My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard

06 Friday Jul 2012

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I could teach you but I'd have to charge

image: Smashingbird Vintage

Where was I last week, you ask? Busy making milkshakes. If you’ll be sweet enough to forgive my absence, I’ll share the recipe with you.

I picked up a killer new writing gig this week. Its subject matter is exactly the direction I’ve been wanting to go in for some time… I just haven’t been sure where to start.

To be clear, I’m crazy fortunate to have the clients I do, and I already write about topics I love. Austin. Travel. Green living. Interior design and architecture, with a cultural essay or two thrown in for fun. I work for cool people who do interesting things, who take risks, and who have unique perspectives on the world. Most days, I pinch myself that this is the space in which I get to play. But there’s still the next step… the one where I get personal and write things just for me — oh, and for the people who’ll hopefully pick it all up at bookstores and order it online someday (assuming I play my cards right and wind up in such places… fingers crossed).  There will come a time when I start spilling my guts 200 pages or more at a time, or craft tall tales, or some balance of both. You’ll see down my ears and up my nose and into the depths of the places I’ve been. That’s some scary business, folks, and I’ve been staring at the ceiling a lot lately, trying to figure out how to put it together.  For years, I’ve been rattling ideas around, but hot holy hell, have I needed a nudge.

This week, I got one, and it made me fall forward.  My new client is a company called Milkshake. It sends out an email a day with a short feature on a business, organization, person or product that’s doing good in the world — or as they like to put it, “good finds that give back.”  You’ve probably heard of TOMS, for instance — the canvas shoe company that operates on a “buy one, give one” model, or Warby Parker, which does something similar with cool and affordable eyewear. Milkshake covers businesses like that, and also things like Bright Endeavors, a Chicago-based non-profit that helps young, at-risk mothers by employing them to produce eco-friendly soy candles in upcycled containers, the proceeds of which go back into their own mentoring and professional development. It covers programs, brands and ideas that give people hope and — go ahead an insert an eyeroll here if you’d like — make the world a better place.  And now, I get to serve as editor of its kids’ edition.

“Sweet god, sign me up,” I thought when I saw the opportunity to write nice things about nice things.  Because truth?  I don’t have much energy for sarcasm; I look at someone like Mindy Kaling or Tina Fey and get tired just watching them spit out one-liners like PEZ dispensers.  I love listening to it, no doubt — but coming up with my own?  I’d spend equal amounts of time apologizing for everything that flew out of my mouth.  Zinger… apology.  Zinger… apology.  And no one wants to read that.  I’ve been told time and time again to check out what Lena Dunham’s up to, and I know when I do I will envy her wit. I have some, sure, but it’s always meted out with equal doses of cheese. Ooey gooey, goshdarn delightful, good old-fashioned cheese. And I’m okay with that. Sweet Andy Griffith passed away last week, and it’ll take quite a few of us to keep all that Mayberry-style do-goodery alive.

There’s an old saying in the media: “If it bleeds, it leads.”  And sadly, it’s true.  We’re conditioned to be compelled by the gore of a drama, the thrill of the bite.  And sure, a charity cookie sale is far less sexy than any given scandal, but it doesn’t make it any less important. Here’s my deal: I can’t bring myself to slam anyone without losing sleep over it. It sometimes drive me nuts. I’m a writer, damn it. We’re supposed to be acerbic, right? Keen and merciless and incisive and hard. Cynics who chew the ends off of pencils — seekers of secrets, tellers of truth. But when truth is so often subjective — when we cut someone off at the knees and later go, “oops!” — well, there’s not much coming back from that. So I think I’d prefer to tell stories that want to be told — stories of things that inspire and build. Stories of people who’ve overcome.  And if anyone listens, kickass. Please enjoy.

We all have the capacity to do good things, even if it’s quiet and done without fuss. Actually, those are my favorite kinds of heroes: the ones we don’t ever hear squawk.  I don’t mind tooting their horns for them; they, more than anyone, ought to be heard.  I’m cool with being the nerd who writes about the bright side.  It is, after all, what makes life sweet.

a.

Brains for free

22 Friday Jun 2012

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A photo signed by Einstein to the attention of news reporter Howard K. Smith. It reads, "This gesture you will like, Because it is aimed at all of humanity. A civilian can afford to do what no diplomat would dare."

image: public domain

I stumbled across something this week that made me smile at the mere idea of it.  It’s called Skillshare, and in case you aren’t already savvy to its charms, it’s a community marketplace in which you can “learn anything from anyone.” In short, much like TED, it connects inquisitive people to their subject matter of choice, but it does it through folks in their local communities, opening up an in-person exchange of knowledge.  It basically seeks to make education — in its broadest sense — more democratic and accessible, and by accessible, I mean right around the corner from your house.

Call me easily-led if you want, but it had me at its tag line: “The future belongs to the curious.”  Can I get an amen? 

You could say that the internet, on its own, opens up a wealth of information and places it at our fingertips, and you’d be right.  You could counter that a lot of information on the internet is complete crap, and you’d also be right.  Try looking up any medical symptom under the sun and give me a rough estimate of the accuracy rate of your first 10 search results.  Abysmal, right?  But that’s okay.  Because as with anything, I think there’s been a bit of a pendulum effect in terms of the quality of content on the web.  We started at the far end of one extreme where there was nothing but esoteric data understood only by programmers, then swung wildly across a vast expanse to the other side, filled with a ton of SEO-loaded, nonsensical muck peppered with funny memes and, thankfully, The Oatmeal.  We’ve spent a little while capitulating in a ping pong match of sorts and are finally, many years since the advent of dancing babies, evites and Blue Mountain Arts birthday cards, finding ourselves somewhere in the middle.  I’m excited to dive into the big glass bowl of brain candy that’s emerging in the center and gobble it all up.

Like I’ve said in previous posts, I’ve been trying to dial down my incessant need for crap trivia — like what lipstick Zooey Deschanel is wearing this week, for instance; at the moment, I’m proud to report I have no earthly clue — and make way for something more satisfying.  Sure, there’s always NPR, god love it, and it’s amazing how much more easily one can get pulled into PBS programming once one eliminates a few hundred other channels from her cable lineup (imagine that!) but it’s cool to know there are people out there who want to — and apparently will — offer an unlimited amount of free education to whomever wants it.

In the spirit of sharing cool stuff, here are two websites I can’t get enough of, and if you’re an even remotely curious person at all, you’re bound to find something worth falling headfirst into on one or both of them:

Open Culture is essentially a tremendous brainpower hub linking out to every kind of free online class imaginable — no, no, I’m not talking about schmaltzy “how to make a zillion dollars overnight”-level nonsense; I’m talking about a downloadable “The American Novel Since 1945″ course from Yale, video lectures from a human behavioral biology course at Stanford, and more than 400 others of that ilk.  Apparently, such things are called “MOOC”s — massive open online courses, and multiple startups are emerging from the likes of the guy who invented the Google self-driving car and other brainiacs and mathletes — see edX, Udacity, et al.  Anyway, Open Culture also employs a staff of freelancers who post multiple times a day with cultural gems like rare recordings from legendary musicians, lost interviews with cultural luminaries and random trinkets of geekery you’d have to see for yourself to fully grasp the magic of.

Then there’s Brain Pickings, the personal blog of Maria Popova, an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow and contributor to both Wired UK and The Atlantic.  She calls herself “an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large.”  She posts ridiculously fascinating things every day, and of course, her writing is impeccable, unfettered and smart.  I adore everything about her work so much, it’s not even worth wasting energy being envious; I just eat what she dishes out each day and enjoy every speck of it.  The best way I can describe her site is to say it’s like a big plate of bacon-wrapped smartness served with a cocktail of sugar-rimmed creativity.  On second thought, that was terrifically dumb.  Let’s use her words instead:

“It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.”

Yeah.  What she said.  Basically, if I ever meet this woman, I might kiss her square on the mouth.

There’s this great quote from someone named Roger Lincoln:  ”There are two rules for success: 1. Never tell everything you know.”  …and it’s brilliant.  In the competitive society in which we live, both professionally and personally, it’s spot-on, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it.  But wouldn’t it be cool if it didn’t make us laugh?  Wouldn’t it be amazing if we looked at each other after reading it, completely puzzled as to what it meant?  I realize such a reality may never arrive, but the curious little kid in me who’s been taught to share her carrot sticks still likes the notion of it.  And I think it’s doable on a smaller scale: it starts with each of us stepping outside of our silos and sharing our brains with our friends.

The older I get, the more I realize I don’t know.  And while each new revelation of my own lack of knowledge is pretty terrifying, at the same time, it’s kind of not so bad.  When you get down to it, nobody knows everything, but everyone knows something.  So why don’t we share more often?

a.

Pick a direction and go

15 Friday Jun 2012

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Pen to Paper

image: The Nervous Breakdown

Most weeks, I attack this blog with an exact — or at least fairly specific — idea of what to write about.  Today, though, I’m back inside two old cycles: “don’t throw stones” and “it’s too silly to spend 800 words on.”  The way I see it, there are three modes in which I operate when it comes to spinning sentences: the day-to-day client stuff, most of which is topical, informative and not particularly inflammatory; the long-form, being-printed-inside-bound-books-someday stuff, which takes time and thought to percolate; and the stuff you see here each week — random musings from a curious human being trying to make it as a writer.  And today, it all just feels like fluff.

Believe me, I have Things to Write About… capitalization intended… but most of them won’t fit inside a blog post, nor do they really belong in one.  Although I’ve borne witness to things awful enough to beg plenty of in-depth conversation, it’s impossible to commit them to a page — or, in this case, a screen — without causing pain for those involved.  On the other hand, I can wax poetic for ages about the silliest and most mundane of things, but even though it’s sincere and I thoroughly enjoy reading the same sorts of things from other people, I worry that I come off sounding about as substantive as sea foam.  I’ve watched people around me deal with loss, illness, suicide, crime, infidelity, incarceration, poverty, addiction, depression, anxiety, and everything else that comes part and parcel.  And while I’ve certainly been affected by it, in some cases much more deeply than others, I’ve still somehow managed to escape it and live a life that, while imperfect, has ultimately been sort of charmed.  I’m nobody’s judge and jury, and it’s not my place to point fingers unless I want them pointed back at me; I’m also fully aware that, conversely, standing on a mountaintop and crowing about the fantastic, amazing, sublime perfection that is my life at any given moment is basically an open invitation for the fates to tear it down.  But I know I’ve been put here to tell some kind of story, and I need to figure out what it is.

Like anyone, I want to leave the world a better place than I found it.  I subscribe to Emerson’s version of what that means (oh, wait, hello; apparently it wasn’t Emerson!), but at the same time, it’s not quite enough.  I want to say something intelligent.  I want to change something somehow.  But the last thing I want to do is preach some kind of sermon, because what in the hell do I know?  Or any of us, really?

I guess I’m trying to say I’m working on striking a balance before I plant myself inside the literary world and attempt to convince people I can write things worth paying for.  There’s telling the truth, and there’s the amount of balls it takes not to run and hide once you’ve told it.  If you’re going to summon up the latter and, in doing so, accomplish the former, you’d better be damn well sure your “truth” is what you say it is, and you’d better tell it in a way that isn’t foolish.  I’m petrified to get it wrong.  I need to get it right.

I had a conversation with someone recently about the way we each experience a story and remember it later on.  We compared a few movies we’d seen together and talked about what we remembered from them, and the differences in our recollections were crazy.  More to the point, we came to the conclusion that I’m crazy… and maybe incapable of linear progression.  Here’s an odd bit of trivia about yours truly: I’ve seen Almost Famous — a film I list among my all-time favorites — countless times, and yet I truly can’t remember if Penny and Russell wind up together in the end.  Look, I can illustrate the grabbing-the-sunglasses-off-the-ticket-agent’s-counter shot frame by frame, and I can draw a picture-perfect outline in my mind of the layout of William’s house and where everyone’s standing when Russell shows up under false pretenses… but seriously, are there things after that?  Because I’m too busy knowing exactly who comes in on what note during the “Tiny Dancer” sequence and reflecting in awe at all the perfect glances between the two lead characters throughout the entire movie, and then, of course, there’s that score, which couldn’t be more brilliant.  I stare in wonder at the artistry of the whole thing, but I’m clueless on some of the 1-2-3′s even though they’re right in front of me.

I’m like that about a lot of things in life.  I get the deeper meaning, the basic message, and the underlying juju of it all, and I take in all the miniscule details on top as if my memory were photographic… but when it comes to the normal stuff most people pay attention to in the middle — major plot points, the bad guy’s motivation, where we last left character so-and-so — I’m blank.  I have a fear, I think, that this will eventually haunt me if or when I make an attempt at fiction, and maybe that’s a sign that I need to stay away from it.  Or, hell… maybe it’s a point on which I should start challenging myself.  Either way, I’m on a self-imposed timeline here, and at some point I’ll have to pick a direction and go.  I saw something earlier this week about the travesty of the fact that some of the world’s most incompetent people are the most self-assured and confident, while the wisest ones are pacing around, wringing our hands and second-guessing ourselves.  I thought back over people I’ve known throughout my life who fit into each group, and the consistency gave me an odd sense of comfort that I might be in the latter… until I caught a whiff of my own vanity and started second-guessing it.

Either way, I’m sure of one thing: I know I was put here to write, and I’ve got a firm grasp of my voice.  The question is: what do I want it to say?

a.

…

Egg on my face

08 Friday Jun 2012

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oopsie daisy

image: zazzle

Writing prompt:

Write about a time when you were embarrassed.

A time?  As in, one singular time?

Excuse me while I reach into my grab bag.  The act of choosing just one anecdote is, hands down, WAY harder than the act of writing it out.

My blunders in life have been plentiful and occasionally massive.  Luckily, I’m just a normal person living an ordinary life and therefore haven’t had to barndance my way off the SNL stage or explain to the American public just what in the world I was thinking when I did the “hey girl hey” with a White House intern.  My oopses, thankfully, are mostly garden variety screw-ups, but I’d still rather not rehash them; I’m oddly adept at replacing the old ones with new, sometimes even more inventive versions of their former selves anyway.  But then again, in re-telling the tales of our utmost idiocy, sometimes we get a good laugh out of things and even enjoy realizing how far we’ve come, followed swiftly by the sobering — exhilarating? — realization of how far we still have to go.

So, screw it.  Let’s empty out the whole big bag and count up all the goodies.

In no particular order, I’ve done all of the following: wore things in the 80s; confided in all the wrong people about all the wrong things; overslept and missed a nonrefundable flight; spent way too long dating someone (make that six or seven someones) who was were comically wrong for me (this epiphany, of course, only presents itself in retrospect); spent too much time lingering on half of those fools once all was said and done; nearly got fired from Bath & Body Works for having no clue how to work a register; wore things in the 90s; nearly got fired from Victoria’s Secret a year after the Bath & Body Works debacle, also for having no clue how to work a register (I was young, okay?); misspoke on a conference call and used the word “canoodling” (making out) instead of “cavorting” (just plain socializing), thus inadvertently accusing several higher-ups in one of the world’s largest PR firms of making out with one another in the middle of the workday; told a roomful of people, through a microphone while wearing a suit, that I was “so excited to finally meet most of them”; genuinely loved the show “Blossom” and had a miniature crush on Joey Lawrence; locked myself out of my own home while wearing a bikini; got pulled over for drunk driving while actually stone-cold sober (yes, my driving is sometimes that bad); and conversely, had far too much to drink on multiple occasions, getting tangled up in all the usual shenanigans folks get into when we’ve gotten too cozy with our spirit of choice.  And we’re not even going to get into my music collection, since a) we already did that last week and b) if I tell you I once stood in the fourth row of a Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch concert, what more information do you need?

Nothing embarrassing happens when we’re sitting at home alone.  Well, plenty of things would probably render themselves utterly mortifying if anyone were to walk in and catch us doing whatever weird nonsense we happen to do when we think no one’s looking (read a phenomenal book called The Visible Man for a lingering head trip on the matter).  On its own, hanging out alone doesn’t so much lend itself to embarrassment.  Playing it safe, staying on the couch and being creatures of habit aren’t the sorts of behaviors that render red-faced humiliation.  To properly embarrass oneself, one has to walk out the front door.  One has to face the world.  One has to take a deep breath and go, “Okay, let’s try something.”  One has to have — how do you say? — chutzpah… moxie.

Nerve.

The guy doesn’t get the girl by sitting in his room, staring at the wall.  The girl doesn’t win the Olympic medal by playing video games all her life.  Nobody ever won a Pulitzer for standing around, reading Us Weekly and waiting for their microwave dinner to ding.  The guy gets the girl by getting rejected a hundred times, giving up, turning around to go home and slamming face-first into the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.  The girl gets the Olympic medal after training like mad, falling flat on her face, knocking out a tooth or two, and getting the hell back up again a thousand times if that’s what it takes.  The Pulitzer Prize… well, apparently that takes a lot of writing.  Like a LOT a lot.  And here, my friends, we are, with a long stretch of Fridays before us.

Am I aiming for a Pulitzer?  Actually, no, and certainly not with this little confessional.  I’m aiming for bylines I’m crazy proud of and good books with my name on their jackets.  And I’ll keep aiming, every day, including these ramble-bramble posts each week to keep me accountable, as long as you keep aiming for whatever you want, too.  Let’s embarrass ourselves.  Let’s f*ck up royally and live to reminisce about it.

Let’s have some stories to tell.

a.

Hey mister deejay

01 Friday Jun 2012

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Please don't stop the music

image: Cassia {Flickr}

It’s occurred to me with some sense of wonder that although last week’s post was supposedly about music, it didn’t talk about music at all.  I guess I sort of used a genre — industrial metal, in this particular case — as a jumping off point to talk about trying new things in the name of learning and love.  So today, I kind of feel like geeking out about some of the music I’ve been listening to lately.  DJ Onesmartpoptart in the house!!!  Oh god, I can’t believe I just said that.  Sorry.

I’m a simpler creature than I like to admit, but since I’ve just come out and admitted it anyway, I’ll go a step further: I honestly think my playlists lately have had little to do with any actual appreciation for the songs themselves and everything to do with the fact that it’s sundress season.  A few weeks back, my Spotify queue devolved from an it’s-okay-if-someone-walks-in-on-me Black Keys/Mat Kearney/Simon & Garfunkel hodgepodge into something much less so… specifically, a late-90s pop princess buffet. This probably happened because I’d just finished a post about wanting to clean up my media diet and eschew all details of reality stars’ so-called lives, which of course made me need to listen to Jessica Simpson’s Nick Lachey-era catalogue over and over and over again for like two weeks straight.  It’s possible a few Mandy Moore ditties made it in there too.  WHY AM I TYPING THIS OUT LOUD?  Oh well.  As much as I know you’re probably judging me, as well you should, it just feels good to get it off my chest.  And admit it: those “ditties” are delicious.  They’re lovable little cake pops full of nonsense* — sinfully sweet and vapidly perfect — and sometimes in life, that’s just what you need to take the edge off.**

To cleanse the palate, I guess, this week I added some new, slightly more respectable stuff from the likes of Regina Spektor, Sara Bareilles and Kimbra, the last of whom I’ve been trying to get into for months but nothing of hers has been sticking… until now.  You know how you like the idea of a particular artist, and you have a certain expectation of them, but nothing you hear from them quite matches what you want from them?  It’s unfair and small-minded and shallow and rude, but it’s the truth sometimes, and Kimbra wasn’t doing it for me until I had a good long listen to everything on Vows in one sitting.  Then it finally clicked, and I can only think of one way to articulate why.  Here goes:

Doesn’t this song sound exactly like the part in Pretty in Pink when Molly Ringwald decides Andrew McCarthy “didn’t break her” and proves it by making her own prom dress?  Or any 80s movie scene in which the heroine grits her teeth and SHOWS THEM ALL… by sauntering into the office/club/football game/school dance wearing something super hot and trendy?  Seriously…. don’t bother looking at the video itself — it’s just a bunch of Fight-Club-meets-Christina-Aguilera’s-Dirrrty-phase silliness.  Just close your eyes and picture the inevitable slow-mo close-up of any given protagonist putting on her lipstick, doing that pucker/kiss thing that no one actually does in real life, sliding a bra strap over her shoulder and deciding once and for all to GIVE ‘EM HELL. Through FASHION.

I can make fun all day long, but :::holy cow::: that song is catchy… and so are all these other girlie confections that have me resisting the urge to just go outside in the middle of the day in a sweet summer dress and walk the dog for an hour and a half whilst drinking lemonade.  It’s June, for godsakes.  Work’s been so nonstop that I have a midday alarm on my phone that simply says “EAT.”  Were it not for my metalhead and the handful of friends who occasionally grab me by the hair and make me go have brunch, I’d gladly be glued to work all the time.  I preach balance to everyone around me but kind of suck at finding it myself.  So perhaps my treble-clef leanings of late are my subconscious self’s way of saying, “Hey, let’s get a little sunshine up in here.”

Ugh, ew, champagne problems.  Moving on: more songs worth sharing.

If there’s someone who’s drawn your ire — some boy or girl who did you wrong, some person who betrayed you in some way or has been generally making you feel like crap — this gem’s for you.  In fact, I think I’ll make it my new theme song for those little moments when someone pisses me off.  It’s like “Piano Man” meets Cee-Lo in the most brilliant way possible, and anyone who thinks that description means it’s a horrible song is not to be trusted and probably hates dogs.

Dear Sara Bareilles: let’s please hang out and be mad at people together.

And last but not least, there’s the lovely Regina Spektor.  She just released a new album and I’m kind of stoked about it.  Regardless of the fact that I live in Austin, Land of Hip Kids Who Have Seen the Future, I have no idea what’s going on.  I love Young MC’s “Bust a Move,” for example, but not because I’m being ironic or something — I just haven’t stopped loving it since middle school.  I’m clearly not cool enough to know all the underground up-and-coming geniuses of sound and whatnot, and I always default back to music that’s more than twice as old as I am anyway, so it’s safe to say Regina Spektor is about as cool as I get.  Frankly, that’s plenty cool enough for me.  I fell in love with her back when she had all those videos on VH-1 (YES, VH-1… I SAID IT) with stark black and white sets, which at the time were exactly what I wanted my “grown-up house” to look like someday… like the Mad Hatter had developed a touch of OCD and gone on a decorating rampage.  Anyway, her new album is as idiosyncratic and wonderful as ever, and it makes me want to sit around eating borscht and talking about Tolstoy all day.  Even though I’ve never eaten borscht and couldn’t name you a Tolstoy work I’ve actually read if you held a gun to my head (hear that? It’s the sound of all my old literature teachers slamming their laptops shut and throwing their hands up in the air), Ms. Spektor and her bright red lipstick still have that effect on a person.  And that’s a good thing.

OK, your turn.  Throw me one of your earbuds.  What have you been listening to lately?  I confessed my Mandy Moore to you, so don’t you dare lie to me…

a.

*like the one in which it kind of sounds like a 16-year-old Mandy Moore is trying to solicit a male prostitute in the wilds of a vaguely Indian locale, partially because when she says “pennies,” it kind of sounds like “panties,” but mostly because over a bed of Bollywood instrumentation, she actually purrs, “How much for your love?”

**which is my defense for singing along to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” when it comes on in the car.  Let me be clear: I haven’t plunked down $1.29 for this song. I refuse. But I’ll belt it out in public like it’s my job, because that’s… better.  Or something.***

***JUST LEAVE ME ALONE OKAY?!?!?!???!!

…

For those about to rock

25 Friday May 2012

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image: The Shabby Creek Shop

Tonight, I’m going to my first metal show, ever.

I’m pretty much a Great American Songbook girl all the way, having grown up on a steady diet of Cole Porter standards, Rodgers & Hammerstein classics, a little bit of rock and a totally unhealthy stream of MTV pop trash for balance.  I have an open-ended appreciation for all forms of music, though, and new experiences have become something of a drug for me in the last few years.  So, when one of my favorite people I’ve ever known asks me to go on a road trip and absorb some mega-angry industrial metal with him at the Toyota Center in Houston, I’m all about hopping in the car, even though it’s going to be like this.

Ah, the things we do for love of learning… and also just for love.

Let’s be clear: my only reference point for this super-upset band we’re seeing, Rammstein, is a snippet from a song of theirs called “Du Hast” to which Beavis and Butthead banged their heads a long, long time ago when Beavis and Butthead was something people actually watched.  That’s all I’ve got.  That’s all I’m working with here, kids — a memory from the mid-90s.  The broader perspective isn’t much better; my entire metal catalogue consists of exactly one — count ‘em it, one — Rage Against the Machine song that everybody over the age of five probably also knows by heart, and yes, it’s the one with the F-bomb in the chorus.  Tee hee.

Cindy Brady here, reporting live from the mosh pit!

When my boyfriend first asked me months ago — a hundred months ago — if I wanted to go to this show with him, I saw how excited he was.  He’s a planner by nature, so the advance notice didn’t really surprise me, but apparently this particular (German) band doesn’t tour the US often, and he wasn’t passing up the chance to see them even if it meant going on his own.  This boy was logging onto StubHub and making some magic happen whether I was on board or not, but he was sweet enough to ask me along anyway.  I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Yes, on two conditions.  I’ll go with you if you let me wear a bike helmet and a light pink tee shirt that says ‘Baby’s First Metal Show.’”

Know what?  That fool agreed.

Just kidding… he’s not a fool at all.  But he did agree.  This brilliant and amazing person has totally signed up for my randomness in all its forms.  He’s fully aware he’s joined forces with a pearl-encrusted borderline unicorn enthusiast.  He understands he’s in a relationship with someone virtually incapable of sarcasm or acidity, and he’s completely cognizant of the fact that sometimes, hanging out with me entails Muppet references and a completely made-up language.  Although I try to keep the fairy dust to a minimum, he knows it’s entirely plausible that his date to the Rammstein show will be rocking pigtails and a maxi dress.  I might even scamper up into that joint in some ballet flats.  (I did find a sweet pair of earplugs made to look like 9mm bullets, but I didn’t order them in time.  I mean, look, though… I tried.)

In the end, I think we’re all just people looking for other people whose dreams, fears and weirdnesses fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces up against our own.  Although I doubt I’ll walk away from the Rammstein show a believer, I’ll likely have learned how to curse a jerk out in German… so, there’s that.  Perhaps I’ll have figured out how to throw the sign of the beast without looking like I’m rooting on the Longhorns or saying mahalo. And hopefully, I’ll see and hear in person some of the stuff I’ve learned this week from the metal documentary I’ve been watching a little of each night, which was produced and directed by a diehard metalhead who also happens to be an anthropologist and which includes sound bytes from my literary spirit animal, Chuck Klosterman, who would probably sigh and roll his beady little eyes if he ever read this sentence, because a) I’m such a rock neophyte it’s ridiculous, b) this sentence is nine miles long and horrifically constructed, and c) aside from being practically unreadable, this sentence also includes an a)b)c) section, which is something he does fairly often and which, therefore, looks super-reductive coming from me.  OHAI, Chuck.  Love your work.  <awkward pause>  Kbye.

Anyway, most importantly, there’s the fact that tonight’s show is going to make my boyfriend really, really happy.  If he can sit through The Muppets with me, I can experience Rammstein with him.  He’s a good egg.  I think I’ll leave the bike helmet at home and bang my head with him just this once.

a.

…

Touch a snake & slap a pirate

18 Friday May 2012

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When was the last time you touched a snake?

Whatsa matter, Joan?

image: RKO Radio Pictures

Having grown up in Florida, slithery little serpents have never really freaked me out that much, nor have bugs or even spiders, which seem to have a significantly higher “ick” factor for most people than their short-legged counterparts.  But believe me when I say I’m terrified of plenty of things.  Failure.  Success.  Public speaking. Looking stupid.  Awkwardness, which makes no sense at all since I practically invented it myself.  Tons of things make me want to crawl into the carpet and hide on a near-daily basis, which is why I was riveted by this particular TED Talk I stumbled across earlier this week.  It was given by legendary designer David Kelley, and in it he tackled the notion of creatives vs. non-creatives and pretty much crushed the fallacy that creativity is some sort of finite, predetermined thing that’s rationed out to some of us but not to others. Even though the subject matter was specifically about finding creative confidence, I walked away from it with a fire lit underneath me about conquering fear in general.

He talked about his experiences in creative workshops with his clients — top-level executives who tend to excuse themselves from the most critical points of such meetings to “take important calls” when really, they’re simply intimidated by the creative process and secretly don’t think they’re capable of taking part in a meaningful way because they “just aren’t the creative type.”  He talked about helping people build upon their successes, starting small and gaining ground over time until they become aware of their own power.  He likened it rather seamlessly to the phobia treatment process established by an esteemed Stanford psychologist named Albert Bandura.

So, Bandura.  This guy — yes, I’m calling him “this guy” even though his name is often bandied about alongside the likes of Freud, Jung and other high-rollers in the psych world… I call him “this guy” because he sounds like someone I would totally buy a beer if a) he’s in fact still alive and b) I were to run into him in a random bar somewhere and magically know who he was — anyway, this guy developed a methodology that cures people of their deepest fears within a matter of hours through something he termed “guided mastery.”  We’ve all heard of his process — you have legitimate phobias of, say, snakes and flying, and a therapist guides you through a series of actions that bring you closer and closer to dealing with both until you realize with horror/glee that OH MY GOD YOU ARE HOLDING A MOTHERF*CKING SNAKE ON A MOTHERF*CKING PLANE AND NEITHER OF THESE TWO THINGS IS KILLING YOU.  Tada!  Cured.  And also badass.

But really, the example Kelley gave that got deep into my bones and took up residence had to do with little kids and their fear of an MRI machine.  He told a story that I hope I’ll never forget, which is partially why I’m writing about it here — for my own selfish purposes.

The story goes something like this: Doug Dietz, a highly technical medical imaging equipment designer with an engineering background, was standing in a hospital watching one of his MRI machines in use.  Unfortunately, it involved a terrified little girl who was gravely afraid of the monstrous piece of equipment in front of her and who was rightfully pitching a royal fit about it, crying and pleading not to be forced inside.  He learned that the little girl was a prime example of the typical MRI experience at that particular hospital: 80 percent of kids undergoing the MRI process there (and probably everywhere else, too) had to be sedated in order to get through it.  The prospect of being put inside this godawful metallic coffin was petrifying, particularly for someone so young.

At the time, Dietz was attending Stanford’s design program and learning about things like empathic design and iterative prototyping, and thanks to the little girl, ye olde cartoon lightbulb blinked on over his head.  With kids like her (i.e., kids in general) in mind, he redesigned the machine to look — convincingly, I might add — like a pirate ship.  As a result, the entire imaging room now looks like something straight out of the imagination of Walt Disney himself, and the sedation rate has plummeted from 80 percent down to ten.  Dietz apparently always gets choked up when he tells the story of his creative journey and its results, including the fact that he once saw a little girl finish her scan, go up to her mother and ask, “Mommy, can we come back (again) tomorrow?”

That’s the thing about overcoming scary stuff — it strengthens us and makes us more fearless over time.  Bandura called the result “self efficacy,” or as Kelley describes it, “These people who had lifelong fears… ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives; they tried harder, they persevered longer and were more resilient in the face of failure.”  He explains how we walk away from conquered fears with “the sense that you can change the world — that you can attain what(ever) you set out to do.”  The little kids that walk away from the “pirate ship” having totally conquered the experience… Dietz melding his technical background with newfound creativity he didn’t know he had until a child’s fear moved him to find it… even Kelley’s own bout with cancer, after which he decided to spend the rest of his days not just teaching design, but talking to large groups about the fact that we’re all capable of doing more than we realize… of creating great things… these people are all heroes in their own right.  These people illustrate for me with perfect clarity just how limiting my own fears and complacency can be.  These people make me want to grab a damn snake, get on a plane and go apesh*t on some pirates, like maybe even this weekend if I can find a coachwhip and a decent fare.

Screw fear.  Screw intimidation.

I’m ready to rumble.

Are you?

a.

…

Copycat, copycat

11 Friday May 2012

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I’m a little hot under the collar at the moment, so forgive the absence of my usual fluttery whimsicality.  Today, I’ve got beef, and I’m laying it out on the table.

Oh, hello there, darling.

image: Takkoda.com

Did everybody see The Avengers last weekend?  Yes?  OK, good.  Let’s start with a specific example of what’s making me want to go Hulk on somebody.  My friend Liz, a professional photographer, posted something online this week that blew my mind.  Completely frustrated after an experience she’d had while shooting a wedding, she shared the following gem:

How to drive a wedding photographer’s blood pressure into coma range:

1) Take your brand new, hulking digital camera and lens kit to the next wedding you’re invited to.

2) Spend the day shooting under the photographer’s feet or over their shoulder.

3) Keep the camera in front of your face all day so that every image the photographer takes includes your awesome new camera.

4) Try to spark up conversation with photographer about camera gear.

5) Post all your pictures from the wedding with your logo on your facebook “business page.” 

After I stopped laughing, I started getting mad, even though I’m sure the dude’s “photographs” weren’t one-tenth as amazing as those of the actual professional he was mimicking, and even though this arguably funny story had nothing to do with me.  But my protective instinct kicked in and my own anger started to build as I saw parallels forming between us.  Her irritation had kind of hit a nerve.

Even though I’m new to freelancing, I’ve been writing in some way, shape or form for years, and my work’s been plagiarized beyond belief in ways that will spin me into an irrational rage if I spend too much time on the particulars.  Yeah, yeah, “imitation is the purest form of flattery” and all that, but there’s imitation and there’s robbery, and the line between the two might be blurry, but not THAT blurry.  I suppose it should be flattering on some level, but — actually, no.   When you’ve shed a certain amount of sweat over a piece of work and someone else walks by, lifts their leg on it, then takes what you’ve done and passes it off as their own, trying to gain something from talent that isn’t theirs to sell… well, that’s just bullshit.

Here’s the thing.  We’re all intelligent individuals in some way or another.  We all have the potential to do great things.  And like we were taught in elementary school, stealing and/or screwing with our neighbor’s work isn’t okay.  Regardless of how crafty someone might be in their execution — regardless of what loopholes they crawl through like Catherine Zeta Jones in her catsuit with the little red lasers in that thing she was in with Sean Connery — thievery is still thievery, and there’s nothing cool about it unless maybe it’s being committed in the name of freeing innocent prisoners in a war-torn nation or something, but that’s an act of bravery I’m pretty sure my copy-and-pasters and Liz’s dude at the wedding were not, in fact, up to.

Yes, we’re all influenced by one another.  Yes, we can be derivative without even realizing it; I fully admit I’m a perpetrator of that myself… but for god’s sake, man, don’t plagiarize.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking your victim dead in the eye and smiling while you make a copy of their car key or if you’re smashing and grabbing while they’re out of town.  I don’t care if you’re backed against a wall at the eleventh hour and think you have no choice.  Hey, I’ve stood against that wall and cursed the clock myself, but I can say with certainty that I’ve never stolen someone else’s stuff and passed it off as mine.  I’d rather take the heat for being late, being slipshod… anything, really, other than pick-pocketing.  And if the reason behind it is as simple as someone being worried that their own capabilities don’t measure up, they have two choices: either prove themselves wrong or suck it up and change course. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”  He was right.  When paired with too much ego, it steals joy from all involved.

Nobody likes a jackass.  If you ever happen to catch one red-handed, please call them out and tell them they’re better than that. Because somewhere deep down, maybe they are.  And if they’re not, I know a big green gamma man perhaps they’d like to meet.

a.

Pickles for breakfast

04 Friday May 2012

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"At least you're not a vegetable -- even artichokes have hearts."

image: Guardian UK

I was years late to the game when it came to seeing the movie Amélie… but thirty seconds in, I was mesmerized, and then elated, and then addicted, and here’s why. The opening subtitles read something like this:

“Amélie is six.  Like all little girls, she’d like to be hugged by her daddy (a doctor), but he never touches her, except for a monthly check-up.  The thrill of this rare contact makes her heart beat like a drum.  As a result, he thinks she has a heart defect.  Declared unfit for school, Amélie is taught by her mother.  Deprived of playmates and slung between a neurotic and an iceberg, Amélie retreats into her imagination. In this world, LPs are made like pancakes.  The neighbor’s comatose wife has chosen to get all her life’s sleep in one go.  Amélie has one friend, Blubber (a pet fish).  Alas, the home environment has made Blubber suicidal.  Blubber’s suicide attempts destroy Mother’s nerves, and a decision is made (the fish is set free in a stream as Amélie looks on, heartbroken).  To comfort Amélie, her mother gives her a used Instamatic.  But (when a car crash happens nearby as she’s taking pictures of the sky) a neighbor fools her into thinking her camera causes accidents.  Having taken pictures all afternoon, Amélie is petrified.  She stares at the TV, racked by the guilt of causing a huge fire… two derailments… a jumbo jet crash.”

Okay, so upon reading that back, it actually sounds horribly depressing.  But if you’ve seen the movie, you know the words’ juxtaposition with brilliant camera work, an accordion-heavy score and an air of jaunty, childlike imagination make it about the most charming thing ever to appear on a movie screen.  Incidentally, Amélie grows up to live a beautiful and textured life.  And yes, while the gamine and gorgeous Audrey Tatou’s last name may as well rhyme with “Mepburn,” her Audrey-ness isn’t the only thing that makes the Amélie character compelling.  What makes her compelling is the fact that she is weird as hell.  You find yourself championing her, sitting on the edge of your seat hoping she’s about to do something even weirder and somehow more open-hearted than she just did a minute ago, and she never disappoints.  If she were an actual person in the real world, sans French narration, English subtitles and whimsical musical score soaring overhead and swooping in at just the right moments for dramatic effect, most people would pay no attention to her whatsoever, or perhaps just smile politely at her in the supermarket and quicken their pace a smidge.  Because homegirl is sweet but insane, and that is why I love her. 

Maybe I’m just looking for validation.  In fact, I’m sure I am.  Living a 9-to-5 professional existence, we have our quirks — because we’re human — but we exert serious control over the select audience that gets to witness them.  We stick to the dress code, keep personal conversations short, and mostly just dig in and get the job done.  We hide our weirdest weirdnesses, or at least do our best to water them down and make them office-friendly.  We’re alternate versions of ourselves… doppelgängers in suits.  Nowadays, I sit here mostly barefoot, staring at my Judy Blume wall, cranking out a hundred or more pieces of writing per month, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that I am batshit crazy.  We all are, really… some of us just get to be a bit more free about it.  And let me tell you something: it is awesome.

There are liabilities, sure.  We have to anchor ourselves to something to keep from spiraling into total insanity — we have bills to pay, families to take care of, friends to catch up with, obligations to fulfill — and living whimsically is a luxury we have to enjoy in small doses.  But aren’t those doses amazing?  Particularly when they’re super strange and we realize someone we know and adore shares or at least appreciates those things about us?

Yes, I live in a city that incorporates the very word “weird” into its somewhat-official motto.  I consciously moved to an environment that’s more accepting of bohemian culture and left-of-center living than most places are.  I admit it’s a bit of a sugar bowl, and I’m sure that’s part of the reason I’ve been able to let my hair down so much since I got here.  I remember writing a journal entry back when I was in college about how I felt like I had a stronger sense of gravity within myself than anyone I knew; I felt too centered, too anchored, too fearful and rational and orderly and square.  I actually felt weighed down by my overwhelming empathy for everyone around me and my worrisome nature in general.  I’m sure it stemmed from saying goodbye to way too many people in my family way too soon and dealing with things that no child ever should (the thing about Amélie’s dad, by the way, blessedly isn’t something I can relate to; my dad in particular is a phenomenally warm and amazing person, and I’ve never not been aware of his love for me.  Truly — I couldn’t be more thankful for it.)  Somehow, over time I managed to shake it all out to some degree, and just start living life almost in reverse, having fewer cares as an adult than I did as a kid.

I hope, though, that no matter what age, everyone out there has the opportunity to make a choice about where to land on that continuum and spend most of their time.  I like routine, but it freaks me out sometimes.  Yes, there’s work to be done and responsibilities to manage, but every once in a while — well, more than every once in a while — it’s grand to eat pickles for breakfast.  It’s good to take detours and sing to ourselves (okay, I do that every day) and live in our heads and be weird as hell.  Because in the end, as per Amélie, that’s what makes life rich.  That’s what makes us real.  And when we find other souls who get our oddities and want to enjoy them alongside us — when we stop feeling the need to apologize for things that require no such thing — well, that’s life at its very best.

a.

…

Those who can, teach

27 Friday Apr 2012

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I covered a wall in Judy Blume last week.  Covered, top to bottom.

Step into my office...I’ve been working from home as a full-time freelance writer for five months now, and as sublime as days spent on the couch can sound when you’re daydreaming about them from an office, once you actually start living the dream, things change.  Days blend into nights.  There’s no separation between work and non-work.  You start having in-depth, two-way conversations with the dog.  All that structure you rallied so hard against and swore you’d never return to starts to actually make sense, and not only do you acknowledge its legitimacy, but despite all your freedom, you even begin to crave it.  I’m pretty sure it’s the primary reason (among many) that coworking spaces now exist — to save us from ourselves.

So, I decided to convert my dining room into an office.  It’s at the farthest point of my apartment from the space where I spend most of my time, so there’s some sense of a border between the two.  I’ve been writing so many pieces on home decor and design over the past few months that I’m spoiled for choice when it comes to inspiration, which is why it’s kind of hilarious that, after sifting through an all-you-can-eat smorgasboard of breathtaking ideas, I landed squarely on something straight out of elementary school:

A big black chalkboard and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.

I’ve loved the idea of chalkboard paint ever since I first learned of its existence, and I’ve loved Judy Blume since I was a little kid.  In fact, reading my first two Judy Blume books in Ms. Shirkey’s fourth grade gifted class was what made me want to be a writer to begin with.  The dotted lines weren’t hard to draw.  ”She’s a girl… I’m a girl,” I thought. “Her name’s Judy… my mom’s name is Judy.  I love writing… my teachers keep telling me I’m good at it.  I wonder if I could do it for a living when I grow up.”  So I spent several hours last week covering an accent wall with chalkboard paint and several more scrawling the first chapter of Judy Blume’s first book (or the first one I knew of hers, anyway) from ceiling to floor in chalk marker.  And without my even planning it, it fit perfectly.

As I was transcribing the words onto the wall, I started thinking about all my influences from when I was young, and everything somehow tied itself back to a teacher.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit something: we’ve all heard the term “PK,” short for “preacher’s kid,” and I’ll readily share the fact that I’m a TK, which is probably similar.  My mom taught kindergarten, second and third grade for about a decade apiece, and although she was never my teacher, some of her friends were, and I got to know them over the years as people, not just “Mrs. So and So from Classroom 4B.”  As a result, the phrase “those who can’t, teach” has always made me laugh, because I know anyone idiotic enough to utter those words has clearly never tried.

I have to wonder what some of my favorite teachers are doing now, or if they’re even still with us.  I hope, of course, that they’re all healthy, happy and retired — or close to retired, anyway — and getting some much-deserved rest from all of us snot-nosed brats.  They’re probably not chilling out at all, though, if they’re anything like my mother, who kept volunteering at her old school well after she was off the books, no matter how much we begged her to just take a load off for once in her life.  But she wasn’t having it; it was in her blood, just like it was for Mrs. Steinman, for whom only the act of teaching me cursive could pull me out of the coma of a crush I was in over Christopher Hutchins, the skinny little green-eyed boy I spent the entire third grade obsessing over at Hogan Spring Glen Elementary.  Then there was sweet Mr. Gunter, who patiently stayed after school to help several classmates and myself with our long division even though we were all pretty much hopeless.  He was tireless and kind.  He gave me my first C, but we all know whose fault that was.

I’ll never forget the lilting Southern accent, perfect dresses and love of classic literature Ms. Belote bestowed on all of us in the seventh grade at Hendricks Day School — nor will I forget the fact that one day in 1988 I took one look at her ice blue 300ZX and thought, “Oh man, English teachers are cool… I’ve got to be one someday.”  Because of that woman, I actually thought diagramming sentences was a fun thing to do, and I still dissect language in my head that way sometimes.

Senora Tyler taught English and Spanish in eight and ninth grade and scared the living hell out of me, but in doing so, she instilled a sense of grammatical discipline in me that no other teacher ever quite matched, while the beautifully rebellious Ms. J. — my junior year creative writing teacher — made sure I understood the importance of questioning authority and the brilliance of making the choice to break select rules once they’d all been mastered.  Those two women in particular still swirl around in my head from time to time when I’m writing.  But obviously, as amazing as they all were, none of them made nearly as much of an impact on me as the one whose class I never once attended — Mrs. Lynch.

Now, back to the first chapter of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing: it’s about a nine-year-old boy bringing home a turtle he won at a birthday party and his mom’s reaction to the unexpected — and smelly — new pet.  Thanks to that fact, I looked up at the blackboard in front of my new desk the other day and realized I now sit eye level every single day with the words “my mother said.” Those words are staring straight at me while I work each day to achieve something she encouraged me to chase from the day I told her it was what I wanted until the day she took her last breath.  To call it mere coincidence would be a smidge naive.

She’s been gone for six years now, but somehow, but she’s still teaching me things.  Just like all the good ones do.

a.

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