Poetry Thursday: Cranky is as cranky does

I am annoyed
by this fake movie
with Jennifer Aniston
and this real guy
falling asleep in my lap,
in my airspace

And I am annoyed
by my pants not fitting
and by all the things I ate
to make them that way

And I am annoyed
by the books I brought to read
because the good ones are done with
and the bad ones
I want nothing to do with

And I am annoyed
by the time
that crawls so slowly
when all I want
is to crawl into bed
(and miles to crawl
before I sleep)

I am annoyed
by how little I wrote
and how easy it was
not to write it

I am annoyed
he hasn't called
and that she
will not stop
by the heat
and the humidity
by having too much
and not enough
and the hopeless
piles of civilization
I cannot stop seeing
all around me,
that I cannot stop
adding to
even when I know better

Dear God:
I am annoyed
and dismayed
at what I know will be
the long, shameful walk
back
to the me
who is not
annoyed.

xxx
c

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

Asking the right question

A while back, when my shrink and I were trying to dismantle my Lack of Entitlement Issues, she had me ask myself a question repeatedly: What do I feel like doing?

Like the complaint-free bracelet or any other kind of check-in built around raising awareness, it worked like gangbusters once I focused on it for a while. Which is to say, it probably would not have moved me forward had I not made it Project Front-and-Center, but once I did, it moved me from a place of not even realizing I had stuff I wanted to ask for to what I suppose will be a long, flat plateau of asking for it outright. Still, it's a kind of progress.

One of the tricks of forward motion, though, is learning to ask the right question. This is where the older among us usually have it all over the younger, because we've been in enough situations where we've done things right and wrong that we have a working vocabulary of questions for various conundrums.

For some reason, though, I'd never found a good question for grappling with immediate satisfaction vs. delayed gratification. I mean, I'd powered through quitting smoking and transitioning onto the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, but there were really compelling things urging me on in the moment: inability to breathe, for the former, and blood pouring out of my ass, for the latter. Once the super-compelling reason disappeared, it was much, much harder to just say "no" to tasty grains and sugar. (Fortunately for me with regard to tobacco, the stuff tastes and smells vile once you've been off it for a while.)

More and more ideas have been coming to me via my gut lately, possibly because there is a lot more gut lately, thanks to straying from SCD, and I've been better about giving them the attention to float up to me (possibly as a result of the awareness-raising from the Lack of Entitlement exercise.) And a few days ago, this came up: instead of asking myself if I really wanted this (bad thing, usually carbs), or if something else wouldn't be better for me (duh!), or what such-and-such-inspiring-hero would do, or if this would give me more or less room/health/whatever, I should ask how I wanted to feel: right now, in five minutes, the next day, etc.

It's worked and it's not worked, and so it's really too soon to say if it's a significantly "better" question. Honestly, I find that I'm more willing to reason out the answer to any question if I'm better rested, so the truly significant gift I can probably give myself is less about the perfect set of questions and more about eight hours.

Still, I wonder: if framing has so much to do with what we do, what are the framing devices that work the best? And which of these were truly surprising to you? The "feeling" angle seems so obvious in hindsight that I figure there are probably other, even better questions out there.

So how about it? Are there questions, ways of framing a situation, a decision, that finally turned the key in the lock for you and made the tumblers fall into place? Or is it more about powering through for you?

xxx
c

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

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #15

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.

Incredibly (and surprisingly) heartwarming video involving Jewel, karaoke and a little good-hearted trickery. [Facebook-ed, via Gretchen Rubin].

If you don't think a piece about sexism in art can be wildly entertaining AND illuminating AND thought-provoking, you're not reading enough Jill.   [delicious-ed]

My new-favorite quote about writing, and kinda-sorta-prettymuch what I want to do for the next 50 years of my life. [Tumbld]

Fantastic Flickr set of classic albums reinterpreted as Pelican books. [Stumbled, via KERNSPIRACY] [Flickr-faved]

Tarp surfing. It's a thing. [YouTube-d, via The Rumpus]

xxx c

P.S. I'm posting tons more awesome stuff to the Coudal feed through the end of next week. No, really, they said I was good!

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

Poetry Thursday: Game on

The first change is
up to you.

The rest
come rushing
up to you,
one after another,
pell-mell,
willy-nilly,
greedy, greedy bastards
ready ready ready
for the light
you have let in
through that small, small
crack in the door.

The news is
that changing one thing
changes everything.

Whether that bit
of news is
good
or bad
depends on how
open 
your arms
and your brain
and your heart
really are.

xxx
c

Reframing your ducks

I have a signed Keith Haring poster from the New York Book Fair that's been with me for 25 years now.

It's moved with me from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Chicago, where I finally had it framed and hung it proudly on the wall of my first bona-fide "grownup" apartment (i.e., all mine, with furniture I purchased myself); it's moved with me since to three other places and one additional city, Los Angeles.

Somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with it, but I hung onto it because it was valuable, literally, perhaps, but more personally, because I could remember the moment of signing, me, nervous and sweaty on one side of the table, Keith Haring, weary and sweaty on the other. (New York summers are the opposite of dry and temperate.)

He asked me who to make it out to, and in a fit of stupid reaching to be different, I said, "C-A-W", my initials. Because more than anything in that moment, I wanted Keith Haring to think I was interesting and unusual. I'm sure that's exactly what he thought, right after "Christ on a bike, they come out in the heat."

Anyway, there it all is, in one framed, signed poster: me in my lost, twentysomething yearning, and New York City, and the closest I ever got to Keith Haring (other than the dance floor of Area a couple of times, where everyone served as background for everyone else's ongoing New York music video.) It's not serving to do anything but remind me of what a sad little tool I was, both for my pathetic stabs at cool and for selecting an orangey-red frame that matches nothing I've ever had nor will have in my home. Yet even though I am committed to letting go of what's not working for me, I can't give this the heave-ho. The idea of selling it hurts my heart; the idea of giving it to Goodwill is unthinkable. It needs its Next Right Home, but it's not fit to go out into the world yet. Its Next Right Home's owner would (rightfully) look at it and politely decline. It is '80s in the worst of ways, bright, loathed, neglected.

It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the thing was not empirically awful. That it could be saved by, perhaps even made lovable by, reframing. I scouted readymade frames, Aaron Brothers coupon in hand (does anyone shop at Aaron Brothers or Bed, Bath & Beyond without one anymore?) but came up short. Which is how, a few fiscally painful exchanges later, I wound up with my same old poster looking completely awesome on my bedroom wall in its new, plain, wildly overpriced, custom black frame.

Getting rid of new stuff, stuff that you haven't had for a while, or that hasn't been in your family for a while, getting charged with multiple hits of emotional energy, isn't too hard. Even the expensive new stuff is relatively easy to let go of, once you get over that first hump.

Getting rid of old stuff is much, much harder. For starters, you're invested in it seven ways to Sunday; it becomes so much a part of you, it's hard to see how it could serve you differently, or serve someone else better completely.

I recently unearthed a mamaluke of an old habit, not remembering, that is going to be an unholy bitch to wrangle. My shrink and I spent the better part of this month's session unpacking it, and I just know I'm going to be a long time at turning this one around. The reframing began with me being introduced to the idea that when you come from a fucked-up home, you tend to do a lot of dissociating, and that leads to a lot of not-remembering. For a long time, it either didn't matter (I could look things up, or ask) or the problem wasn't that bad. But with perimenopause, things have declined precipitously, I forget names almost instantly after they're made known, and random nouns are getting harder to grab as my rickety head-RAM spins fruitlessly. Plus, I want to live a good life, and that means addressing my demons, even the stinky, hoary ones I paved over or figured out a way to work around a long time ago.

At some point, I will let go of most everything. And at some point further down the road, I will let go of the rest of it, as we all will when the clock counts down to zero.

For now, I let go of what I can as I can, and reframe the rest, so it can continue to serve. And it warrants remembering that one can enlist a little help with the reframing, as well as help with the outright tossing. None of us got here on our own; sometimes, we can all use a little help getting to the next place...

xxx
c

Book review: On Writing Well

If I were a better writer, I'd be able to do justice to On Writing Well, William Zinsser's own brilliant writing on writing.

Or maybe I should say, if I were the writer I dreamed of being back when I first dreamed of being a writer, I could write the review I had somewhere in the back of my head: that perfect review that made the book come alive, that explained it perfectly, in words that danced around on the page in fancy clothes, as I'd always imagined my words doing when I finally got my word-choreographer chops.

Here's what Zinsser might say to that: Why don't you just tell them what the book is about, and what you got out of it? (Only, you know, he'd do it better. Because he's WILLIAM ZINSSER.)

Fine. Here's what I got out of it:

1. Writing is rewriting. You knew that, right? Even though most of us who write mostly on our blogs mostly don't. Like me, if you couldn't tell. Well, it is. Writing is rewriting. And some of what may be most useful to you about this book are the before/after examples. This man is ruthless with his darlings. Slaughtered, incinerated bodies everywhere.

2. Most good writing is good, simple writing. Very easy to get tangled up in your fancy pants, fancypants. Again, the book is rife with examples of good, simple writing. Which, to bring us neatly back to Point the First, is the result of plenty o' rewriting.

3. The writing that looks the easiest is often the hardest to pull off. Dialogue that sounds realistic. Humor that's actually humorous. Anything short.

4. Any subject can be interesting if it's written about well. Unfortunately, most people who know a lot about a thing don't know much about writing. If this is you, this is your book!

5. Anyone can learn to write well (enough). Mostly, writing is about listening and cutting and getting the hell out of the way of your story. The essays in this book will teach you how to do this.

There's a reason this book warranted a 25th anniversary edition. It's one of the best how-to manuals on writing out I can imagine, and I dream big. If you're a writer, or want to be, you should read this book; if you're serious about it, you should read it once a year.

xxx
c

• Buy On Writing Well by William Zinsser on Amazon
• Read my review of Zinsser's equally awesome book on memoir, Writing About Your Life
• Read William Zinsser's regular column on the American Scholar website

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.

Family, friends, health, work: Pick three

There's an old saying the creatives in my old ad agency liked to lob at the suits when they started fire-breathing stuff like budgets and time and quality:

Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick any two.

Actually, we were rarely this articulate or polite under pressure, usually, we used a lot more words, rapid-fire and sotto voce, most of them of the NSFW variety.¹

It's a cheap truism, obviously crafted by someone who was paid a lot of money or given much time to come up with it, but it makes it no less truthful. That whole having-it-all thing? Bullshit bullshit bullshit. A bill of goods you've been sold by a similarly well-paid, overworked team of mad men, most of whom have the fat lifestyle or lousy home lives to back it up.

Which brings us to the updated project-triangle illustration for the modern age of self-actualization, the Four Burners Theory as (apparently) laid out by David Sedaris, and expounded upon by my young friend Chris Guillebeau. In the interests of symmetry, a model worth aspiring to, I lay it out thusly:

Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three.

The metaphor of burners is a great one, provided the four you envision sit on a cooktop of the ancient variety (like me!) where there is limited gas to go around (unlike me!), and it is impossible to go great guns on all four at once. If you've been privileged enough to grow up cooking on Wolf ranges, think crappy, old plumbing, where a neighbor's flush means your scalding-hot blast of shower. (Or, in the case of Gloomy Manor, any water running anywhere in the house means the trickle of shower water you're under reducing itself to spittle.)

The idea is not that you can't have all four, even at once: it's that you can't have an exceptional level of all four at once. You cannot put in the time required to raise children properly and nurture outstanding friendships of depth and be an elite athlete and win the Nobel prize in chemistry. Because to be outstanding at any one thing requires an outstanding level of focus on that thing. Ipso facto, right?

Since you are a smartypants, your brain is racing to find exceptions to this rule. Lance Armstrong, maybe. (Although, you know, that's an awful lot of primary relationships, not to mention single-parent offspring, to qualify for categories #1 and 2.) As Ben Casnocha notes, Tim O'Reilly seems to be living the dream, but I'd wager O'Reilly himself would say that he's not all-in with any one of the four categories.

My own bias has always been towards a singular focus on work; it's how I was raised, and I suspect that to a degree, it's also how I'm wired. My Crohn's epiphany brought an end to that, though. In one fell swoop (and several subsequent months of recovery), I realized that while elite athletic performance was as meaningless to me as it had ever been, a baseline level of health and happiness was not. The former requires a certain amount of time and attention in the form of rest and, because of my annoyingly high-maintenance diet, food preparation. The latter? Well, sleep pulls double-duty, I refuse to be miserable at my own hand, and an average of eight hours daily is required to keep the Mean Reds and blues at bay.

The happiness part of the equation is far, far trickier, because family, friends and work each factor into that level of buoyancy I strive to maintain. I'm guessing they do for most of us; we feel better when we're being useful, and that requires both meaningful work and a level of reasonable engagement with other human beings. Historically, I've let the first two slide. Most of the serious relationships I've had ended largely because I just can't handle the demands of a primary relationship.² Hell, I can't always handle the demands of friendship. So I have a few close friends who, for whatever reason, put up with my bullshit, and many more casual friendships which are less time-intensive and which I can thus maintain without a lot of stress and drama.

This means I forfeit most of the benefits of family, and for now, I've made my uneasy peace with it. I really, really, really want to hit these next ten years hard, work-wise. If it means I end up pushing a shopping cart or a ward of the state in my old age, well, there's no one to blame but me and my choices. I also accept that there's no guarantee my work will be of a quality that justifies these choices. Frankly, that's even scarier to me than ending up alone, which is probably an indication that I have a long way to go before I can join the ranks of the mentally healthy, but there you go: it's the truth, and that's as good a place as any to start from.

If I have a point here (other than my seeming one, which is to depress the hell out of you), it is this: you are the sum of your choices, and there is no gobbling up your cake and still having it whole on the counter, pristine in its lovely glass cake stand, there for you to enjoy tomorrow. And a non-choice is a choice, too, so there's no weaseling out of it. Your life will get eaten up from under you, even if you don't do the eating. (Pro tip: deep-six the TV.) I have been extraordinarily lucky in that the IDIOTIC amount of time I spent doing something I hated, writing ads, turned out to be of some utility later on. Really though, the sooner you can get yourself out of something you're done with, or release something you have no use for, the better off you are. Trust me on this.³

In other words, let us not miss out on the most obvious and helpful part of the whole equation: pick. Choose. Decide. Spend time in thoughtful deliberation, weighing the pros and cons of your choices and actions and possible outcomes and then BE a verb.

Do not be like me and let life live you for too many years. A few, fine. No harm done. Everyone needs a break, and there is some value in playing at Candide a bit, here and there, for the adventure of it.

But do not lose sight of the almighty power you have built into you. Yes, be, but also, do.

Pick one to hit out of the park or pick a life that lets you gracefully enjoy a bit from the sampler plate of all four.

Pick, though. Pick today, and then pick again tomorrow...

xxx
c

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Sedaris essay referencing the four burners The lady who told him about it (she'd heard of it in a management seminar) said the stove could be electric or gas. I think for the analogy to really work, energy-wise, it needs to be gas and old, per my description, above. But hey, what the flock do I know?

¹If we could talk at all, that is. Sometimes, we were so apoplectic at the unreasonable demands, all we could do was fume and point to the graphical representation we'd clipped from wherever, probably an ad, while we kept working.

²There were other reasons, but I fully accept that I suck at giving my beloveds the attention they deserve. And until I figure this shit out, I'm off the market.

³Or, hey, just read the archives.

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #14

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.

Can't stomach Mad Mel's disturbing rants on their own? Try this mashup with kittens! NSFW, of course. [Facebook-ed, via David Avallone].

Great Idea for Book Reviews #247: ask a writer to describe the last great book they read.  [delicious-ed, plus a "via"  shoutout in perpetuity to The GirlPie for introducing me to The Rumpus a ways back]

Two songs heavily reliant on the vernacular use of "baby." They could not be more different from each other, yet they are both undeniably catchy. [Tumbld]

One of the great things about summer? The joy of blue popsicles. [Flickr-faved]

If you're fond of the "oh, god, why am I stuck here and how the hell do I move ON?" posts that tend to pop up here on Mondays, you will lurve this simple, illuminating bit of wisdom on just that. [Tweeted, which almost never happens, so you know it's good]

xxx
c

P.S. I will persist in reminding you until July goes bye-bye that I'm guest-editing the links feed at Coudal all month long!

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

Poetry Thursday: Heat wave

Try to focus
on how free
your toes feel
in your brand new flip-flops
or how cold they don't feel,
like they did last March
or anything else
but the creeping, creeping
heat
that floats upward
from the ground
only to pool
in your head
with no way out,
slow-cooking your brain
and what's left
of the information inside it.

Do you miss
butternut squash soup
and roast vegetables
and crisp apples
and piles of warm
blankets on top
of you, holding the cold
at bay, weighing you down
ever so gently?

You do.
So do we all.

They will be back
before we know it,
before you can say
"Pass the ice, please,"
before before before.

What was it like
before,
when it was cool?

I forget...

xxx
c

Show me yer rig! (Gmail tags edition)

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13318319&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Show me yer rig! (Gmail labels edition) from communicatrix on Vimeo.

This week's edition is a followup to the screencast on using filters in Gmail: showing a bit of where I'm filtering those tags to, in other words, taxonomy.

Because I didn't want to make the video overly long, I'm including screencaps of the bulk of my tags in gmail, along with some of my rules and reasoning behind them.

Here are the prized, above-the-fold tags:

Here are the tags just under the fold:

And here are the tags just below them:

There are a few more below that, but they're really just variations on a theme. Basically, I keep the stuff I don't want to see but want to keep at the very bottom of my long list of tags by using a system of more or les 'x's and colons. (Did I say "semi-colons" in the video? Enh. You know what I mean.)

I have a feeling this might be on the outside edge of usefulness for someone who reads this blog, but hey, I'm still kinda-sorta trying stuff out in these videos. So let me know what you think: good, bad, ugly.

And hey! At least they're getting shorter, right?

xxx
c

P.S. New newsletter went out today. You're subscribed, right?

Chasing vs. going after

I didn't submit a talk show idea to Oprah. (You can thank me in the comments.)

I didn't submit a panel idea to South by Southwest. I didn't submit myself as a speaker for the international women's conference a friend urged me to.

I haven't entered a contest or sweepstakes in I-don't-know-how long, haven't asked to be included in a gathering I knew would be fun but that I hadn't been invited to, and the last guy I liked who asked for my number had to pry it out of me.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last year or so I went from being someone who chased after things to someone who went after her own thing. And yes, there is a difference.

Take Yaddo, for example. It's an artists' community in New York State that houses writers and poets and, well, artists in retreat, providing them with a beautiful, distraction-free setting in which to focus on a piece of work. One applies, and one is either accepted or not. I have decided to apply, because I really, really like the idea of me in a beautiful, distraction-free setting, finishing one of the three books I started writing this year¹. Or take Jennifer, although you can't, because her delightful husband already has her, heart and soul, who introduced me to the idea of Yaddo, and that it was a perfectly reasonable thing for me to apply to. (She wrote most of her book in residence there.) I met Jennifer because I wrote a review of her excellent memoir, and got to know her because, after a bit of correspondence, I asked if she might want to start up a little writers' group here in L.A., and she said "Yes."

See, it's not like I don't go after things. I'm going after Yaddo; I went after Jennifer (in, you know, the friendliest and most well-meaning of ways). And if Yaddo turns me down, I may go after a slot again, later on, if I really want it. What I'm realizing is that in the past, there were too many times when I chased stuff because I thought that catching it would get me something or somewhere. That it would mean I had made it, maybe, where "it" is the cool kids' club or a USDA-prime stamp on my ass or some other shortcut to the other side of some mythical, self-imagined velvet rope.

Much like Gertrude Stein's genius summing-up of the perils of grabbing at the evanescent, however, on the few occasions when I managed to chase down my trophy and nab it, I came up empty. The thing I had desired wasn't there, and the desire I had going in just vanished without a trace.

If pressed to define the difference I see between chasing a thing and going after a thing, I'd say this: a chase ends up being about the chase, and less about the fox at the end of it; going after something is putting one foot in front of the other and moving towards what you want. Deliberately, thoughtfully making choices, and perhaps delaying gratification elsewhere, so that you can get to the Next Right Place you need to be. Although I guess you could just as easily go after a refrigerator or a dream house or even a fox, if you had decided that what you really wanted was a teeny, tiny stole. But you would want that refrigerator or that house or that tiny stole because you really wanted it, you'd really thought it through, and figured out how it would make your life that much better, and it was worth losing that much life to go after it, and not just because you wanted to fill an empty place in your soul with a high-end icebox or rub your neighbor's nose in your teeny, tiny fox stole.

Is submitting a talk show idea to Oprah always chasing? No. Absolutely not. I'm sure there were lots of people who were motivated as much by the idea of making a submission video as they were winning the golden ticket. When I entered a similar kind of contest a few years back, a huge part of the "why" for me was that I came up with an idea for a video I thought would be hilarious and great fun to assemble, not because I particularly lusted after the idea of being chosen from on high (no pun intended) by the great gods of the cut-rate airline to travel in their metal tubes and document what I found along the way. I mean, it would have been fine, but the winning, I was ambivalent about; the making of the video I had to go after.

But I spent a lot of years as an actor, watching a lot of actors chase after stuff that wasn't there. As I said in a recent interview, you need to be about the acting, and the day-to-day work of being about the acting; if you're going after gold statuettes and the love of a million random strangers in the dark, you're going to come up with nothing even if you get your wish.

So yes, chasing vs. going after is a little like the old destination vs. journey standoff. And it's also about living for other people vs. living for yourself, living the life you really, truly want, every possible minute that you can. It's probably also a bit about all that good sovereignty stuff that Hiro Boga talks about.

The easiest way for me to think about it, though, is wanting what you want enough to do something about it, but really wanting what you want.

As the song says, more I cannot wish you...

xxx
c

¹Yes, three. And you heard it here third, I already let the cat out of the bag with Havi's Kitchen Table people and Pace & Kyeli's World-Changing Writing Workshop. There will be more on these three massive mothers as I move forward, including how you can participate in one of them, but in the meantime, if you want to get on a notification list, sign up here, and leave a note in the comments field to that effect.

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

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #13

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.

Don't mess with the women of The Daily Show. Especially if you're Jezebel. [Facebook-ed].

A Marxist take on the financial collapse, with pictures!  [delicious-ed]

Those BP folk, they sure are some nimble-footed PR geniuses. [Tumbld]

Not crazy about Scientology, but I like the building from certain angles. [Flickr-faved]

And don't forget, I'm guest-editing the links feed at Coudal all month long!

xxx
c

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

Poetry Thursday: utilitarian

Poetry is not
the sole dominion
of hearts and flowers,
angst und drang,
misty, water-colored memories
or raging against the machine.

Poetry is an equal-opportunity
conveyor belt,
portable language
that works hard
in short bursts,
serving up energy
in small doses
like vitamins
or bouillon cubes:
there when you need it, 
handy, on the third shelf, in the back,
a quick hit
of inspiration
or instruction
or other non-necessary
vital nutrient.

Why not
a poem about math,
about naps,
about alternating current
or meditation?

Why not
a line
or two
or three hundred
about someone
you may never see again
or the way the light
hit the side of that brick wall
and carried you back
to your girlhood days
and the freedom
you forgot you had?

Why not
tell the world
in a way it might be ready
to hear
about hockey
or horticulture,
scissors or roping steers,
ice sculpting, sunscreen,
chemo, parcheesi
mountain rappelling,
database management,
composting, credit,
and how
to cut back on coffee?

Don't we all 
need waking up
in one way
or another?

Couldn't we all
use a lift 
from here to there
now and then?

Wouldn't it
be great
if you could grab a cab
or a train
or a bus
at any corner,
rain or shine,
to take you from where
you're stuck
right now,
to some place
you never knew existed
but is just
where you want
to be?

Is it all bottled up
for want of permission?

Fine.

Here's what you do:
take the thing you know
and cook it down,
long and slow, steady-like,
or all at once, in a flash,
then serve it up
to the rest of us.

It doesn't have to be perfect:
it just has to be.

We're hungry,
goddammit.

xxx
c

Image by kenhodge13 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

What's up & what's gone down :: July 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)

• July L.A. Biznik Happy Hour at Jerry's Famous (Wednesday, July 14; 5:30 - 8) Co-hosted by my friend and colleague Heather Parlato, this is a really low-key, easy way to get out and meet some likeminded solopreneur and small biz types. Free, but join Biznik here first (which, hooray!, is also free). UPDATE: It's "sold out" now (which it's not really, because it's free, but you know what I mean), but check back, if/when someone drops out, you can grab their spot.
• The Ojai Women's Business Social (Thursday, July 8; 5:30 - 7:30) My friend Jodi Womack started the OWBS over a year ago, and it keeps on growing with no signs of stoppage! A wonderful, totally laid-back event just for women to meet and mingle with other business women.
• Coudal Partners Fresh Signals (the entire month of July!) Yup-yup, in case you missed it, I'm posting random (but mostly design-and-culture-ish) links as the proud guest contributor on this month's feed of delicious links.

Colleen of the Past (stuff I did you might not know about)

• Havi Brooks' Kitchen Table I probably shouldn't even tell you about this, because we had so much fun and Havi and her people are so awesome, and (here's the bad part) you can't just get in on the Kitchen Table action without applying and passing muster (which is probably how Havi ensures that only the exact right people make it in there.) But I'll use the opportunity to plug Havi's site, which apparently I inspired her to start lo, these two or three years ago, and which is always full of great info. And the comments sections of the posts are like a smaller, freer version of the Kitchen Table! Especially check out the Very Personal Ads on Sunday. Serious hoodoo going down that way.

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.

Break

Every so often, one is required to take a vacation, whether one wants to or not, when one is about to have a nervous breakdown, for example, and metaphorical white-coated men show up with kind firmness and a complimentary wrap-sleeved jacket. Or when one is still a teenager, without agency or car keys (which is the same thing in modern-day North America).

Or, slightly more happily, when one's sister decides to get hitched in a remote slice of paradise tucked into a box canyon in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. I mean, I suppose I could have declined; I am well past my teens and have agency galore. Car keys, even. But I would rather eat ground glass than miss the wedding of the person responsible for, among other things, saving my life some eight years ago.

Still. Generally, I do not vacation well. Since I've discerned there was a difference, I've found my favorite "vacations" are just wry twists on my regular routine, which is to say, taking select pieces of my regular routine to another place so that I can see and do them slightly differently. The carousing, the foreign schedule, and, on weeks like this, the meeting of a whole bunch of new people for the first time, even fantastic ones, can make bona-fide, Normal People Vacations somewhat problematic for the introvert freak contingent.

This trip was slightly different. Okay, wildly different. I left, I stayed, I enjoyed the hell out of myself, even though I barely busted out the laptop to write until today. The food and surroundings and accommodations were outstanding, which never hurts. And the occasion was a wildly happy one: my sister has met a genuinely superb guy with an incredibly nice family and the greatest, most welcoming set of friends I've met in a long time. Not a dud in the bunch, and every last one of them kind, funny and generous. I have hit the family-and-friend jackpot, and didn't even know I was entered to win.

But also, I took some necessary precautions along the way. Housekeeping-wise, I prepped before I left, lining up several posts (although not this one, or one that should have gone up yesterday) for my various outlets of nerdery. I've got the rest of my life down to a streamlined minimum, so there's not nearly as much last-minute wrangling to do before I leave home. And most importantly, once I got here, I did what I needed to do to keep my circuits from frying: lots of sneaking off by myself to read, to walk, to Nei Kung, to unplug. (Also, if you are an introvert/feminist/lightweight, refuse all offers of tequila shots, and keep your arms down when the bouquet gets thrown, if you can't avoid the affair entirely.)

It wasn't as much alone time as I get at home, living my freakish little life with its great swaths of solitude, but it was enough. I'm good, I had a great break, and I would not have done one thing differently. And now I have 50 new best friends, plus a brand new spare fambly. Plenty of time to nap when I'm dead, or something like that.

If you have a need for solitude, balancing it with the other, seemingly-lesser (but really, only less obvious) need for fellowship can get tricky. With a little time, care and the inevitable leap of faith, though, it generally all works out in the end.

And at times? Smashingly so...

xxx

c

Referral Friday: The Secret City

I confess: I have broken my self-imposed hiatus a couple of times since I self-imposed it this past December.

Once, for a good friend and client. Because, hey, that's what you do for a good friend and client.

The second time, most recently, for a friend I practically bullied into accepting a free session, I so believe in his work: Mr. Chris Wells, performer extraordinaire, heart big as all outdoors, and creator of The Big Artist workshop, which I attended last month and raved about here. Chris prepped his big-as-all-outdoors heart out beforehand, but the truth is he already had a mighty clear vision of where he wanted to take this puppy, and I mostly helped facilitate around the edges.

Chris has an equally clear vision for (of?) where he wants to take The Secret City, his celebrated NYC-for-now-based performance/celebration/art-church, which recently won an Obie Award for being so fucking fantastic. (Okay. It won strictly for being fantastic, but I am lost without my celebratory expletives.) And right now, he's doing him some serious biggifying, as my friend Havi would say, raising $15,000 in 45 days via Kickstarter to take The Secret City to the next level: a bigger space; non-profit status; world domination by art. You get the idea.

You can pledge $25 and get a song on your voicemail. Pledge more and get art. T-shirts. Secret City board member Roseanne Cash serenading you in private. (You have to pledge a lot more for that one.) Or be a mini-titan with your name in the program and a personalized thank-you note for just a buck.

A patron of the arts! For a buck!

Either way, have a wonderful weekend filled with joy and art of your choice.

(But come on, a buck!)

xxx
c

Linking up with Coudal

You know how they say that your blessing is your curse? Well, me and my big fat habit of opening my trap before information has a chance to travel to it occasionally nets me the awesome.

To wit, when I was approached by the fine folk at Coudal Partners to be a guest editor for their daily feed of outstanding links during the month of July, or should I say, their outstanding (and daily!) feed of links, I jumped on it. Before I realized, "Holy Moses, now I have to come up with good shit ALL MONTH LONG."

Oh, well. As I've said before, if I didn't terrify myself on a regular basis, I'd still be sitting in a Montessori class, shoving paste up the nose of the girl sitting next to me. (Lie. There is no paste in Montessori.)

So I will simply say thank you to Coudal, and (I think) to my friend, Alissa Walker, who passed along my name for consideration, and knuckle down to the difficult work of cruising the Internet for awesome stuff.

And if you come across any wonderful stuff that bears sharing and is not already well-traveled around the 'tubes (here's a good place to check for freshness), by all means, send it along to me. I'll credit you with a link, and the world will spin on its axis with a little more cheerful vigor.

Happy July! And linking!

xxx
c

Speaking of awesome, to tide you over, and to give you just a taste of the kind of awesome we're looking to share there, here are just a few of the I've found via the Coudal feed:

• A delightful short film from a man living out two childhood fantasies, in stop-motion.
• Another delightful short film for Bronte Sisters Action Figures.
• A thoughtful contextual examination of the popular Facebook game, Farmville.
• Fab, retro catalog for Volvo in the U.S.

Show me yer rig! (Gmail filters edition)

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12937871&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

See it bigger on Vimeo.

Joining its brethren, the screencasts on Google Reader and gCal, is a little (too long of a) video on one specific thing I really like about gmail, its filters.

Pretty much every email program has filters of some kind built in, but I like how easy gmail makes it to set them up, especially once you start making use of keyboard shortcuts (and a cheat sheet can help with that).

The specific hack I added is a top-level (i.e., above-the-fold) label named, reasonably enough, "add to filter." (I mistakenly call the label a filter in the screencast, but it's definitely a label. You create labels, which you can use to help you with filtering.) When bacn-y email shows up in my inbox and I don't have time to deal with it right then, I grab it and move it to the "add to filter" label. I then clean that out once or twice a month, creating filters for stuff I want to funnel somewhere, or sometimes just unsubscribing to something on the spot. I definitely suffer from eyes-bigger-than-stomach syndrome when it comes to bacn.

You don't even have to watch the video if video ain't your thing. My main point here is to draw attention to the advantage of taking time to do one small thing (automate your email sorting) if it helps free up time and headspace to do big things (work, nap, etc.).

Although if there was enough interest, I could do an additional, longer video or post about gmail workflow, with screen captures on the taxonomy I'm using with labels, which has helped me tame the beast. But maybe not. Email is a really personal thing. Plus, isn't everyone sick of talking about it? And haven't most of you given up on email for anything useful or fun and just gone to Twitter and Facebook?

I know I get enough dang "emails" in Facebook.

As usual, comments, criticisms and observations welcome, especially those that will help me improve. And questions? Of course!

xxx
c

Book review: Holy Land

We are studying style in our weekly writing workshop, how we use everything from humor to commas to sentence construction (or lack thereof) to express things, and how those things add up to what we might call a "voice."

Brenda, our fearless-leader/teacher/tour-guide also has us doing exercises that bring our attention to the style of other writers, literally deconstructing their work line by line, paragraph by paragraph, to see how they craft worlds, lure us into stories, and guide our focus.

Like most new things, it's a maddening exercise at first. I stumble through essays so clean and deftly executed they seem born that way, like little literary Venuses on the half-shell. I know it's a lie, of course; no one escapes the painful and humiliating tedium of Anne Lamott's famed Shitty First Draft. Still, despite my best efforts at keeping this (and that wonderful Beverly Sills quote about there being no shortcuts to any place worth going) at the forefront of my thinking, I am always quite sure that when I sit down, it should be different. And immediately, if not sooner.

Here's who might cure you and me and anyone else within earshot of that notion: D.J. Waldie, thoughtful chronicler of Things Southern-Californian, with emphasis on that which was created out of something only to erase the thing from which it sprung. In Holy Land, his memoir of a suburban boyhood in Lakewood, California, he alternately describes what it was like growing up in one of the many manufactured towns that began popping up outside of slightly older outposts like Los Angeles and, in his case, Long Beach after the Second World War, and chronicles the inception and building of the town itself.

Unlike the by-now convention of switching back and forth between stories, chapter by chapter, something James McBride did beautifully to create context and build suspense in his memoir, The Color of Water, and that James Michener did thoughtfully in The Source, so you could skip over the tedious modern-day love story, Waldie writes in what I can only call fragments, because my literary vocabulary is so limited. (I'm working on it, I'm working on it.) He loops from personal recounting of the modern-day life in this same town he grew up in, Waldie lives in the same house his parents bought freshly built, and works for the city government, to historical documentation to childhood impressions and so forth, delicately switching from lens to lens until magically, this strange and complex something that sprang from "nothing" starts coming into focus.

You can get all kinds of glimpses into what this crazy place is like, of course, and from all kinds of angles: Chandler and Cain, Bukowski and Fante, and poor old Nathaniel West, to name a few of the few I've read. Of them all, Joan Didion's writing comes the closest to this kind of oblique, restrained, meticulously constructed narrative (she's a big fan, by the way, if her glowing blurb is to be believed). It's work that clearly required a lot of work to make it look like it didn't; it's un-showy yet elegant, and always evocative.

Holy Land restores your faith in the value of rewriting, and the precision it brings. Not to mention it's a helluva good read...

xxx
c

• Buy Holy Land by D.J. Waldie on Amazon
• Visit D.J. Waldie's blog, "Where We Are," on KCET.org

Legalese, etc! 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.

My narrow, narrow bands of interest and utility

For most of my life, I thought I envied people who were on a mission: the ones who were seized by the desire to paint or to build stuff or to cure malaria.

It was only very recently, maybe as recently as last week, or the week before (time has been playing tricks on me this month), that I realized what what I was really wishing for was to have some kind of defining passion that easily translated into a verbal business card at a cocktail party. I hated being in advertising for most of the years I was in advertising; I didn't even particularly enjoy telling people it's what I did. But man, did I not begin to appreciate how easy it was to tell it.

All of the things I'm passionate about, talking to people about of stuff, telling stories, figuring stuff out, are squishy and weird. The closest I've ever come to a defining thread that connects them all is "creating order out of chaos"; a former colleague once said I excelled at "coming up with creative ideas," which, once I got over the metal-on-metal grind of a well-intended but gratingly redundant descriptor, I decided was not half-bad as summaries went. Ideas, I has them. Maybe I could be the Lucy Van Pelt of idea vendors: a nickel a shot; a buck, perhaps, given inflation. But no, because I'm even less tolerant than Lucy.

As I close in on six months (!) of self-imposed sabbatical, I'm both predictably alarmed and oddly nonchalant about my inability to define what it is I do in a way that is pithy and truthful. What I have been answering of late in reply is either "Nothing!" or "I'm on self-imposed sabbatical!" I will also occasionally just lie and say, "Marketing consultant," if I don't feel like engaging at all. It's a lie, but a relatively harmless one, as lies go.

To my creative intimates, the fellow strugglers in writing workshop, or elsewhere behind the scenes, I share the only thing I know for sure: that I want to write, and that I am doggedly pursuing it, placing structures where they need to be to support it, addressing what obstacles I can see that might be getting in the way of it. (I'm also actually writing, and not just what you see here. But I'm not quite ready to talk about what.)

One thing I'm considering is slashing my expenses to the bone and taking another Stupid Day Job. There are all kinds of issues with that, too, of course. I may be romanticizing it, for starters. Also, absent the singular focus a definable driving passion provides, I may outright hate it: when I had my last Stupid Day Job, I was pursuing acting rather ferociously. What happens when you just want to live your life, figure out some shit and write a little? Does a Stupid Day Job even work under those circumstances? Can anyone even get a Stupid Day Job in this economy?

And who do I think I am, anyway, wanting to live a life and figure stuff out and maybe write, freakin' Thoreau?

Ah, well. I have no reason to believe this, but somehow I suspect I will look back on this time when I am old, if I am fortunate enough to grow old, and in the same way I now smile at youthful me for wasting time cataloguing minor imperfections of flesh and character, I will shake my ancient head at my foolish former self for not appreciating the goodness, the greatness of even these sometimes baffling days.

Every day is a gift, even the ones that don't come wrapped in pretty paper with a bow on it. Even the ones you want to send back to the store. My bands of interest and utility are slender enough not to have crossed in any obvious places, but that they haven't is no reason to wish for this day to be over any sooner, or any other.

Hello, ridiculous day of this tedious month of my difficult year.

Hello, and welcome. Let us see what we can do to each other, shall we?

xxx
c

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