Tonight I went to a GDGT event for a tech gadget press preview where the platinum sponsor was Sony. They were showing off their new Personal 3D Viewer, (which is just a fancy term for goggles that play movies.) As is their right for paying the most to be there, Sony was positioned to be the first table most attendees visited after hitting the open bar. I was no exception so with whiskey in hand, I approached the Sony booth, put on the headset, and hit a little button on top of the goggles to start the Hi-Def 3D movie. The demo that played was a relaxing island scene, 30 seconds of waves crashing, birds chirping, waterfalls falling, and wind blowing through palm trees, it was truly beautiful, if not a little bit boring, and almost made me feel like I was there. Following that relaxing 3D odyssey was a full minute of a woman’s ass in a bikini bottom bouncing as she walked away in slow motion… and that’s when I knew I could never buy another Sony product again.

Because Sony doesn’t have the decency to show me a 3D slowed down version of a bullet through a piece of glass, or a building collapsing on itself, or a fireball exploding on a supersonic airplane, but instead uses their supercool gadget to show me the soft core porn version of the most boring event ever for twice as long as the rest of the video, I can’t buy their nice things. Because no one watches a person walk for more than a few seconds anyway, I can’t buy their nice things, Because Sony’s creative department really thought that this would hold anyone’s attention, much less the attention of the majority of Americans that make the buying decisions (AKA women), I can’t recommend you buy their nice things either.

Did Sony seriously think confusing a tech gadget event for Maxim video was a good idea? I tell you what’s not a good idea, inviting the press and bloggers to see your super cool gadget, and having them write about how uncomfortable you made them feel when a bunch of drunk guys comment on how they’d like to just reach out and touch some ass. Sony turned a professional tech review into a sophomoric discussion on how to objectify women in Hi-Def and 3D. Congratulations, jerks.

UPDATE: My friend Frank would like me to point out that gratuitous ass in a bathing suit does not a soft core porn make. As he was brave enough to out himself as an expert on soft core porn, I concede his point.

My husband went for a guy’s weekend with his friends, they take a trip together every year. It gets increasingly more complicated for them to get together as they build careers and make families. I mostly give him my blessing, it’s important for men to keep their male friends after they get married. I read a paper about this once, how men drop their friends after marriage but women don’t, anyway, I think it’s important to have a support group outside of your marriage, friendships that don’t depend on so many details…

A few of these trips have been bachelor parties, which of course, is unnerving, but manageable.  I have to trust that as long as my husband plays by the house rules and doesn’t do something he will regret for the rest of his life, these things aren’t anything to worry about.  I did NOT feel this way about bachelor parties when I was pregnant and nursing, back then, they were most definitely off limits. You can blame it on the hormones of pregnancy if you like, but it doesn’t invalidate the way I felt.  That’s the funny thing about marriage, as it matures, as the hormones and feelings work it out, the house rules change, if just a little.

Our calendar says that my husband’s flight home was last night, I remember him telling me he’d be home in time to help take the children to school in the morning, but… he wasn’t. I called his phone but there was no answer. I had to decide between denial, worry, or anger to get me through this morning. I chose the first as my exterior expression while the other two ran through my mind in the background, setting fire to every senario. I rented a car to try delivering both children on-time to their schools (which are across the city from each other, and start within 15 minutes of one another.) This is so much easier when my husband is home, weekday mornings don’t work well without him.

On the way to the car I found a four leaf clover, a common mutation I am told, not that lucky at all, but I held onto it for a while, just in case. I opened the door to the rental car and the alarm went off. The car wouldn’t start. While the rental company tries to fix it, it becomes apparent we’re going to be late for at least one child’s school. We leave the car broken and beeping, I left the four leaf clover in the front seat, it was an accident, I considered retrieving it, but left it, telling myself it meant something to find luck and leave it in a stalled car. One child made it to school on time, one child stayed home with me. The fires of worry and anger in my mind are too mentally exhausting to withstand the bus trip and necessary school office interactions to sign the kid in as tardy. I’ve already pictured every ditch my husband’s body might be found in, there is no way I could walk into that school office alone without the weight of thinking I might always be alone bearing down on me.

After 8 hours of wondering what happened and twice as many connections to his voice mail, Mr. Pierce picks up the phone, relief washes over me. “Where are you?” I ask. “Venice Beach.” he says. “I thought you had a flight home yesterday.” I say. “It’s tonight.” he mumbles. “That’s not what you told me and that’s not what’s on the calendar.” I say. “Well, it’s tonight.” he says. “Thanks for being alive, mother fucker.” I growl in anger before hanging up the phone.

Somewhere in Venice Beach is a man half awake, probably hung over after a long weekend with his best guy friends, the ones he hardly ever gets to see. In his fog he’s probably wondering what he did to deserve such a pleasant 6am wake up call, he’s probably wondering if the house rules changed while he was snoring. But if he’s smart he’ll realize love is an unfeeling bitch at the other end of the telephone line, a really… lucky… bitch.

My year in review as told by domain names I’ve purchased and what I intended to use them for:

ALPHAWAVENATION.COM – Was going to be a collaborative book on creativity

COOCHSMOOCH.COM – Marketplace for “Chapstick for your other lips”

COOCHSMOOCH.ME – Virtual kiss-grams for your favorite cooches

DROPKNOWLEDGEON.ME – 1 minute how-to videos
DROPKNOWLEDGEON.US

FASHIONFOREWARNED.COM/TV – DIY Fashion Videos like how to make pants out of trashbags.

GHETTOPROFIT.COM – Stories of profitable businesses with ugly offices

INCHJEANSWEAR.COM – Pants with button elastics (like for toddlers but for grownups)

LATHERANDSTROKE.COM – His and Hers soaps, lotions, and potions

MILDLYCREEPY.COM – Photos of things that are just kinda’ creepy

PITCHCONF.COM – A conference for learning how to pitch to any audience

POWERMUFFGIRLZ.COM – Animated series of superhero beavers that disguise themselves as earmuffs

REMIXREVOLT.COM – I have no idea
REMIX-REVOLUTION.COM

REVULVALUTION.COM - photos of things that look like vulvas but aren’t

SOCIALMEDIASLEEPOVER.COM – virtual sleepovers

SQUAREPEG.COM – ultimate job search site

UNPLAN.IT – social network for people who don’t plan anything

WEAREWINNINGTHEFUTURE.COM – aggregator for status updates/tweets with WTF in them.

Some of them I actually did something with, most not. 2011 has certainly been a fine one for domain names. I bet you’ve got some good ones too.

 (a repurposed post)

Last month, after unsuccessfully shopping for a loaf of bread under $4 that did not list corn syrup as an ingredient,  I started baking bread.  As I’m neither a saint, nor a perfectionist, nor do I have time to knead bread while my children make “science experiments” out of any and all liquids they can find, I used a bread machine. Every other day for the past month, I have dutifully measured out and piled eight ingredients, one over the other, into a mountain of powders floating on a warm oil slicked foundation of water. I put the sloshy concoction into the bread machine, push some buttons, and four short hours later a loaf of whole wheat bread is born.

It Always Gets Eaten

Sometimes, for whatever reason (usually having to do with improperly measuring ingredients) the loaves don’t turn out so great, but we eat them anyway. The small ones don’t complain, but ask for more peanut butter on their bread or more milk in their glasses. The larger ones remark on ways to tweak this or that ingredient to improve the loaf. We mix different flours, add nuts and wheat berries, switch out the oil for melted butter, sometimes we stop the bread machine after it’s finished kneading and let the bread dough rise on the counter or in a loaf pan before popping it in the over. Sometimes it’s delicious, sometimes it tastes like beer flavored cardboard, but the bread always gets eaten.

Miss Perfection

Astonishingly, not one person in my family, during this entire month of trial and error, has suggested that we just go out and buy a better tasting loaf of bread. Making bread was never announced as a “thing. I never said to my family  we would not be buying bread anymore, never made an ultimatum, never forbid any one of them from going out into the world and buying pre-sliced, perfectly spongy, perfectly cooked bread, but no one seems to miss perfection.

We are different that you.

I imagine my children on the playground, I imagine them whispering to their friends “We are a family of bread makers, we are different than you”  I wonder if they feel the same pride I do, if they feel the quiet creeping in of an actual “thing.” We have become a family that makes things, a family that understands and appreciates “craft”… well, at least, we don’t seem to mind the imperfection in it. I’m afraid to stop baking the bread, afraid that if the smell of fresh bread leaves the house, we will lose something much more precious than I can articulate.

I wasn’t surprised my post entitled You’re Not Awesome resonated with so many people, I was however surprised at how many discussions regarding depression I’ve been having in the last 24hrs because of it: depression, how to handle depression, signs of depression, and how to get happy again. (Although I’m not a therapist, I have quite a bit of experience helping people understand emotions as a former life coach.) These kinds of discussions always seem to follow tragedy, especially suicide, however, the information I’m about to share with you usually doesn’t, and I think it’s a shame. I am pulling a few pages out of my life coaching playbook, it’s been sitting dusty on the shelves of my mind for a few years since I stopped coaching, not serving anyone but me, that’s a shame too.

Happiness and Sadness and Everything in Between

A lot of people only really recognize two or three emotions, usually – happiness, sadness, and rage. Of course, there are a myriad of emotions besides these. The scale  pictured in this post is a pared down list of some (but by all means not every) common emotion. As you can see, there is a lot more to being emotional than three emotions. This is not earth shattering news, most people can cognitively understand this. I always wonder how many people that “get” it still don’t take the time to pay attention to the emotions sandwiched in-between Joy and Grief. I bet it’s most of them – smart people are the worst at paying attention to emotions.

Paying Attention is a Big Part of Feeling Good

When I life coached, I made all my new clients check in with themselves several times daily for the week between our first and second appointment and keep track of it in a diary. They weren’t to judge themselves or try to change anything, they were just noticing how they were feeling and then going about their business. What’s amazing about this is that so often after that week I would hear from my clients about how liberating it was to be able to understand what they were feeling, like they had never done it before. They felt like they knew themselves better. Somewhere in there they always felt shame for not paying attention in the past. I always had to admit to them, I didn’t know how to do it either until I went to coaching school.

Go Figure

During our second appointment, we’d talk about the significance of the emotional scale (pictured), it usually went something like this:

Client: “You mean being angry is better than being depressed!”

Me: “Yes, an angry person is someone who feels they have power, a depressed person feels powerless”

Client: “Oh…”

The most fun part of this appointment was when they checked back through their diaries. Their minds were always blown when they saw in their own handwriting what I told them next: It’s nearly impossible to jump straight from an emotional high to an emotion low and vice versus. Contrary to all the greeting cards, and cliché sayings, you can’t jump straight from discouragement about a certain situation and feel joy in it. You have to work through all the feelings in-between, you might be able to jump a few steps, but not the whole staircase. You know where my clients were on the emotional scale when they figured that out for themselves? Somewhere between Relief (#6) that it was impossible to jump straight from depression to joy,  and Frustration (#10) that it was impossible to jump straight from depression to joy. Go Figure.

If you can’t get there from where you are, just move towards joy

The idea that when you’re feeling low about something, (say, losing your job) you should immediately start seeing it as a blessing is total bullshit. It’s too large of a mental leap. Sure, you can fake it (and sometimes you have to) but it probably won’t change how you are really feeling. What you can do is recognize where you are on an scale of emotion like this one, and try to move up it towards Joy, even if that means moving from insecurity to rage. All too often we expect people to get over their own negative emotions quickly, and we tell them things like “Snap out of it” or “Don’t worry be happy” but really, these things only serve to make them feel guilty (#21) – possibly pushing them further down the emotional scale than they already were. There is a trick here of course, you have to keep moving up the staircase, when you no longer want to “rage” you’ve got to let yourself feel the anger, discouragement, blame, worry, doubt, disappointment, overwhelment, frustration, pessimism, and boredom to even get anywhere close to feeling good about it. You can see why people feel guilty when you tell them to cheer up can’t you? Guilt is so much closer to where they are emotionally, and they really can’t move up the emotional scale as quickly as you are asking them to, they feel they’ve failed. It’s not on purpose, we don’t usually want people to feel worse, we just don’t know any better.

I’ve given you a tool. and I want you to use it.

This week, I encourage you to copy this emotional scale and spend some time noticing where you and those around you are ranking. Take note of what emotional steps are in-between where you are and where you want to be. If you notice that you or someone you love keeps hovering near the bottom of the scale, see if you can’t bump up the scale a little, if you can’t do it yourself, get help. Get professional help if you need to. Let me know how it works out. Take it easy on yourself and others, after all, we’re all in this together.

Today, someone I never met took his own life in front of his neighborhood church. Today I looked at all he presented himself to be online, a helpful, wonderful, productive citizen – and I would have never guessed he would ever have wanted to take anyone’s life, much less his own. Every piece of his online persona was so warm and wonderful. Today people that knew him are grieving, and baffled, and angry, and my heart hurts for them.

Today I think of the community I have grown to know online, and all of the wonderful people I have come to recognize as friends, their lives pixelated across my computer screen, their carefully crafted thoughts and words working their way through the word wide web onto my mobile phone, I read about how they want to be seen and how they see others, all from the park bench where I sit and watch my children play tag, where I watch them learn to play fair.

We are not playing fair.

We are so mindful of telling others how great they are, we are just so good at it, but we forget to recognize we are also human, fallible, broken… and we need to say and hear these kinds of things too. These things are what make us approachable, they are the traits that foster connection, and make it easy for us to relate to one another.  Without this kind of honest dialogue, we box ourselves and others into personas that are hard to maintain and hard to break out of… we play an unfair game of make believe where nobody wins, and somebody ends up killing themselves on a beautiful Sunday morning, somebody I don’t know, somebody I’ll never ever ever ever have the chance to get to know.

Missed Connection.

I hope you are ok with showing the realness of you, the combination of your rawness and your rawr, and while I don’t mind celebrating all the good things you present yourself to be, I want to celebrate you more, I’m ok with the dirt under your fingernails, and the fact that your bed’s not made. I love you, I love your mind, even the dark places, the awful places, the places that scare me shitless, I love those too, because they are you, they are part of the reason I reach out into the world every morning and try to make a connection. I don’t want to miss it, I don’t want to miss the connection between the you that you present yourself to be and the you you really are.

Every Last Fucked Up One of You

So, motherfuckers, sweet sweet angels of imperfection, on this Sunday, a day I am grieving for a man I never met, I am also singing you a love song, an out of key melody with rusty rhythm, mud in the middle, and dirty words at the end. In case I don’t tell you enough, I love you, in my way, every last fucked up one of you, I’m into your gritty truth, I’m into your greatness. So I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me for not high fiving you and telling you how awesome you are all the time. You are not awesome, and I like you that way.

Please note Obama’s End Day in 2017 Uhhhh? Republicans have given up on this election already?

(click  photo for larger, more clear picture)

Let this be a reminder: Never forget to have your children explain to you what’s happening in the pictures they draw, you may just get your next screenplay idea.

When You Grow-Up You Get to be Your Favorite Thing

She asks sleepily “Mama, when you grow-up do you get to be your favorite thing?”
I, sitting on her bed say “Yes” then ask “What’s your favorite thing?”
She says (while yawning) “I don’t remember.” Rolls her tiny little body on it’s side, falls quickly to sleep.

Some days are like that, you can’t remember any of your favorite things and all that’s left to do is dream a better dream, dream of new favorite things.