Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 9: It's a dog's dog's dog's dog's world

I've met a lot of people thanks to the Internet. And packing myself off to Skedaddle, as one now-non-imaginary friend calls it, has allowed me to meet up with some of them, or remeet some of them, in the flesh.

But one of the nicest visits I've had was my trip out to my friend Joan's farm.

If my own trajectory (copywriter to actress to communicatrix) is mildly odd, Joan's defies description. She grew up around horses, out here in Seattle, and rode dressage as a girl. She trained as an actor, then acted, then wrote screenplays. Somewhere along the way, she started talking to animals, a skill she now leverages full-time, along with speaking and writing.

We met doing a play that was in many ways like doing time (as I understand it) or serving active duty in the military in wartime (ditto) or Catholic school (we, uh, both have experience with that one). Things were fraught, and that has a way of bonding you.

So when she moved from Los Angeles and we lost touch, I knew it was temporary, and it was. Every few years, we'll lose touch, and then pick up where we left off via some fortuitous re-meetup. (And for the record, Facebook is proving profoundly helpful in this area.)

When I got in touch this time and told her about my trip, she immediately invited me out to the farm. She lives an hour's drive from my little urban crash pad, in a place so staggeringly beautiful (and quiet, sweet Jesus!), you relax into it right away. We walked and hung and drank too much wine, and stayed up into the too-wee-for-me hours of the morning to do most of it.

We had us such a fine, full visit (and so much damned wine) that I had to miss out on two chances to hang with yet more Internet friends here on a visit (what is it with this town? Is everybody here?), and a fine, fine crew I'd long looked forward to meeting.

I have always liked having a choice of many good things, and have always hated having a choice of many good things. Decide to be an orthopedic surgeon, and it's not going to leave you a lot of time to pursue that dream of standup comedy.

In this case, I confess that there were two items in the farm column that tipped it, and their names are Isabella and Olivia.

Dogs will always tip it, especially if you have been away from yours for 12 long days. In the middle of a long visit from home, it is important to get you some good dog lovin'. And these ladies? Delivered in spades.

Rested and restored...

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 8: Down on the farm

Sometimes you eat the bear.

Sometimes you head out to the farm, the bear puts on a pot of French press, and the two of you eat a little cheese.

Everyone should get a day off.

Even the bear.

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 7: Shitty First Draft

There are a million websites, okay, a couple of hundred thousand, that will tell you to curtail your email time.

Your chat time.

Your surfing time.

Here's the thing: what they're really telling you to do is to limit the amount of time you spend on things that net you little-to-nothing, and max out the time you spend doing the stuff that nets you big-time.

You've got to keep body and soul together, yes.

You've got to keep Making Things, putting good things out there into the world that you make, yourself, out of sweat and twine and (your preferred medium).

But sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is to pick up the phone when it rings and talk to the (relative, soon-to-be-not) (and brave!) stranger on the other end.

Sometimes, the best use of your time is to reach out to a bunch of people you haven't connected with in a while and share a few words, regardless of how many (or few) people will read them.

Sometimes, it's just about...wandering. And seeing where the wandering will lead you.

We Virgos, we tend to forget that. We like forward motion, and checking things off lists. We like making a plan, and tend to think that deviation from it spells certain doom.

Here's the thing: I veered about as far off the proscribed list today as was possible. As in, I did not start Working until 1. Or so. Up until then, I spent my day talking and wandering and musing.

But then? I sat down and wrote me a big, Shitty First Draft of Chapter Something. Even smiled a few times while writing it. Oh, it'll all be thrown out, but it don't matter none. It's all in the doing.

Extend extend extend yourself.

Or oh, what you and the world might miss out on.

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 6: Unsticking yourself

Like most human messes, the process of shifting from one thing to another is not linear.

Two steps forward, one step back. (Oh, wait, that's a line.)

I want my growth to happen faster than it does, no matter how fast it happens. I want it to happen in a forward-ly direction, and only in that direction. I do not mind treading while I don't mind treading, but when I'm ready to move, I'm ready, dammit.

If you are in the thick of it, change can be a big, sticky mess. Once you are outside of it, it may still be big, but it is also fascinating.

The older I get, the more I see the gods, you know, the Greek and Roman ones, as metaphor. They're the part of us that sits outside of us. The part that gets to judge and pose and roll their big, fancy eyes.

What they don't get is to play. Like we do. Like I do. Every day.

Today I got to play, and maybe didn't own the field the way I wanted to.

Tomorrow, I get to play again.

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 5: Beware the luggage you didn't know you packed

You settle in more quickly than you know.

The apartment that seemed so strange becomes home (so much so, you relax into full-on slob mode). Within days, you have your grocery store, your coffee place, your routine.

You came up here with intention to try things differently (to get away, to try living elsewhere, to do some writing you'd been unable or unwilling to do at home) and before you know it, you've slipped into all kinds of same-old behavior. Is your life really so different, or did you just haul the same shit, or a subset of it, 1,100 miles north?

There are many great things about Method training for the actor. One of the greatest is learning one's patterns. Patterns are what keep us from being present; patterns are also a great part of what defines us as characters. Examine the patterns, hold them up to the excruciating light of truth, and maybe, maaaaaybe, you can start to break them.

And once you break them, you can start to illuminate them, so that maybe, maaaaaaybe, people around you can start to see theirs. The interested parties, of course.

You look at what you're doing. You look at it under a bright, bright light.

You tell everyone else what you see.

You wake up and try again.

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 4: Small is the new big

Whatever directions your circumstances take, expanding or contracting, growing or reducing, uptick or downward trending, you adjust.

I've adjusted upwards and downwards all my life. Up, up, up for years; then, a few years after my parents divorced, a sharp downturn when we relocated to Gloomy Manor, a.k.a. my maternal grandparents' house, where we lived with them and two uncles who were also in the throes of their own particular life changes.

Up again with Mom's second marriage; down and down and down with the demise of that. Although at that point, the downwards contractions were only visible on vacation visits to the homestead; my own path had diverged in its own upwards/downwards fashion, through various communal living experiences at college and in New York City, where I shared a series of shitty rooms and apartments with a series of interesting roommates. Mammals, most of them.

The move to L.A., back in 1992, was a big step up in comfort and convenience. Grouse all you want about L.A., we live the soft life there, with our cars and our endless free and/or cheap parking. Parts of Los Angeles are truly urban, and I have one intrepid friend who's managed a car-free life for her entire stay there, but for the most part, we are fat and lazy suburbanites in city people's clothing. In New York, you get tough; in L.A., you may become hard, but you get very, very soft.

My four days here have been sort of a revelation in terms of personal comfort. Don't get me wrong: I adore this lovely neighborhood, its walkable treasures, its spectacular views. Within a half-hour's walk I have all the great bookstores, markets, coffee shops and eateries a city girl could hope for. And I mean great, of the kind of exceptional quality that would have you driving all over L.A. and back again.

But the trade-off for truly civilized living, at least, among the commonfolk, is 7/8ths-scale everything else. A tiny apartment, with tiny closets and a microscopic kitchen. You? Maybe you're fine with the microscopic. Me? I'm a metaphorically fat, lazy American pig who's used to driving her car to the supermarket, buying in ridiculous quantities, and feeling vaguely guilty about the waste. And the E-Z-Bake Oven is not exactly a McMansion, either. But compared to my current digs, the full-size fridge, oven AND cooktop, and capacious cabinets feel positively suburban.

Truthfully? It feels good to scale back. I like literally weighing an item in my hand and deciding whether or not I want to hump it back to the crib. It feels good to be able to count on both hands the items of food and drink I have to eat and drink. Having to wash the previous meal's dish and cutlery before I eat again, because there's only one set? Is a good exercise for me.

Some of the good comes from things just being different. From being outside of the usual, and my comfort zone, so I'm forced to be thoughtful and attentive (and thankful! Let's not forget thankful!)

But part of the wonder of this trip is in literally scaling back. To the stuff I've brought with me. To the space allotted.

In constraints lie the keys to expansion.

Here's to busting down more walls...

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 3: Wax on & serendipity

Anne Lamott says Mondays are bad for writing.

She goes so far as to say that one, "one" being you, the aspiring writer, should never endeavor to begin an important project on a December Monday, December being the Month of Mondays.

Perhaps.

She also speaks (kindly) to a lot of important concepts for the creatrix: the importance of the Shitty First Draft. The soundness of the Short Assignment. The eminently sensible principle of Not Beating Oneself Up, a.k.a. the Scourge of Perfectionism.

I did work today and I wrote today. Some okay work and a horrendous Shitty First Draft of a new Chapter One. Forgive me for not sharing all, I hate to be coy, but to fill you in on every last detail would be to spread my seed rather too thinly. And as the kind of gal who always half-wished she was a dude (the freedom! the equipment!), I'm excited enough to have seed to spread, period.

At some point today, when the slanting sun had crept high enough so as to make work in my otherwise otherworldly-perfect workspace unbearable, I crept out and up the hill for a coffee. While there, feasting on caffeinated beverages that only get this good because of fierce competition, I received a call from my gal, gelatobaby, who, coincidentally, is here tearing up the town...with her mother.

An invitation to dinner! From two ladies who know their culinary stuff far better than I can hope to in a thousand lifetimes! How could I say anything but "yes"?

We met, we supped, we plotted. They treated me to the finest dinner I've had in months (oh, god, the carpaccio! the mussels!) and dropped me on their way back down the hill. I hadn't the groceries I'd intended to get on my way up, but was fed better than I possibly could have been by my own hand and the Safeway.

Part of what I am here to do is what I planned. The rest? What just comes up.

In serendipity we trust. Good night, Seattle!

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle, Day 2: Tables and sharing

I will go to great lengths of accommodating discomfort in order to avoid Discomfort.

Case in point: I ate white-bread-and-cheese sandwiches for four days in London during my first visit there, at age 16, because I was too terrified to venture out beyond the first place I found that sold food. (I also missed my chance to see Elvis Costello in teeny-tiny concert, as well as the original cast of the Rocky Horror Show, for pretty much the same reason. Yes, I know.)

More proof? After three weeks of profound illness and several harrowing nights of 104º+ fever, I still had to be tricked into going to the hospital by my clever, clever sister. Because to hell with the idea I might die by staying away: the emergency room would have been a clear admission that something was seriously wrong with me.

I did what I could to prep for a good month away: clothes, plans, transpo, housing. It never occurred of me to ask my charming host about workspace arrangements. Hell, she was throwing extra sets of keys to an office to me; why would I think about it?

So when I threw open the door to my Home-and-Office Away from Home, imagine my surprise at finding exactly two clear horizontal surfaces above the floor: the bedside tables on either side of the Tempurpedic. Which, to be fair, is also a clear horizontal surface (and a scary-comfortable one, at that), but highly impractical for use as a computing workspace, which is what I was after.

I jury-rigged something out of one of the tables, the iMac box and a few pillows (for carpal tunnel-reduction). Within five minutes, it was clear that any notions of productivity I'd driven up here with were going to be dashed upon the rocks of half-assedness; there's only so much one can do with crap tools and a crap set-up, no matter what kind of raw material and will one is working with.

The BF said two words: Craig's List. Well, I guess that's one word, as far as the Internet is concerned. And it was a fine idea: people unload far costlier items than a beat-to-shit table on the "free" list every day.

But I knew that looking it up was only a small fraction of a complex equation, the rest of which was a snarl of potential issues that started with my giving up a parking spot in a neighborhood that places a premium on them, and ended with me sliced to ribbons in a culvert out back of a trailer park in some remote, exurban swath of Seattle. With a lot of narrowly-missed freeway exits in between. I could put up with the end table, couldn't I? For just a few weeks?

I couldn't. I came here to write, and I couldn't write shite perched on a futon couch, my knees wrapped around a bedside table, my mousing arm wobbly on a giant cardboard box. I found the perfectly priced, beat-to-shit table in a faraway suburb, took a deep breath, and emailed. Three hours later, my table was reassembled in the Temporary Pad, my car was parked in a new and equally deliciously located spot, and I was walking downtown for a celebratory Americano at my beloved Caffé Umbria.

They don't alter you overnight-and-forever, these little stabs at change. But they do have a way of making other things fall into place almost magically. A few hours later, I ran into a friend from Los Angeles who is here, performing in a play. Got invited to dinner with a couple of online friends who were gathering nearby. (Got to buy my idol, Dan Savage, a drink while I was there, too.)

On the cab ride over (did I mention the cab that magically appeared out of nowhere?), the driver and I talked about fear and petrification and how to manage the former to help stave off the latter. I think I may have convinced him of the rightness of taking a two-hour vacation, all by himself. As a start. As a gateway challenge.

Today? Was a good day.

xxx c

Staying Awake in Seattle: A 21-Day Salute™

There is a reason they call it uprooting yourself.

If you've never moved, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if you have, you're know exactly what I'm talking about: that weird feeling that you've landed on another planet, where the ordinary rules of gravity and suchlike don't apply. You can walk, because your legs still work, but you're taking in so much information that it all feels new, like the first time you walked (I think, really, I can't remember that far back.)

You pull into a parking space and you're not sure if it's a legal space because they mark things differently, so you feel even more unbalanced as you go to check out your new place, the place you will call home for the next few weeks. And it's fine: you have not, in fact, landed on another planet, but on a very thin slice of this very same planet, which happens to have stairs and running water and windows and walls and floors just like your own slice.

Still, this is not your own slice. The strange smells and sights that assault you at every turn assure you of that. You are an alien; you are here by the grace of something other than you. This ain't you, babe.

So you unpack your stuff. And as you obsessively unzip and unpack and plug in and turn on (narrating the whole damned thing like your Big Move is a show on the National Geographic channel), you of course think of Carlin and his stuff. And you wonder about all the other people who move around all the time, and how they make their nomadic whistle-stop lives feel grounded and substantial.

You fuss and muse and make a few calls (because those lifelines to other worlds, they are grounding) and finally, you decide to take one of the homegrown maps your absent host, your Ghost Host!, has drawn for you and walk for provisions (and definitely walk, because you'll be goddamned if you'll get back in that car and drive up disorienting hills after three days on the road, only to return to find the maybe-parking space is gone and now you've got to find another...in the dark.

It's beautiful here. Even tired/jazzed and disoriented, you can't help but notice. Around every corner is another picture-postcard view. And different from the picture-postcard views you're used to, with their Hollywood signs and magic-hour lighting on the palm trees, so you really see them.

The store is not your store, but it has food like your store. Food so like your store, you try your customer affinity card at the checkout, and are secretly delighted that it works. (Secretly, because you have no one to tell; you've made a friend of the checker, who is also a SoCal transplant, but she left San Berdoo eons ago and it is her job now to talk to the wobbly and disoriented of all stripes.)

You feel a little better walking back. You've walked this way once, so it's already less unfamiliar. You start to think about how in a few weeks, maybe a few days, it will feel familiar. You need to mark this, the feeling, and sit in it, and for god's sake, don't rush past it.

And then you look left. A giant spire, lit up like Christmas, looks back at you. Points toward the rest of a sweeping vista, a carpet of lights ringed around a bay. For you. Here. For you.

This is why you haul your ass out of town. This is why you leave things and change things and try things. For the feeling of imbalance. For the reminder that you're just a floating speck on a floating leaf. For the occasional glimpse of beauty that's both shockingly new and hauntingly familiar.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here in Seattle to wake myself the fuck up the rest of the way. Done what I could where I could; now I let my new, host circumstances take care of the rest.

We shall see what we shall see.

xxx c

Seattle happens on the left side of the "but"

I shouldn't be here now. Living. Writing. Relationshipping.

Seriously: I've done everything wrong.

I shouldn't have left my job-job 16 years ago (and counting). Not that Real Job, with its corner office view and its fancypants title and its fatty paycheck and its sweet bennies.

I shouldn't have moved out to Los Angeles to chase a half-baked dream. I definitely shouldn't have then dumped the half-baked dream for the even loonier one of becoming an actor.

I shouldn't have left the hospital that weekend. I shouldn't have gotten rid of the Similac and everything else on the doctor-recommended BLAND diet and gone on the non-doctor-recommended Specific Carbohydrate Diet. I shouldn't have worn extra layers of clothing and filled my pockets with change for my first weigh-in, to buy myself more time.

I shouldn't have left my marriage: we loved each other; that's supposed to be enough, right? And I certainly shouldn't have entered into a committed relationship with a married man.

The older I get, and, let's face it, the less authority figures whose worry-laden calls of inquiry after my current madness that I have to take twice weekly, the more comfortable I am with doing the stuff on the left side of the "but". The craaaazy stuff.

I'd like to try parachuting but...

I'd like to take a sabbatical but...

I'd like to try the chicken tikka masala this time but...

A couple of things worth noting here. First, some people really don't want to do any of that stuff; they just like jaw-flappin'. That's cool, but you know what? If you're here, putting yourself through the very specific agony of reading all these verbal gymnastics to unearth some pearl, odds are you aren't of the fish-mawed yarnspinner variety.

Second, not all of the stuff on the left side of the "but" need be executed. Or, given your current circumstances, is even executable, by a sane and responsible citizen, anyway. If you're the sole means of support for a family of seven, I'd consider you a prize shithead if you ditched them to pursue your left-of-the-but dream of...well, anything.

What you are allowed to do, what we all must do, and always, because we are not fixed in stone, is to stay awake and keep your finger on the pulse of your desires. Provided you are not just talking for the sake of hearing your own voice (and if you are, well, dang, there's a little something you could study for a bit, isn't there?) the stuff on the left of the but, in my experience, is the you that's a few steps ahead calling out for a little help, here. Whether that voice is a canary in a coalmine, tweeting your tatty and inevitable death-by-not-being-alive or a quietly shining light guiding you through an approaching fog to the next safe harbor lies largely with how you treat it.

The big breakthrough for me was starting to look at the stuff on the left side of the "but" as a bit of guidance: a place to start. Is there something about parachuting that's interesting to me? What is it? Or them, all of them? And while we're at it, let's have a look-see at the stuff on the right side. What, exactly, is this thing that is stopping me? How do I feel about that? Is it even true, or is it a rutted road, an old story, something I don't particularly like or believe in anymore, but have come to accept as a fixed given?

You don't have to parachute; you just have to sit down and make a list. Surely, you can sit down and make a list. (Yes, I can. And don't call me "Shirley.")

I speak of the list both literally (I am a big listmaker) and metaphorically (hello, therapy!). This is about you, getting down with you. Use whatever time and tools necessary, because really, you aren't going anywhere until you do. That thing about your shit following you around? About the Universe, in its infinite diaffected jackassery, delivering the lesson to you time and time again until you learn it? Living proof, right here.

At the end of your listmaking, literal or metaphorical, you may decide that yeah, parachuting is just the thing, and what the hell are you waiting for? You may find that you actually hate the idea of a sabbatical but you hate your job even more. You may find that this fear of ordering anything but korma is the tip of a particular iceberg you might want to start addressing...by having the tikka masala.

Or not.

The thing is to look at the thing. Pay attention to the thing, both sides of it, and how they intersect (or don't). Since I started applying this thinking, I've not done as many craaaazy things as I have done, but I've considered them all. Considering costs you nothing but a little cold, hard light on your interior works. Which I realize is more than some of us are willing to do, ever, and that any of us are willing to do always, but again, you and I are both here, so I'm guessing we both get down with the craaaazy from time to time.

Which is why, like the subject line sez, I'm heading up to Seattle later this week. For a month.

There are plenty of good reasons to not get in my car this week and drive 1,135 miles just to do there what I do here, or much of it, anyway, god willing and the creek don't rise. Gas is crazy-expensive. The drive is long. I leave behind unfinished, L.A.-specific projects here. Not to mention an excellent boyfriend and his equally excellent dog.

But there are other, less-Good reasons to go. I fell in love with the PacNW when I visited it last year, and want to see if what I saw and felt was true. I've "met" a lot of folks from parts north-by-northwest and feel like it's time to actually meet them.

Biggest of all the fuzzy reasons to go: I'm coming up on my 16th year here in Los Angeles, and it gets harder to see stuff when you've been looking at it for so long. Or, it seems, to make stuff.

So here's me, doing the craaaazy thing. Going to Seattle to meet people. In the middle of fall. To make stuff. To talk about it all.

It took a long time of things lining up in my head (listmaking! therapy!) and a fortuitous clutch of circumstances to do it, but I'm going. I've been surprised at how non-surprised, even supportive, the people I've told have been.

Maybe we all want to do the stuff on the left side of the but more than we know.

Maybe it's time to start thinking about it...

xxx c

Wherever you are, hang in there

For all of the people who extol its virtues, I'm pretty sure that there are relatively few people who actually live in that state of grace known as balance.

At least, most of the awake people I know don't. We're on a tear or we're passed out. We're Getting Things Done or cooked. We're high as kites or low as...really, really low things.

Heaven forfend I offer prescriptions for anything, since I've got my own mess I'm wading through, my own silverware tangle to sort out, but since externalizing some of what I go through seems to be useful to some people, I figure I might as well keep on doing it. And Thursday's observation is this:

If you do the work, it works.

It may not work as fast as you wanted, although it probably will happen in the time it should. There are plenty of cautionary tales for not wishing things on oneself sooner than one is equipped to handle them; enough baby actors have fallen backwards into a tub of sitcom butter and shown up 20 years later on Reality Rehab for us not to know this. But still, the Wanting gets so big sometimes, it can override everything: the good sense to take a breather. To spend time on "non-essential" (read: essential) activities. To sleep. To eat. To reflect.

I know, because I've done it. I've thrown over all kinds of things, including my good sense, in pursuit of the external. Which, after many years of coming up empty-handed, I've decided should really be called the Pursuit of Filling in Giant Holes with Air. Doesn't work. Not even sure it should. After all, those holes? They're your landscape, your badge of honor. Your map of Places Been, your souvenirs of Hills Conquered.

No, to paraphrase my wise first-shrink/astrologer, you don't ever get rid of stuff; you just learn to recognize it, and do an end-run around it, more quickly. It becomes as if your shit isn't there, but of course it is. It's a part of you, your shit, which is as it should be. Otherwise, we'd all walk around the emotional equivalent of the Elective Surgery Squad, simulacra of our real selves. Pleasant enough (provided we don't cheap out on the contractor), but lacking the je ne sais quoi of real, live human beans.

If you've been hanging 'round these here parts, you've seen and heard of my long struggle. Way back around this time in 2007, it became clear that things were unclear. I'd made a huge career shift the year before, from acting to design, and had experienced just enough success to realize it wasn't where my passions lie. (Lay? Mignon Fogarty, where are you when I need you!?)

Believe you me, if you're a highly motivated, high-producing type, there is nothing more terrifying than not knowing which direction to point your guns at. It's terrifying to give yourself room and time and space...to just swing gently in the breeze. When I asked for help last December, it was with the firm conviction that a good four months of reflection would allow my Purpose to bubble up and reveal itself. Add the few months of anguish mounting to the point where asking for help was actually less painful than not asking, and you'll see why I was a full-bore wreck around the end of May.

That thing about kissing frogs to find princes? Really, it's about finding your thang, your path, your Joe-Campbell-style bliss. And Campbell, no doubt, would have agreed: fairy tales, like myths, are metaphor, coded for your protection.

I'm not quite ready to lay out the All New and Improved Communicatrix Offerings just yet, but my head is (mostly) clear on what needs to be done and, more importantly, my heart feels light enough to manage the task.

More soon. Much, much more...

xxx c

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

Winning by adding vs. winning by taking away

As alluded to previously, I decided to enter a contest.

One where I actually had to make something, and a not-unsubtantial something (because for better or for worse, I am no good at half-assing things).

Now, I'm no Orson Welles, hell, in my best ad ho daze, I was no Hal Riney or Mark Fenske, if you want to get technical, but after 20 years making a living in the business, I know how to write a reasonably on-target and entertaining commercial, and how to act in and edit one as well. This video I made? It may not be worthy of being voted up, but it's hard to see what about it makes it worthy of being voted down.

Only it's not. Because I know what the voting down is about; it's about winning by making someone else a loser. That's the nature of hating. And, as my pal, Pamela Slim said in a very nice email to me about the subject, "Haters really suck, there's no way around it."

The reason I know this is because (gulp) I used to be a hater. Or, if not a hater, one of those people who believed there was a finite amount of x to go around, where x = love, happiness, good fortune or anything else.

Honestly? I have no idea who or what to blame for this burned-in rationale. The drill in our house was that you had to earn everything, every compliment, every bit of praise, and yeah, you kind of started from zero each time. I'm sure there was a lot of sound, bootstrap/depend-on-no-one/Depression-era rationale behind this, but damn, it sucked to be me for a long time. Because when you really want to be happy winning second or third place? You really don't want to be reminded that it could have been first, if someone else hadn't won it. If you had just worked a little harder, like we know you can.

What's sad is that I will always have to override that green monster trigger with every instance of someone else's success. Or maybe it's not sad; maybe it's good to have a reminder that a lot of people are still grappling with it, and that the world is still fueled too much by fear and anger (and I'd argue that a lot of anger is just fear in a different Members Only jacket.)

Whatevs, as the kids after me but still long ago used to say. I hope you will go watch the video and vote me up (or at the very least, not vote me down).

Even more, I hope you enjoy my little video, and the effort and goodness of people it represents. All those people in the video who helped me. A whole lot more who either sent stuff I couldn't fit in (there was a :60 limit, which I went over a little anyway with that fade to black) or had freak A/V problems or just other stuff in their lives that needed tending to.

The good people will win, even if my video doesn't.

But vote it up anyway, okay?

xxx
c

9/22/08 - UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who supported me, but it just wasn't good enough. Well, not really; I made it to the final 10, thanks to you, and then nowhere, as the rest of it was on them. Which is neither particularly surprising nor disappointing. Although I still hate losing. Regardless, please do not hold my losing against what appears to be a perfectly good airline. You are now free to move about the cabin, or show them the LUV, or whatever it is that floats your boat. Er...pilots your craft.

Vote here. Thanks!

and now...

VIDEO CREDITS!! (or, "It Takes a Village" Dept.)

In my haste to get out the video, I screwed up URLs, misspelled names and generally screwed up all manner of pertinent info. And the first two people in the vid, Jack & Chris, don't have titles over their names b/c I am a goddamned artist, goddammit, and I felt like having titles too early would give away the joke. Forgive me; I fully recognize what a colossal pain in the ass I can be about stuff like that.

In order of appearance:

Jack Lyons (@sidereal_)
Chris Ereneta (@cjereneta)
Angie Tapia & Company
David Eckoff (@davideckoff)
Scot Duke (@MrBusinessGolf)
Jon Deal (@zuhl)
Pamela Slim (@pamslim) (and vote for her SXSW panel here)
Mignon Fogarty (@GrammarGirl)
Rachel (@EffingBoring)
Peter Shankman (@skydiver)
Havi Brooks (@havi)
Karen Putz (@deafmom)
Laura Moncur (@LauraMoncur)
Mary McCauley-Stiff's Coffee Mug

And of course, HUGE shout to The BF for purchasing and learning to play ukulele in 12 hours, as well as for sound massaging (mm...massaging...) and remaining on an even keel while I spun like a (bitchy) top.

There are other people who VERY KINDLY sent video, stills and offers of help, but for time and space reasons, could not be in it or, sadly, credited. (Drumroll, please!)

@SeoulBrother (OMG, you guys, I SO WISH I could've fit that one in)
Joe Hage (Ditto...so much good stuff that didn't, I know, I should shut up, already)
John Dickerson (@JohnDickerson)
Dawud Miracle (@DawudMiracle)
Mary Sheely
Elisa Camahort (@ElisaC)
Rebecca Morgan
Evelyn Rodriguez (@eve11)
Susan Bratton (@SusanBratton)
Stephen Hopson
Scott Simpson (@scottsimpson)
Jay Hathaway (@strutting)
Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan)
Postmodern Sass
Dorn Martell
Dani Nordin (@danigrrl)
@tj
Dave Hardwick

...and anyone else who, in my haste, I may have forgotten. But this is the Internet, TELL ME, and I'll add you.

"Art, 100; commerce, 0" (or, "There's Always Time for What Moves You")

While I have been noticably AWOL here of late, I've been off-the-charts generative in other parts of my life.

Even reductive, as necessary.

Writing. Designing. Cleaning. Writing.

Creating presentations for me to speechify. (Yes, multiple: when it rains, it pours, baby.) Writing off-color songs and performing them before a live audience (use caution with that last link).

And, most exciting of all, clearing the decks for what looks to be the adventure of my middle-aged life, later this fall.

On top of all that, I got a crazy-ass bee in my bonnet to submit an entry to this little contest Southwest Airlines is running. Not because I have a great love of air travel (really, they're gonna have to turn me around on that one), but because some real-life connecting over the weekend in the form of an impulse trip to Albuquerque reminded me of how awesomely stupendous it is to see people in person. And something about the crazy vortex of creative energy that's currently experiencing me (no pun intended, and yes, that grammatical construction was correct) inspired an idea.

Did I say "inspired"? More like "leapt out of my head, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me...HARD!" Because that's how it is with creativity and ideas and The Juice: once you open yourself up to it, and kinda-sorta let it be known that you will be a responsible conduit craaaaazy things happen.

There are some things you have to do to make this great state of creativity happen. Merlin has been posting a lot of good stuff about it lately. In fact, he's been so on fire, I'm guessing he's practicing a lot of what he's preaching.

And more's the better for all: us, because we get his best, and a goodly dose of inspiration, to boot; him, because I can almost guarantee you he feels better these days when his head hits the pillow.

You can't always be in productive mode, of course. Fields lie fallow once yearly for resting/recuperative purposes, and probably, so should we. (Well, not for a season, necessarily, but you know.) I'm guessing that even high-percentile-prolific people like Seth, Chris, Walt, my friend, Tim, and anyone else who makes a metric crapload of cool stuff on on a regular basis takes a break sometimes. (Brogan, you officially need to take one more often!)

But at some point, you put your ass in the seat, hunker down and do the deed. And you say "yes" to all the good stuff that comes along that really lights your fire, regardless of how busy you are. Because, trust me, you will always find time for the good stuff. And the stuff that grabs YOU? And won't let you go? That's the superfine, añejo stuff. That stuff, you clear your calendar for.

I am hunkered; I have swept away all non-essential items. But I am going to come back from this crazy jolt of creativity with new vigor and a plan, so look out!

In the meantime, if you feel like helping me out on my crazy little project for Southwest, and you live in or near one of the cities listed here, email me. The address is all over this site, but you can also just send to communicatrix at the gmail. Easy-peasy.

Thanks for playing. Now...go make stuff!

xxx c

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

Authentic voice, in blue

You know that thing you do when you're little? Imagining some Kodak Momentâ„¢ of yourself, surrounded by test tubes, curing cancer? Or pirouetting in yards of tulle before a sold-out crowd? Or addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dressed in tulle, while curing cancer?

In just over three weeks, I'm going to be standing up in front of 200 people and talking about talking. I never imagined anything this weird.

I'm guessing that Nina Hartley, famed star of the adult entertainment world, registered nurse and Berkeley-born offspring of practicing Buddhists never at any point in her life up to now imagined she'd wind up in front of a group of people with her clothes on, reading a personal essay that neatly and elegantly made a universal point about connectedness and self-actualization via a vividly detailed description of an explicit sex act involving her hand and someone else's ladyparts.

Compared to Ms. Hartley? I'm a piker in more than one way.

I told almost no one about this particular gig. And not for the obvious reason, that it was a sex-ay affair. (Come on, it was held on the back patio of a sex-toys shop, fer criminy.)

No, I kept mum because, as with most gigs I might advertise, I was concerned about quality.

Perform bit roles in enough shitty nickel theater that you drag your family and friends to and eventually, when the stars fall from your eyes, you get it: everyone has his breaking point, and you don't want your devoted fan base to hit theirs before the event you really need them to turn out for. An evening of erotic anything (barring the one-on-one variety, natch) is not generally what leaps to mind when I think "wildly entertaining", and a slate of writers whom I'd never read and never heard perform doing erotica? Uh...uh-uh.

I'll admit, I'm not widely read in the stuff. I'll also admit that at least part of my trepidation stems from my Midwestern roots. Although thanks to my beloved paternal grandfather, a crazy, arts-lovin' liberal atheist who became more and not less so with age, I did have exposure to a modest variety of printed adult matter, albeit furtively. (At least, I'm pretty sure I kept my tracks covered.)

My favorites were Playboy (when you're 9, you really do like the comics) and R. Crumb comix, something I never really thought about until recently. Neither was for the truly squeamish, but both were artfully conceived and executed, and I'd argue that the Crumb stuff was written in as authentic a voice as can be. I remember the shock of recognition I had watching Crumb, the Terry Zwigoff documentary, for the first time. It was like I stumbled into some wormhole and was living in 1971 and 1994 simultaneously, the likeness was so compelling.

Compare that to the awful stylings, nay, overstylings of most adult entertainment and to me, the source of cringe-inducement becomes wildly obvious: forget the feminist POV; it's just embarrassingly derivative, stagey or stiff, you'll pardon the pun.

Your voice is your voice is your voice; once you know and trust it, it can accompany you anywhere, from tea with the Queen to bottle swigs on the Bowery (the pre-gussied Bowery) and everywhere in between. You can write a memo or a eulogy or a potty-mouthed song (my choice) and it will be you. Should you sing your potty-mouthed song at Windsor Castle? Probably not without being asked. Neither should you hunker down on your middle-aged haunches and start coo-woo-wooing at a toddler just because you've got 45 laps around the planet on the shorty. They're people, people: as The Youngster used to say, "Short, ignorant people." (The BF adds, "who don't pay rent.") And they have bullshit detectors whose calibration has not gone off-kilter from years of smoke being blown around various bits. Never forget that it was a child who pointed out the buck-nekkidness of El Jefe.

I would never have thought that getting up in front of 35 strangers and singing a song about dirty keyword searches would leave me feeling so much better prepared to stand up in front of 200 and talk about Authentic Communication. But of course it did, of course, of course. More than most of my Toastmasters speeches, although they were helpful in their own way.

There was no governor up last Thursday night, and it worked: me, trusting what I had to say, er, sing, and putting it out there.

What are you afraid of? What would happen if you did it anyway?

Or maybe the question is, "What will happen if you don't?"

xxx c

LINK to my performance of "The Dirty Keywords Search Song" at In The Flesh: LA on YouTube (WARNING: Contains language which may be offensive and/or NSFW.)

Image by Mr. Mo-Fo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

How doing one thing differently saved my bacon

Anyone who's read my newsletter, spent more than 10 minutes in semi-meaningful conversation with me or seen the shame that is my bookshelves knows I have a predilection for the self-help aisle.

I fought it for years, in no small part because I saw my mother devour book after best-selling book even as her alcohol intake crept slowly but steadily upward. Reading is no substitute for action. Buying and piling in artfully arranged stacks around the house, even less so. And while I'm a pretty productive motherfucker when all is said and done, I've got undeniable hard-wiring for procrastination on both sides of my genetic divide.

Dad was a frighteningly efficient accomplishment machine, but anyone who knows about "-aholic" tendencies knows that's just the flip side of the same coin. He "did" out of fear; mom "didn't". And they both avoided the root issue until the days they died.

I, on the other hand, have made it my singular mission in life to act, and to act well. There's nothing else for me to leave behind to make the world a better place, no genetic material I've given a better start to, no big pile of money to fund a groovy foundation. It's just whatever ripples I can send out there now, and whatever additional ripples people whom I've (hopefully) helped or a book that I've (hopefully) written can send out later.

So when I get stuck, when there's not only no forward motion, but no indication of what that forward motion should be, I get a little panicky. I don't think, "Oh, good...a nice rest!" or "Great! Things are just marinating upstairs!"; I start sliding into the dark place on a greased chute with no handrails.

In times like these, I grab onto those books like a lifeline and use them to start hauling myself back up. The best ones (and you do know to only read the best ones, right?) offer some kind of clearly defined, actionable steps, and when you're in a place where you can't see clearly, a well-lit staircase with an "EXIT" sign at the top is your friend. It doesn't matter which set you get on: it will get you out.

Sometimes, though, there is no time. Sometimes you find yourself in hella mess and the clock is ticking and there's just no damned time for a whole book, much less careful digestion and implementation of its contents. That's when you need this prescription-strength remedy:

Do One Thing Differently.

Yes, it's a self-help book, too. I've never read it, though. I've only heard of it, and then fondled it briefly in my shrink's office while waiting for her to come in and start our session:

"It looks like you could get everything you need from this book just by reading the title."

"You can," she said.

I'd thought about this exchange many, many times since we first had it, maybe six months ago. (Maybe a year, my memory ain't what it used to be.) I've thought about it a lot because I've been dealing with my own existential crisis for the past eight or nine months. I actually capped off the year by doing one thing very differently: admitting out loud that things were broken, and that I was taking some time off to evaluate them, four months off, to be precise.

The gods love it when we make plans, don't they? It's like Season 4 of LOST to them, or, more likely, some really good, trainwreck-y reality TV. I'm guessing they've had me on TiVo and are praying I get renewed for another 13 episodes. My Finnish dark night of the soul has been appointment viewing up on Mt. Olympus.

It was getting old down here, though. So I've been One-Thing-Differently like mad, from my kitchen to my alarm-clock setting to my hairstyle. Desperate times call for desperate measures! A few of the myriad thangs I changed up include:

• enlisting the help of an accountability partner, a badass, take-no-prisoners type whose list of accomplishments makes me look like a piker
• replying over and over to generalist queries into my state of health and well-being with a frank admittance of my perilous suckitude (counts as once because the first 15 times were an out-of-body experience I gained nothing practical from)
• admitting I had fucked up
• walking three miles each morning, whether I wanted to or not
• billing for work done (feel free to laugh at me, the gods aren't the only ones who know how ridiculous I am)

On Thursday night, I finally had a breakthrough of the major sort. Something popped, and it feels like I'm finally on track again. Thank god. Gods. Whatever. That's an eight-month experience I don't want to repeat anytime soon.

But from the other side, I feel it my duty to say that the One Thing thing works. It really does. Those One Things got me through a lot of rough patches and gave me the hope and the oomph to hit it for one more day.

And cumulatively? Holy crap, do they add up! Try it. Try folding in a few one things, and see if there's not some kind of major, quantifiable effect at the end of six months. A kitchen you're not afraid of entering. A scale you're not afraid of stepping on. It works, folks: it really, really works.

The biggest irony in all this is that now I feel like I've got to read the book. Just to see if I did it "right" and if next time, I couldn't do it better.

You, however, have no need of it. Just do it, like the ad said. One thing. Differently.

And if you've got some sweet, sweet self-helpage you know about and don't leave it in the comments? You're no friend of mine, Klein.

xxx c

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

Overestimating and underestimating your ability to do anything and everything

I saw The Youngster last night at a screening of our mutual friend's film. Lots of great things happened, like seeing Tony Shalhoub sitting two rows away and Kojak parking and a gigantic platter of shrimp at the after-party, but really, the best thing about the evening was it was full of milestone howdys.

That's my new name for in-your-face reminders that if you combine your own effort with enough time, stuff happens. Big stuff. Good stuff. Stuff that is delightfully surprising in its bigness and goodness.

Take, for starters, the fact that The Youngster and I were there together at all, laughing and joking and having a good time as excellent friends. Someday, I will tell the sad, sad tale of our tumultuous time together and the explosive way in which it...well, exploded. (Hell, he's a writer; he'll probably tell it, too. Or maybe we'll tell it together.) For now, know that six years ago, I doubt either one of us believed in our heart of hearts we would, even could be friends at all, much less friends of the excellent variety: fast friends, the ones you have walked through the fire with, and thus would run into a burning building for.

Then there's acting.

Oh, my god, is there acting.

You have no idea of how badly I wanted to be an actor. Or maybe you do. After all, I've described how late I came to the game, how I wept when I was dumped from the place I was sure would be my everlasting theatrical home and for how long I've grappled with the fame thing. In a business where it's death to take anything personally, I took pretty much everything personally. A continual oozing wound was the Jan Brady-esque relationship I had with my own theater company: someone else was always getting the good part in the school play, and it wasn't until I discovered my metaphorical knack for scenery painting (in this case, graphic design) that I gained any respect, self- or otherwise, at all.

Last night, my former artistic director lobbed a request at me: did I know of any actors who would fit a certain set of specs, a set of specs which, except for an illustrious résumé that would dazzle the producers, pretty much made for a good police sketch of yours truly. And really, all I could think of was how fun is this? I get to flip through my mental Rolodex of fab actresses and solve this really interesting puzzle.

Eight years ago? I would have frozen in place while my heart dropped to my bowels, spent the car ride home weeping and railing (at The Youngster, probably, who did his fair share of talking me down off the ledge during our three years together), then carefully added the slight to the large and musty heap of umbrage I kept locked in the closet.

There were more milestones: me, the hapless introvert, being social and enjoying it, probably a four-year conscious effort. Me, ambulatory with health and heft (six years); then me, with a slight reduction in heft and bump in endurance (three months of walking daily). Me, happily ensconced in an amazing primary relationship with an equally amazing man (we'll call that 20-odd years of lessons on and off the field, with a considerable assist from my therapist for a good 4-year stretch).

It all comes down to this: you can sit there and bemoan your lousy fate, which I freely admit I've spent great swaths of time doing, and the hand I was dealt wasn't half-bad, or you can change what you can. Most of the big change, like it or not, happens incrementally, over a long time. As Chris Gillebeau says in his delightful ebook* on effecting meaningful personal change, "we tend to overestimate what we can complete in a single day, and underestimate what we can complete over longer periods of time."

Or, as the rejoinder to someone who rebuts encouragement to earn that degree, learn that instrument, master that sport with a "Do you know how old I'll be by the time I can practice/play/take my picture on the top of Mt. Everest" goes, The same age you will if you don't.

For the love of all that's holy, start a project. Today. Pick one thing you really want (the end you want) and start plotting the route to get there. If you are like me, like most people, if the quote stands true, you will set unreasonable goals for yourself. You will try to cram too much living into the hours, days, even weeks. You will, like me, like most people, overestimate your shit like crazy. 'Sokay. It evens out over time. (I'm hoping that one's ability to guesstimate, time-wise, also improves over time, but whatever.)

There will always be stuff left over on the to-do list. What matters more, I see now, is that we actually did something. Went after something. Something, hopefully, that we really wanted, that was really important to us.

I am sure I will never get everything I want.

Then again, I am positive I am underestimating my ability to chase it.

xxx c

*Download A Brief Guide to World Domination, and behold how eBooks should be produced. Well, for starters, and horizontally-oriented, as Seth points out.

Fame, the bitch-goddess

It is a big deal, being famous.

Most folks who self-identify as actors work quietly, whether they want to or not. All but the a fraction of the top 1% will toil away in obscurity, only a handful of those will end up recognizable to anyone for any length of time, and fewer yet of these will have a fame that lasts beyond the 15 minutes of critical media mass they get.

Who the hell cares?

Well, for starters, the thousands of actors living in L.A.

Wait, what am I saying? There are probably tens of thousands living in L.A., and that's just counting the openly declared. Secretly, they probably number in the hundreds of thousands, and if you widen your net to stretch past the state line, mostly likely millions. Scratch a Mitty, find a McConaughey, or at least, that would seem to be the deepest hope of the denizens of reality television.

I know a bit about fame because I've seen it up close & personal. I have worked with famous people, and for famous people. I have known many regular people who became famous. (It doesn't work the other way, you know, once famous, always once-famous.)

Even more pertinently (and potently), I come from a long line of people who wanted to, but never quite became, famous. A grandfather who wanted fame so desperately, he kept his young son (who also wanted it, at least for a while) from becoming famous. A mother who once traveled 2,000 miles across the country to sit in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby on Oscar night, so convinced was she that an upcoming lead role in a major motion picture was meant for her.

And the apple (that would be yours truly) did not fall far from the tree either way you slice it: I wanted fame; fame, as it turned out, did not have much use for me.

There are many embarrassing admissions one might make on the road to the Truth, but one of the most excruciating has got to be this taste for fame. It is profoundly uncool: a state seething with need, and we all know how wildly attractive a feature is need*. For most of us, the desire to gaze diminishes in direct proportion to the subject's need to be gazed at: the faster you chase me, the harder I run. The exceptions, those few who wanted fame so badly they could taste it, and were actually rewarded with it? Most are wildly, profoundly gifted, which is compelling. At a distance, anyway, and in the kind of dosage that celebrity requires of its celebrants.

I thought I was done with this need for fame once I set acting aside. As if. Those of you familiar with the treating of symptoms vs. the addressing of root causes are having a hearty chuckle now, no doubt.

It followed me, this back-clinging monkey, into the blogosphere, helpfully hitting the "refresh" button when we'd visit Sitemeter. How many people clicked on my site today? How about now? How about now?

Today, despite my best efforts to CHILL, ALREADY, I feel it seeping into the groundwater of my new playground, Twitter**. What started out as a fantastic way to stay or even get connected (not to mention an Exercise in Writing Short) and morphed into a dangerous, if entertaining, diversion now seems to be devolving into a three-ring circus of smartmouthing, spambots and webcockery. I hold out hope, but it grows fainter as the weeks pass.

Did I say "pass"? I meant "fly by." Because that's what's been happening to my weeks, along with the months and years they turn into. And the weeks are made up of days, which are made of minutes and even seconds, precious, precious seconds, that are chewed up by the hundred-thousand in pursuit of stuff which in and of itself, is ultimately meaningless. Don't believe me? Ask yourself the question I just heard Jack Kornfield ask in my earbuds during my morning walk today: "Which parts of your life make you the happiest? I'll bet they're pretty simple."

I gave it some very quick thought and confirmed: dog hugs. Falling asleep when you're tired. Ice cream. The first hit of coffee in the morning. Sex, especially with someone you love. Hell, most anything with someone you love. Does it need to be a beach on Hawaii, or can it just be some of the time you'd have carved out getting there?

That's the thing of it: most of fame is about getting there, and upon arrival, turns out to be like Gertrude Stein's characterization of Oakland (there's no "there" there). And its intangibility is matched only by its evanescence. Ask anyone who's tried to sell it, or reclaim it, or even hang onto it.

On the other hand, if fame is a by-product of something you'd be doing anyway, much of its fraught-ness disappears. It might even be seen as kind of a pesky nuisance, albeit with a few bitchin' perks.

I'm thinking a lot about this because I'm moving away from something I knew would never get me any acclaim (graphic design) to something that not only might, but must in some measure if it's going to support me in my old age (writing). Fortunately, it doesn't have to support me; there's a long and fine tradition of writers toiling away in relative obscurity, supporting themselves with day jobs. Wallace Stevens, for one. Bukowski, for another. When I start to think it would be easier if I could just be famous NOW, dammit, I think of them, and think again.

Maybe it wouldn't be easier.

Maybe it would just be different.

That said, I'd be lying if I told you I'd lost my taste for fame. I still see myself sitting on Oprah's couch, my latest book between us. (From this blog to her ears...please.) I see myself answering calls to have my essays in publications, instead of having to make them. And I know that with the right level of fame, that dream I have of me, a laptop and an ocean view materializes on a much more spectacular part of coastline, and that when the sun sets or a chill comes on, I can continue to enjoy it from the comfort and privacy of a much more spectacular abode.

I will write, though, no matter what. Should I never have any more readers than I have right now. Should I somehow piss off the lot of you and have only imaginary readers.

The bitch goddess exists in my line of sight, but I lay garlands at her feet no more. Well, maybe just a token daisy every now and then, to keep a hand in.

For the most part, I'd rather spend the time writing, in there here and now. For you, I hope. For me, I must...

xxx c

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

*And it only gets worse with age. What can be amusing or even charming in the young (those crazy young people with their hubris!) is cringeworthy in the old (back away from the Speedo, Eurotrash grandpappy.)

**For you non-nerds, Twitter is a 140-character-per-post, social media messaging service that is as addictive as it is wonderful. More onTwitter later, I think. I've been promising various people an article on it for weeks now.

********

UPDATE: Dreamhost is, once again, experiencing wonkiness. Sorry for the lost comments earlier; I've reconstituted what I could, and did me PLENTY OF SWEARING while I did it. (Not at you; I love you guys!)

UPDATE (07/16/08): Bonus extra fantastic link on the inanity of chasing fame, which is probably not anything you want to get caught with, anyway. By Brad Warner, aka the Zen Punk Monk (oh, he'd kill me for reducing him to a catchy handle, but come on, it's so great!)

For Kevin, on the occasion of his 50th birthday

It seems impossible that my cohort is turning 50, and yet, there it is.

I'm sliding into it myself, just three years and change to go. Truth be told, I can't wait: my 40s were so much better than my 30s, which were so much better than my 20s, which were so much better than my teens, I figure my 50s are going to rock the house.

Or, at the very least, that I'll get another decade or two of yum before I hit the point of diminishing returns.

On the other hand, it's a good thing I've some time. Half a century is a significant achievement, and calls for a marker of equal significance. I received one such tribute about a week ago, from my friend and former art director, Kevin Houlihan. He assembled 50 of the people he'd met along the way, from the godmother who held him at his baptism to a friend he met in a bar about a year ago, and asked us each to write a little something for a book he wanted to assemble about the people he'd met along the way.

Here's the beauty part, though: instead of asking us to write about him, he asked us to write about ourselves. His point? That, as his wise and no-nonsense New Hampshire-bred father used to say, "You can tell a man by the company he keeps." So Kevin sent each participant a series of questions designed to help us unearth what it was about us that had helped him learn about himself.

The result? A breathtaking compendium of musings, stories and yes, a little haranguing, that is universally appealing because of the specificity of approach. I'm forever parroting every English teacher I've ever had about the key to great writing lying in the detail of the personal truth one lays out there; maybe instead of yakking, I could just direct people to this book.

Unfortunately, it's a private publishing of 50, one for each participant. There has been a groundswell of support for a more public release, but until that happens, you'll just have to content yourself with one of my entries and imagine the rest. The question to me was what, if anything, did the various & sundry creative outlets for my expression have in common, and how did I continue to nurture my creativity.

It's a wonderful question for anyone to ask of themselves, or of their loved ones; it's a glorious question to be asked...

xxx c

***

I have called my life many things in an attempt to get across the idea of what it's been like to live it, to express the heart of my journey. One of my fave-raves, coined several years ago upon quitting my Hateful Advertising Career, was that I was “Living My Life Backwards”: going from a hyper-responsible, overachieving, 401K-building, condo-and-cat-owning twentysomething to a foolhardy, largely unemployed, dream-chasing thirtysomething. (And then a sex-crazed, metaphorically-old-purple-wearing-lady fortysomething.)

Not a bad quip, you know us copywriters, always with the handy quip, but somehow too…pithy. As Einstein said, Everything as simple as possible and no simpler, please. (As an aside, that's where a lot of advertising and marketing goes off the rails: oversimplification. That, and too many objectives. But let's not go down that bad path, shall we?)

I wish I had a pithy answer for my life's work now, for what motivates me, for what the thread is. But I don't. I have a long and boring story, which I'll summarize here:

Many years ago, when The Groundlings Sunday Company pulled over and dumped my baby-actor soul by the side of the road to fend for itself, I thought I needed a theater company to call home. And so it was that I found myself standing on a stage in a tiny, back-alley theater in Santa Monica in front of an insane French woman (sorry, redundant), “auditioning” to be a paying member of her highly experimental theater company.

She let me perform my wildly inappropriate monologue, but it was clear that what she wanted to do was get to the Q&A.

“What would you do,” she called out from the dark, “eef I asked you to take off your pants, take off your shirt, take off your shoes and stand zere nakeed on ze stage?”

“Uh…ask you why?”

There was a long pause. Then, whether to out me as a poseur or to see if maybe, possibly she could salvage this ten minutes and put an extra $35/month in the theater's coffers I don't know, but she threw out another one:

“Why,” she called out again, “do you want to be an actress?”

No one had asked me this; I had not even asked myself about the why. Why does one throw away everything with no promise of a something down the road? Why does a sane, smart girl with a career and a title and a condo and a cat toss it all out the window for what younger and more talented people will tell you is one of the world's worst career options?

I stood in on that dusty stage, lit from above, threw head back and my arms open wide and let whatever it was inside me that had been responsible for my irrational decision do the talking: “To tell The Truth!!!”

It was right, that Voice. (It always is, you know.) My whole life until then had been a quest to funnel The Truth as it is writ large somewhere in the cosmos into words and pictures that made sense down here. So I did it for awhile in advertising. And then in acting. And then in design. And now, with words, both on the blog and aloud, wherever someone will let me.

If I get off track, it gets me back on. If I need inspiration, I go back to the well.

The Truth.

I mean, come on, can that ever get old?

Don't save "happy"

As with many who self-identify as Survivors of Well-Intentioned-But-Ultimately-Fucked-Up Parenting, the confounding mix of messages I received in my formative years served to demagnetize my self-esteem compass for decades to come.

"We expect a lot from you" really meant You will not be good: you will be excellent. Or else."

"You can do it!" was mainly true, most of the time. Unfortunately, the critical phrase, "...and without any help, or it doesn't count", was left unspoken but did its damage anyway.

What has been the hardest thing to reconcile, however, is the idea that I should take pride in my accomplishments, but not too much.

W as the kids say TF?!

Not being able to discern between appropriate rejoicing and vile showboating has the same effect as not knowing which fork to use: you end up giving a wide berth to a lot of invitations, just to be on the safe side.

Safe may be safe, but it's hardly fuel for growth. With the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, no one ever changed the world by making it smaller (and one could argue that even though her physical world was profoundly limited, that chick was 100% down with the Truth.)

Safe is also not very joy-making. I'm not a happiness addict, well, okay, I am, but I'm 12-stepping my way out, and besides, "happiness", or really, "pleasure", as it's come to mean, has relatively little to with living in a joyous state, which I'm going to come right out and call "ability to live in the moment and thrive because of it." Safe is about keeping things as they are, and any boob will tell you that it's impossible to reside permanently in a state of pleasure. The ice cream melts. The orgasm passes. Crafting the buzz is theoretically possible, but even if you spend the time to become a Jedi knight of the bong, aren't you eventually going to have to do something else with your life, if only to replenish your stash?

The Youngster, who in many ways was wise beyond his years, had a great saying: "Don't save happy." It is one of the World Champeen Sayings precisely because of its obliqueness-to-brevity ratio.

Don't hold back on a compliment. Don't be stingy with a loving impulse.

Pointless to hold on to a snowflake, or a gallon of whipped cream, they won't keep.

And those gift cards? If you're living in most other states besides California, land where the consumer reigns supreme, they expire, dude; use them.

I think the application of this rule works beautifully both for people with no self-esteem issues and for those of us who feel like tooting our own horns means forever branding ourselves as That Asshole. Slow and judicious application is the trick to digging your way out.

For example (WARNING: HORN-TOOTING ALERT!!), last year I was approached by a representative from a fairly large publishing house about writing a book.

(Hang on, gotta wait for my heart rate to go back down.) (Okay...)

The odds of this actually culminating in my being hired and paid actual cash money to write this book are long, and the steps along the path to getting there are many. Still, one cannot deny that it is a fantabulous thing just to be asked, and on the basis of nothing more than a bunch of blog posts. If a friend told me that, I would think it was hot stuff.

So that's what I did: told a (few) friends.

And when I got the word back from my contact that she liked the chapters? Again, I told a few friends.

And when I heard that it had cleared the next hurdle of my contact's boss, the editor? Friends got told.

It was not, shall we say, easy. My heart raced and my face flushed every time I said it out loud.

But to not say it out loud, at least to some one, is no longer acceptable. It's something I need, for now, if for no other reason than it is, for whatever reason, difficult out of all proportion.

There is another reason, though: if I hold back and play it safe, how can I be of any use to you, who might need a nudge to break through your own personal roadblock? If I can't deal in the Truth, how can I expect to anyone else to give it to me straight?

If I don't move forward, if you don't, if each one of us doesn't, how will the world?

The truth is, something will always be hard. When a thing gets easy, if you're living your life out loud, you move on to the next thing. You climb a bigger mountain or tackle a bigger equation or break a tougher record. Cynicism prevents me from dragging out that confounded Marianne-Williamson-not-Nelson-Mandela quote one more time, but it's true, cheese factor and all.

Being small doesn't serve. It just takes up less room on an airplane seat.

xxx c

Image by Mike_fj40 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

As if, and what it takes to act that way

Ask any self-help guru and they'll tell you straight up: getting there is equal parts thinking and doing: thinking, to figure things out and doing, to, well, to do the damned things.

Of course, if it was easy, we'd all be there, right? Happy, graceful and accomplished, speaking five or six languages as we waved to our two perfectly behaved children while playing a mean game of tennis in the same shorts we wore back in high school. Or rather, the same-sized shorts: we'd be so rich, we'd own a few shorts factories.

What usually happens is more like a variation on the spinning-plates scenario, children and waistline going to ruin while we apply proboscis to grindstone, or worse, a Rip Van Winkle approach to change: we fall asleep for 40 years while plate detritus builds up in scary towers around us. It's not that our intentions aren't honorable; it's just that it's such a pain in the ass, dealing with all those fucking plates. The idea of real change is enough to make anyone run screaming into the night, and isn't that what falling asleep really is? A really quiet way to run screaming into the night?

I've been piling up plates for what feels like forever. There's always some great plan to help me keep them spinning: an electronic whojamawhatsit, a new system, a new book. None of them work, or at least, they don't until you close the gap between thinking and doing. And lo, there is the rub that will keep the self-help industry thriving forever.

So how am I closing the gap? Uh...slowly? Painfully? One heinous, long-put-off task at a time.

And for me, there are two things that keep me going.

The first is a dream: me and a laptop and an ocean view. The clearer I get about what I really want to be doing and where I really want to be doing it, the more my precious stuff looks like what it is: a bunch of crap I'm holding onto in lieu of doing the hard work I must to get myself there.

The second is support. I'm a loner and an introvert and kind of a crabapple, besides. I like to do stuff by myself because that way, I get all the credit. There, I've said it.

Only the more I really looked at things, the more I realized that nothing I did, not one single thing, did I truly do all by myself. Someone's always got some kind of damned hand in there, even if it's not in an immediately obvious, collaborative kind of way.

If that's true, that I'm not really getting it done all by myself, why not outright ask for support to get there? For...everything? If one of the keys to getting to the next place is acting "as if" one is already there, why not solicit help from people on the other side of the divide, who don't have to act "as if" because they already are that, exactly? The fittest I have ever been is when I hired a personal trainer to help me get there. The best headshots I have ever taken were when I employed the specific help of my agent as well as many-minds (for a referral) and the photographer (for...well, duh.)

Support can also come from people with a like-minded goal, even if they're still in the "as if" stage. Alcoholics Anonymous? Built on that. Accountability, accountability, accountability.

This humble slice of the web has been a bit of that for me, and I thank you for it. Toastmasters, similarly, has been a huge help: when people expect you to show up, you show up. Or at least, there's a better chance you'll show up.

I'm ramping it up a bit now, with a few accountability partners for getting my shit together and putting it out there. I have a lot of shit, as it turns out, and shoveling shit is no one's idea of a good time. Neither, for that matter, is putting it out there. It's about as much fun as not eating ice cream or saying "no" to a trip to Disneyland.

It's "no" for now, though, so that it can be a resounding "YES!" to other things, that laptop, that ocean view, soon.

Not soon enough, of course. But soon...

xxx c

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