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.

Have you ever heard the term “Home team advantage” – usually having to do with either playing a game on your home turf or knowing your “team” has your back? I’d like it if everybody knew what their home team advantages were and took advantage of them. All too often, I hear of people wanting to succeed regardless of who their home teams are and I’m all for that, but through stubborn hardheadedness they work in spite of the home team advantage, inadvertently snubbing those that could help them most with subtle “I don’t need you, I can make it on my own” mantra. That’s fine, but unless you are the Clint Eastwood hero character in Dirty Harry it’s probably not going to work for you.

The world doesn’t need more heroes going it alone in inhospitable landscapes, it’s hard to follow a leader who refuses to foster community. The world needs people who take advantage of advantage, that know the worth of their “home team” and realize, especially now that social networking has enabled us to have a myriad of “home teams”, that we are all just one home run away from succeeding thanks to our hugely varied support networks.

My advice, take advantage of advantage, if you find you have it, and it serves you well without damaging your integrity, take it, run with it as you round all the bases – thank your fans in the stands for supporting you, take a bow, and show em’ how it’s done before doing it again.

(Sports analogies – a new one for me)

Four years ago I watched my mother get happily married in Vegas before she flew off to England to start her new life. Three years ago, she flatlined during routine angioplasty and almost lost that new and wonderful life. My mother almost died another two times after that, covering her bathroom walls with blood from a burst femoral artery. I would only learn about it much later, when my mother called to tell me that she couldn’t walk, that she’d almost lost her foot, that the the doctors were working so hard just to keep her alive they had ignored (out of necessity) the lack of blood to my mother’s leg. The doctors would later discover the reason her artery kept bursting: she had contracted MRSA (an antibiotic resistant bacteria) in her leg from the angioplasty surgery.

My mother was hospitalized for nearly 6 months, and couldn’t walk for a year. She missed her children terribly, but didn’t want us to see her that way, which is why, when she called a few months ago to say she had been cleared by her cardiologist to fly and had bought tickets to Vegas, I knew I had to go see her, although, having just lost my job due to a recent acquisition, I wasn’t sure how I was going to afford to get my family from Chicago to Las Vegas. No matter how we diced it, planes, trains, or automobiles, with skyrocketing fuel costs, the trip was going to cost more than we had to spend. Now, I’m not one to visit family often, I went 10 years without seeing my grandmother, and hadn’t seen my dad since he married Cole and I 6 years ago, but not seeing my mother after all she had been through, there was no way lack money was going to get in the way of that reunion.

Remember SOBcon this year, remember how Connie Burk from GM presented Mark Horvath with a brand new car decked out with Wi-fi so he could do his work with InvisiblePeople.tv? Remember how the guys from Murphy USA gave Mark free fuel for a year? That’s the kind of miracle I was praying for. Actually, I was praying for a much smaller miracle… a two week miracle that would get me to my mother and back… and that’s just what happened. I asked Connie about the most fuel efficient cars to rent, and I got an email a week later asking me when and where to drop off my Chevy Equinox loner car from GM. The day after that, I got a package in the mail addressed to “Internet Rockstar” from Murphy USA with a pedometer, a jump rope, a water bottle, and a $100 gas card. With the help of the people at GM and Murphy USA, I could bring the cost of the trip down to under $500, and visit not only my mom, but every relative and friend along the way, which is what I did.

I cannot express to you the feeling of putting my arms around my mother after almost losing her three times, of introducing my father to his grandchildren and my grandmother to her great grandchildren, of meeting my nieces and nephews, or exploring the Grand Canyon and Route 66 with my kids, or driving through the devastation in Joplin Missouri after the tornado there last week, but I will try, in another post, later (when I can process all of that.) What I can express right now, is my gratitude to the people and companies that helped me get there. Thanks so much to Connie from GM and Casey from Murphy USA for reaching out to me, no questions or favors asked in return. You guys are awesome.