What trips you up? Pride? Temper? Fear? I get shanghai’d by all three, sometimes in combination, but nothing gets me like patience. Because I have so damned little of it. Today, I almost did a foolish thing, I almost bailed on an opportunity because it wasn’t getting me somewhere fast enough. (Well, I also felt [...]
zen of everything
When things are heavy on my mind, as they were last night, I sleep fitfully, dream much, awaken often. I woke up finally this morning with a bolt, and a strange directive: Olive Prouty. I’ll spare you the woowoo details, but I’m fairly sure it was a message from Mom. Why she’s pestering me from [...]
I had a call today from The Youngster, an ex who is both a current friend and collaborator. Along with The BF, we’re working on a couple of interesting projects (one I can show you; one I’ve alluded to) that have, in the main, gone swimmingly, but have been quite a lot of work (as [...]
As the dread, dead weight of the weekend lifted after 8 hours of rest and some attendant perspective, I knew that today’s lesson had to be It’s always darker before the dawn. Then I drove to the Cuban joint for provisions. And while I was sipping my coffee, waiting for them to prepare my salad, [...]
Rather than bore you fine people with the oft mind-numbing tedium of my workaday life, I try to keep the shop talk (and the whining) to a minimum. Sometimes, though, there’s a useful nugget buried in the poop of everyday existence, the kind that’s like a shiny diamond you swallowed by accident, not the kind [...]
For a long time, my credo was this: Always go to the party expecting to have a bad time and you might be pleasantly surprised. I used it literally when going to a shindig, and metaphorically when approaching almost anything else: math class, the grocery store, doctors’ appointments. I was really good at coming up [...]
Before you atheists go running for the hills, or at least the greener pastures of more skeptical blogs, know this: I have never been much for organized religion. In fact, the introductory essay to what I’d assumed would be my first book, How I Pulled My Head Out of My Ass (A Skeptic’s Guide to [...]
It’s Table Topics at nerdmasters, and you’re handed the topic you must speak on for one to two minutes: tell a story about a celebrity you’ve met somewhere, somehow, and elaborate if you need to from there (which is code for ‘make it up if you have to.’) I didn’t have to; between my job [...]
I don’t have a single advanced degree, but even if I had five, I would need six more before I felt secure enough to call myself an expert. I have over 20 years of quantifiable success in three areas of communications under my belt (and lately, a lot of pizza), but I would need 10 [...]
Part the first: Fear of the Unknown Around 4pm, I was crossing the street, wondering why no lessons had made themselves known to me yet (was I so close to enlightenment I perhaps needed none?) when I narrowly missed being mowed over by a high-end SUV. The driver was mortified. He went white as a [...]
