Video Vednesday: Woo-woo feng shui voodoo

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFYO_uAx3CM&w=480&h=385]

I've spoken before of how and why I enjoy fooling around with feng shui. For me, it's one part voodoo, six parts Really Fun Way to Clean and Organize Your House.

Anyway, I've probably spent the most time cleaning and organizing and feng shui-ing the two corners opposite one another in the far corners of the bagua, Prosperity and Helpful People & Travel. The former, everyone goes for first, for obvious reasons, which were the same ones did: "Money? Count me in!" And yeah, within two weeks of feng shui-ing the crap out of my Prosperity corner, two checks that producers had been sitting on for months, $10K each!, showed up in my mailbox. So, you know, maybe.

But really, the main reason I do those corners is because they are my kitchen and bathroom, respectively, and they get fiiiilthy. (And because, hey! More money!)

Some details possibly worth noting:

• The book I reference is Karen Rauch Carter's excellent (albeit very, very corny) Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life, which I reviewed on the blog, and which I recommend all the time, especially for people going through some horrible life b.s. that have to process. It's therapeutic and game-like at the same time, cleaning and decluttering and moving all that stuff around. (And the "fixes" are called "cures".)
• The names are written on slips of red paper because it's supposedly "activating." Again, who knows? But the acts of intentionally shopping for red paper, cutting it into strips, etc. focuses attention. You could also use a red pen on white paper. I've done that, too.
• The iPhone app I reference and use during the video is called Downtime. It's awesome and it's free. Just remember to turn off the sound if you're using it while you give a presentation. I had one hilarious experience with me and the Tarzan yell from They Might Be Giants' cover of "Istanbul, Not Constantinople." Fortunately, it was in front of a group of actors, not heads of state. (What? You don't present in front of heads of state?)
• Per the comments from last time, I did wear a scoop-necked shirt and brush on some eyebrows. But really, that's all the dolling-up I can muster these days. Sorry.
• Also, I'm sorry about the sound. It's assy, I know; haven't figured that out yet. I think the mic on the display might just be too sucky to use. It's a shame: I love the Apple LED, and it is so much more energy efficient, it's startling (there was a noticeable drop in my utility bill the month after I got it), but the audio components blow. If you are an audio-head and have suggestions, I'm all ears. So to speak.
• I'm not sorry about calling it "Video Vednesday" again. For some reason, it reminds me of my dear, departed gramps, who taught me how to do crazy cartoon accents. I think he'd get a kick out of it, so for now, it stays.

I hope you find this enjoyable and/or useful. Again, as I work out the kinks with these, I am actively soliciting feedback: good, bad or mixed. Fire away!

xxx
c

Book review: The Shadow Effect

There is a truism in acting that you cannot play a villain if you view him as such, because every character is central to his own life story and never, ever sees himself as a villain. The first thing you are supposed to do as a good actor doing responsible script analysis is to comb through the text looking for ways in which you and your character, villain or hero, are the same. Only once you've grounded yourself in those do you go back through and seek out the differences, to add color.

And if you're honest, whether you're playing a villain or a hero or, most often, for most actors, something in between, you will share most if not all of the qualities of that person, although they may manifest themselves in different ways. The most common example, thrown up the first time you have to play a killer and wonder how you can do it if you've never killed, is to take yourself back to some moment of murderous rage: in the car, at being cut off; at a mosquito who will not leave you alone; at a bully who humiliated you one too many times. (Once was usually sufficient for me.) With the possible exception of sociopaths, we are all made up of all qualities and all possibilities; we just act on them, or not, differently.

The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Power of Your Hidden Self is a collaborative effort on the part of three modern self-help authors to address the parts of us we don't or can't look at. From their individual perspectives, M.D. with a spiritual bent, recovering addict and teacher, spiritual seeker and teacher, respectively, the authors discuss the common threads in what holds us back from finding peace and joy, both as individual entities and humankind. If it can be boiled down to one thing, and maybe it can't, since the book is a little disjointed, it is that we suffer because of the way we divide and separate: ourselves, by not embracing the truth that we contain all kinds of impulses within us; and ourselves from others, mainly by denying our common humanity, looking for the differences between us, projecting and even magnifying them unduly rather than starting from the rather terrifying premise that (sociopaths excluded), we are mainly the same.

The process of re-integrating begins, as I'm finally realizing most things do, with noticing. (Damned meditators: they had it right all along.) You can start anywhere, but the authors seem to agree that a very useful place is to begin by observing how you project your own behavior onto others: he's a selfish ass; she's stuck up; they are imbeciles who refuse to listen to anyone. Very, very easy to demonize someone else. Much harder to use them as a mirror in which you view your own, horrifyingly unsaintly behavior. But really, any sort of embracing of truth will work, and there are multiple suggestions for getting started, as well as for understanding why we bury and cover and isolate in the first place.

As far as accessing the central theme of the book, that we contain multitudes, and that acknowledging the suppressed voices among them, however terrifying at the outset, is critical to becoming whole, which is critical to self-actualization, I found the first two sections, by Deepak Chopra and Debbie Ford, to be the most useful. Portions of Chopra's were actually thrilling/chilling to read, and Debbie Ford is an easygoing, super-accessible writer. Try as I might (and I did!), I can't fathom the appeal of Marianne Williamson, on the page, anyway. She seems like a lovely and compassionate human, and she certainly has a large and loyal following of people for whom her words resonate, so it's probably just me. (I feel like the same obtuse maroon reading those other giants of self-help, Wayne Dyer and Eckert Tolle, too. If someone can 'splain it to me, please do.)

If The Shadow Effect as a book is a bit fractured, the messages relayed in it are of a piece, and the range of techniques and tools fairly ensure you'll find a way in that works for you. I'd suggest letting significant time lapse between reading the three segments, and picking the one to read first that resonates with you. The very practical, carefully laid out "diagnosis/cure/prognosis" method that Chopra takes works best for me. If stories are your way in, I'd maybe start with Debbie Ford, and if inspirational writing is your thing, by all means, start with Williamson.

It's valuable work, worth doing. Hopefully, one of the ways of doing will work for you...

xxx
c

• Buy The Shadow Effect by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford & Marianne Williamson on Amazon
• Visit the official website of The Shadow Effect
• View a recording of a live talk on The Shadow Effect with the three authors (93 minutes)
  

Image by Horia Varlan via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. Cover © HarperCollins, designed by LeVan Fisher. Photos of Deepak Chopra and Debbie Ford by Jeremiah Sullivan; photo of Marianne Williamson by Lisa Spindler.

Legalese, etc! Book furnished as a review copy, and links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links: if you click on them and buy something, I get Amazon dollars. Which is great, as it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #09

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

If you read only one review of Sex in the City 2, make it this one. Hilarious. [Facebook-ed]

The happy news is that if you can make it to 50, things get happier.  [delicious-ed]

What would Los Angeles look like with no cars? Something like this, perhaps. [Stumbled, via Heather Parlato]

A provocative guest post on the dumbing-down of youth by (surprise!) a youth was interesting right down to the highly contentious comments section. And like the best things, made something else clear to me. [Tumbld, via @ebertchicago]

You click a random site, you wind up on a great photo, the comments lead you to a genius online business: who says random surfing is pointless?! [Flickr-faved]

xxx
c

Image by williac via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #08

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

My friend, Adam, wrote a wonderful essay that rolls into one our changing world, our love of stories and the delicate web that connects us all through time and space. As I said in my re-post (because that's whatcha do on Tumblr!), this kind of stuff is what the web is for, both in and of itself, and in a meta sense. [Tumbled]

Top photo find of the week month year: this edited stream from MSNBC. [delicious-ed, via daringfireball]

While in Ojai last weekend, I met one of the founders of this innovative project bringing power to remote, off-the-grid parts of Africa. John and his partner, Carl, are there right now, updating via MMS on their smartphones. I love the internet! [Stumbled]

At Success Team last week, my guitarist friend noted my eclectic taste in music. Note that "eclectic" does not necessarily mean "good." [last.fm reveals my deepest, darkest musical secrets]

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf is depressing as hell, but this pool of suggested new logos for BP is pretty outstanding. [Flickr-faved, via kernspiracy]

xxx
c

Image by williac via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Moving toward vs. getting rid of

During last night's first meeting of the Big Artist Workshop, gentle genius Chris Wells (hey! he won an Obie!) shared the most useful hack I've ever heard of for dealing with one's art as a focus-challenged person:

Don't worry about letting go of things; think instead of what you would most like to move toward.

Like most shifts in thinking, it will probably end up being profound because it is so simple. I have trouble letting go of stuff, because the decisions are too painful. So I don't: I now turn my attention toward the one thing I am moving toward right now. Those other things? Those other ideas for projects and stories and songs and books and demands on my limited attention? We'll talk about what they're for later, when we understand it. For now, it's enough to know that I can safely move toward this one thing.

The class was full of so much goodness, it fairly blew my mind.

xxx
c

Image by olliethebastard via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: Mildred Pierce

Aside from a very youthful devotion to Agatha Christie and a semi-youthful one to Fleming's 007 series, I've never been drawn to genre fiction.¹ Even in these two cases, you could say my real affinity was for Christie and Fleming (or Poirot/Miss Marple and Bond, James Bond), not mysteries or spy stories, something the occasional dip into a genre would just reinforce.

Honestly, I'll happily consume the best of any genre, where "best" equals "what moves me." I get that some people reject slapstick or horror or melodrama out of hand; I especially get it as a non-fan of The 3 Stooges, the Saw franchise (one of which I saw accidentally, no pun intended) and, with the exception of a freakish Luke-'n'-Laura fixation in high school, daytime soaps.

On the other hand, if you go in for wholesale rejection of a genre, you stand to miss out on all sorts of good stuff, in film as well as in books: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, not to mention the entire Bugs Bunny oeuvre; Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist (as well as Candyman and The Ring and Night of the Living Dead); and everything Douglas Sirk ever made.

It was my strange love of 1940s melodrama which, in a very roundabout way, led me to Mildred Pierce, the James M. Cain novel that served as source material for the 1945 noir-ish vehicle of the same name, the one that resuscitated Joan "Box-Office Poison"'s career. As with Play Misty for Me (a seminal example of the woman-wronged thriller genre set in 1970s Central California) and Jackie Brown (a brilliant caper picture set in the Los Angeles South Bay of the 1990s, but equally an homage to the 1970s blaxploitation genre), I became obsessed with Milded Pierce, the film, for several years, watching it over and over again to soak up period detail and Faulkner-tinged darkness. I'm drawn to art with a strong sense of time and place, with a particular fondness for the California of a different time; I'm also partial to (surprise, surprise) fiction that features a strong female character at its center, even if she's a little off-whack.

This, Mildred Pierce-the-book has in spades, even more so than the film version. Cain's Mildred, like  Hollywood's, is cunning at business, not to mention tenacious. Fed up with the philandering antics of her unemployed husband, she tosses him out on his ear, this, at the height of the Depression, with no means of supporting herself and her two girls, much less paying the mortgages on the outsized house Bert built for them in grander days. Yet bit by bit, through sheer force of will, she not only pulls them up and out, but way out, building a restaurant empire out of homemade pies and latent street smarts her mousy-housewifely life didn't begin to hint at.

It's here that the book and film truly diverge. I was shocked to read Cain's description of Mildred: blond, small and weak-chinned, a perfectly nice-looking, ordinary woman who, over the course of the book, sees her looks start to slip and her slim figure run to fat. Compare that to Mildred as depicted by the icy Crawford, who, though she was tiny herself, was formidable and mannish; in every picture Crawford did, she looked pulled together; she also frequently looked like she was a hair's breadth from picking up whomever she didn't like and heaving them from her path, if not just eating them outright. Maybe it was the shoulder pads.

Cain's Mildred is also an extraordinary woman, but partly because in some ways she is so ordinary: a tiny, emotionally needy (and, uh, sexually rapacious!) wisp of a nothing, who has freakish secret reserves of strength and savvy (and, uh, sexually rapaciousness!).

Equally powerful in the book, if not more so, is Mildred's wildly narcissistic elder daughter, Veda, a vain, conniving, beautiful girl who has no use for anyone or anything she cannot manipulate. My favorite passage in a book of many, many favorite passages is one where her singing teacher reveals the truth of this serpent-child to Mildred, who is so blinded by love of her daughter, and some textbook-crazy love, at that, she stands to be destroyed by her. It is ingenious and shocking and hilarious, all at once: a brilliant, out-of-nowhere character analysis that is so on the money, your breath is taken away.

The book is fat and juicy, full of good stuff like this, as opposed to the movie, which is a lean, slick creature of another sort almost entirely. Which is not to say either is better than the other, but that each is brilliant in its way. The movie plucks here and there from the book, a character, a storyline, a setting, but casts aside much of the delicious psychological character study for its noir through-line. Reading Mildred Pierce is like that recurring dream of New Yorkers: the one where they open a hitherto secret door somewhere in their tiny apartments and find a huge, sprawling, extra-apartment's-worth of rooms, complete with all the high ceilings and skylights and million other details your perfectly-nice but oh-so-cramped place was missing without your even knowing it.

It is, in short, 300 pages of sheer pleasure. And that is worth dipping into any genre for...

xxx c

• Buy Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain on Amazon
• Read a real review of Mildred Pierce by Michael Blowhard at 2Blowhards

¹ I also went through a Stephen King phase in high school, starting with the short stories that showed up in women's magazines, continuing to The Stand, which was maddeningly bloated compared to the house-afire reads of Carrie, 'Salem's Lot and The Shining. My theory was that he got too big to edit, there's some irony for you, although I did enjoy bits and pieces of subsequent books, and always admired his way with a story. My god, to be able to come up with plots like that!

Photos: (l) photo of author James M. Cain (lifted from NNDB, which has a crackin'-good quote about Cain from fellow genre author, Raymond Chandler); (r) cover of first edition of Mildred Pierce ©1941 Alfred A. Knopf, via wikipedia.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #07

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

Aaron Sorkin's response to the Can-Gays-Play-Straight kerfluffle kicked off by a Newsweek piece (penned by a gay!) is full of quote-worthy bits, but the whole of it is simply breathtaking. [Tumbled, via Keith Johnson on Facebook]

Music lovers are (rightly) sad that Lala is going away, but there is a new reason to rejoice: stereomood is almost as much fun, with a much prettier interface and a pick-your-mood playlist assortment that so far is right on the money. [delicious-ed]

It was indie publication week, all right. I opened my mailbox to find two gloriously offbeat self-produced books, a brand-new real-life magazine created out of whole cloth in 48 hours, and a really sweet looking photography how-to book...AND my friend Emma and her pals put out this delicious online mag called, well, Delish. [Stumbled]

If this video of a bus driver getting the surprise of his life doesn't make you at least smile, you may not be human. And if you're anything like me, have Kleenex handy. [Facebook-ed, via lonelysandwich]

Sometimes you go on Flickr for one thing and end up falling in love with your adoptive city all over again. [Flickr-faved]

xxx
c

Image by williac via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Video Vednesday: Annual Goals, Daily

Don't worry. There's no way I'm titling an entire series with a corny pun.

I'm not even sure I'll make this a series. But I did decide to finally, FINALLY, do a little videoblog thingamabobby.

Because it's important to try stuff. Because some people (apparently) like video. Because for once, I had something to write about that seemed to lend itself to video.

Well, kinda-sorta. Enough to give it a go. So here goes!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfZzEmwGMWg&w=480&h=385]

If you're not into video, I basically describe my new morning habit, cribbed from Penelope Trunk, of writing down my annual goals (almost) first thing every morning, then writing down my daily goals underneath. With checkboxes next to them. Because little things are important. [BONUS LINK: one more from Penelope Trunk on goal-setting/achieving, complete with rationales for why the individual "tricks" work.]

If you are into video, I would love to know why. No, really, I really would. Because I don't mind doing it so much as it's just not my default mode. And feel free to let me know if you like audio, and why. And maybe even what. I have a much better idea of why people might like audio (in the car, on an iPod, while cleaning or doing repetitive/dull tasks, etc), but I'm sure there is a lot of stuff I haven't thought of.

Thanks, and enjoy, if that's your thing. Or, you know. Just tune in tomorrow, lots more writing from this gal...

xxx
c

Book review: Ill-Equipped for a Life of Sex

For all of my public candor and truth-excavatin', there are areas I will not touch.

One of them, no pun intended, is sex.

Another, believe it or not, is relationships. I am a champion of privacy, wherever possible, and also a big, fat coward: I'm loathe to pull a Truman Capote and end up like Truman Capote (although the middle of his life, in between the gothic horror and lonely, alcoholic demise, does sound interesting.)

These are just two of the reasons I was floored by Jennifer Lehr's 2004 memoir, Ill-Equipped for a Life of Sex. In it, as you might expect from the title, she exposes her many and colorful sexual encounters (in vivid and fascinating detail), from her first kiss (or desire for one) through her mostly sexually-dysfunctional relationship with her eventual husband to her post-marital flirtations and fantasies. If Lehr left anything out, it was neglible: parts of the book read like letters to Penthouse Forum, only realistic. I was shocked not so much by what she did, but that she was writing about it so openly in the same book where she cheerfully and un-self-consciously outlines her relationships with many members of her family, with whom, it would appear, she is still close (and who definitely win the prize for most tolerant family around.)

This, though, is the trick of the book, and the second meaning of the title: it's as much a story of how she got here from there as it is a salacious recounting. What Lehr has done is to write a book, a shockingly intimate book, about intimacy itself, and the role it plays in keeping all kinds of relationships alive. To bare ourselves metaphorically  requires high levels of trust and commitment, often far higher than those required to strip down and get busy, not to mention a slavish devotion to truth.

And over and over, after each screw-up (so to speak), she throws herself once again headlong into the truth. There is her shink, and her next shrink, and her shrink after that. (Geographical and other factors outside of her control necessitate the moves.) There is his shrink, and AA, and their shrink. Shrinks. There is an art project in grad school that leaves her open and vulnerable and ultimately spurned for attempting to get at a truth, which (surprise, surprise) freaks everyone's shit right out. It is so painful at times, watching this earnest struggle to get at the truth, to learn what it is and then learn how to live in it, to communicate with it, one aches for this young woman and her crazy quest.

But this is the same thing that makes it compulsively readable. Well, besides the sex, which is pretty salacious, and the unselfconscious exposure of her very privileged life. (Lehr was financially supported by her family, and in fairly grand style, pretty much until her husband's ship came in.) Again and again, despite the crazy pain involved, she dives into the hard work of scrutinizing her screw-ups for clues as to their genesis, until finally, she comes up with the answers. They are both complex and simple, always boiling down to truth and communication, communication and truth. Many of the reviewers on Amazon say they saw their own life in Lehr's; the rest (and we're talking half and half), dismiss the book as an overly-long, poorly-written exercise in narcissism by a spoiled princess.

Could it be shorter? Yes, by about 100 pages, I reckon. Better-written? In parts, certainly. Hell, there are parts of every post I've ever written that I know could be better-written, usually as I'm writing them.

It's fearless, though, and earnest and heartfelt. And it's a startling expose of the real reasons we both turn away and towards sex in (and out of) relationship. It's about addiction of all kinds, and how it keeps us from true love and connection. It's about how unbe-fucking-lievably hard it is to communicate when the stakes are high. (The story of how John and Jennifer Lehr turn around their relationship is instructive and inspiring.)

So while I wish that maybe she'd had a little more experience with writing before she sat down to tell her story, or an editor who had leaned a little harder on her, I'm grateful to Lehr for sharing it. And very much looking forward to deepening my own commitment to rooting out fraud in my own life...

xxx
c

• Buy Ill-Equipped for a Life of Sex by Jennifer Lehr on Amazon
• Visit Jennifer Lehr's website

¹She explicitly the details of life with her husband, comic actor John Lehr, or the lack thereof, when it comes to.

Photos: (l) ©ReganBooks, Cover design by Richard Ljoenes; (r) photo of author Jennifer Lehr ©Stephanie Howard

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #06

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich gives the "Fight the power!" rant of my dreams about fat-cat mega-banks. [Tumbled, via daringfireball]

It's Eastwood month at This Distracted Globe! [Facebook-ed]

No one would be for armistice if we were all equipped with a cupcake cannon. [vimeo-liked, via coudal]

Like Salon's Heather Havrilesky, I am transfixed (not to mention humbled and kept in check) by hoarding shows. [Stumbled]

Superhero action figures of fiction! [Facebook-ed, via coudal]

xxx
c

Image by williac via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: The Talent Code

It's rather maddening in hindsight, all that time and longing wasted on wishing for smarts I didn't have but thought I needed to achieve what I wanted.

If only I'd applied more of that time and energy to the actual building blocks of greatness: to deep practice, with its excruciating but completely engaging try-fail/try-fail/try-fail/(etc.)/try-succeed/learn, lather-rinse-repeat chain of events; to finding the source of ignition, the tiny thread I could worry down to the source of my deepest and most fulfilling passion; to seeking out the coaches who could, thanks to the masterful acquisition of skill and knowledge themselves, coax out the best in me.

Oh, wait, I did. I do.

The most of many wonderful things about The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle's fantastic look into what makes greatness is the triumphant matter-of-fact-ness with which Coyle lays out, over and over again, his two central theses:

First, that the joy is truly in the journey, as there is no destination; the greatest of the greats is never "there" yet, because as long as one is alive and driven by passion, there is a way to learn/tweak/grow. The trials and failures become both more and less significant, because they're happening at a master level, but there's always always always something left to master. Such good news. Can you imagine how eye-stabbingly boring it would all be otherwise?

Second, that you can start anywhere, with anything, so long as the thing lights your fire and you put in your time properly. The "deep practice" Coyle talks about, the actual quality of work and attention applied to those now-famous 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell pointed to a bit ago in Outliers, helps build myelin, that stuff that coats the wires all your crazy neural impulses fly around through. More myelin, faster-traveling impulses, better skill, more mastery. (And more enjoyment, which brings us back to Thesis #1.)

There is a little bit of luck to greatness, at least, there is in an uninformed world where we don't know how to make "magic" happen. In quotes because of course, it's not magic, it's science and awareness and commitment (a ton of commitment) and love (so much love). But that is what The Talent Code is for: to get the word out there, to spread that love. It's a map studded with neon signs pointing the way to the possible, a signal shot up in the sky, saying, "Look here! Do these things deliberately, create these spaces where young people can see what is possible, and magic can happen! You can make star athletes and scientists and cellists and poets! You can coax the genius out of anyone, yourself included!"

The book is filled with stories of talent "hotbeds" and genius coaches and methodologies for deep practice that both illuminate and inspire. You will pick it up and not be able to put it down. You will start communicating with people from a place of deeper curiosity.

You will want to tell everyone you know about it, immediately, and urge them to get it, to read it, to share it with everyone they know.

And then, if you're like me, you'll probably want to go practice whatever it is you do that really, truly lights your fire...

xxx
c

• Buy The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle on Amazon
• Visit The Talent Code site & blog

Images (left to right): Photo of Daniel Coyle © Scott Dickerson; © 2010 Bantam Books; Design: The DesignWorks Group.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #05

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

It's been a while since I've gone on a rampage about shitty PowerPoint. Fortunately, the New York Times is picking up the slack. [Tumbled, via Cameron Moll]

Small can be beautiful. Dazzling, even. [Facebook-ed, via Unclutter]

Whose fans are dumber? Yeah, there's an algorithm for that. [Stumbled]

If you're just getting started with Twitter, there are other how-to's you should read first. But I absolutely loved this higher-level, advanced-class writeup of Twitter Best Practices, partly because it graciously and specifically expands on the more esoteric "style" stuff I'm just grumpily alluding to in my own Twitter Policy, and partly because the author would cringe if he knew I'd used the term "best practices." [delicious-ed, via lonelysandwich]

A four-year-old favorite of many, this is the essence of "sweet puppy." And the perfect summation of what's made Flickr magic. [Flickr-faved]

xxx
c

Image by williac via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Maximum-value packing: getting from here to there in one attractive piece

This past trip to Tacoma was significant in more ways than just initiating me into the TEDx experience: for the first time in too long to remember, I got from here to there (and back!) with something resembling ease.

Some of my new-found attitude can be traced to exactly that: attitude. While I will likely never be worry-free, I've whittled it way down just by acknowledging I'm the worrying kind. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but just giving my worry a little bit of voice, rather than my old way, of ignoring it and/or telling it to STFU when it got loud-ish, has made all the difference. Because when I pause to listen, (a), I feel heard, which takes care of a lot of the problem; and (b), I actually take steps to deal with some of the wacko problems that come with being me, which, in turn, makes many of them go away.

Worry #1: What will I wear?

On the surface, this always seemed nuts, as I had more than enough clothes to wear right there in my closet, most of which I really enjoyed wearing. But they were rag-picker clothes, the wardrobe of one who views value shopping as sport, and clothes as a mode of expression.

I cannot believe it took a twentysomething straight male to point out the glaringly obvious, but when I read this post by young Jesse Thorn on the dangers of buying thrift-store ties, it all fell into place: thrift-store acquisitions, however mint and spiff, are the pieces other people let go of because they couldn't make them work. They can be fantastic sources of cool accent pieces, but the odds of finding cornerstone wardrobe items are razor-thin.

During the Great Purge of '09, I unloaded everything ill-fitting, irretrievably stained/torn, etc. That removed some of the stress of packing; I no longer had to worry about bringing this sweater I always wore with that shirt to cover up the blotch/rip/etc. But after my trip to DC this year, I had a packing revelation when I realized the stress I was enduring over whether to wear the cute navy-blue thermal tee on the plane or save it for an out-and-about day could be completely eliminated with the purchase of identical cute navy-blue thermal tees. I immediately went online and purchased six. They did not arrive in time for SXSW, alas, but man-oh-Manischewitz, packing for Tacoma could not have been easier, style-wise.

The corollary to this is anti-worry is equally "no duh!" simple: most everywhere I travel to sells everything I need. Last summer, a friend's mother died while I was in town on a jeans-only trip; amazingly, I found an Actual Department Store that sold clothes, and bought some appropriate pants that would not embarrass me or her family. A Christmas Miracle in July.

Finally, there's a gigantic bonus-extra to this wardrobe methodology: dressing daily is equally mindless, with the same fantastic Style Quality Control. Gretchen, I should have listened to you sooner!

Worry #2: What if I miss the plane?

I am the daughter of one of the world's most frequent flyers. Literally. My father is now deceased, but in his day, he was one of an elite group of lifetime AAirpass owners, a privilege for which he paid $250K (a pittance! a pittance, I tell you!). Said AAirpass entitled him to fly first-class on any American (or partner, back in the day) flight for the rest of his life, which he did for almost 20 years, sometimes six days per week. On a whim, he told us, he once checked with the airline to see where he stood in the pantheon of all-time big American Airlines frequent flyers. There were two people ahead of him and they were both professional couriers.¹

For a guy who could get on almost any plane to anywhere, he was notoriously nuts about getting there early. I've already missed as many flights in my life (one) as I believe he missed in his (not owing to acts of God, anyway). I used to fry my circuits every trip over getting there in time, until I finally arrived at the magic number: two hours. Yes, I get to the airport two hours before every flight, no matter how early the flight is taking off. It is absolutely insane, but in a perverse stroke of irony, it keeps me from losing my mind.

I look forward to the "me" time, and, occasionally, will treat myself with trashy magazines at the airport. Which brings me to my final worry...

Worry #3: Everything is so expensive!

I am not exactly cheap, but I'm not exactly a carefree spendthrift, either. It chaps my hide having to exorbitant prices for staples like water, wifi and trashy magazines. (Okay, those cost the same everywhere, but I almost never buy magazines for full newsstand price.)

I used to carry my cheapskate mentality when I traveled. Then I discovered a miraculous new modus operandi: plan for what you can, and let go of the rest. As I do in my talk about communicating, I advocate a 99-to-1 ratio of planning to letting-go. I generally plan for snacks and sundries at least a week in advance, and with checklists, to coincide with the last regularly-scheduled trip to the store.

I also finally dedicated a Dopp kit and attendant Ziploc quart bag to traveling supplies. They are fully loaded and ready to go at all times (except now, when I just realized I rotated my toothbrush out, and, like a good Mormon, need to replace my stock).

Now that mostly everything is in there, I feel better about not cheaping out on the stuff I either left behind or want to treat myself to because I am at the airport two hours before a 5am flight. Good for me, good for the economy!

***

I travel nowhere near as often as Dad, or friends like the Chris-es Guillebeau and Brogan. If I get to that point, and a part of me really, really hopes I never do, at least by air, I'll adapt further.

But these small things have made a mighty difference, both in how I anticipate a trip and how I enjoy it once I'm there...

xxx
c

¹For you doubters, here's a little story about some litigation around the fabled lifetime AAirpass. While it goes without saying my dad was scrupulously honest about using his own AAirpass, we did joke about how he should have gotten one with initials-only, rather than first-initial-plus-middle, so that I might continue to fly as C.A. Wainwright after he'd passed on to that great Admirals Club in the sky. Well, I joked, anyway.

Image cropped from photo by David Masters via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #04

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

Imagine it's Monday. Now, what would make things better? Exactly. [Tumbled, via @mulegirl on Twitter]

Seth Godin is brilliant when he talks about marketing and inspiring when he talks about the need to conquer fear and make stuff. I'm not surprised that he's also incredibly astute at parsing the reality of why we fall for real estate. [delicious-ed]

Whose fans are dumber? Yeah, there's an algorithm for that. [Stumbled]

I've written extensively about my love for Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on creativity and admitted out loud that Jill Bolte Taylor was my inspiration for the talk I gave at IgnitePDX, but with his talk on music and passion, conductor Benjamin Zander became my official muse for TEDxTacoma . [Facebook-ed]

Like my friend Merlin noted, this is what the future looks like. And I like it. [Flickr-faved]

(One final, unlinked note: keep a good thought for me tomorrow morning, okay?)

xxx
c

Image by via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

No more!

I've been giving little talks for long enough that a part of me insists I should have some kind of system down.

One that not only has me starting earlier and working more methodically, but that provides some sort of framework and steps for proceeding; some kind of handy-dandy, E-Z-1-2-3!â„¢ process for getting talks out of my head and onto paper before they come back out of my  head.

Alas, there is no system yet. While I marvel at my friend Cliff Atkinson's excellent "Hollywood screenplay" framework for content creation (which I'm currently re-reading about in his wonderful book, Beyond Bullet Points, for inspiration), using bits and pieces of it as well as Nancy Duarte's and Garr Reynolds' brainstorming techniques from slide:ology and Presentation Zen, respectively, something obstinate in me refuses to budge from my old, familiar pace 'n' blather method. Sorry about that, neighbors; sorrier than you know.

However, one massively helpful thing I have begun doing is admitting that this spazzy and backwards way of working is, for better or worse, currently my default way. Out loud. Or rather, out loud on my calendar. At some point last year, in a fit of pique, no doubt, I added an all-day event to my gCal "work pods" calendar titled "NO MORE!" In caps, so I couldn't miss it. In burnt orange, just in case.

Now, when I have something big coming up, like my very first TEDx talk, up in Tacoma, this Saturday, I stick a bunch of burnt-orange "NO MORE!" jellybeans on the days leading up to it. Instantly, those days are shut off, devoted solely to whatever is already on there or whatever big thing I have coming up. I have even learned to stick the burnt-orange "NO MORE!" jellybeans on the other side of the big event, for recovery time.

Because sometimes, the best way to keep going is knowing when to stop...

xxx
c

Image by kasrak via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Hey! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: The Guinea Pig Diaries

My favorite kind of learning is the stealth variety: where you don't realize you've learned something because you're too busy being engaged and (God willing) entertained.

With The Guinea Pig Diaries, nine immensely readable stories (and a clutch of highly enjoyable appendices, end notes and other writerly add-ons), A.J. Jacobs jumps straight to the top of my list of People I Officially Endorse Learning From. This book is smart as hell and you can dance to it, proving that you don't have to be a pompous gasbag (or even an earnest gasbag) to assist your fellow travelers in their quest for useful information.

Jacobs' not-so-secret approach to researching his stories is, as the title suggests, that he approaches his job as a journalist by treating his life as a series of experiments.¹

The sly awesomeness to this approach is that it allows him to deeply explore topics that would otherwise be dangerous territory for an upper-middle-class, educated, Anglo male from the First World. When you're at the top of the privilege food chain, you risk alienating a huge portion of your audience by even broaching the subject of the subjugation of women; if, on the other hand, you can truthfully recount your real-life experience with being treated as an object (posing nude at the behest of a female celebrity) or a "wife" (ceding full control of decision-making to your own, real-life spouse), not only do you gain credibility, you garner some enormous good will. Especially if you're hilarious at your own expense in the recounting.

Not all of the topics are especially inflammatory: there's great, thoughtful stuff in there about nature and purpose of truth, courtesy of an experiment in something called "radical honesty", and some wonderful observations about the importance of character from a delightful piece on George Washington (who apparently didn't start out with much of the stuff, go figger!).

Even the essays you might consider puff pieces going in end up being substantial in their insights. "My Outsourced Life," a piece that in a slightly different form ran in Esquire several years ago, took a trendy topic, the growing number of Western folk who were turning to the Far East to get their dirty work done more cheaply, and without any big fuss managed to make some really good points about power, mutual respect and personal responsibility without ever veering into...well, pompous (or earnest!) gasbaggery. This is like the non-consumer-object version of what I've come to call "selling-fu": Jacobs invites you into his conclusion not by ramming his thesis and data down your throat, but by lining them up in an irresistible (yet truthful! and transparent!) fashion.

The older I get, the more I realize that there really is no way to change any mind that's not ready to be changed. But you can start building bridges with the right thoughts and techniques, so they're there to cross when the people on the other side are ready. A.J. Jacobs is building excellent bridges to further conversation, and I, for one, am happy to cross over and keep talking...

xxx
c

• Buy The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs on Amazon
• Visit A.J. Jacobs' website
• Watch A.J. Jacobs' talk on his Year of Living Biblically at the 2007 TED-esque EG Conference

¹It's even got a name, "immersion journalism", and plenty of modern practitioners: Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, who wrote one of my all-time favorite read-and-re-read books, Nickle And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Although AJ is way funnier. At least, in the book.

Images (left to right): Photo of A.J. Jacobs © Nigel Parry, originally in Esquire; © 2009 Simon & Schuster; Design: Jason J Heuer, Photo: Michael Cogliantry.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Ice cream for everyone!

Maybe it's a reaction to the stress of not knowing what's next, even though I've had a full four months to suss the sucka out. Maybe it's the Resistor whispering sweet uglies in my ear as I near some kind of (oh please oh please oh please) creative breakthrough.

Whatever flavor of fear is to blame, I have been horrified to note of late a creeping desire to trash-talk, whatever, whomever, whenever.

I know it's no good for me: even if it wasn't the #1 poison the Four Agreements warns against (which it is) and even if happiness handmaiden Gretchen Rubin hadn't discussed the downside multiple times (which she has), I literally feel awful now when I gossip. Sick to my stomach, plus a little dizzy. And that's on top of the self-loathing that kicks in.

Fortunately, my friend Dave Seah introduced me to the ultimate spell-breaker for lifting the hex and clearing the fog that a good, and by "good," I mean "bad", gossip session induces. I was at the end of a long jag of gnarly, personal posts to our Google Wave project, not gossipy blips, per se, but that kind of venting that's just to the side of it. When I finally copped to overindulging and confessed to the weariness it had brought on, rather than batting back a similarly heavy reply, or a snarky joke, or just ignoring it entirely, as though it had never existed, Dave said the exact perfect thing:

"Okay, then, ice cream for everyone!"

I laughed out loud when I read it, the sticky ugliness vanished in a poof of delightful, and immediately, God was back in her heaven and all was right with the world.

Since that exchange, Dave and I have used it at least twice more in the Wave and I've found myself using it quite a bit in the course of my day to get myself back on track from all kinds of derailments: Accidentally read another horrible thing about racist fear-mongering while you were on the interwebs? Ice cream for everyone! Crabby friend on the phone attempting to launch a bitch-fest? Ice cream for everyone! Catch your own ungrateful self complaining again? Ice cream for everyone! It's short, it's easy to remember, and it doesn't dangle loosely from my bony wrist.

So. Weekend over? Tough week ahead? Stupid guy cut you off in traffic on the way to work?

ICE CREAM FOR EVERYONE!

Unless you have a better one. Eh?

xxx
c

Image by Jelene via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #03

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

What does an artist do when she finds herself deeply in debt? She explores her relationship to money by illustrating every purchase for a year. In other words, she draws, and thinks, her way out of it. [delicious-ed, via @gelatobaby on Twitter]

I've been following my friend Cookie Carosella's wonderful (albeit frequently horrifying) tales of middle-aged dating for a while now. This hilarious story of passive-aggressive matchmaking and what it wrought is your perfect introduction. [Stumbled]

If you haven't seen young Lin Yu Chun's startling homage to Whitney Houston's cover of Dolly Parton's classic "I Will Always Love You," you are in for a treat. An eerie one, but no less amazing and heartfelt for being so. [Facebook-ed]

This single quote of Anne Lamott's from a recent Salon interview so perfectly summed up my criteria for what I may, and may not, mine from my life for my writing, I felt it deserved its own post. [Tumbled]

I wish I could use every fantastic photo I find in my searches to illustrate the posts on communicatrix-dot-com. [Flickr-faved]

xxx
c

Image by via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: The Book of Awesome

The Book of Awesome will not make you more so.

It's neither prescriptive nor is it wildly illuminating. After all, most of us can sense the difference between good and bad, easy and difficult, delightful and not-so-much, and when we're thinking clearly, we know how to open ourselves up to the light and steer clear of the stuff that pokes, stings, smarts, bogs or otherwise makes life, well, less awesome.

Here's the thing, though: it's easy to forget how colossally awesome life is most of the time. How almost unbearably fortunate most of us are in so many ways just because we get to wake up in the morning, stretch our relatively healthy and make our stupid beds. That whole Be Here Now thing the Buddhists are always (gently, patiently, eternally) harping about? If we were wired for it, we wouldn't need those pesky Buddhists; we'd just BE.

Fortunately for himself, blogger-newly-turned-author Neil Pasricha remembers to remember, and fortunately for us, he is HI-larious while doing so. Oh, yes, my friends: while reading The Book of Awesome, I laughed loud enough to startle the neighbors no less than a dozen times. TWELVE TIMES. Which made me physically feel awesome in addition to being freshly able to appreciate additional awesomeness around me because, as Pasricha and many others have pointed out, laughing is quite good for you, physiologically-speaking.

Some of the entries (chapters? items?) are also quite moving. There's a beautiful piece toward the end serving as a tribute to an awesome friend of Pasricha's who died tragically young, and the piece that closes the book, well, I won't give it away, but I will say that it alone is possibly worth the cost of admission. Well, it and the HI-larious laughing parts.

If you're already a longtime fan of the blog, you'll notice some duplication of entries, although the book is carefully edited for the best of the best, plus what I felt was really great flow. As a fan of the intimate and thus far irreplaceable something that happens when you read words on pulverized dead trees, I would consider getting a copy to dip into as needed, to remind yourself to BE HERE NOW (and maybe, just maybe, find the AWESOME in the moment). Even better, I would definitely consider getting it as a gift for your sad friend or your Internet-free friend, or even your sad, Internet-free friend.

AWESOME is as AWESOME does...

xxx
c

• Buy The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha on Amazon
• Visit 1,000 Awesome Things on the interwebulars

Yo! Disclosures!

1. The advance review copy of The Book of Awesome upon which I based this review was provided to me for free, and may vary from the book you purchase (although I didn't find any errors of a spelling or typographical nature, so, you know, kudos to Neil, Amy Einhorn and Team Awesome.

2. Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Image (left) by beadmobile via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. Image (right) ©Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Group Inc.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #02

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

If you aren't already madly, head-over-heels in love with Roger Ebert for his brilliant body of work and his spectacular lemons-into-lemonade reinvention as the Busiest Dude on the Internet, you will be once you read this wonderful essay he wrote about his father.  [delicious-ed]

No, I don't have an iPad (yet). But after seeing this terrrrrific batch of crazy drawings by my friend, Nathan Bowers, when I do get one you can bet that one of the first apps I'm getting is Harmony. [Tweeted]

Engaged as I am in the ongoing throes of my own decluttering, I find much of what my friend Brooks Palmer writes inspiring, illuminating, or both. But I especially liked this piece on clutter-buster meeting clutter-buster, which has all kinds of good stuff in there: learning how to connect with someone, the benefits of being kind to ourselves and others, and as always, understanding our deeper attachments to stuff. Oh, and if you're L.A.-local, I hear there is still a spot open in Brooks' upcoming private Santa Monica workshop. [Stumbled]

I have not seen, nor heard, a more spectacular example of full-on-retro, unabashedly individualistic web design since, well, probably that Peter Pan guy. But Yvette's Bridal, with its links to just about everything, portraiture inclusive, is a whole lot more joyous and a whole lot less creepy. [Facebooked, via @zeldman on twitter]

And finally, because a week ain't a week in my book without a corny cartoon pun, this excellent, unabashedly corny one. [Tumbled, via The Practical Archivist]

xxx
c

Image by via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.