Tiny Victories

This episode is for everyone who is haunted by the notion that they’re not self-helping enough. Fans of NPR’s Ask Me Another can hear host Ophira Eisenberg on the Tiny Victories hotline. That show ended it’s 9-year run on NPR last week (Sept. 24th), but this week you can hear Ophira call in to the Tiny Victory hotline about her relationship to sleep. Plus, we hear from Meredith about why she’s throwing in the towel on therapy. And Annabelle sums up the common theme linking both calls by quoting Nietzsche.

We have two listener calls this week. Fielding Edlow, who stars in the web series Bitter Homes and Gardens, has unearthed the secret to a happier marriage. Plus, Cindy calls in to explain the benefits of asking for help.

Whether you like it or not, it’s pumpkin season. You can get a pumpkin latte at Starbucks, pumpkin spice Bud Light, pumpkin spice scented candles. People are simply wild about pumpkin...except for a small fraction of people who aren’t. These folks, Annabelle’s people, are part of the resistance, and it’s their time to shine.

Do you ever get recurring stress dreams? Annabelle’s been bedeviled by a particular dream for the past twenty years where she’s living in the same studio apartment from another lifetime ago. Recently, however, the dream took a turn for the small, and the studio apartment of her dreams is now a bathroom with a mattress. This week, Laura will attempt to find some way to save Annabelle from her subconscious. That’s right. Laura House will attempt to “inception” Annabelle to more fitful sleep.

There’s a fashion trend never seems to die: the prairie dress. The BBC chronicled the popularity of this zombie dress in a piece by writer Addison Nugent entitled The Prairie Look That Keeps Coming Back. To Laura “I Grew Up in Prairie, TX” House, the dress is triggering. And until a few weeks ago, Annabelle felt nothing but hate for it. And then the entire foundation for her antipathy was upended in a single afternoon. Plus, a new listener faces off against her garbage disposal, and lives to tell us about it.

For anyone who, like Laura House, HATED exercise, this is the episode for you! For her entire life, no-longer-spring-chicken Laura House has approached exercise as some approach dental care: It sucks, but it’s one of those things you just gotta do. Cut to present day, and Laura “Hoops” House, not only exercises regularly, but looks forward to it! And all it took was a basketball, and a modest goal. Plus, Annabelle tells us about her short-lived dreams of joining the WNBA.

When Annabelle got lost en route to a party, she felt a panic attack coming on and had to pull over to the side of the road. A friend recommended she try “breathwork”, and 800 classes later, Annabelle is now an expert on pranayama, holotropic and The Wim Hof Method. Sorry. The actual expert on the topic, who with her colleagues created Breathing with Color (pg. 49) , a technique to help children who are victims of trauma and crisis events. And she is a professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University, the world-renowned Robin Gurwitch, Ph.D. This episode features twice as many Gurwitches as others, and just one House.

This week’s topic are those gifts that keep on giving. Laura House tells us about two ridiculous gifts she would never buy for herself, that her brother got for her. One of those gifts was a set of self-grinding salt and pepper shakers, and Laura felt compelled to grind some salt during the recording as if Annabelle wouldn’t take her word for it. We also hear from listener Jane, who happened to be putting batteries in another kitchen gadget while leaving her message. This is a really fun show, and we encourage YOU to call in with any gift success stories that you have.

No matter how many ads for pharmaceuticals you may have seen, nor possible side effects you’ve heard listed at the end of these ads, nothing will prepare you for the side effect Annabelle experienced with the medication she’s taking. This week she shares the wild story of discovering a nondescript passageway in the bowels of Cedars Sinai Hospital where the drawings of noted Israeli artist Yaacov Agam hung on the walls. Annabelle may or may not be one step closer to a new vocation, that of an art thief.

One of the benefits of recording in the same space is that there’s no 2-second lag, and it’s a much more natural experience. But if you put two friends who like to talk in the same space for just the second time in months, the odds of keeping a session to an hour or less are slim to none. So in between takes, Laura and Annabelle caught up with each other while producer Swish eavesdropped…and kept recording. When Laura spoke about how happy she was for her fiance, Brian Swartz, Annabelle armchair-analyzed their relationship. That analysis became the first part of today’s episode, and presented a mystery that would require them to find a word detective to solve it: Is there a word that means the opposite of schadenfreude?