A quiet, simple life with dollops of insanity

A few months ago, I had occasion to take an unusual and particularly interesting inventory of my life.

I say "unusual" because as a chronic self-dev-junkie-(slash)-overthinker, my default setting is "taking inventory." Taking Inventory is a sort of state of being, an always-on operation that provides a constant, low-level background hum.¹ (Which, given this hearing loss I seem to have sustained from a particularly fabulous but surprisingly loud record-release party last fall, is actually a boon.)

I say "particularly interesting" because while any reasonably thoughtful inventory can yield some pretty wowser data, the circumstances surrounding this one changed both the way I approached the inventory and, I'm guessing, the quality of the results.

In this case, I had a really limited window to get very, very clear on my priorities, with probably no further at-bats. So the thing had to be vast and done fast, and the stakes were much higher than usual. This created an uncharacteristic mix of thoroughness and detachment in my execution, and a startling clarity in the results: quietude and simplicity are more important to me than, well, a lot.

They are more important than money, for sure. This is non-news, I've walked away from a lucrative position (with benefits! and opportunity for advancement!) because while I very much liked the stuff, I did not like the nonsense demanded as payment. Even more insanely, perhaps, I walked away from a consultancy I'd just started developing because it felt overly complex and "noisy." I get that there are very few true "mailcart guy" jobs, but I'm still prepared to scale back even more and take a dumb-ass day job that supports a simple life rather than push through noise and complexity for money. Comfort isn't comforting if you're using it as chaos management.

What the inventory made clear (and which is still hard to wrap my head around) is that quietude and simplicity are more important than being liked, or in some cases, loved.² I have always had a deeply-felt need to please and to serve. I still do, but I've finally ceded my physical limits: there is neither enough time nor enough me to go around; what's more, I have some faulty factory-installed parts that shut down operations if I don't handle them gingerly.

* * *

So why the hell would someone who likes to keep it quiet and simple go to something like SXSWi, a now-22,000-person-strong (by some estimates) clusterfuck in a town barely able to accommodate half that, an "educational" conference whose programming is legendarily spotty (and getting worse), and whose noise and activity levels drain the lifeblood of even normal, hardy extraverts with youth on their side?

At first, back in 2006, I went out of curiosity and a need to be game. My then-boyfriend wanted to go, and I have learned that leaping has its rewards. So I leapt, and it was good, except for the burning out, which was bad. I learned about what makes a good (and a bad) talk. I learned actual stuff about podcasting and design. I saw movies, which was reason enough to go.³ I was really grateful I went, and grateful to him for encouraging (i.e., pushing) me to go.

When I leapt again in 2008, it was because I'd met a bunch of people online and wanted to meet them in real life, and while I was still uncomfortable with the practice, I recognized that the only way to it is through it. 2009 and 2010 became more and more about connecting with my now-friends, while slowly expanding my circle.

This year, quite frankly, I went because I had gone before. I went because I was afraid if I didn't, I might be missing something. While that's true, I actually would have missed a number of terrific chance encounters and planned meetups, going "just because" is no longer adequate as a sole reason to do something.⁴ And the drawbacks inherent in a massive, out-of-town conference, where it's impossible to get true downtime, where the panels are so many and so spread apart it's literally impossible to get to some of them on time, where the crowds are so thick and the control of them so absent a small person feels unsafe, mean this was probably my last South-by. It would take extraordinary circumstances to get me back, and a lot of ingenuity in the personal engineering of it. I like my insanity as much as the next guy, but I can only like it in micro-doses.

* * *

I had a short spasm of semi-coherent debriefing in the Wave with my friend Dave. I vented my frustration, my feelings of overwhelm, my nostalgic longing for the Good Old Days when it was a "tiny" conference of less than 10,000 people. He reminded me that even then, way back in 2006, there was an old guard complaining about how SXSWi had tipped, how it had been taken over by non-makers, how it had been "ruined" by this next wave of people discovering the web as a publishing tool, a means of connection. And he was right. And I am right. And SXSWi is right (if a conference can be right): it is a living thing, there to serve the people of the web in the time that they are using it. I greatly enjoyed my five visits, and I'm fine with handing it over to whomever is moving into this ever-changing, always amazing space.

May you enjoy your glorious new thing, and may I find my new dollops of insanity easily and joyfully, and may we all leave the world a better place in our own particular way.

xxx c

¹What I mean by this is that I am constantly analyzing where I'm at and examining ways in which I might be resisting not moving further. Kind of like relentless self-development. There are obvious actions like being part of a growth-directed mastermind group, psychotherapy, and reading a great deal of self-development books and other materials on how other people tackle change. There are less-obvious actions like simply turning my attention (constantly, consistently) to whatever thing I've identified that I want to change, noticing envy, for instance, and going through a sort of on-site inspection/analysis/implementation process. If you have questions about this, please do ask them in the comments, or, if they're super-private (and I totally get how they might be) feel free to email me.

²The "loved" part I still don't have a handle on. I'd like to believe there's a way to be me and be in a primary relationship, if only for the seemingly contraindicated reason that primary relationships are the world's greatest self-development labs. Also, division of labor is a great time-saver. Also, footrubs!

³Although strangely enough I preferred the tech-y stuff and the meeting people. Mostly, I treated the movies, once we were inside, and over the stress of the lines and the "will this Gold Badge actually get us in and decent seats?", as a way to be quiet and shore up needed energy for more mixing it up.

⁴I did also go because it's still a cost-efficient way to see a number of people at once. The problem is that there's a cap on the number, say, 30, and that's on the outside. Over four days, given my capacity, I have the ability to have meaningful meetups with about 30 people. Hugs in the hallway are awesome, and it's always nice to make a quick connection to someone in real life which you can then continue later, online and off. But meals, drinks and hangouts? You're talking 30, maybe 40. 50 if you don't need the insane amount of disco-nappage that I do these days.

UPDATE 4/7/11: Many writers have posted pieces, chiefly grumpy, about how SXSW has finally jumped the shark. Or that maybe it did last year. Or two years ago. Or 10. My favorite take on the hoo-ha is one written by my pal John Gruber. (And it should be noted that John and I "met" via Twitter, then met a few years ago at...SXSWi! After it had jumped the shark and everything, according to the old hands.) John's take is, as per usually with John's writing, straightforward, thoughtful, and succinct. You should probably read it, if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

But for sheer charm, you should treat yourself to my friend Alissa Walker's SXSW writeup. Because no one touches Alissa Walker for sheer charm. Especially with photodocumentation!

Photo of yours truly in a rare SXSW moment of relative quiet by Mike Monteiro, used under a Creative Commons license.

How to be a better writer

A good friend of mine has some issues with language.

She is, by her own admission, a lousy speller. While her vocabulary houses more than a few five-dollar words, they're as likely as not to turn up as malapropisms when hauled out. Her sentence construction can be choppy, her grammatical structure inelegant and her punctuation, when she uses it, would most charitably be described as "creative."

My friend is one of the best writers I know, and I'd read almost anything of hers I could get my hands on.

* * * * *

I get asked sometimes how to be a better writer. Me! Who, if writer prizes were being handed out would almost certainly win the one for Least Aware of Her Own Process. (Note: I'm currently taking pains to change this. They are painful pains. More on this shortly.)

Sometimes it's the earnest request of a person wildly capable in another arena, or someone who came up in another language, then moved to the U.S. and got by on things like wit, smarts, hard work and the acquisition of practical skills. Usually, anyone who bothers to ask me this isn't half-bad at writing already, but is frustrated with not being as good at writing as they are at their core competency, or is embarrassed by their lack of facility in arcane areas like grammar and usage.¹

Other times, it's the annoying non-question of the dilettante. They don't really want to know, or rather, they have no interest in actually doing the work required to get there. They're looking (maybe) for a class or a book or a coach, a silver bullet.

But I tell them the same thing I tell anyone who really wants to be a better writer: (1.), read more good stuff; (2.), write more, period; and (3.) if you're already doing quite a bit of both of those things, consider taking an acting class or an improv class or something that will get your stubborn head connected to your damned heart, along with the rest of your organs.

While good teachers and coaches and classes can absolutely help move things along (and make the moving-along way more pleasant), there's really no avoiding numbers 1 and 2. (You can get around #3 via other kinds of emotional education, either on a shrink's couch or in the classroom of life. Budget accordingly.)

* * * * *

This how-to-get-better-at-writing business has been much on my mind lately.

Partly because I have been getting a lot of very nice compliments recently via the electronic mails about my own writing. (You know who you are, and thank you. They have been lifelines to me lately, especially given my low spirits from the Crohn's flare.) I usually look at my own writing with a giant shrug of "Meh.", because I'm always looking at other people's writing and comparing it to that. Yes, Mark, I know comparison is from the devil. But I've only recently been made violently aware that I am actually comparing my struggles with writing to other people's finished writing. Talk about your a-ha! moments.

Anyway, sometimes the nice things are just nice things, but sometimes they come bundled with a query for writing services. While I know there's gold in them thar hills (and I also know the only thing I'll never say "never" about again is saying "never"), I'm afraid that's off the table for the foreseeable future. Call me superstitious, but I couldn't write a damned thing of worth until I'd put a fair bit of distance between me and copywriting, and I'm terrified that picking it up again might the writing equivalent of shaving Samson. Or worse, something of more lasting or even permanent nature, a really, really strong depilatory or a laser or something. Besides, at this point, my voice is so my voice, I would probably be a rotten copywriter. I think the best ones are great mimics who thrive on perpetual new intake. So not me anymore.2

But another big reason it's been on my mind is that finally, FINALLY, I am preparing to teach what I know about writing. A very particular type of writing (blogging, natch), but still, writing. I feel woefully ill-equipped for the task. I feel stupid and ungainly and lost. I feel 100% certitude that I am worse than every other teacher of writing who ever taught.

In other words, I feel like those people I'm always fielding the "how-to-be-a-better-writer" question from.

* * * * *

So that thing about pain I brought up, above? We're back to that. Lots and lots of pain and shyness and anguish and nervousness. As I slow down to look at the things I already know. As I bring my full attention to all the things I do not know. The good news in this is realizing I'm actually a better writer than I give myself credit for most of the time. The bad news is everything else: The unknown! The fear of failure! In public! The anxiety over not feeling good enough!

And at the same time, I know that putting myself through this not only will teach me how to teach, but will teach me more about writing. And probably speaking. And definitely learning.

Everyone who is any kind of a writer worth being always wants to be a better writer. The reading changes, and should keep changing. The form the writing takes changes, and should keep changing. But it keeps on keeping on.

Everyone who is any kind of a writer worth being is also, on some level, balls-out terrified. Because if you are really becoming a better writer, while you are certainly building on what you have done, you are always, always, always doing something you have never done before. You are living, you are improvising, you are making it up as you go along.

Which is why no matter how great a writer you are, you should have a few butterflies scattered around the joint. Because if it ain't butterflies, it's probably buzzards.

Remember my friend, the great writer with wobbly vocabulary and the rickety foundation of grammar and usage? She is a great writer because when she writes, she is 100% alive. She is living, which is to say growing, changing, in that very moment. So life pulses through her writing, and flows through you as you're reading.

* * * * *

Read more (good) stuff. Write more, period. If necessary, please do get some improv training or qigong lessons or your head shrunk.

If you really want to be a better writer, though, learn how to make friends with fear and open your heart to change.

And then get yourself used to the idea of doing that forever.

xxx c

¹And I get why they sweat it, some people are horrible snobs about usage. I wish I could remember who said it, but someone big, like, Seth Godin-level big, went on record as saying a lot of our grammatical and usage rules are b.s., elitist, kept in place to make people feel bad about themselves. English is crazy plastic (callback alert!); we're adding "bad" pronunciations and rules along with new words all the time. I can be a little on the snobbish side myself, dangerous in someone who plays pretty fast and loose with rules she's not 100% sure of, but only time it really bothers me when people "break" English is when they are trying to make themselves seem more educated than they are. Even then, I mostly just feel sorry for them now that I am all grown up and full of equanimity and stuff.

²I do have an inkling of how I can employ my writerly skills to help you out, though, so if you're interested, watch this space. Better yet, get on the newsletter mailing list.

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

Poetry Thursday: All the things I wear because the ugly is too awful to bear

I wrapped myself in layers to keep out the wind and the rain and the cold-hearted, to protect my delicate belly fur from brushing up against stinging bitches, to fend off hailstorms out of nowhere and guard against shark attacks, sermons, rabies, catcalls, and random acts of insomnia.

I outfoxed the bad and the maybe-bad and the looks-bad-from-here and the ba-a-ad bad bad I heard about from a guy who knows a guy, with my elaborately constructed fortress of guile, goose-down, faux fur, Real Housewives, rants, mantras, uplifting quotes, strategically-placed sarcasms, and a cotton-rayon shell with a touch of Spandex for movement.

Unfortunately it got hot in there and not a little smelly.

Which is how on one of your more tempting summer days I found myself unzipping a jacket just for a moment.

And after the toxic cloud of sour grief and withered possibilies and tears and rage and confusion was finally carried off by a kindly breeze I think I heard a bird. Or maybe it was the ocean. Or maybe it was a poem, finally whispering softly enough so I could hear her, "Off...take it all off."

That was weeks ago, or maybe months, or was it yesterday?

No matter. I am down to the last fourteen layers now, and peeling fast. Two sweaters forward, one t-shirt back.

With any luck, I will die completely naked.

xxx c

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

Making allowances for the way you work

Yesterday morning, I finished reading Unbroken, the true-life story of Louis Zampirini's triumphant, plague-filled journey from punk kid to Olympic runner to WWII Air Force bombadier to POW to haunted veteran to redeemed hero. It's an amazing story.

As I tore through it on my Kindle, the only way for the spindly-limbed gal to fly when it comes to oversized books, I kept thinking three things:

1. Damn, this is an amazing story!
2. Would I have what it takes to make it through this?
3. How in the wide, wide world of sports did Laura Hillenbrand write this with CFS?

The joke answer, of course, is "very, very slowly." It would take a wildly robust writer a long time to research and write a compelling and historically-accurate 400-page book about a series of events in a time when everyone's last sneeze was not recorded for posterity*; it took Hillenbrand 10 years.

* * * * *

I didn't pick up Unbroken because Laura Hillenbrand has a chronic illness and I have a chronic illness and hey, why not be inspired by a writer whose chronic illness is a thousand times worse than mine to get off my lazy, relatively well ass and write, dammit; I picked it up, well, downloaded it to my electronic reading device, because I'd heard people rave over and over about what a gripping tale, what an immersive experience it was. Hard-core lefties, Republicans, old folk, youngsters, literati. Enough of a spread to render the thumbs-up agnostic.**

I picked it up because I had a long plane ride ahead of me and, thanks to tailwinds, a longer one back, and I fly in the back of the bus, where postage-stamp-sized trays jutting out into what could only laughably be called "room" preclude any sort of real work, much less 15" laptop-opening. It's a situation that calls for books one would describe as "gripping" and reading experiences one would call "immersive."

I picked it up because, after a rough three weeks patching myself up from a foolhardy near-crash outside of San Francisco, I knew I'd be spending more time alone in my hotel room resting when I wasn't strictly needed in order to spend the energy my job called for when I was.

* * * * *

Toward the end of my talk, I got a question that comes up so frequently, I may end up adding it to the presentation proper: How do you do all of this?

You see, I've just spent 50 jam-packed minutes going over Right Behavior online in our fast-paced-and-rapidly-changing modern media landscape (and indicating that much of it is now expected, if not required, in real life). All the ins and outs of tweeting and Facebooking and policy-creation and email-sig-shortening that you need to know so you don't fall behind, or worse, come off like a thankless jackass online. Understandably, this is overwhelming to people at the beginning of the learning curve. Just the idea of doing it is overwhelming, never mind the actual learning and doing.

I get this; I do. And while I answer for myself, because really, that's all one can do, I am really giving the answer for everyone, everywhere, regardless of the condition of their health or the state of their business or the vigorous and very real demands on their life: you make accommodations for what is important to you. My work is important to me, so I don't do or have a bunch of things normal people have. Lately, I've realized that my health is important to me, so I'm learning to accommodate that, too. Slowly. And, if I'm honest, as much because I'm terrified at the thought of not being able to work as I am not being able, period.***

It may help to remember that while I'm relatively facile at this whole being-online thing, I have my own c*cksucking boulders to push up my own motherf*cking hills. For example, I have always just been lucky enough with money and modest enough in my desires that I didn't have to learn anything about it to get by in relative comfort. Now the economy is squeezing me along with everyone else, AND I'm (almost) 50, AND I want a couple of bigger things that are simply not going to be possible without winning the lottery or changing my rhythm. And I don't play the lottery.

* * * * *

Everyone has their basket. The older I get, the more I think that most choices boil down to love or fear, and most of the pain in the world is caused by choosing the latter. It is much, much easier to do the scaredy-cat thing and peer into the tippy-tops of other people's baskets and become covetous or enraged or pitying or what have you. It is much harder to look at yours, get down with what's in it, and get to work. However you work. Whatever your "work" is.

But that's what's required: complete honesty looking inward, and complete love looking outward. Honesty and love. No more, no less. Not very sexy, but there it is.

I'd be surprised if anyone gets all the way there, ever, before the lights go out. I have a looooong way to go, which is why I'm spending more time in hot baths liberally sprinkled with Epsom salts than I am at the discothéque. (Well, and also because I don't think there are such things as discothéques anymore.)

Give yourself the room you need to live the life you want. That's what all this stuff about decluttering and streamlining and goal-setting is really about. Room to do what's right, and what feeds you, and what saves the world. Once you have enough room, see about what you can do to provide someone else with some before you get yourself more. (Because really, beyond a certain point, how much room do you need?)

We all know what's best for ourselves. And we can all start making sure it happens right now.

xxx c

*Actually, another thing I kept wondering while I read was how these men in the Japanese prison camps managed to keep diaries at all, much less preserve them for 60 years. Their ingenuity and stubborn determination made me ashamed of my dithering over writing software programs and WordPress glitches.

**Speaking of agnosticism, I almost certainly wouldn't have picked it up if I'd known there was an actual religious redemption in the story. In the context of Zampirini's life, though, it not only makes sense, you're happy when it happens. I'm wary enough of organized religion to say my own, little "hosanna" when one of the good guys turns up.

***I know, I know, it's messed UP. I'm not saying this is a good way to be, or that it's a place I want to stay. I'm just being brutally honest about where I am. Because in my experience, skipping that first step really makes the whole thing go farkakte.

Photo © Addison Geary Photography.

The good news is the apple kicks your ass

Pulling out of a flare is a tricky business.

You get better on a very slow upward trajectory, with occasional "two-steps-back" days from eating too volatile a mix of ordinary ingredients (oh, BOY, do canned tuna and hard-boiled eggs not mix) or too "advanced" of an item. Yesterday, after weeks of not tasting an uncooked vegetable or piece of fruit, I broke down and got jiggy with half an apple. Look out, world! I'm eating an entire HALF of a raw apple!

A half-hour later, I was soaking in a hot Epsom bath to ease the cramps shooting across my lower back.

What's really odd about this particular flare is that while I wouldn't say I'm overjoyed to be dealing with it, neither is it bothering me as much as the past few have. For whatever reasons, age? wisdom? resignation?, I've adopted an attitude that much more closely matches that of my initial recovery, back in the fall of 2002. Or maybe it's just that this time, I'm back to me being able to rest on my own in my sweet little apartment, all tidy and peaceful and filled with the comforts and treasures that soothe me. While I no longer have the huge financial cushion I did (not to mention the assumed easy earning power of a robust economy once I was well enough to rejoin the living), I have enough, thanks. (And I'm probably even more deeply grateful to have it.)

Work is another thing, and an exceedingly interesting one. I haven't not been working; I've just been working very carefully, chipping away at things here and there in the background. Pulling things off the home page of the site. Tweaking things quietly, in the background. Writing, writing, writing. There is more time for this because I am not getting out much right now, but I'm still capping things at a reasonable (for me) 7 or 8pm and climbing into my salty tub. On top of a, shall we say, leisurely-paced day. The work comes more slowly when I'm impaired, but I am able to pay closer attention to the way it comes as well as the words themselves, if that makes any sense.

For instance, I notice myself getting upset over getting stuck in certain places (a "way" thing) and I notice myself (over)using the same words or construction (a "word" thing). Slowing down to see this has created room for me to relax and let some other solution bubble up, getting up and moving to my analog desk, or grabbing a stack of index cards to do my version of my friend Daphne Gray-Grant's excellent advice to mind-map pre-writing. (If you sign up for her newsletter, you'll get a copy of her mind mapping instructions. It's plenty to get started, and the newsletter is consistently useful if you do any sort of regular writing, or just want to understand how writing works.)

Slowing down is just outstanding for noticing things, period. Those of us who operate in overdrive probably do so at least partially to blow past certain parts of the scenery we find a little unattractive. My personal adopt-a-highway program has made great progress along certain stretches of road, but when I slow down, I'm embarrassed to see the junk I've allowed to accumulate near certain scary underpasses and dark tunnels.

I feel a little guilty bringing up the feeling poorly. I find myself impelled to do so, though, because I'm not good enough at saying "no" sans explanation; I almost always feel like "no" is not enough, that "no" needs some accompanying excuse. (And I know that's not true, I'm just saying that so far, that's how I've operated.) Inevitably, it brings up expressions of sympathy, because people are kind and empathetic and such.

I am coming around to the idea, though, that illness isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is just a thing, like tallness or shortness, bigness or smallness, oldness or youngness, singleness or marriedness. There are times when it is better to be tall than short, and being very short, I can enumerate them with alacrity. On the other hand, "tall" is a distinct disadvantage in the context of "commercial aircraft." I have been single and married and everything in between and guess what: so far, I prefer single. Try traveling back in time and telling 25-year-old me that, though. You couldn't: she was too busy doing actuarial calculations to avoid ending up chairless when the music stopped. (Hint to 25-year-olds: the music always starts up again, there are all kinds of nice chairs nowhere near the ring, and you may not be the sitting type.)

Do I very much look forward to having a great deal of energy again? I do! Even more, I look forward to using it wisely, so that it comes in a steady, sustainable flow, not pedal-to-the-metal bursts followed by a blowout. I look forward to it so much so that I am moving hyper-slowly now. It is not exactly pleasant, all this noticing, but it is one of the most fascinating shows in town...

xxx
c

P.S. One of the crazy little things I did was to put up an FAQ, something long, long on my to-do list. More on that later, but man, do I ever see how a well-done FAQ might significantly reduce drag on the average one-woman operation. Talk about enhancing sustainability!

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

Poetry Thursday: Unmoored

Every now and then, you become unmoored.

You will not notice the moment of release.
There will be no fanfare
to note the event
as you float out to sea in your sleep,
no streamers,
no teary farewell waves from shore,
no bottle of champagne
cracked across your bow.

You will simply wake up one day,
staring at a random item from the toiletries aisle
missing your exit on the 101
reading the same line three times, badly,
trying too hard
laughing too loud
crying too easily,
and realize not only that you feel wobbly
and weird
and a little pissy around the edges,
but that it has been a long, long time
since you touched real ground.

Here is the thing
to remember:
the moment you notice,
you are back.

Not back and hale, perhaps,
not back and fixed,
back and firm, but
back, baby, BACK.

You start again now,
breathing once,
twice,
three times.
Someone turns the sound back on,
ranchero music, the axe-murderer ice-cream truck,
Marco! Polo!
Somebody cues the scruffy dog
with a bead on that squirrel,
somebody else
throws something on the grill a block away.

And here you are again,
10 and 40 all at once,
you are you,
you are alive,
you are moving across the Earth
under the sun,
you are a million miracles made whole
right this second.

Welcome back.

xxx
c

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

Why I never pass up an opportunity to quote Beverly Sills

A good friend of mine recently decided to quit smoking.

She'd quit before, which obviously means that the quitting didn't quite "take." So this time, she decided to quit differently.

First, she's investing money in the deal. For them amongst us what is on the cheap side, money can be a powerful motivator. As my friend said, "I'll be damned if I'll spend this much and not quit."

Second, she's spending it on hypnotherapy. I quit the cheap way, but I'd raved to her about my experience with using hypnotherapy to get back on the diet for my Crohn's last fall: one session, one recording that I listened to for about two weeks, and done. I still look at potatoes or rice or a McDonald's drive-thru sign with longing, but the impetus to go for it is gone. It was a singular and fascinating experience which I've not shut up about since.

* * *

Hypnotherapy done right is part of a larger self-excavation process: getting at the "why" sandwiched between the smart, true part of you that doesn't want to smoke or eat or do crack and the part of you that has, until now, reached for a cigarette or french fry or crack pipe regardless. My friend's "why" is her business, but anyone old enough to want to read this blog has more than a passing familiarity with the many, many shapes and sizes a "why" can take. "Less-than" Why. "Angry" Why. "Social Anxiety" Why. "Why, Oh" Why, a.k.a. "Woe Is Me" Why.

If any of these look like variants on "Fear" Why, it's because they are, of course, every last damned one of them. My god, what won't fear stop us from doing? Or keep us doing, depending on whether the action is salubrious or not. Based on my own experience in talk therapy and reading eighty bajillion self-help books, it's pretty clear that fear is the biggest "why" there is. Fear lies underneath feeling less-than, underneath social anxiety and anger and woe. If there's one thing I'd like to impart about fear, it's that if you scratch pretty much any kind of yuck, you'll find fear under there somewhere.¹

My friend knows from fear. She's lived long enough to experience several expedient fear delivery systems, plus she's done time on the couch. She gets it. But when you start looking at your fear through the finely-ground lens of doing one monumental thing, when you slow down and take the long way home, you learn a few things you didn't know. The depth of your fear, for starters, and a peek under the tent at a few other ways fear might be stopping you that you didn't even realize. It's fascinating stuff, this just paying attention. And an excellent value proposition, so much more bang for your buck.

Even if it is painful and dull and embarrassing. Which, if you're spending a significant amount of time and money, there's a very good chance it will be.

* * *

There is a very strict order of steps involved in quitting smoking this particular way. There's no jumping ahead, no skipping steps. Instead, there is an intake date, an agreed-upon quit date (or "start of your smoke-free life" date for you optimists) and a whole lot of exercises between. A lot of looking, a lot of thinking, a lot of noticing. My friend said she was ready to quit a week early. Her hypnotherapist said sorry, but she was not.

* * *

Which brings me around to the title of this here piece. My favorite quote and main mantra for the past four or so years, well, other than THAT one, has been this one:

There are no short cuts to any place worth going.

It is attributed to the American opera singer Beverly Sills, and if the "opera singer" part of that last phrase wasn't enough, read a bit of her history and you'll know that the lady knew whereof she spoke. Whether the ass-end of your proposed journey is being healthier, happier, wealthier or wiser, there's no getting there faster. 10,000 hours. Rinse/repeat. Park your ass under the Bodhi tree, bub, and make sure you do plenty of wandering first.

If it feels a little grim, I assure you that it is far less so than the mood I'm usually in when I conjure up this line. Remember: practice is painful. Change is excruciating. Feeling stupid feels awful. (To me. Although if they didn't to you, you'd probably have clicked away long ago to see what was happening on Facebook.) Sure, I could find a happy-happy saying full of cheer and sunshine and optimism. But you know what using it under those circumstances would entail?

Skipping steps.

On the other hand, when you resign yourself to this way of thinking, or rather, when you surrender to it, the way women of grace do with time and gravity, you bring yourself back to plumb pretty quickly. Of course I feel this way, you realize. That is what feeling is! The depictions of change we see in movies and books blip over a lot of this stuff, or make it look sort of sexy-frustrating, with lavishly-produced montages or deftly-condensed metaphors which are, wait for it, boring and time-consuming to produce, at least for long stretches. As I said in last month's newsletter², when you see something good, you're not seeing the mountain of shit someone shoveled to uncover it.

* * *

My friend Brooks³, who calls himself a clutter-buster, uses the simplest process possible to help his clients to let go of things that may once have served them well but now are serving only as impediments. He has them hold up one item at a time and asks the same question of each one: "Do you need to keep this, or can we let this go?"

This is how you went from being a person who'd never experienced smoking to one who could not imagine life without cigarettes. This is how you get from "good" to "bad" and back again. (And for the record, "back again" isn't necessarily better, but done thoughtfully, it's far richer.)

Look, I am doing this. Why am I doing this?

Can I let this go?

xxx
c

¹With "and EVERYONE is scared about something, even people you'd never dream of." For more cogent and inspirational stuff around this, read Krishnamurti and my friend Ishita's monthly magazine.

²It's not up on the archives page yet, but if you subscribe, the nice Emma robot will automatically send you a copy.

³Brooks has a really good post up today on how he clutter-busts over the phone.

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

Placeholder habits for setback times

About 5 days into my 11-day incarceration at Cedars Sinai (IBD Block), my handsome new gastroenterologist dropped by on morning rounds, indulged me with some perfunctory flirting as he made notes in his charty-chart, and then shot me a stern glance over imaginary half-glasses.

"You know," he said, "it wouldn't kill you to get out and walk around a little."

I looked at him; I looked at the IV still attached to my arm. I looked down at my impossibly bloated belly and the impossibly bony legs just past them. True, I'd used those knobbly sticks to get us all to the toilet several times per day, about 32 times, according to the notes I was obsessively keeping, but outside the room? Down the hall?

He waved vaguely in the direction of the window and the glorious L.A. day it framed.

And the courtyard, out there. You can take the elevator down.

Well, alrighty then.

I do not recall how far I made it that first day, but I do remember the feeling of finally stepping outside the hermetically sealed hospital confines and into the reasonably fresh Southern California air. It was exhilarating, only more so: better than the greatest top-down convertible ride on PCH, better than psilocybin mushrooms on an Ithaca summer day, even better than Disneyland. And I love Disneyland.

I remember marveling at how sunshine felt on my skin, and how the sky sounded, and how each breeze carried impossible mixtures of coolness and warmth. I remember being astonished at how involved everyone seemed, rushing here and there. I dimly remembered what rushing was like, it is, after all, my factory-installed setting. But it seemed so crazy right now, to be rushing when there was this sun and this sky and this air. I felt not exactly sad for them, but tender, the way I always felt like the angels in Berlin from that old Wim Wenders movie. Like I was out of time and place, and could see things for now that I couldn't see before, and that I would probably have to fight to see again. While not as heart-stoppingly amazing, the experience was not unlike the bloody epiphany I'd had a few days earlier: a veil lifted or fallen or however the hell it is that veils make themselves scarce.

This is partly my roundabout way of saying I'm sick again. As in, fighting-a-Crohn's-flare sick. Don't worry, I've done it before, more than once. Successfully! Yes, we could quibble about how successfully, as there have been subsequent flares, like this one. But each time, I learn a little more about what I can and cannot do safely. This time was screamingly obvious, in hindsight: do not follow up two weeks of crazy prep and one weekend of excellent (but energy-depleting) work with an 800-mile roundtrip driving excursion punctuated by heavy social activity. Especially when you are almost 50 and immunocompromised.

But it is also in part my way of reminding myself not to let the dazzling Perfect that I see there, sparkling just out of reach, get in the way of the very much good that exists and that is possible in the here and now.

Can I handle a full-on, two-mile walk first thing in the morning? I cannot. But a leisurely stroll to the library and back later in the day, with a rest there to skim a book or three? Absolutely.

Maybe not my full Nei Kung routine, but 15 minutes of Horse Stance, like my teacher told me to do, I dimly remember, when I once confessed my all-or-nothing mindset to him.

And when those are too much? I walk to the corner mailbox to send a note, or do ten minutes of Horse Stance. Five, even. And if I were immobilized temporarily, I suppose I would lie there and think about walking, or reflect on what Nei Kung has done for me, or see if I could do crazy chi-stimulating things with my mind only yet. (Doubtful.)

Like an old acting teacher used to say, if the answer has to be "all" or "nothing," most of the time it's going to be "nothing." Placeholder habits are a surprisingly simple, surprisingly gentle way back from that kind of thinking. It can even be a game, dreaming up how to do just a little of this, a placeholder of that.

That's all I got today. Except, well, stay healthy out there, if you are. And hang in there, if you're not.

xxx
c

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

Lessons from 2010: Maximal joy, minimal hoo-ha

I have been thinking a lot about love and friction, only not in the way your mind maybe-perhaps just jumped to, if you are like me and we are both, like, 12.

I have been thinking about love in terms of what I love, and whom I love, and how those two things intersect. For example, I love figuring stuff out, reading and taking in and mulling over and hashing out and finally, getting some semblance of a clue. I can do all of these things on my own; I must do quite a bit of it on my own. Maybe the ratio changes as one gets older and, presumably, wiser, but for now, I'd reckon I spend three to four times as much time taking in and hashing out and so forth as I do actually gaining semblances of clues, much less putting them out there.

But while the part that I'm actually sharing with others, the "talking" here, in posts, and in the comments, and in social media, as well as the talking-for-real one-on-one, in groups, during talks, takes up perhaps a smaller amount of time, it delivers a disproportionately large part of the thrill. Which makes sense: We are social beings! We like being around each other! Wherever two or three are gathered! And so on.

So the answer to love seems pretty straightforward: figure out what it is you really and truly love, and move toward it. Do more of it, be around more of the people who facilitate it for you. Relentlessly hew to your love, and ignore that other stuff, or just deal and dispense with it as quickly as possible.¹

Friction is more complex. More obviously complex, anyway.

For our purposes here, "friction" is what stops you, or slows you, what creates drag. And the tricky thing is that you don't want to get rid of it entirely, because some of the friction is good for you, and arguably necessary: who learns from easy? You may like easy; I certainly do.

Trickiest of all is that friction can be fun, in the right amounts (cf. that thing our 12-year-old minds immediately went to). The right amount of push-back in a conversation is thrilling, even (or especially) when it borders on maddening. Worthy opponent, and all that. Ditto solo problem-solving and, jeez, is it just me, or is all of this tinged with innuendo today? Well, you get my point. (Point? Really? Argh!)

In the wrong amounts, of course, friction is dreadful, even deadly. Too much friction will grind you to a nub. For me, advertising shifted from the good, learning friction to the bad, grinding kind. So did acting. So did, I'm ashamed to say, more than one long-term relationship.

Most pertinently to me, so did the confluence of friction-filled endeavors that led to my Crohn's onset. First, because since my collapse in September of 2002, I can no longer count on Powering Though Shit as a modus operandi.² Second, because that sucker crept up on me, and while I was, or thought I was, moving toward love. I wasn't in advertising; I was acting, and in a great play! I wasn't in an unfulfilling marriage; I was in a wildly passionate relationship!

Yeah, I know. Nothing like a good, clear view from the outside. Or hindsight.

What about the present, though? Because like it or not, that's where we're all doomed to live, no matter how much we look back wistfully or project ourselves into the future.

My suspicion is that the clearer one gets about love, what love means to one, what one cares about more than one's own small human self, the simpler it becomes to discern that line where useful friction shifts into fruitless grinding.

My other suspicion is that for those of us who are good at kidding ourselves about what love is, who are good at "keeping things vague," as my old Method acting teacher used to say, the very most useful tool of all is the truth. Relentless truth. Gentle truth. Simple truth. The truth at the core of the Method: "Where am I right now?"

• I am at a party, late at night, having fun.

The first two items are facts; the last is a state of being, or an assumption based on the first two items. Provided we're playing what we'd call in the Method class a "simple" scene, drama or comedy with a clear who/what/where, as opposed to the kind where there's a lot of dramaturgy required before you can make heads or tails of it, we start with these tangibles. And we challenge the assumptions.

• I am at a party, late at night. It is loud, and I am unable to hear the person next to me without him shouting and me straining to listen. I was up early this morning and up late the night before. I am tired. My attention is straying elsewhere, mostly to thoughts of quiet and sleep.

So I am not in a party, late at night, having fun. Maybe I was having fun. Maybe I am supposed to be having fun. But now, at best, I am having "fun".

This may sound ridiculously obvious: You're at a party and you're tired and not having fun? Leave, dumbass! Who's keeping you there? And who needs an exercise for this?

Well, maybe you do not. In certain situations, more and more of them, thankfully, I do not. More and more I am awake and attuned to my real feelings, and more and more I am inclined to act on them. Still, I have blind spots, both unavoidable, the ones I don't know about yet, and willful, the ones I'm still, for whatever reason, unwilling to give up. I power through, I blip over, I look away out of fear or politeness (which one could argue is a form of fear).

One big truth at the end of last year was that the way I was working was not working. After a year of both musing and actual, physical testing, I think it comes down to this: I had stopped being truthful about what it was I loved, i.e., the thing I care about more than my own, small human self, and stopped being careful about managing friction, i.e. the physical realities that made it possible to pursue it. Now I don't have to just guess whether MORE ROOM makes for a happier, healthier, more productive and loving Colleen; I know it.

I know I need a certain number of hours of sleep per night and the right kind of food and enough exercise.

I know I need a ridiculous amount (to some) of time spent alone, and in a quiet, nurturing environment.

I know that doing the shit out of something is fine, but that it may involve equal parts pursuing the something and lounging on the bed or in the bath, reading, and not just reading books that will obviously move me toward my goals, but engrossing novels, vivid memoirs, enchanting graphic novels.

I know that it is as important for me to take an hour to walk as it is three to write. It is as important for me to take three hours to shop for real food and prepare it as it is to work on my PowerPoint deck.

Those 16 non-working hours in a day aren't for squeezing more stuff into; they're not even for making the eight working hours work better, although you can use them for that, which I confess is largely why I started turning my attention to them. They're for living. Living! Who knew?

My (slightly) older but infinitely wiser friends Hiro and my First-Shrink-Slash-Astrologer both advocate more being, less doing. In my heart, I know they are right; I also know that to tell a doer to Just Stop Doing It is like telling snow not to fall or water not to move downstream. For the time being, then, for 2011 and beyond, I will continue to look at different kinds of doing. Switching doings. Working, yes, working, on further reducing drag.

Finding ways to discern and describe what it is I love in real terms. Finding ways to reduce drag on my movements toward them.

With joy! Towards love! And as much as possible, out in the open, where it might be seen and made use of. But working.

For now the "being" will have to take the form of "being okay with that."

xxx c

¹It may take a while to discover exactly what it is that you love, but there are tools for that: The Artist's Way is a good start for those who self-identify as creative; plenty of tools and exercises for excavating your truest, purest self, for me, the part that is still 10, before my dreams started bumping up against the world's expectations. Until I was 10, I was an artist, I didn't have to think about whether I was, or what it meant, or whether I was a good one, or whether (and this is a big one) it was practical or not. I just was.

²This does not mean I have not tried; oh, me, how I've tried! Each time, a little less successfully. I tire astonishingly quickly now compared to the rate I did during my 20s and 30s, or even my mid-40s, and my bounce-back rate gets slower and slower.

And we're back in 5...4...3...

I officially ended 13 months of Self-Imposed Sabbatical this past weekend, in rather a hootenanny-ish way, ergo my delay in actually getting something posted today. I'll write much more about the event, about the sabbatical, about the lessons I took from them and the ideas that have begun coursing through me again largely because of them, but for now, just a few quick top line observations:

It's not just you. If there is one thing I learned over this past year in general, over this past weekend in particular, even, it's that everyone is confused and everyone is learning and everyone is terrified and everyone is cautiously/secretly hopeful (if only spasmodically) and everyone thinks it's just them, and they'd better shut up and keep their head down and try to look normal, or spout some party line hoo-ha about Tough Times. It's not just them, er, you. It's everyone. It's me, and pretty much everyone I've engaged in conversation on the topic, a rather wide swath of humanity. (Note: I've been taking the bus more recently.)

I am not sure how much of this we can blame on the outrageously sped-up change cycles we're enjoying these days and how much is just part and parcel of the human condition. What I do know is that if you can take a little risk to let down your guard and float it out there, you're likely to find someone to help you carry your load. Or at least commiserate over the size of it.

There is no "done." You will doubtless find this hilarious, but in my naivete I thought of this sabbatical thing as I did muffin-baking: throw a bunch of stuff together in a bowl, add this or that until it tastes pretty good in its raw form, stick it in a medium oven and 35 minutes, or 53 weeks, later, bing! Muffins!

It is not like that at all. In fact, it resembles quite uncannily what I remembered to be the drawing on the cover of The Artist's Way, an endlessly winding road carved into the side of a mountain, where at every level the view was somehow different, yet somehow familiar. Only it's not the cover of The Artist's Way; it's some other idea of a mountain I'd heard of or dreamt of from somewhere else. Maybe it was "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

So there you go: no "done." Just give that up. (And if you don't believe me and several millenia of philosophical teachings, check this out. That's business modeling, baby, no squishy woowoo stuff there.)

The soft things may be the most necessary. This is not the case for you if you are a big lounger on chaises longues, but if you are, you're not reading this anyway, you're lounging on a chaise. I hit seven out of ten goals for this past year. (My years now run from mid-February to mid-February, but let's just say it's unlikely I'll publish three books in a fortnight and call it a day, shall we?) All seven were "soft" goals, reading more books, connecting more often with friends, eating right, exercising adequately. That sort of thing. My three token Masters-of-the-Universe goals all tanked. Yet I've probably made more progress this one year than I have in the past five or six put together, if we're going to call "living happily in one's own skin" a worthy ambition. And I do. And if you don't, well, I wish you well, but we're probably going to be spending even less time together in the future. I'm turning 50 this year; I don't have as much dithering time as I once did.

And finally?

It's good to be back.

xxx
c

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

The value of the right questions, Part 1

I've done a handful of interviews for the presentation I'm giving later this week, which has renewed my appreciation for the skill involved in asking the right questions.

My previous experience with this valuable journalistic skill has been minimal, but similarly instructive. It took an shockingly long time to draft a set of questions for Seth Godin that would be useful (to my readers) and worthy (of Seth's time) for my leg of the Linchpin "book tour" last year. You wonder why those legendary Playboy or Rolling Stone interviews from Back in the Day are so good? Or, for that matter, why Colin Marshall and Jesse Thorn have such compulsively listen-able podcasts today?¹

It's the questions, stupid.

Good questions make for interesting answers, and interesting answers get you thinking about all kinds of questions you suddenly want to ask yourself. Good questions wake you up to the world around you, and get you reengaged with life. It's a huge gift to be interviewed by a smart, generous, curious interviewer. First, and foremost, you have a blast. A conversation all about the things that interest you, with someone who is (purportedly, anyway) interested in how you came to be that way? What's not to love?

But what's really wonderful about a great interview, an interview designed to liberate valuable information from your skull for the purposes of sharing it with other people who might then learn from it, is that it forces you to focus, but frees you to do it. You could wander off into the poppy fields, and I do, frequently, but there's that nice interviewer, ready to lead you back to safety. Or on to a more interesting topic. Or whatever. Someone else does all of that hacking-a-path-through-the-jungle stuff. Someone else keeps an eye on the map and the compass, and allows you to wander around, commenting on this or that fascinating sight, and the eight things it makes you think about, in glorious freedom. Rather than facing a blank page, which I realize is my main job as a writer, but which absolutely gets tiring at times, someone gives you some structure, some prompts: What about this? And this? And this other thing?

It's such a valuable thing for showing you parts of yourself you might not otherwise see and training you to think in a way you might not ordinarily think that if people are not lining up to interview you, I'd look for ways to give yourself this gift. The Proust Questionnaire is a great place to start: not only has it withstood the test of time, but you can compare your answers (afterwards, please!) to a world thinker so great, they ended up naming the damned thing after him.

My friend Gretchen Rubin (of Happiness Project fame) is terrific at posing thought-starters. Check out her question frameworks for coming up with resolutions that will be more satisfying to pursue, making better decisions, keeping your temper. I also enjoy reading the interviews Gretchen does with people she's interested in. Like the Proust Questionnaire, the questions remain consistent, so you could certainly use them to do your own (unpublished) Gretchen Rubin Happiness interview.

Whatever your means, it might be useful to start turning your attention to good questions, what makes them, where to find them, rather than focus quite so much on tracking down answers. Not that there isn't still a place for plain, old information (God Bless Wikipedia, and long may it reign!), but the knowledge that you piece together as the result of good questions is the information that really keeps on giving.

It's a now-hackneyed tradition to end a blog post or seed one's Facebook wall or cop out on meaningful Twitter contribution by asking a question. Too bad, because asking good questions is not just a way to gain eyeballs or get a break from the relentless feeding of the beast or incite the troops to (heaven help us) "join the conversation," but to stimulate actual, creative thought.

Still, this is a post about questions, so I will scatter a few about on my way out the door, mostly as fodder for you to think about as you move through your day. (Although the comments are, of course, open, they're even unmoderated again, assuming you've previously proven yourself to be a friendly nation.)

• Where is the last place you (unhappily) found yourself that felt so familiar, you were finally moved to take action?
• What is your favorite color? Was it always? When did it change? Where is it in your life right now?
• Replace "color" (above) with "book," "song," "teacher," "friend," or "food."
• What five songs make you the happiest when you hear them? Have you learned the words to them?
• What song could you sing right now in its entirety? Do you like this song?
• What is your greatest fear? How are you living with it (or not)?

xxx
c

* * *

COMING UP WEDNESDAY: A fun question-and-answer exercise to lively up your next gathering. You're subscribed, right?

* * *

Speaking of someone who knows how to ask the right questions, my longtime blogging pal, Marilyn, did a really challenging one with me that she's shared on her new site, La Salonniere, today. I'm especially thrilled because I love all the previous interviews so much: between her eclectic interests and her devotion to learning how things work, she is one amazing interviewer!

* * *

¹In the case of the live interviewer, it's all about the ability to improvise. Jesse probably has the edge here, improv fanatic that he is, although that could be my bias toward comedic presentation. I'm also mad for Adam Carolla, whose podcast was killer out of the gate. Nothing that 20 years of assiduous practice on terrestrial radio and crappy comedy stages can't buy you.

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

Life in the silo

I believe in the essential goodness of people.

I may forget it here and there, when I'm pressed for time, or not well-rested/-fed/-clothed, or when some deep, emotional trigger gets pulled. But usually, and fairly quickly, I recognize these lapses as such. They're my (temporary) deviations from an essentially optimistic, basically loving worldview, brought on by my own forgetfulness in administering self-care.

What reels me back in varies, but the underlying, foundational bit of knowledge I'm operating from goes something like this:

I do not change the world I live in by reacting to it like a jackass, except for the worst.

This is not a bad thing to keep in mind all the time (along with useful stuff like "breathe!" and "stop!" and "when's the last time you ate, anyway?"), but it's a really, really good thing for me to remember when something awful happens. It is quick and easy to reach for anger, for outrage, for righteous indignation. There they are, all handy and stuff, just like the drive-thru window of your favorite fast-food place. And hey, everyone else is at the fast-food place, right? Damn right! That's why this #$@(!) line is so long! *HONK!* *HO-O-O-O-ONK!*

At a little gathering this weekend, someone reminded me of a great assessment device for making sound decisions: what would your future self want?

Will your future self be happy that you shaved a half-hour off of your afternoon by picking up Extra-Value Meal #9? Or would your future self prefer to continue fitting comfortably in her pants, remaining ambulatory and independent into her dotage, continuing to poop from her factory-installed organs?*

The nice thing about this kind of projection is that it is easily (okay, SIMPLY) reframed to encompass more and more compassion and awareness as I get better at it. Does my future self want to wade through a world thigh-deep in single-use plastic? Or, how might my future self feel explaining to her theoretical nieces and nephews as we all munch dejectedly on our Soylent Green that yeah, we could sure use some of those resources my cohort and I burned through, but man, were those burgers fast-'n'-tasty! And, as you see, so on.

I am not always the best at considering Future Colleen. Far from it. One thing that really seems to help is keeping myself a wee bit uncomfortable. Not in a martyr-ish way, necessarily, although putting a cap on the thermostat, or asking whether you really need this or that important doodad, doesn't hurt. (More on that, and 2011's theme of Conscious Stewardship, to come.)

No, I'm talking about the discomfort involved in stepping out of the silo and bumping up against my fellow man. I dread the thought of socializing. Amazingly, more and more the actual experience usually varies from "pretty good" to "awesome," but even if it's objectively a low-grade Torquemada-fest of enervation or bombastery, if I can muster the right mindset, it's usually enlightening and it's always strengthening.

There are degrees of this, then, too, bumping up against lots and lots of my fellow men, in small groups and the occasional noisy crowd. Meeting them on their home turf. Acting as leader, or hostess. Things that are terrifying, at first, but that one gets better at. No, really. I'm not just a reasonably assimilated introvert; I'm so acclimated now that more often than not, I pass for extravert.

Achieving even this level of comfort took years of assiduous plugging away: Nerdmasters; networking practice, under the kind and patient tutelage of another reformed introvert; hurling myself again and again into scary, unfamiliar circumstances. In other words, not easy, not overnight. But oh, so well worth it.

I know how annoying it is hearing people parrot platitudes like "Be the change!", especially on Twitter or Facebook. Knee-jerk anything is suspect, save perhaps the impulse to throw oneself under a future bus to save one's theoretical niece or nephew. But at almost-50, and having foregone a great deal of potential income in favor of exploring more existential concerns, I think I've earned the tiniest right to suggest that maybe, just maybe, this lack of tolerance thing is kinda-sorta becoming a problem. And that perhaps, just perhaps, we might do well to bring a bit of awareness to it. That's all. I don't have a handy app or pledge page for this; just raising a thought. Maybe we could start small (it's usually best, in my old-lady opinion) by listening more. Literally.

There are all kinds of ways to start. Anything, I think, can be a start, provided you're bringing a loving intention to it.

Me, I'm going to go out and meet up with some people this week. Some old friends, some new ones. Maybe even some weird ones. (It's L.A., so definitely some weird ones.)

Because I have a silo, but I live in a world. Your world, my world, our world...

xxx
c

*On the other hand, if you're opting for the Filet-o'-Fish rather than ripping someone's head off and crapping down their neck, your future self thanks you, as does mine. It also gently and lovingly suggests you bring some attention to this "solution," and start exploring alternatives.

UPDATE [1/10]: A lucid, thoughtful, somewhat charged (he's blunt, folks!) piece by Jon Armstrong on the genesis and implications of the Giffords shooting; his wife Heather Armstrong also has a short but very touching post on what I think is one excellent way to move forward.

UPDATE [1/11]: Another excellent piece by Penelope Trunk on the role mental illness played both in the shooting and the tragic story of Bill Zeller. Link to Zeller's lengthy, sad and well-written suicide note via the previous link, or this MetaFilter post, or directly on this Gizmodo post and Zeller's site (as of this writing, anyway). My favorite takeaway from this horrible series of events came from a comment on the MetaFilter post:

The best I can do with something like this is to remember to always be nicer, because you truly never know what someone may be dealing with inside.

If I could make just that change, I think I could call this a live well-lived.

UPDATE [1/12]: Via Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter, a very sharp op-ed in the NY Times on the role fear plays in all of this, and a reiteration that this is not a left/right issue, but an issue of thoughtful engagement vs. fear-mongering, isolationism and other insalubrious human tendencies.

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

It's just Monday

It was 1.1.11.

The first day of a new decade, all shiny, all ones, all the promise of a big, brave, beautiful new year stretched out before us.

It was the reboot, the fresh start, the alpha to 12/31/10's omega. It was hope, objectified. It was intention, projected.

Or, you know, it was what we called it the week before:

Saturday.

***

One of the reasons I decided, finally, to opt out of the Race for the New Year in December of 2009 was because of the pressure. So much pressure to get it right, to start out right, to not screw up this fresh chance to not screw up. Instead, I decided to roll with December in January.

It turned out to be one of the smarter moves I've made, but not for the reason I thought. Yes, there was less stress, not compounding a searching moral inventory with the demands of a holiday. My god, have you experienced a holiday recently? By which I mean "have you endured one?" BAH. And humbug.

I haven't really even celebrated the holidays since my split with the Youngster back in '02, and I find them off-the-charts stressful by osmosis. The world gone mad, right up in my airspace. And my left-turn lane. And everywhere else on the roads, in the stores, at the bank, and the etcetera.

No, the big "win" I got from pushing everything off for a month, and then five, six, seven weeks before locking down the program for the upcoming 52, was realizing that I could do it. That I was the boss of me, not some calendar established by a powerful pointy-hat-wearing patriarch four and a half centuries ago. To catch a plane, to make a meeting, to honor a birthday in a timely fashion, yes, I will adhere to the almighty calendar; to determine my present and future well-being? No way, Pope José.

***

I quit smoking on a Thursday in September over 20 years ago.* I started this blog on a Monday in November over six years ago.

I have done everything that changed my life for the better on a day.

On the other hand, I have done plenty of things that went absolutely nowhere on a day. You never know what will come of a day, and what will not. Sometimes you stick a flag in a hill and things work out; sometimes, not. But most of the time, it is the picking, not the day.

What I know now is that today is as good a day as any to start something. And that no day is a good day to stop without intent. Opt in or opt out, but opt. Pick a hill. Start pushing. It's as good a day as any.

***

Then again, sometimes the thing picks you.

My ex-boyfriend told me that one day a voice in his head told him, "Get a dog." And he did, and the dog was Arnie, and it was good.

And yesterday, on my morning walk, a perfect one-word theme for the year floated by: SHIP.**  I have never picked a one-word theme for the year, although reading about it has piqued my interest. Many years ago, I would have sweated and fretted my way to a one-word theme, with the probable result of it not fitting, not working. Finally, I am learning a thing or two about ease. And about how other people's "instructions" are of far, far less use to you (or me) than their stories. No two paths are the same. No two interesting ones, anyway.

***

So. It's just Monday. What are you up to today?

xxx c

*Thursday, September 17, 1987. This is one reason why I will never, ever throw out my journals, they are my outboard brain.

**Seth has been talking about this for months, for years; I've been resolving to do it for almost as long, at least since I talked it over with him at this time last year. Oh, the plans I had for 2010! The resolve! The three books on the docket! Of course, I still have them. Only on a much longer, far more sensible docket. Although there's still the outside possibility that I could get three books in some ship-able state by the third week of February. But I wouldn't take that bet.

Photo by Evil Erin via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. And yeah, "Bench Monday" is a thing..

100 Things I Learned in 2010, Part 2

This year didn't kick my ass so much as it snuck up behind me, whispered in my ear it would kill me if I made so much as a wrong move, and slipped off into the night before I could make out what the fuck it looked like. This year was easily the worst since I got sucker-punched by 2002.

Still. This year could have been SO much worse. I know this. I mean, I forgot this, but then I remembered, and so sometime a month or two ago, I started making another kind of list, of things I was really, really lucky to have. Stuff like friends and health (especially when I got it back) and relative solvency, of course, but also stuff like "sunshine!" or "rain!" or "electricity!" (Although electricity mixed with rain, not so much.)

My point is this: I write because I have to, but I also am never far from realizing I write because I get to. As in, "I am alive for now, and living people GET TO WRITE."

So as this year draws to a close, I reiterate: I am alive for now. LIVING PEOPLE GET TO (fill in your Thing of Choice  here.) For my part, I am grateful for this year, and pledge to try my best not to slip out of gratitude for too long at any one point during the next.

Besides, sometimes the shittiest years bear the greatest fruits. Fertilizer, yadda yadda.

May you gently lay to rest your previous year, and rest your arms to open themselves widely to the next. Thank you, and I hope we'll see each other in 2011!

xxx c

1. It's hell in the hallway.
2. Never judge a bra by his cover.
3. My sign-painting obsession is not an anomaly.
4. Hypnosis feels like cheating on your pain.
5. But it hurts so good.
6. There's almost no mood that 100 miles of open road and a "singalong" playlist can't fix.
7. Keep that comfort television toward the top of the queue, too.
8. Habits before tools.
9. Fun has a high switching cost, but a stunning overall ROI.
10. Compassionate understanding is more effective than strict punishment.
11. Although neatly-drawn boundaries come in mighty handy.
12. Halve the meat.
13. Double the veggies.
14. Deep-six the carbs.
15. Anyone who says you can have it all, doesn't.
16. Everyone loves a good hack.
17. And a peek at someone else's setup.
18. The answer to more things than not is "less."
19. (Underwear and socks, excepted.)
20. Lemongrass is magic.
21. Hippie "deodorant" is the toiletries equivalent of the "CLOSE DOOR" button on the elevator.
22. When it comes to inboxes, "zero" is a journey, not a destination.
23. Unloading beats acquiring, hands-down.
24. Facebook is the best thing to happen to birthdays since cake.
25. Coconut is the best thing to happen to Larabars since Larabars.
26. Hotels are worth it.
27. That goes double re: springing for the single.
28. If you're not paying for the service, you're the product being sold.
29. An open jar is an empty jar.
30. Discovering bona fide Christians could almost restore one's faith.
31. I may never be immortalized in ink.
32. Vinyl, however, is another story.
33. With a rather bittersweet ending.
34. There are angels all around you, if you know where to not look.
35. Slow leaks cause steadily mounting anxiety.
36. There's no news like really fucking great news.
37. Ask around all you want, but you already know what you need to do next.
38. Sorry, not that.
39. Yes, that.
40. Don't forget the Epsom salts.
41. There's no free qi.
42. Misery (still) loves company.
43. Muppets (still) rule.
44. For good or for ill, you're making a difference.
45. Less video.
46. More music.
47. Crushes are better in individual serving sizes.
48. Troubles are better shared.
49. Fear is a yellow light, not a red one.
50. When life lets up, you're probably not living it anymore.

Yup. This 100-things thing is indeed an annual thing:

2010

• 100 things, Part I

2009

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2008

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2007

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2006

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2005

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

Magnificent drawing of yours truly, the clown, © Wally Torta, gentleman and scholar.

100 Things I Learned in 2010, Part 1

I know that normal people marvel over how fast time flies when they see Rite Aid putting out the holiday tchotchkes in July or read stories of their college roommates' babies get busted for dealing meth, but I'll tell you what, nothin' sez "Old timer!" to this old timer like posting your SEVENTH annual "Things I Learned in Whatever Year" to your blog.

This year was not an easy year for many people. On the other hand, easy years are rarely memorable ones. And, as my memory ain't what it used to be (I think), maybe I'm better off with a "challenging" year.

Part 2 coming at you on Thursday...

xxx

c

1. Love is easy.
2. Forgiveness is hard.
3. Which means that actually, love isn't easy at all.
4. December is way more fun when you do it in January.
5. The best slide shows present you.
6. To get down with the future, meet the kids who'll be running it.
7. For someone who never liked dogs, I sure turned out to like dogs.
8. Then again, no one told me they had medicinal properties.
9. You're never too old to learn how much you have yet to learn.
10. Or too good to make light of it.
11. The way to read a lot of books is 40pp at a time.
12. If you build it, they will cum.
13. You may never work harder than the year you don't "work."
14. Exhaustion is the true mother of invention.
15. The two greatest blogs about change are newsletters.
16. But the king is the king for a reason.
17. There will never be enough hours in a day.
18. I don't know why or how, but wishing works.
19. I finally have enough author friends to form a football team.
20. And 2011 is bringing in some strong starters.
21. As for me, we'd better hope those Mayans were wrong.
22. Car washes are infinitely better when you add free magazines.
23. Everything is infinitely better when you add hot guys.
24. The best pictures are inevitably the worst pictures.
25. When it comes to chasing, I give up.
26. Uniforms rock.
27. Pen pals rule.
28. Nothing underlines the need for self-love like a run-in with one's inner shithead.
29. At a certain point, "procrastination" becomes simply "one's working style."
30. The biggest learning is in the doing.
31. Cheap is beautiful.
32. Ice cream is better than gossip. For everyone.
33. You'll hate half of what you try.
34. If you're incredibly lucky.
35. And unusually diligent.
36. Feminism and heat are not mutually exclusive.
37. I'd walk a thousand miles for a singular comment.
38. Two thousand, if the comment comes from the elusive Dan Owen.
39. I like my books like I like my eggs: hard-boiled.
40. The biggest skies are the hardest to get to.
41. But when you hitch the right ride, they're beyond worth it.
42. Maybe video ain't so bad.
43. When life won't buy your lemons, offer it lemonade.
44. On the other hand, when assholes spill oil, set them on fire.
45. Although some of them are pretty good at self-immolation.
46. Nothing feels as good as true service.
47. Belly laughs run a close, close second.
48. Then again, these days, belly laughs are the highest form of service.
49. Social media is dead.
50. Long live social media.

Part II is here. And have I mentioned that I've been doing this 100-things thing for SEVEN years now?

2009

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2008

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2007

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2006

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2005

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

Photo © John Gruber via Flickr.

Poetry Thursday: Slow death by bullshit happiness

You think to yourself: "I can do this!" or "This will be good for me!" or even "It doesn't matter."

And so you smile when someone asks how things are going, broadly, you smile, with most of your teeth, and you flick aside what's left of your heart, and you stick out your hand and say, "Grrrreat!" or "Couldn't be better!" or, when life is particularly bleak, "Things are looking up!"

And you recite from memory a menu, several pre-selected items from columns "A" and "B", of all the marvelous wins and fabulous opportunities and other stale pellets of extruded terror formed into appetizing, life-like shapes, tarted up with brio and garnished with a wilted sprig of false humility until you question whether you can even remember what it felt like to really, truly feel anything.

What happens, I wonder, when you just fucking say, "Damn, I'm tired. Business sucks, traffic was awful, my husband left me, my hard drive crashed, the dog has cancer, and the Emperor's ass is a flat, pale, pockmarked bucket of sad the sight of which is going to take years to wipe from my memory banks. What's new in YOUR world?"

Whether everything is awful right now or everything is perfect right now everything IS right now.

And I can't think of a single thing that doesn't get a little bit better served up fresh and truthfully, with humor, with tenderness, with the judiciously-chosen expletive, dependent on company.

Besides, what's the alternative, slow death by bullshit happiness?

The end is coming, either way.

And I'm guessing, just guessing, mind you, that if you let at least some of it hang out, the two of you might even toast to the ironies of life, and the way a bump in the road can turn two complete strangers into fellow travelers.

xxx c

Return of the governor cold

I'm into Week #3 of the Cold That Would Not Die.

Admittedly, part of this is probably my fault: I pushed myself way too hard on Thursday and Friday, emotionally and physically. Sometimes you can't avoid these things; sometimes, you don't want to.

At any rate, it is an interesting thing, being forced to slow down so significantly, to find a setting (or be forced into one) between "full-bore" and "off." I walk, but more slowly and not as far, and only when I have the energy to do even that. I forgo my usual full routine of Nei Kung, happy if I can do just 10 or 15 minutes of Horse Stance. I take longer to do everything, it seems: brushing my teeth, finding the items I'm looking for at the drugstore, getting dressed, putting away my clothes. It is like being very, very young, or perhaps like being very, very old. It reminds me of being very, very sick, although thankfully, I know what very, very sick really feels like and I'm nowhere near that, knock wood.

I'm just...hampered.

Almost six years ago, I wrote a little item about how it felt: the "governor" cold, I called it. It was a way to reframe the annoyance, both to remind me that, compared to what I'd been through before, it ain't no thang, and to maybe make it a little useful to me. Which it is. I've stopped drinking coffee, and I'm actually going to bed when I'm tired. Remarkable.

I've also revisited my nightly "gratitude dump." No, not that kind of dump (although given my plumbing, I'm always grateful for a good dump). It's a kind of elaboration on the gratitude journal, where I just spill out thing after thing after thing that I am grateful for, until I've exhausted four columns on a page of my 8 1/2 x 11", college-ruled notebook. Some of the things get a little silly, like "roof" or "spiral notebook." Then again, if you think about it, both of those things are pretty awesome, and I have them along with four-columns-minus-two-lines' worth of other awesome things.

Partly as an outgrowth of my feelings of gratitude and partly out of sheer self-interest, I finally signed on with Kiva and made my first loans. (Thank you, Jason and Jodi, for the brilliant idea; it was the best I felt all weekend.

I did a few other, small things, too: got the last four installments of the newsletter posted to the archives, for example. Restrung one of my guitars to pass along to a friend, now that I'm done with it. (Don't worry, I kept the other one.) Cooked some meals. Drank a lot of weak tea and hot water with lemon. Got my hair did. And wrote every day, either longhand or in the Google Wave with Dave, downloading this crazy stream of stuff that starting gushing a few weeks ago. Maybe being sick is actually good for thinking? Dave seems to be going through the same thing, both cold and crazy-stream-downloading, so yeah, maybe.

Hopefully, though, it's just the slowing down that's doing it. Because I can do that anytime. Right?

xxx c

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

Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #30

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web. Keep up with them day-to-day on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my daily travels. More about the genesis here.

Great tips on reading faster without reading dumber. [delicious]

A haunting story made more so by the very particular use of photographic illustations. [Google Reader-ed, via Neil Kramer]

Awesome swear-ridden rant from screenwriter Harlan Ellison on writers getting paid. [YouTube-ed, via Joy Lanzendorfer]

Amazing motion graphics work applied to illustrating one of my favorite Jonathan Coulton tunes. [Facebook-ed, via Daring Fireball ]

xxx
c

Comic by Ape Lad via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

The phlegm that says "I love you"

Back in September of 2002, I started drawing my colon.

I first drew it on the day after my second-ever colonoscopy, the day I was finally told how bad off I really was in unequivocal, Western-medical terms ("aggressive onset," white-cell count, colostomy, etc.). I continued drawing it once per day, every day, for months afterward, well after I was out of the hospital and back to work.

It's nowhere in the journal entries that precede the drawing itself, but I am fairly sure of the genesis of the sketching-as-therapy endeavor: several years earlier, during her first bout with cancer, my mother shared with me her own hoo-doo sicky-sick ritual. She did not draw, but she regularly visualized the diseased parts of herself¹ slowly getting better as cancer cells were politely escorted out by the contents of the chemical drip in her arm. This image was easier and more pleasant for her to fix on, she said, than the war-like one some people favor: This radiation is KILLING my cancer! This chemo is KICKING THE SHIT out of those mutant cells!²

I had no better ideas, so I did the same.

The first drawing is hastily done; my intestines look more like a really poorly rendered black-and-white sketch of the Yellow Brick Road cover than actual human organs, and there is nothing as specific and action-oriented as escorting going on. The next day, however, features a fair approximation of a colon, along with some very dynamic-looking action lines. By Day 6 (see above), the drawings are not only more specifically rendered, but more lovingly. The joint is lousy with hearts, for cryin' out loud! And on Day 11, I have the whole exit/recovery strategy meticulously mapped out: the meds and SCD-legal food, rendered as hearts, are waving at the mischievous buggies on their way out.³ To an actual toilet. (God is in the details, amirite?)

Whether or not you hew to the woo, there are some useful aspects to the practice of embracing an illness in this way.

First, it gives you something to do besides fret, nap, and watch Murder, She Wrote on an endless loop. I am way too good at fretting, way too bad at napping and even I can't watch TV forever. There was something very calming and focusing about drawing my colon every day. I'd reflect on the shape of it, add nuances to the exit strategy, draw a few more "good" bugs and a few less "teacher" bugs with each rendering. Plus, you know, super-nifty illustrated journal after the fact.

Second, reframing the illness made it much easier to get down with the slow pace of returning to wellness.⁴ Rather than looking at the whole thing as a "woe be me!" experience, I was able to look at it like a class, albeit a really tedious one with an unusual number of bathroom breaks.

Third, drawing every day helped to keep me in a state of gratitude. Because making the bugs my teachers made it impossible to feel completely angry with my disease. And because I chose to render the medicine as little hearts, I remained grateful to my I/V drip, my medical team, my health insurance, my amazing bed with the remote control that made it go up and down, up and down.

I bring all of this up because I'm sick right now. Not with Crohn's, but with an annoyingly trenchant and inconveniently timed cold. At least, for now it's a cold; one person I know had this whatever-it-is morph into bronchitis. I am not a fan of bronchitis. I quit smoking, some 23 years ago, because of incipient bronchitis.⁵ Not to mention I don't have the margin for error with antibiotics I did pre-Crohn's, in my blissfully sturdy 20s.

I am no saint. I can piss and moan and resist acting in my best interests with the best of them, even though the consequences of not doing so are intimately known to me.

And yet it is getting harder and harder to stay there. Hooray, middle age! Hooray for you, too, hundreds of hours of therapy, reading and purposeful self-reflection! I finally get that it's more useful, not to mention delightful, to treat myself with a little consideration, and to turn my attention to the nifty side of things. If I can't do my usual long, power walk, I am treated to a the beauty of my neighborhood in super-slow motion. If I cannot be out and dashing about in my usual can-do fashion, well, for the short stretches I do get out, I'm even more aware and appreciative of the fine weather we enjoy in Los Angeles. And slowed down thusly, when I am home I'm even more grateful for the serene snugness of my little apartment and its, no, really, insanely luxurious appointments.

I've written long ago and at length about illness being a useful, if painful, way to slow things down. I've spoken more recently (and far more briefly) about rotten things being a gateway to big love. But I still need reminding; maybe I always will need reminding. Slow is not a factory-default setting.

And so I move too fast and I curse before I remember to say "Thank you!" and slow down for a bit.

But I do slow down for a bit. Which is what we call a start.

Oh, and for the duration? Posting will be light...

xxx c

¹As the primary site was her cervix, there was also some kind of radioactive tampon she got to wear. Get your pap, ladies!

²Mom died just 18 months after diagnosis, but far, far past what the doctors had initially predicted for someone with Stage 4 cervical cancer that had metastasized to her lungs. She even went into full remission for a time, fooling us into thinking she'd be around for a good, long time. Alas, the cancer came back fast and aggressively, and in her weakened state, a state not at all enhanced by her alcohol intake, except from a relaxation point of view, I can't see how she could have fought it off. Watch the drinking, ladies!

³Western medicine is finally coming around to embrace the theory Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas and Elaine Gottschall put forth a heckuva lot earlier: that the source of the irritation that causes Crohn's is bacterial: a crazy, unchecked proliferation of "bad" bacteria that the guts of Crohn's and ulcerative colitis patients can't handle, which irritates the intestinal wall and triggers the immune response (your body attacking itself).

⁴I was very fortunate, I realize, to be returned to a state of wellness. I get that this is not the case with all illnesses, and I'm the last one to point the manifesting finger. You know, that creepy part of new-agey-ness that wonders, in the most inappropriately passive-aggressive, outrageously fake-compassionate way, what you did to bring this illness into your life. Uuuuuuuup yours, you "Namaste!" motherfucker. (One of these days, I really do need to write up that essay on the "Namaste!" Motherfuckers. I have far more contempt for them than I do other fringe groups one could name on the other end of the socio-political spectrum because seriously, they should know better.

⁵And I really, really liked smoking, so you know I must have really, really hated the idea of this bronchitis thing happening again.

Poetry Thursday: Some small magic is making your life possible right now

If you tell me miracles do not happen
I will not contradict you.

I cannot point to precise amounts of money
showing up in time
to save the curly-headed ingenue lashed to the tracks
from the fiery vengeance
of a foul-breathed dragon.

I do not believe
in spontaneous healing
or insta-overhauls
and I am pretty sure
that if Jesus showed up again today
it would not be
on a waffle.

But if you ask me about magic,
well, then,
I am all in.

Not cruise-ship illusions
or witchy incantations
but real, homemade magic.

Time, for instance,
imbued with tincture of patience,
okay, oceans of patience,

Time works wonders
more amazing
than that big wall in China
and a couple of pyramids
put together.

Laughter, obviously.
Like a light switch,
that laughter.

And let me tell you:
if you have not stood
on the razor's edge
between dark and light
and had the perfectly-timed,
impeccably-turned line
flick you nimbly from one side
to the other
while you weren't even thinking,
much less looking,
and felt the tears that soaked your heart
suddenly pouring down both sides of your face
with laughter,
well, then, brother,
I submit
you have yet to live.

And love,

Well, where do we start
when it comes to love?

Love is a magnet
and a builder of bridges. 
Love keeps feet
on the ground
and launches otherwise logical heads
into the stratosphere.

Love can stitch two hearts together
patiently, bit by bit, 
over sixty-five highly improbable years
and krazy-glue others together
so swiftly
and permanently
that the word "excruciating"
works equally well
to describe the coming together
or the pulling apart.

Love is making something possible
somewhere 
right this very second
and third
and so forth.

Love is so amazing
and enthralling
and uplifting
and empowering
I would live in love all the time
if it didn't scare the shit out of me.

It takes muscles
to live in love
not just a heart of fire
and a head for poetry.

But I will get there.
Just you wait.

Until then,
I practice.
I exercise.
I make what joy I can,
and take what time I am able to
without tripping over my own two feet
like the jackass I am.

May this day
and every other
bring a little more magic.

May I make a moment indelible
by standing still in it.

May you heal or be healed
by some flavor of joy.

And may we both do one tiny, terrifying thing
that nudges us gently
back to the love
we have been standing in
all along.

xxx
c

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