear a rubber bracelet—like the Lance Armstrong one, but in purple—and switch it to your other wrist every time you complain(only spoken complaints count; you are allowed to complain in your mind as much as you want). The goal is to go twenty-one consecutive days without switching the bracelet at all. Anytime you have to switch the bracelet to your other wrist, the clock goes back to day one and you start again. Apparently, when you finish—um,
if
you finish, or if you
claim
to have finished—you can go to Bowen’s website and order a “Certificate of Happiness.” Not to complain or anything, but that sounds to me more like something you get after completing a course in tantric sex.
    Within just a couple of days of starting (and restarting) the challenge, I discovered three things:
    1. Complaining bonds people. The magic of several of my closest friendships is that we can comfortably and safely bitch about others to each other. Much as I’d like to finish what I started, I realized that I don’t want to give that pressure valve up just yet.
    2. The bracelet kind of worked like the tapping I described above: it focused me on the fact that I tend to complain mindlessly. So I started to complain more deliberately. I feel better already.
    3. A Certificate of Happiness is something I can award myself!
    In the end, it’s hard for me to say that I truly regret any challenge or therapy I’ve done in the name of self-improvement. Wait—actually, see this page for my feelings about juice detoxing, and if I were you, I’d not eat Chiclets off someone’s ass. There was actually a self-help angle involved in that episode (none of your business), but you cannot remove that kind of imagery from your mental hard drive no matter how much