I can't stand paparazzi either

I occasionally stop what I'm doing and thank my lucky stars that I have my space and privacy instead of swarms of people following me around.

Hey, you never know when you may be famous, so enjoy your obscurity now.

Trouble sleeping? Here are some tips!

One sure fire way to help reduce stress is to get better sleep. It allows the body to spend less energy focusing on survival (approximately 30% of your energy goes towards processing what your eyes see), and more energy healing and rejuvenating. The University of Maryland Medical Center has these tips on how to sleep more quickly and easily (such as Progressive Relaxation, Toe Tensing, Deep Breathing, Guided Imagery, Quiet Ears).

Another technique I've been advocating lately is to massage lavender oil your feet just as you get into bed. It not only has a pleasant aroma, but helps calm, relax, and balance both physically and emotionally.

It's important to keep in mind that these are just tools to help you cope with whatever is causing you to feel so distressed. You can apply tip after tip, but wouldn't you prefer to just sleep soundly, easily, and feel well rested when you wake up?

Fortunately there's a system to help you do that.

But at the very least start by giving yourself a set amount of time to sleep each night and protecting that time.

Stuck in the subway

It took 13 years.

I've been living in Manhattan for quite a while now, frequently using the public transportation system, and today is the first time I've been stuck in a train for an extended period (over 15 minutes).

No one in my subway car was happy about it, but everyone seemed to take it in stride. I was amazed. No one expressed a sense of entitlement, "this shouldn't be happening to me!" but there was a fair amount of, "All they (the Transit Authority) have to do to fix this is ..."

I turned my attention to jotting down a blog post and smiling at the coincidence that yesterday I saw a movie where all the transportation systems in the US were disrupted - so my predicament was fairly tame in comparison.

My gratitude list (aka, at least I've still got this going for me):
The lights are on
The air conditioning is on
The conductor is telling us why we're delayed
I have some water in a bottle
We're passing by other, non-moving trains

And those are just some of the 'practical' ones before going onto:
A fight hasn't broken out
I'm not wounded
The ceiling is sound and hasn't collapsed on us
Rats aren't storming the subway cars
No reports of anthrax

45 minutes later, I was at my subway stop and late for a meeting - a good number of the attendees were also late, and some had yet to arrive.