Enjoy!
Carrie’s memories of summers visiting her uncle are beautifully written.
Graham’s ode to John Lennon, written on Lennon’s birthday is a great read.
I only wish I lived next to churches that made signs like the one in this post. My God, what great material! I have to admit, I don’t read the signs posted on churches around here – maybe I’ll start now…
Don’t read this if you are easily offended, but if you like a good expletive-laced rant, go for it. You’ll be glad you did.
Claire Hennessey, of Crazy California Claire, named me as one of her three ‘Pay it Forward’ blogs the other day, and I’m grateful for the mention. Claire and I connected through the Rach Writes Platform Building Campaign, and our connection has been the highlight of the entire campaign experience for me. We have become critique partners, and I absolutely love reading and commenting on the memoir she has in progress. It’s a very charming story and I’m excited to see where she takes it. She’s also provided me some excellent feedback on a short memoir piece I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. Thanks, Claire! It’s great to have your support! I’ll post my own version of Pay it Forward shortly, with my regular links to some great posts I’ve read in the past couple weeks.
I bought a used book a month or so ago on Amazon. It’s called News from the Border, and is a captivating memoir about a mother and her autistic son, written by Jane Taylor McDonnell. I had read her book on writing memoir, Living to tell the Tale, in which she used excerpts of her memoir to illustrate various tips about technique, and I enjoyed it enough to buy the book. As I mentioned, I bought the book used – why not save a few dollars, right? When I opened the book, the first thing I saw was a red stamp that said, “DISCARD,” with the name of the library it once belonged to. I immediately felt a little sad. Even though I had yet to read the book, there was something about the finality of that red stamp, the callous rejection it implied, that bothered me. I don’t think I’ve ever run across a book that was so clearly marked for the dump or some other such final resting place for garbage. It evoked an image of a stuffy librarian wearing a flowery shirt and a light cardigan sweater, glasses hanging on a sparkly chain around her neck, sitting in front of a stack of books that hadn’t been checked out often enough to warrant the space they consumed on a shelf somewhere. She opens each book, firmly pressing down on the plastic stamp that marks her prey as rejects as she moves each text to a new pile of “discards.”
Let me say, I’m not one of those people that is so enthralled with books that I treat each one as though it was as sacred as the Old Testament to an Orthodox Christian. I like books – very much, even. But I’m not generally that sentimental about them. In fact, I’m one of those people that likes to get rid of things, books included. When I get rid of books, I either sell them back to Amazon or drop them off at a recycling center that has a book section where others can come and pick through the books and take them for themselves for free. So, I guess I never thought that there is actually a cycle of life a physical book might have, with a sort of death at the very end. Obviously, despite being stamped “DISCARD,” this book has yet to meet its final end, so perhaps I’m being overly dramatic. Nonetheless, I just didn’t like that angry red stamp.
P.S. To my friends that have a library science background, I apologize for the blatant stereotyping. I am sure that none of you will ever be a stuffy librarian that wears flowery shirts, cardigan sweaters and glasses on a shiny chain around your neck.
In the past year, I’ve been told how long it takes to form a habit – twice, actually. One person told me three weeks, and another person told me four weeks. Well, I started this blog on August 5, and although I never said it, I intended to post every day. Until this past Sunday, October 9, I’d only missed 3 days. You’d think that regardless of whether it takes three or four weeks to form a habit, I’d have done that by now with my daily writing. But, no. And, I did have a stretch of more than four straight weeks without missing a post in there, so perhaps neither person is right. In any case, I am determined to get back on track this weekend. Thanks to the people that continued to visit despite my abrupt break. More soon…
I’ve been fighting off a cold this week, and it’s the kind that starts with a nagging sore throat and clogged up sinuses. So, I went for the Halls. Though I have half a dozen bags of Breezers, I was out of the real cough drops, and that’s what I needed, so I had to buy a new package of Mountain Menthol. I was surprised to notice that Halls has taken a sort of fortune cookie/cheerleader approach to communicating with consumers with sort throats. The wrappers are full of brief motivational messages.
– Tough is your middle name.
– Flex your “can do” muscle.
– Get through it.
– Seize the day.
– Impress yourself today.
– Nothing you can’t handle.
– You can do it and you know it.
– You got it in you.
– Don’t try harder. Do harder!
– Put your game face on.
– Let’s hear your battle cry.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. First, I don’t have a battle cry, and even if I can do it and I know it, that doesn’t mean I want to do it when I’m sick. Sometimes I like to think “tough” is my middle name, but not so often. My “game face” when I’m sick is non-existent. Even when I do just “get through it,” most people know because I can be a pretty whiny sick person.
Maybe they’re just trying to be cute. Then again, maybe their marketers think if they push us to keep going when we’re sick, we’ll need to buy more and more Halls because it will take longer to get better. Either way, I go through stretches of semi-addiction to Halls every year when I get a cold, so these messages will neither make me buy their product more, nor will it make me buy it less.
I think I would be much more entertained, though, if the messages were more along these lines:
– Tell them it can wait.
– Threaten to cough on them.
– If you must go to work, pass us out in meetings.
– Your bed is calling you…
– Stay home!
– Show off your blue tongue.
Tears, tantrums, salesmen, and shotguns. Need I say more?
If you have not seen this video of “The King and Queen of the Techno Challenged,” go view it immediately. It’s brilliant! Thank you to Tamari Etherton for posting this!
A ton of us have blogged about the death of Steve Jobs. I liked the quotes attributed to him in this post. I also liked that some cool guys made the Retro Mac theme. Not for everyone, but still, a cool tribute.
I like random. In fact, I love random. The concept of random, random things, random encounters, any kind of randomness – so I think I’m going to love this new blog.
Well, guys, you’ll be happy to learn that I am exceeding expectations, creating something that is needed on the web, and have received not just a thumbs-up, but an enormous thumbs up for my labors! Seriously, though – do you get blog spam like this? It makes my day!
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I know this is all over the Internet and every news channel by now, but I heard that Steve Jobs died today on my way home from work, and it saddened me. That it saddened me somehow surprised me, too. It’s not like I knew him, and despite his reputation as a genius in product design, his perfectionism was known to make him brutal to work with. I probably couldn’t have worked for him, but I certainly did respect him. As someone who has been into electronic gadgets for years, is a student of business and leadership, living in the Bay Area, where Jobs was more of a legend than anywhere else, and working in technology for so long, perhaps he was a bigger figure in my unconscious than I realized. I don’t know. I’m puzzling over it. As I read the news tonight, I followed a link to the Commencement address that Jobs gave to the 2005 graduating class of Stanford. In it, he discusses death, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the year before. I have some issues around death – it’s a rather long story, so I won’t get into it right now, but suffice it to say the topic is generally on my mind more than I’d like it to be. I’ve included some excerpts from that Stanford speech below. At the moment – for me, at least – these words from Steve Jobs seem as big a tribute to humanity as any.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
…
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
…
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
…
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
Thank you, Steve Jobs.
Another exercise suggested in Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories has to do with timelines. The idea is that you create timelines for various years in your life. He suggests jotting notes in a box for each month of the year you are digging into. I took a slightly different approach that suits my super-organized way of doing everything. I used Excel. On each row, I entered the date in one cell, then a description of some event in another cell. This way I’d never run out of room in any given boxes for a period of my life, and I can just keep adding to it as I find time to work on it, periodically resorting the list in chronological order. I then went through a lot of files I keep. The two that were most interesting were my old taxes and my medical records folder.
My timeline file has only 57 events in it so far, but by going through my old taxes (I had copies of every year from age 17 on), I was able to reconstruct the jobs I had when I was younger. I’ve had a lot of jobs, which I will talk about in another post – but my timeline showed me just how many jobs I had during the few year stretch immediately out of high school – from factories to dive restaurants to department stores. It was fascinating to look back at how little money I made, and how often I changed jobs. I also moved a lot. There were three years where I filed taxes in more than one state because I was moving around so much.
The medical records were eye-opening, too. Since I live far from home, I must have requested copies of my records from the local hospital where I had a few surgeries and other health encounters that landed me in the ER. If you can get your hands on copies of your medical records, you should. Not only for practical reasons, but to read what these people actually wrote about you. It’s really interesting to read about the actual procedures in medical terminology, and the opinions the doctors have of how you presented to them. I will find something to share one of these days, but to get back to the point of sharing my first experience with the timelines exercise, it really did do a lot to jar my memory of different events. I’m kicking around the idea of writing a piece just based on the medical mishaps of my youth. I recommend the timelines exercise to anyone that wants to take a different angle on remembering their past.
It has been well publicized that many tech companies offer crazy perks to their employees, probably for a host of reasons. Pool and foosball tables, video game rooms with PS3, Wii, XBox. Some of the flashier employers in the Bay Area offer meals, even on-site dry cleaning, haircuts, chair massages, and fitness facilities. Some people say these perks help keep people at work longer, while others say they are necessary simply to attract the best talent. When I started my new job, I didn’t expect any perks like this because it’s still a small company, and I was right – there are no relaxation lounges, spinning classes, or laundry facilities, but, they do give us a few things – Starbucks coffee with a variety of extras – milk, half and half, raw sugar, sweet & low, etc. Friday mornings bring bagels, cream cheese, fruit, and lox, and the fridge is always stocked with Coke and Diet Coke. I think there might even be orange juice.
I rarely buy soda to drink at home, but I have long been a fan of Coke – I never did like New Coke as much as Classic Coke, except during the days of Max Headroom, when it was cool to take the taste test between Pepsi and Coke in the mall. If you picked New Coke, you got a Max Headroom poster and other junk that I used to decorate my bedroom walls, along with cutouts of Ralph Macchio and Kirk Cameron from Tiger Beat or whatever the teen magazine of the day was. Anyway, now I drink coffee all morning, but switch to a can or two of Coke in the afternoon.
It reminds me of my uncle. I have never known anyone that likes Coke as much as he does. In fact, his son’s first word was Coke. We were all sitting at the dinner table, and my young cousin was somewhere around 2. All of a sudden, hands flailing in his high chair, he yelled, “Coke!” in the sort of clipped voice of a newly talking toddler. The rest of us laughed, so he repeated the phrase over and over and over. My cousin is now out of high school, and I have no idea if he turned into a Coke drinker, but I’d be surprised if he didn’t, what with all the Coke my uncle always had in the house. I do believe that nothing beats Mexican Coke, though. They still use real sugar instead of corn syrup, and it is so much better. Not to mention that drinking from a glass bottle is more reminiscent of youth and hot summers, whether or not you actually drank Coke from a bottle back then.
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