A poem about envy.
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
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.
On "off"
Thanks to a few systems I've got in place right now, the ongoing Google Wave with Dave project and Hiro's class in keeping your sorry ass from getting sucked into the internet, I've been paying a lot more attention to where I place my attention.
This gets painful in spots, mainly because of my inability to stop just short of judging. On the other hand, it's helped me to notice that noticing alone is useful, whereas judging is not, so there you go: 49 years in and one very long trek around the barn, Colleen finally arrives at the usefulness of meditation she's heard tell of.
For those of us who have difficulty with modulation, "off" is both a tantalizing and terrifying setting. "Off" is restful in that deep, dark way, conking out cold after a long day/week/month of whatever. It is also the antithesis of getting stuff done: the only thing you get done on "off" is nothing.
Only...that's not quite true. Take sleep, for instance. (You might as well; I certainly don't.) In addition to all of the battery-recharging and physiological fortifying that happens while we're sleeping, there are crazy brain things happening, too, quite a lot of them. There is a whole lot of something going on during that nothingness, just of a much quieter, less obvious nature. Because, well, you're asleep.
In the same way, I've started to notice amazing changes both to my body and my outlook since I began practicing Nei Kung just five or so months ago. On the physical side, my posture has improved, my quads are turning into bands of steel and baby most definitely has back she hasn't had since her 20s. I am in better shape than I've been since I was hitting the gym five days a week and paying a trainer to do it with me for three of them, yet all I do now is basically stand in my apartment holding various poses for a half-hour daily.1
The mental shifts are happening just as slowly, or maybe quickly, although they are even more subtle. That I'm even willing to contemplate mere contemplation, much less do it, is extraordinary. Things still bother me, sure, but neither as much, nor for as long. I am hardly what I'd call a non-selfish bundle of compassionate energy, but I move much more quickly from "me" thinking (taking offense, being hurt, etc) to "other" thinking (giving the benefit of the doubt, or just noticing the "me" that is always in the way). I feel the beginnings of what I can only guess is something like grounding. I've even slowed down to the point where I can handle a short, Chinese-style meditation that my teacher shared with me. And, surprise, surprise, that shit works. So well, I may even try it more often.2
"Off" is not really "off," I'm discovering, but the flip side of "on." There is never nothing; like the white tadpole in the yin-yang taijitu I keep on on my wall, it is an opposing force, quiet and yielding, but no less a force than the other. Not only is "on" not "better" (caution: Western patriarchial cultural bias at work!), in one way, it's just there to make "off" be off. "On" does not exist without "off," and vice versa.
These are all pretty obvious "discoveries." (And I've already used far, far too many quotation marks to cordon things off in one essay.) But this is what is demanded of me if I will make the next discoveries to move myself to the next place, wherever the hell that may be. Because for those of you keeping score, yes, I'm finishing up Month #5 of Self-Imposed Hiatus on top of Year #2 (or #3, depending on how you count it) of figuring out what I want to do with my life. You think you're frustrated? HA.
This year, I am learning about "off." This past weekend, I took two full days of "off." I haven't done that since April of 2009, if you count a cross-country road trip while you're nursing an incipient Crohn's flare "off" (which I did, because I am batshit-crazy), and who-knows-how-long before then. But this weekend, at around 7pm, I just switched my setting to "off": drove up to Ojai, hung out with my friend, Jodi, and her dog, and all of their friends, and did exactly nothing.3
Like all things, this takes practice. One can make it a practice, which I intend to: one day per week, in the "off" position. Will I succeed every week? Doubtful. Possible. Who knows?
But "off," I am on...
xxx
c
Image by snflwrgddss23 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
1I even get to watch streaming Netflix while I do it. People are blown away when I tell them this, as most Westerners' chief exposure to the non-fighting martial arts is via the moronic b.s. montage ads for prescription medications featuring groups of people in floaty clothes doing graceful tai chi moves as a unit. Which is fine, if that floats yer boat, but entirely unnecessary. Nei Kung is the original "and you can do it all in just 30 minutes a day, while watching television!" exercise. The Chinese are an eminently practical people.
2Lest I inaccurately paint the picture of myself as an even somewhat enlightened being, know that there was a ridiculously obsessive and angry-making episode involving a kitchen faucet last week. That lasted two days. And is still not resolved.
3Of course, I was doing something all the time. Just a different something, and not particularly startling or noble: we ate quite a bit, and drank, caffeine and alcohol, and even nerded out with buddy computer tutorials. But I read almost a whole book, which I can't wait to tell you about, and dawdled and talked and generally had a grand old time.
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.
Poetry Thursday: The damn bathroom
It's disgusting
in there.
So disgusting
I get in and get out,
and have my deflector shields up
the whole time.
So disgusting
I occupy
the smallest amount of space possible
in this smallest place imaginable
and fuzz out the fuzz
and the dirt
and the crud
and the rest of the unmentionable detritus
from even the corners
of my peripheral vision.
So disgusting
I cannot see
how disgusting it is
until company is coming
and I see it through their eyes
and am moved to give
the most convenient surfaces
a quick flick of the sponge
and light a few votives
in the vain hope that their eyesight
is good enough
to do their business
by candlelight.
On this one day, though,
it is not the bathroom
that is disgusting,
it is me.
And I am so disgusting
I can take neither of us
one minute longer,
and attack us both
in a frenzy of Comet
and old kitchen sponges
and elbow grease.
It is disgusting.
And hateful.
And bo-ring.
And it goes on and on
until it kind of
gets interesting.
And it goes on a little further
until it
and I
are not only not disgusting
but actually inspiring.
A crumbling old
mid-century wreck,
patched over in the broken spots,
most definitely the worse for wear,
as far from modern
and sleek
and elegant
as you can imagine,
inspiring.
And the bathroom
ain't bad
either.
xxx
c
This poem was inspired by my friend Gretchen Rubin's 6 tips on dealing with boredom, specifically, #2, which outlined Diane Arbus's method.
Image by 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
What's making the most difference now?
Sometimes I stumble on something that works so well at what it's supposed to do, it affects me in an entirely different way than I thought it would.
My mandoline, for example.
I had heard about these magical tools that produced razor-thin slices of food for years before finally deciding, on a whim, to buy one. I can't remember where I came across it, trolling an aisle at Marshall's, most likely, an activity that occasionally turns up amazing, life-changing things for under $100 like a copper-sandwiched All-Clad or a bra that fits. The mandoline was well under $100, under 1/10th of that, as I recall, and an alluring, ruby-red color to boot. I bought it immediately and, after getting it home, just as immediately stuck it in a drawer where for the next 8, 10, 15 months or so, its chief purpose was to annoy me whenever I went in search of a knife or a corkscrew and instead, the stupid thing turned itself sideways and jammed the damned drawer shut.
Stubbornness, hope and two cucumbers saved it from the Goodwill pile. I am trying to stay SCD-legal, and for me, that means finding ways to make ordinary, good-for-me stuff seem more delicious and alluring than, well, the usual delicious and alluring stuff that is poison for me. I looked at the cukes, thought of the mandoline, and somehow, the right synapse fired. Five minutes and several janky moves later, I finally had the rhythm down, and a neat stack of paper-thin cucumber that seemed, well, delicious and alluring.
It can be a mandoline, then, that helps me move forward: a way of slicing the same thing just a little bit more finely. Or it can be writing down my annual goals every morning, every goddamn morning, so that they are there in front of me, quietly reminding me of what it is I really want.
It can be making the bed in the morning while the kettle is on, and reading 40 pages of a book with a cup of tea before I wake up my computer from its night's sleep. It can be creating little check-boxes next to each to-do item of the day; it can be recasting that to-do list as a "will-do" list, and whittling the number of items down each day until it really is.
It can be just deciding to notice, and foregoing, for now, the judging that generally follows.
It can be so many things, big or small. Mostly, for me, though, it is so many things, all small. A thousand-hundred tiny things, one after the other, one by one. Small. Smaller. Smaller still. When your default settings are "full-bore" and "off," it is hard to see what you need to and, much, much more importantly, to feel what is happening to you. With these million-thousand tiny things come the same number of opportunities, and even a white tornado like me can grab one out of a million-thousand.
Besides, this is how change works: a little bit at a time, then all at once.
Not all of the things work. As many, more, even, far more I abandon as quickly as I pick them up. That's okay. There is always another small thing to try: keeping a sink clean, spending just 10 minutes at something, adding a habit, removing a piece of clutter.
What makes the most difference to me now is not one particular thing, but the transforming power of any one thing...
xxx
c
Image by jared via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Bad habits live in the dark, Part 2
A follow-up post stimulated by a comment on last week's, Bad habits live in the dark.
This is a week of observing.
By which I mean this week, I am turning my attention to what is going on in a given moment, any moment, but particularly (when I can slow myself down enough to catch them) ones where I feel out of the ordinary.
This round of consciousness-raising started with a (gentle) exhortation from Hiro, as part of her wonderful (because of who she is), maddening (because of where I'm at) class on curing Internet Hangover. During our first session, this past Wednesday, we were given some tools for handling some of the intense demands this always-on, always-open portal of energy can make on the unprepared soul.
Even more importantly (to me, anyway), we were instructed to pay attention as we wandered hither and yon to how we were feeling and where we were feeling it. Did a certain site make us feel anxious? Angry? Sad? Excited? Where was the anxiety located: chest? Head? Stomach? Loins?1 In other words, most of what we're doing at these beginning stages is learning to shine some light on what's happening so we can see it.
Part of what's maddening about this for speed addicts like me is having to slow down to do all this. There's a "Yes, yes, I know" aspect to all of this change business. I know I'm spending too much time in email and on Facebook and trolling my Google Reader for new items. I know I need to get off the Internet and get on with my work. I know I'm stuck. NOW, PLEASE TO BE GIVING ME THE ANSWER PLEASE.
The thing is, there's knowing and there's knowing.
The first knowing is head knowing; people who are good parsers are really good at head knowing. We are also sometimes a bit, shall we say, divorced from the feeling part of knowing, at least, from the feeling that triggers the impulse to reach for more of our soma of choice. Whatever reptilian part of us that is screaming for the safety of more "news," more wine, more candy, more sex, more Battlestar Galactica does that through the vaguest and most inarticulate of asks: "MORE. WANT. NOW." Slowing down to feel the tender hurt and pain is the last thing that lizard is interested in.
When I first started acting, really acting, not the fun but not particularly real horsing around I did in sketch comedy up until then, I cried for two years. A slight exaggeration, but only just very. The Method class I took was an excruciating daily exfoliation of my soul. Hell, it was soul-rolfing. Not what I would characterize as fun or even, most of the time, non-awful. But the results, when one of us was willing to do it, were extraordinary. You would watch in amazement as some perfectly good simulacrum of experience metamorphosed into a holy, super-real transport to another world, via Chekhov and skill, yes, but mainly via the fearlessness of one or two brave souls willing to let go.
In the same way, when I had my breakthroughs in therapy and my hospital bed epiphany, there was a monumental falling-away.2 But if I look at them carefully, each was preceded by an excruciating pain point, or, more precisely, a series of them, where I really and truly stared at what was blank in the face. The breakthroughs were awesome, and by that, I mean wonderful, magic and transporting. The moments of examination before? Uh, not so much.
Part of the reason they were so horrible is because of so much ignoring along the way. I was very Scarlett O'Hara about most of my minor annoyances, there was always a day when I would deal with them, but it was always another one. In the meantime, on the shelf or out the window or just brushed away like a pesky mosquito they go. When I look back at myself way back when, or last month, or yesterday, most of the time, I wasn't even conscious of the brushing-away. It becomes reflexive; you don't even have to think about it.
And here we are, back at it, not thinking. Or if thinking, only doing it in that super-spiffy, hyper-efficient, Type-A way: "Oh, yeah, that; it's probably bad. Let's get to that sometime, hey?"
In the comments of the first part of this post, The GirlPie brings up the notion of becoming a good liar. She talks about it in the context of integrity, saying that having a Specter of Wayne would do her no good because she has gotten so proficient at bypassing the truth. I do not know The GirlPie well, but I know her enough to suspect that she has integrity to spare, and that she's equally blessed in the proficiency department. For whatever reasons, a Jewish-Catholic, I'm doubly burdened by guilt, I am a terrible out-loud liar, so that route to bypassing integrity is generally unavailable to me. I am, however, wildly skilled at lying to myself, or rather, at speeding past the truth, ergo I totally get where The GirlPie is coming from.
So here is what I have to say about accountability and integrity and using these magnificent beasts to wrangle the less magnificent (but no less mighty) ones to the ground: sloooooow down. For now, don't even go there, just notice.
Note the feeling you're having, as soon as you can catch it, because that's all you can do, as you eat candy bar #1 or #5 or #25. Just note, at first. Note. Observe, like a scientist. Scientists don't judge, in the lab, anyway; they just note. If you are up for it, maybe write it down privately. Do this as often as you need to until you get bored with it. You will, eventually. Bored or disgusted, and then intrigued. What if I try this next? you might ask at this point. You might. Maybe. And then, when you do, you can find the Specter of Wayne that works for you. Might be a shrink. Might be the courageous decision to speak honestly to the shrink you already have. Might be a 12-step meeting.
For me, for now, The Specter of Wayne works. But let us be clear on this: it works in exactly two areas I've spent enough time looking at and noting and getting bored and disgusted with, and no more.3 There are other areas I have not yet begun to note. Or to become disgusted with. Or hit bottom with, or whatever your notion of "Enough!" is.
My other habits, in their time. Your habits, in yours.
Sharing what we can about grappling with them, or supporting each other in the pursuit of excellence?
That, all the time...
xxx
c
1And before you make any assumptions about Hiro's fan base being into the pr0n sitez, know that feelings can manifest themselves in craaazy areas. It's a chakra thing, apparently, and those lower chakras are all about basic survival needs, safety included.
2And the one in the hospital? Let's just say if I could bottle that shit, the world would be a very different place.
3You'll note (haha) that I've discussed the SCD illegals cheat that Wayne is helping me with but not the other. That's because it's private. I may or may not ever discuss it here. Doesn't matter. I discuss here what I've got enough distance from to talk about in a way that might be useful to someone besides myself, and what does not affect my privacy or the privacy of others. You don't have to be public about everything. You don't have to be public about much of anything, when you get right down to it.
Image by emilio labrador via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup!
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.
Supercute, commissionable inky portraits that remind me a bit of a looser Louise Fitzhugh, for a very reasonable $25. [Tumbled, via Adam Lisagor]
An interesting interview from New York magazine on what constitutes selfless memoir with two controversial, and female, memoirists. [delicious-ed]
A brief, beautiful meditation on the beauty of life by the inimitable Jeffrey Zeldman. [Stumbled]
My poem didn't make the cut, but I still bought a copy of 48 Hour Magazine (Issue Zero!), a wild, wonderful work of love from a really smart (and kinda crazy) devotees of media genres old and new. [Facebook-ed]
Of course, not getting selected meant I had to find a photo to go with the poem. And that always turns up great stuff. [Flickr-faved]
xxx
c
Image by williac via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Poetry Thursday: Hustle
It takes over
when you want something,
like a sleeper Cylon switch
tripped on some remote mother ship:
one day
you're sitting on the couch
eating Fritos
watching the Wheel;
the next
you're an unstoppable force
in a series of headlong collisions
with a never-ending stream
of immovable objects.
God help you.
You can
of course
avoid this
if you like.
The racing of your heart
and the ringing in your ears
and the rumble in your belly--
they all go away
eventually
or at least
you can pretend they do.
But a word of advice
if you would not awaken:
Stay away from New York in the spring
and Paris in the fall
and Rome, anytime.
Stay away from the suburbs of Dallas
and the swamps off the Gulf
and the hills of Kentucky
and anywhere else
there are people
or buildings
or neither
or both.
Quit going to plays
and museums
and ballparks
and beaches,
especially the ones next to oceans,
and absolutely stop watching anything played
at a professional
or amateur level.
You should also probably forget
about thinking and writing,
and dreaming (day or night),
and give up yoga and running
and fighting and screwing
and even being celibate for any length of time.
This one particular French cookie
I read about?
Kind of spongy? Shaped like a shell?
Avoid it like the plague.
Speaking of reading,
give that up entirely,
along with talking
or listening
or even eating anything
besides maybe Fritos
and something to dip them in
while you watch the Wheel.
Oh. And if you ever decide
to play hooky
from your hateful day job,
and skip out on a client dinner
for a falafel sandwich on your own,
do yourself a favor:
stay out of this one particular
cinema in Westwood.
I'm pretty sure
that firetrap
they call "Theater 2"
is a Cylon base
riddled with
hidden switches.
Because 25 years later,
I still cannot remember the movie I saw
but I know that I haven't slept
a wink since.
xxx
c
Image by Bukutgirl via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
Mastering the art of surrender
While searching for a particular Merlin sound bite on scaring yourself into stuff that I wanted to grab for my most recent newsletter1, I stumbled on this transcription of a different equally wonderful interview that Colin Marshall did with him.
There is such incredibly rich goodness in it, great, smart things we all know about how important it is to hoe your own row and be clear on what it is you want, but that we forget (again) until we're reminded by someone whose cleverness is tinged with just the right amount of earnestness (or is it the other way around?). But the thing that got to me today was the part about how this quest is, at times (and for great long stretches of time), a lonely and expensive slog:
People who are like, "I wanted to be a doctor since I was five" or, "I always wanted to be a lawyer." I have a lot of friends who became lawyers and hated it. There's no reason to think that your own career in the arts or personal publishing is any different. Make sure it's what you want to do. Make sure that you really have a lot to say about something, and that you have a giant amount of tolerance for, first of all, making no money , for it actually costing money for a while. If you want to do this stuff right, you're going to have to hire lawyers and stuff. And it's costly. It seems free because you can get a free blogger account, but ask anybody who's trying to make this scale, and it takes dough.2 [italics mine]
I have no mouths to feed and incredibly low overhead (for Los Angeles, anyway). Between my own nervous squirreling away during the fat times and smart investments and even smarter not-investments and a bit of a legacy from my dad's passing and, yes, the occasional gig I take even though I'm technically not for hire these days, I am good. Nay, better than good, I am in the most luxurious position I could be without being kept by someone or having what my friend Peter calls "Mailbox Money," that stuff that makes working actors do a whoopee jig every time it shows up. And still, I am terrified about money most of the time.
Lately, I've run into an unusual number of people who are on the prowl for their Next Big Thing. I smiled knowingly at one person who's currently suffering through Year One and had a moment of internal nervous recognition upon hearing another bemoan his rounding up on Year Three.
How long can it take to find your Next Big Thing? As long as it takes. Or whatever the answer is to that other one about one hand clapping.
What has been helping me through the crazy of late are the eminently sensible words of my first-shrink-slash-astrologer spoke to me recently: "Master the art of surrender."
It is a message she's served up to me many times over the years, in and outside of readings. Because I have a very particular, one might even say "controlling", idea of how things should go and what I need. And who's to say it's all true? Am I such a genius that at 22, I foresaw future happiness in a life without children, without corporate prestige, without a primary relationship, and in a city every elder I ever respected had nothing but scorn for? No. Not even close. I didn't even know I liked dogs for another 25 years, that's how much I knew.
This, or something better. Hold a good thought, definitely have goals and intentions, but stay open to the awesome. Master the art of surrender. Live in the goddamn moment for a change, and for the best kind of change.
Because really, what do you know? And when did you know it for sure?
So I work on my tolerance for chaos and ambiguity. I see myself getting mad, but I sit in it a little less each time, and frankly, that I'm even noticing I'm angry is a gargantuan improvement. I have good days and I have bad days. But these days, even the bad days I'm starting to recognize as good days, because they are DAYS, baby.
They are DAYS...
xxx
c
1Subscribing is strictly optional, but if you like it here, you might want to subscribe to stuff I write about there. It's a little more polished and a little more obviously useful. You can see for yourself by visiting the archives. Which, I'll apologize for up front, are loading insanely slowly. The only downside of my move to Thesis.
2And then, when you thought it couldn't get any worse, there is this:
It takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of self-awareness to be open to the fact that you may become popular about something that you didn't want to become popular about. At a certain point, you don't get to pick that anymore.
Christ on a bike. What is the one thing more terrifying than working at something you're making virtually no money at? The prospect of all that work paying off in a way you don't even want. Finding that either you've propped the ladder up the wrong wall or someone moved it to another one while you were climbing. Yeesh!
Image by oldsoul_sn via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
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
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.
Bad habits live in the dark
While I have been chugging away at certain goals, book-reading and Nei Kung-doing, especially, I've been lagging embarrassingly behind on others.
One of the most embarrassing failures has been my inability to resume my dedication to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. For a regimen that not only turned my health around seven years ago but also managed to get me down to a negligible amount of medication, I'm amazingly dismissive of it. I'm not just talking the occasional cheat: there are oceans of Rolos between me and my former healthy self; vast chasms you could fill with Pizza Hut Thin-and-Crispy Veggie-Lovers Supreme. I would think nothing of driving through the Jack-in-the-Box window for their revoltingly delicious, deliciously revolting 2-for-99¢ tacos, of tossing a bag of Jelly Bellies, or M&Ms, or Marshmallow Peeps, in season, into my basket on the way out of Vons or the Rite-Aid.
Literally. I would not think. This has made transgressions surprisingly friction-free, but has gotten me further and further from feeling like it's possible to be on SCD at all.1 And you know, I can't count on there being prednisone and other immunosuppressants after the apocalypse, so it behooves me to get off the junk well in advance and give my poor intestines a chance to sturdy up.
Fortunately, I seem to have stumbled on a solution that costs nothing, is easy to implement and that, thus far, has stopped all fast-food cheats dead in their tracks: the Specter of Wayne.
Wayne is a good friend and an even more exacting external conscience. A fellow ACoA with bigger balls than I, he simply has no tolerance for moral ambiguity. Like the SCD, you either are or are not with Wayne; he won't argue with your choices unless you want him to, but there is no lipsticking of the pig with Wayne. It is broccoli, and he says the hell with it.
Which is how, after he gently brought up a very embarrassing lapse in, uh, judgment I was making over and over again, we ended up with the brilliant fix of me contacting him before succumbing. I could succumb after that, but I had to let him know first. If you are an addict or someone who loves one, you may recognize this as sponsor-like behavior, which it is, with one significant exception: it would not be Wayne's job to talk me out of my indiscretion, just to bear witness to the possibility of it.
Well. The genius of this was immediately evident. I am ruled by shame and fear (yeah, yeah, I know); Wayne is an inflexible arbiter of right and wrong. There was no fucking way I was going to cave if it meant letting Wayne know. The mere idea of it was enough to stop me when I was on the brink. Hence, the Spector of Wayne!
At last week's Success Team, my little weekly gathering of like-minded self-improvers, I reported that the Specter of Wayne had worked so well in curing me of my previous bad habit that I wanted to apply it to another: the getting of me back onto SCD. We would go slowly, just junk/fast-food, for starters, and fuzzy borders, at that. I went to a wine-tasting event on Friday night with the full intention of enjoying whatever delicious illegals they laid out next to the Malbec and sangria. Hell, even the sangria was illegal. But these were fine-quality baked goods and chocolates, not thank-you-drive-through abominations.
Eventually, I will banish even those, of this I am sure. Partly because with each thing I say "no" to, I grow a little stronger and more confident. I live a little more in the light of truth, and believe a little more deeply in the power of focusing on that which is best for me.
But I also retain a healthy respect for the Specter of Wayne. Whatever it takes to get there from here...
xxx
c
1The SCD is a binary proposition: you're either on it 100% or you're not on it. And, in my experience and that of many thousands who have gone before me, one requires fanatical adherence for a while before one can feel safe letting illegals creep in here and there. If ever.
Image by Random Activity via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
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.
Poetry Thursday: Los Angeles, dammit
You could be sad
somewhere else, maybe,
but here?
Surrounded by darkened mountains
dotted with the fairy lights
of a thousand houses on stilts?
Flying through the night
on doo-wop and dinosaur bones,
windows down,
spring-into-early-summer air
whipping your pigtails
into whirligig frenzy?
Here? In this temporarily
frozen slice of endless possibility
tinged with pleasure?
Not here.
You come for a stretch, I know,
a season of pilots,
a trip down to Disneyland
and back up to Yosemite,
a trek to the beach
to watch the freaks,
a spin up to the aeries,
or down into the valleys,
to gawk at the stars.
And
if you never find
yourself behind the wheel
at night,
rolling down the 405,
up the 2,
around the curve
that gives you a 360 view
of crappy Los Angeles,
whipping it into
a froth of wonder
so goddamn majestic
your heart could break
if it didn't swell properly,
if you never do that,
well, then, friend,
back to the East,
or the Lakes,
or whatever Great-White-North
baked-desert-rock
Old-World-wise
side of the planet
you may return.
But if you would
wish yourself back,
stay off that freeway
after hours,
when the magic is strong
and the sirens' song, true,
or L.A.
will make you her bitch.
xxx
c
Image by jondoeforty1 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
What's up & what's gone down :: May 2010
A mostly monthly but forever occasional round-up of what I've been up to and what I plan to be. For full credits and details, see this entry.
Colleen of the future (places I'll be)
- The World-Changing Writers Workshop (course: June/July 2010; my "class" is on July 8) Finally, after years of hounding by millions, okay, some hounding by a few persistent souls, I'll be teaching a little mini-class on writing as part of this excellent workshop series produced by my pals Pace & Kyeli of Freak Revolution. The lineup is STELLAR, four of my fave writers, plus me!, and I can already tell from the prep that Pace & Kyeli have requested from me that this series is going to kick some booty. Pre-registration starts next Tuesday, May 11, but if you go to this page now, you can sign up for a free intro tele-class (I won't be on that call) and download a free PDF with some good, basic writing tools. Oh, and yes, I'm getting paid for teaching, and yes, those are affiliate links. Look at me in my Big-Girl Pants, getting paid for shit!
- May L.A. Biznik Happy Hour at Jerry's Famous (Wednesday, May 12; 5:30 - 8) If you live in L.A., work for yourself and want to get out of the house to meet/mix with other like-minded people, come check out this monthly gathering my cohort Heather Parlato and I have been hosting for almost a year and a half. It's free to join us (we ask that you buy a little something to support Jerry's), but you'll need to join Biznik here first (which, hooray!, is also free).
Colleen of the Past (stuff I did you might not know about)
- The Career Clinic radio talk show I had a fantastic time talking with my Internet pal and real-life terrestrial radio talk show host, Maureen Anderson, about decluttering as it relates to business, creativity and life itself. All four segments are available for your listening/downloading pleasure here, on this shiny new libsyn account I set up: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
- TEDxTacoma If you weren't there, I'm sorry you missed it. If you were, I love you and can't wait until we meet again. A truly extraordinary day of inspiration, fun and unbridled passion-exchanging. I wrote about it here. My small contribution, a talk on communicating with passion, that's sort of a mini-crash-course in acting, is available to view on YouTube.
- The Emma blog did a really lovely writeup about my 99.99% non-sucky newsletter (and its apparently spectacular open rate), and...
- My Biznik collaboratrix, Heather Parlato featured me on her (highly-recommended for its own excellence) blog, where she talked about what it is, exactly, that I do. Which is wonderful, because half the time, I have no idea myself.
Colleen of the Present (ongoing projects)
- communicatrix | focuses My monthly newsletter devoted to the all-important subject of increasing your unique fabulosity. One article per month (with actionable tips! and minimal bullsh*t!) about becoming a better communicator, plus the best few of the many cool things I stumble across in my travels. Plus a tiny drawing by yours truly. Free! (archives & sign-up)
- Act Smart! is my monthly column about marketing for actors for LA Casting, but I swear, you'll find stuff in it that's useful, too. Browse the archives, here.
- Internet flotsam And of course, I snark it up on Twitter, chit-chat on Facebook, post the odd video or quote to Tumblr, and bookmark the good stuff I find on my travels at StumbleUpon and delicious. If you like this sort of stuff, follow me in those places, I only post a fraction of what I find to Twitter and Facebook.
xxx
c
Image by madnzany 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
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.
Connecting to and communicating with passion (my talk at TEDxTacoma)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnALY0ZW1s4&w=480&h=385]
Apparently, the only thing that terrifies me more than giving a talk at TEDxTacoma about passion-based communicating is watching myself give a talk about it.
Still, I felt is was important to put on my Big-Girl Pants and watch it. The whole thing, slightly less than 18 minutes, because I got a little nervous and forgot some stuff.
My objective (as possible) critique? Not as horrible as I'd thought it would be, even good in places! I think the main points come across, and I think there's valuable information in there for anyone starting out on the road to putting out the word about what moves them. I forget sometimes, but it really is confounding, having all that energy and no funnel to put it through; the discipline of acting has a lot of valuable information for building your funnel and practicing the use of it.
Also? MY MOUTH WAS SO DRY. I'd forgotten until I watched this again, but I was sort of freaking out on stage because I could feel my mouth drying, drying, drying up. That's what all that weird, old-people-tongue-moving stuff is about: trying to keep my lips from sticking to my teeth. I know: disgusting. But there it is. A technical reality of speaking, especially early in the morning after you have had not enough water and too much caffeine. Gonna have to work on that.
Finally, the sound is iffy in places. I'm talking into a headset mic, but the audio seems to be coming from the ambient me, not the mic'ed me. And we're in a chapel, so it gets a little boom-y and I come off (much to my embarrassment) a little preachy. Maybe that's a function of the chapel's acoustics, but I think there's a bit of me to blame, too, in that. So. You know. Working on that, too.
It's a process, right?
xxx
c
Video of me speaking at TEDxTacoma shot by my new pal, and dead ringer for Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, only the goofy, fun version, Kyle Sleeper, one of the fine students of the amazing Michelle Jones at Puget Sound University University of Puget Sound who helped get this shindig birthed. You can watch all the videos of the talks from TEDxTacoma on YouTube, including my fave "talk" of the day, the performance of the a capella group, Garden Level. Love them boyses who raise their voices, yes, I do!
Thanks, Michelle! Thanks, Kyle and all you crazy kidz! Thanks, UPS! Thanks, TEDxTacoma!
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.