Anxiety: The Unsung Hero

Seen as a nuisance, yet it is your biggest advocate.

The Pyramid of Luxuries

The Bespoke - $1,000 Groceries Gift Card

The Ultra High End - $100 Potbelly Gift Card

The Superpremium - Potbelly

The Premium Core - Potbelly Gift Card

The Accessible Core - Anxiety: The Unsung Hero

The Affordable Luxury - TRIVIA: Which one means “fear of being alone”?

The Everyday Luxury - Combined Social with Charity

The Bespoke

Last week for September submissions!

Click on the banner to enter The Bespoke Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: $1,000 Grocery Gift Card [ARV $1,000]

• Odds: For every 130 Ducky Tran premium member by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) Grocery gift card

• Contest Period: September 4, 2024 at 10 AM CST to October 1, 2024 at 10 PM CST

The Ultra High End

Previous Contest Winner

The winner of Issue 44 Ultra High End Contest is KEVIN from ARLINGTON, TEXAS! Here’s his submission for “something that makes you double-take”:

Congratulations KEVIN, you won the $100 Grooming Gift Card! You can you use it to get any grooming supplies you may need so you don’t end up on the next double-take photo contest. Check out the other submissions:

I was surprised there wasn’t anything scary, but then again, I guess most scary things you only want to see once. It seems like things that are funny or that make you hungry is what makes you double-take.

This Week’s Contest

Click on the banner to enter The Ultra High End Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: $100 Potbelly Gift Card [ARV $100]

• Odds: For every 70 Ducky Tran premium members by the time of judging, I will give out a gift card

• Contest Period: September 25, 2024 at 10 AM CST to October 1, 2024 at 10 PM CST

You may be wondering why Potbelly? In short, I want you to try or share my favorite sub sandwich with others. To find out what to order, you have to read my flashback in the Superpremium section this week.

The Superpremium

This week’s Superpremium topic is Potbelly. Presently, it feels like every restaurant has their own version of the hot chicken sandwich. Before that, it was the fried chicken sandwich. And further back, it was the chicken tender box. Nostalgia time!

If you go back to the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s, you have the subway sandwich craze! It lasted a long time and thousands of sub sandwich shops opened all over the world, here are some you may have heard of: Subway, Blimpie, Quiznos, Jimmy John, Which Wich, Firehouse, and many more. Just from these 6 specifically mentioned, there are already over 42,000 stores!

However, out of all the sub shops, I really only ate at one place, specifically one sandwich. It was definitely the right place, the right time, and the right people scenario; Potbelly’s Sandwich Shop, college years, and with my wife (then girlfriend). At least once a week, I would stop by the Potbelly store next to the UT Austin campus and grab the Big Italian with hot peppers. (The sandwich is shown above)

Other than the right place, time and people, this sandwich was delicious. I ate for 3 people, so the Big sandwich was necessary. I like salty and spicy foods, and this sandwich delivered! The pickle, pepper oil, cured meat and cheese made it into a charcuterie on the go. It was as fancy as a college kid could get while delivering all the right flavors. I recommend you try it if you haven’t, Potbelly has many locations, but they all feel homey due to their wood interior designs. Sitting at a Potbelly having a Big Italian with hot peppers really feels like the good ol’ days.

The Premium Core

For anyone that can’t wait for the prize or are frequent flyers of Potbelly, here’s a deal for you! If you do happen to go, invite me and we can grab a sub together.

Deal #1: This week you can get a $25 Potbelly gift card for just $15 at shop.duckytran.com. There will only be 8 available.

The Accessible Core

Anxiety: The Unsung Hero

TRIGGER ALERT! The article may have opinions and concepts that are triggering to some individuals. Please realize it is meant to be an informational article with my opinions on certain topics, it is okay to agree or disagree, but please keep it tame.

This week’s focus is mental wealth, I want to discuss how anxiety has been trying to help us regardless of how it has been demonized by our present-day society. However, I am not here to discuss about how Big Pharma is monetizing depression and anxiety as I don’t have the background to prove such; however, American journalist Robert Whitaker does and has chronologically shown how it happened in his easy-to-read article.

Even though I don’t have the credentials to prove the former concept, both society and I have witnessed horrendous acts by large corporations acting for their financial gain without remorse on damaging effects to the general public. Here are a few examples if you have forgotten:

1. Theranos lying about blood testing technology to be worth billions.

2. Boeing trying to save money resulted in life-threatening software which crashed their 747 Max

3. Wells Fargo faked accounts

4. Tobacco companies lying about harmful ingredients in cigarettes

The Robert Whitaker’s article walks through the events that brought us to where we are today fearing the thing that protects us from our fears, anxiety.

Truly, anxiety and depression are very complex concepts and chemically even more complex. To state what they are, to be, cures and remedies, or anything of such should be left to the researchers. There are so many levels that I will only be discussing the general concept of anxiety and not only the levels that society wants to discuss, extreme levels. However, we do know something about it, its history. The history of anxiety is everything we can see, experience, and learn about.

By definition, anxiety is a feeling of fear, dread, and uneasiness. In our lives and history, anxiety has kept us from running off a climb, burning on hands on fire, and withdrawing when approached by a tiger. When we recognize our anxiety and try to understand why it is present, we can see a resolution; however, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

We seek therapy, medicine, and miracles as cures to our anxiety when all those things are avenues to help get to the solution of our anxiety. For instance, we are sad that we lost a loved one, so we may seek therapy to talk to someone about the depression that followed. However, we fail to realize that our depression showed the impact the person had on us and to embrace that love. We could grasp the lessons and love that person showed and replicate in other people’s lives; instead, we sulk by constantly talking about a point in time that have already pass.

Therapy should be used to find a solution and not seen as the solution, as anxiety normally reveals the solution but we hide it by ignoring it.

Medicine is good when, chemically it is too much or too little for us to control ourselves, but once we get to a medium, we should be trying to rid of the medicine. As proven in many medical studies, drugs that alter our neurotransmitter production, will make our body dependent on it. However, this is rarely the case, and people of left addicted and dependent on these drugs once meant to help them.

Miracles. Either through religion or not, miracles exists when there is not logical explanation for something to happen. However, why wait for a miracle when feeling better without any help itself is a miracle. Not just a play on words, but it should be seen that anxiety is a feeling or sign, not an action. It is up to us to act on these feelings given to us and miracles will happen.

There is much more I want to write about, but in this forum, this is as much as I can write before it gets too much. To summarize it, anxiety tells us the solution it thinks we should take, it is up to us to move forward or backward with it.

Don’t sit on the solution when it is provided.

Don’t complain that no solution is present, when you haven’t willingly opened your eyes.

Don’t just talk about the incident, act on it.

Don’t just drown yourself so you forget anxiety (the actual solution).

Don’t wait for a miracle, when the miracle was in front of you the whole time.

The Affordable Luxury

Issue 44 Community Poll Results

Here’s the results from last week:

1. About 60% of members said they have stage fright. I am one of those people, even though I can control it to a certain degree.

2. Between the fear of spiders, tight spaces, bumps, and drowning, which one is the scariest? You voted 50/50 between spiders and drowning. Spiders are smaller than humans, but vast bodies of water are too daunting to me.

3. TRIVIA: What is algophobia? Answer is the fear of pain, which half of voters got correct, the other half picked the fear of math.

This Week’s Community Poll

Here are this week’s poll questions:

The Everyday Luxury

I asked you if I should combined a charity event with the BBQ Social and about 60% said yes; however, those that said no gave great feedback. My goal will be to make sure the charity event can occur without interference with the eating period or the socializing part of the social event too much. That way, the social event and charity event can occur on the same day, but on a non-interference basis.

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