Saturday I overheard my six year old son whispered a confession to his little sister:

“Last night I peed in the soap bottle.”

Yes, the foaming soap dispenser that we’ve been washing our hands with all day, the one that after petting the cat and rubbing my eyes I used soap from to wash my face… that soap, it’d been compromised.

As punishment for defiling the most sacred of hand cleaners he had to write everyone in the family an apology letter (pictured above.)
If you ever need to sum up parenthood in one photo or seven words, you’re welcome.

Me: “What do you want for your birthday?”

5yr old: “A hawk eyed camera copter and studying my little sister’s brain.”

Me: “what?”

5yr old: “Get it, we’d donate her brain to a brain bank!”

Me: “um, I’ll see what Santa can do about the brain donation, ok?”

5yr old: “We should study his brain too, that guy is nuts.”

From the archives: 5/7/2008

Mr. Godin,

I would like to interview you for a documentary I am compiling exploring the evolution of purpose (personal, social, technological).  Actually, I would be ecstatic honored and quite possibly wet my pants if you said yes to an interview for my film.  It’s working title at the moment is “Life in Perpetual Beta“.  We have an interesting line-up of creatives, techies, life coaches, authors etc. that we are interviewing [ Sidney Levy, Nova Spivak, Dan Pink to name a few].  I think that your personal style would really kick ass and fit with our message. (ala Dan Pink “there is no plan” or Yoda “there is no try only do”  – how social networking and collaborative economy is changing the shape of society and shifting the way we think about work).  It may turn out to be the irreverent whorish bastard child of “the secret” with a heart of gold, thus making it world famous or it may just be another blurb that gets put up on Youtube, but all the same, I’d love to get a few moments of your time to interview you.  Please do let me know if you would grant me the honor of an interview.

In gathering information for Life in Perpetual Beta the book (common’ you knew it was coming) I looked through my old interview pitch emails. I didn’t know Seth Godin from Adam at the time to tell you honestly, but my tribe told me I had to have him, so I made an impassioned plea… was even ready to pee my pants… then had the audacity to mention honor… still hard to believe, I did eventually get the interview, You can see it here.

I don’t mind when a toy manufacturer goes all out to promote a product, I really don’t. It’s when they all do it together around the holidays that it gets to me. In Target the other day there were at least 3 toys in every single aisle that were jumping out at me. Case in point: The Baby Alive dolls in the video scared the crap out of me, all of them jumping up and down in their zip tied cribs giggling as I walked by – that’s just not right, toys should not be self animated! At least the one my kids are obsessed with (Bigfoot the Monster) has a button you have to push… We have stood in Target for well over an hour pushing it’s buttons, of course, those aren’t the only buttons being pushed. Christmas shopping with kids is close to martyrdom.  It’s no better at home as the Bigfoot Toy has it’s own Facebook app, which my kids are also obsessed with… you can make the thing act out it’s moods… which we do all day… and enter to win one… which we’ve also done (what am I thinking!)  Makes me paranoid about what toy manufacturers are planning to startle us all into buying online this coming Monday.

The markers who are killing me at Christmas are the same ones who paid me to write this post.

When I was six, I remember asking my parents to stop making sexual innuendos to one another over the family dinner table, “Mom, Dad, that’s gross, please stop.”  I didn’t know exactly what they meant, but I knew their conversation meant more that the words they said. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of mechanics of sex, my parents were not as discrete as they could have been, and as cliche as it sounds, we had cable.  It was more that I knew they weren’t supposed to be talking about it in front of  kids. – I learned that earlier that year when was grounded for two weeks after my mom heard me using planetary metaphors to explain the sex to a rapt group of neighbor children all sitting cross legged in our back yard. “Well, you see, the man puts his Jupiter in the woman’s Venus.”

After that, my parents didn’t talk at dinner at all – I had effectively shut down their reindeer games.  It’s a sad thing really, now that I’m an adult, knowing how healthy for a relationship a good game of innuendo tennis can be, I wonder to this day if I had just kept my mouth shut would’ve they stayed together?  I know what you are thinking, you are thinking it’s ridiculous of me to hold onto that childish thought of fault – but let me tell you what, kids are exhausting, they take everything, and more often than not, one of the first things they take down is sizzle between the two folks that brought them into the world. I swear this is why there are so many innuendos in children’s movies. Just so when you are wrecked from a day of working and parenting and your kids want to watch Shrek for the hundredth time with you, your mind has somewhere else to go to than the land of far far away.You all knew that Innuendo in Disney movies is a corporate plot to create more Disney consumers, didn’t you? Why else would they put them all in there, think about it…

As an adult I love word play and hard to unmask innuendo, it’s part of who I am, I’d take a slightly clever compliment to my ass over a slap to my ass almost any day of the week, or at least several clever compliments proceeding the slap. It’s not as impressive as knowing the formula for rocket fuel or having performed open heart surgery, but I pride myself on my ability to decode innuendo and the sexual metaphor in conversation, it’s been a hobby since childhood. This is why it puzzles me so that it has taken me over 15 years to understand why Jessica Rabbit would be married to someone as ridiculously stupid as Roger Rabbit, he’s an idiot of a cartoon character, whereas she, she… is not bad. How did I miss the obviousness of this pairing? His name is Roger for crying out loud, and he’s a rabbit, a fucking rabbit for crying out loud!

And you thought this post was actually going somewhere didn’t you?

skull of 6yr old boy

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“Dental records must contain

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dental profile and/or x-rays

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of sufficient detail for

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identification.”

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A:Why would anyone need to identify my son by his dental records at a week long summer camp?

B: What exactly occurred at this camp in years past that would necessitate that verbiage on the permission slip in the first place?

C: I have  watched enough CSI episodes and summer camp slasher movies to know that identifying someone by their dental records is not a good thing. Do I let my teenage son go to such a camp?

It is a permission slip for summer camp for heaven sakes!

Twenty years ago…

When I was 14, my dad was sent to fight someone else’s war.  Saddam Husein’s army had invaded Kuwait and the US military had acted swiftly and decisively to protect Kuwait with “Operation Desert Shield” which in turn became “Operation Desert Storm” and my father fought the storm on the front lines.  My parents broke it to us kids by surprising us  after school with stories of The Christmas Bunny, a confused rabbit that hid Christmas gifts for us throughout the house.  As soon as we could shrug off our backpacks we were tearing through our house in search of misplaced Christmas gifts. My six foot four father pranced around the living room extolling the virtues of the Christmas bunny in a falsetto voice, while my mother, calmly, and with no hint of emotion in her voice, told us that my father was shipping out in a few short weeks, that he wouldn’t be home for the holidays.

I would like to tell you that at 14, my heart broke upon hearing the news, I would like to tell you that I was not so self absorbed in my teenage fog that it consciously registered that my father was going off to risk his life for total strangers, but I can’t. The truth is, it barely registered, the truth is, that I loved my parents for the zaniness of The Christmas Bunny and barely took notice of the reason and emotion behind it. Truth is, after my father went to Kuwait, I was more pissed off that my mother was moving us to nowheresville Kansas “for our safety” than I was about my father.  (So what that our high school had gotten several bomb threats, the school hadn’t actually blown up, and besides, I was finally beginning to place in gymnastics, no way did I want to move back to the states to some podunk town in Kansas.) I”m fairly sure my brothers suffered from the same self absorbed teenage fog as I did, we could not believe the nerve of my mother, for disrupting our lives by moving us stateside.  I cannot imagine being in my mother”s shoes during the time that my father was in Kuwait. I cannot imagine the emotional turmoil she must have been going through as she watched the three of us kids, oblivious and ungrateful, I cannot imagine packing an entire household and moving it across continents while my husband was on the front lines of a war, worlds away.  I had a lot of  trouble sleeping that year, my mom, I’m pretty sure, didn’t sleep at all until he came home.

Today…

My little brother has been sent to fight Saddam Husein’s army twice since my father’s first tour to the middle east, he has left and come back to his wife and children twice now. Twice.  Today our country told him his combat boots will take him again, away from his family, all the way to Afghanistan.  Sometime in the next few months, he and my sister in law will have to tell their three children again, that their daddy is going away, and he’s going to miss Christmas.  This is far as I can take it, my little brother will miss Christmas, I can’t think any further into all the go-wrongs that could happen, just that his family will miss him, and they probably wont be getting any sleep.

This is not something I would have chosen to write about but circumstances are unfolding in a way that makes it necessary for the truth to come out, and I’d rather you heard it from me.  I have had and continue to have a lot of great opportunities, and a lot of people have placed a great deal of faith in me, and I would hate for that trust to be tarnished in any way, this is by far one of the hardest things I’ve written about in my life.

In the Big Time

18 months ago, I began working as the community manager for a website called Biglife.ws. In theory, the site was a great idea, hundreds of coaches specializing in very specific niches attracting clients that were interested in that particular niche of personal growth. In practice however, it was quite a production to get the site functioning and teach the coaches about the importance of digital literacy. (I didn’t learn the terms community manager and digital literacy until much later, at the time I was “just helping out”)

In time, my work at Biglife was so valued that I was given part ownership.  In fact, Victory Darwin, the site administrator, was so impressed with my passion for empowering the coaches, that soon he and I were working on several projects together, one of which was Life In Perpetual Beta, only not in the form that most of you know it, in fact, the film didn’t even have a name then.

The film that Victory and I intended to make was primarily to highlight the coaches on our site,  I would create original content, and he would sell interactive spots to life coaches.  One could watch the movie and click within it to reveal some interactive element involving steps on how to achieve said mode of thinking the core content made mention of. Victory had some success selling the spots, although truth be told, I think the concept was a little too technologically advanced for most of the coaches we contacted – that and none of them had heard of paying to be in a film before, but Victory persevered.

Around the same time, Victory convinced me that we should do some consulting together, or as he put it: “Melissa, you be the heart, and I’ll be the brains.  I hoped to learn a lot about marketing and was thrilled Victory was willing to teach me ( and boy did I ever learn.) My coaching practice, Think Without The Box Coaching became Think Without The Box Coaching and Consulting and we landed our first client right out of the gate. In no time I received the biggest single check I’d ever received in my life, $10,000 made out to Think Without The Box Coaching and Consulting (Sole Proprietor – Melissa Pierce). I was in the big time, or so I thought.

Face Plant from 100 Miles Up

I’m not sure which of these things happened first, but the cumulative effect pretty much was a face first dive at 100mph firmly tied to all Victory’s loose strings.

1. Victory started changing the marketing plan of our film on the fly while talking to prospects, sometimes promising headlining interviews, taking their money, and then telling me we could change it later “marketers do it all the time”  (Note, I still stupidly accepted the money in my paypal account, always sending him his part.)
2. Think Without The Box Coaching and Consulting was “all heart – no brains”, half way into our first project, Victory disappeared, said he couldn’t work with our client, didn’t do the work that he said he would do, and incredibly enough, did work that our client asked him not to do. I,  had no idea what to do, I ended up calling my vendors for advice.
3. Lastly and most importantly, I kept filming. I realized there was no way the film I intended to make and the film I was currently making were the same film, this last realization was probably the only good thing to come out of this whole ordeal with Victory.

After Rock Bottom

My confidence was shattered, tucking my tail between my legs, I quietly quit as community manager at Biglife, warned the coaches, deleted my profile, my posts, and my videos all with the press of a button (This is why on LIPB there is no first Dan Pink video, it was hosted on Biglife.)

My first and last big time client at Think Without The Box Coaching and Consulting and I settled on a fair amount of services received vs. services rendered that I have yet to repay. (If you think the rock bottom face plant hurt, try having a karmic and financial debt you can’t pay back immediately follow you around.)

What hurt the most though was closing my coaching practice, I just couldn’t concentrate on my clients’ needs anymore. I had zero confidence, I was supposed to coach my clients to follow their gut instinct when clearly I had not been following my own.

I pressed on with my film alone, searching for answers as much about what was happening in society as what was happening in me. (That’s when you guys came to my rescue, encouraging me to keep going, thanks for that.)

A few months later I got a flurry of phone calls and emails informing me Victory Darwin had committed suicide. The entire Biglife community was in mourning. I somehow tracked down his dad, and amazingly enough, Victory was alive and well. Turns out, “Victory” was one of many online pseudonyms he’d used and killed off when his online persona was no longer believable, or when he was looking for publicity. I know it’s going to be hard for you to believe, but it was in that moment, even though I had cut off all ties with him months before, that my heart truly broke, and I saw Victory for the first time for the scoundrel he was. Certainly I’m not the only person who has  sullied their reputation and injured their pride by associating with Victory, I know I’m not the only person who didn’t want to talk about it. I’m sure he’s still out there, online, scamming some other sucker who, like me, will be too ashamed to admit she’d been had.

Why Now?

I’ve been getting angry hateful emails, blog comments, and phone calls for the last several months from people who were scammed, just like me, by Victory. And while I understand there is a price I have to pay for playing a game that I inherently knew I couldn’t win, I draw the line at threats and harassment. I’m putting this out in the open in the hopes of ending the harassment against me, helping other people in this situation and moving towards closure. I’m sharing this now because I finally have enough confidence in myself and my ability to move past it that I know it won’t destroy me to admit that I screwed up and am, have been, will be paying for it for some time.

Although no one died (at least, not in the literal sense) it’s with a heavy heart I write this post. Each time I sit down to type it out I feel completely powerless, embarrassed, and ashamed that I let it happen to me , after all, I am MRS. FOLLOW YOUR HEART,  certainly I would have paid attention to said heart repeatedly beating out the steady warning signals of impending doom.  In hindsight, there were a lot of red flags that I could have easily paid attention to, but I chose to ignore. And as much as it shames me to say, once in a while I don’t let my intuition lead, once in a while, I screw myself by ignoring the eureka of instinct just for the thrill of it, and this is a story about one of those times.

UPDATED POST  12/21/09 8:20pm -  I received this email from Victory’s personal email address two hours after I posted this, note that it’s signed “Brent” – possibly another identity. (I originally included it in the comment, but was advised to include it in the posting)

hi Melissa, 

I was so disappointed to see your blog post about Victory.

Looks like you need a way out and this is the best you’ve got.

I still wanted to like you because you’re smart and funny and all, but this really destroys anything left that was good.

The lipb project is all yours. Own up to it.  None of this has anything to do with Victory.

You made a lot of slanderous statements and outright lies that can be proved to the contrary.

I’ve downloaded the source code and the screen capture of the blog.

I’m going to make one last nice gesture.

Remove the names of the people and the websites and all the tags.

…actually, just delete the entire post.  That story just makes you look bad. I don’t think you realize how most people would read it. Just one big lame ass excuse for your failure.

If you delete the post, then good…

If not, you’ve just created your worst enemy, and I’ll be happy to show you how effective I can be, both online and offline at settling debts.

It would simply be wrong of me to let this stand.

And as destructive as I will be, I’ll do it with love. I owe it to Victory.

love,
Brent

Interview #1: Right Place

courset in intimates store

Please ask for help when testing the vibrators

I walked into the interview wearing a wool suit, paired with fishnet stockings and tall black boots. The store owner asked me politely to take a seat. I was interviewing for a merchandising and buying position for a local woman owned intimates boutique that had recently been featured on Oprah. The store had pink walls and was full of lacey corsets, colorful bras, and every type of body shaping underwear one can imagine. I took a seat in a pink wingback chair as I listened to her explain the plot of a porn movie the store sold to a customer  (Porn movies have plots?). When her call was over, we went to the back room office, cluttered with boxes of open merchandise, dirty dishes, and personal mementos. She tells me this holiday season has been particularly busy, and that keeping organized has been difficult. I’d be taking over her job of handling inventory levels and budgeting, mostly data entry. She’d be concentrating of growing her company.  I’d be in the backroom ordering negligee and neon dildos, day in and day out, crunching numbers and spinning  forecasts.  To say the place would be exciting to work in is an understatement, the job however, sounds pretty lonely. She tells me she thinks I’d fit great but feels an obligation to interview all of the candidates and she’ll get back to me in the new year.

Interview #2: Right Culture

Boeing Building

I walked into the interview wearing a wool suit, paired with black stocking and tall black boots.  The market manager asked me politely to sit down as she finished discussing with a co-worker the man downstairs who tried to cash a fraudulent $3000.00 check, and the fact that so and so wasn’t invited to the party so please don’t mention it.  The office was in the Boeing building, an ominous black tower jutting out of the city skyline. There were rows of cubicals filled with people whoring out their time for money. I sat in the end seat of an incredibly long conferences table in an austere room overlooking the Chicago River.

The tasks are not as exciting as a job well done.

She explained that there were not any open positions but they were always looking for people who would fit their office culture.  She explained the need for agility and curiosity, the need to be unafraid to question and be frank, she tells me that with a 150yr old company these things are necessary for it to stay in the game.  She asks me if there is any task I absolutely hate doing. I tell her, tasks are like wiping butts, it’s not the task you take satisfaction in, it’s a job well done.  We spend much too long sending witty reparte across the table at one another.  I don’t really want to leave.  A job in a cubical sounds like hell on earth although, I’d get to interact with a lot of creative and smart people all day long. She tells me I’m on the short list and I’ll be hearing from them in the new year.

Right Brained

Shopping for a place to make a living is hard work. I tell myself it’s only a job, that I just have to do it, but it’s really not true is it? Finding a stimulating place with a culture that fosters creativity is a tough business in itself.