Trapped

As we live and as we are, Simplicity – with a capital “S” – is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

– Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House

False Creek – Vancouver, BC

Earlier tonight, I tweeted this simple message:

The more you wish things would change, the more they stay the same.

At the end of Friday, I could have sworn it was meant to be a Monday. Things did not go my way all day. The only exception for the day was having a good morning with my daughter – a busy morning with her stacking couch cushions and other objects everywhere, but a good morning, none the less. The more the hands of the clock moved around, the more I thought about everything I wish I could change in my life, but I am rather powerless to change it.

I have gone through most of my life trying to focus on what I can control: how I do my work, how I exercise, how I express love. I can’t say I have done all of that successfully, but I have never tried to force others to change and tried even harder not to become stressed out with the decisions of others. That much I can say I have succeeded at.

Other situations, I feel utterly trapped in how to respond. There are no right answers anymore, and no middle ground solution either. I never feel comfortable putting pressure on people to make better decisions, because inevitably it leads to a larger confrontation – something I try to avoid at all costs. I understand that some arguments are healthy in a relationship, but there has to be a better approach when it comes to people who aren’t in relationships.

The more I think about the situations I am stuck in, the one common thread they have is I am a more rational/realistic thinker, and the other person is more of an emotional thinker. At times, my way of thinking leads to paralysis by analysis, but more often than not it leads to well thought out plans covering all the bases. I try to think about how my decisions will affect everyone involved, putting emphasis on others and not myself. The emotional thinkers I have issues with react to problems, thinking they are much larger than they tend to be, and seem to lose control if things don’t go according to their plan. They don’t think through their suggestions in the same way I do. They want the problem fixed, at all costs, as soon as possible.

These situations are absolutely draining to me.

I am constantly having to defend my decisions and choices, trying to prove that they are the correct course to go on or that they are a reasonable choice to consider, at the very least. When my choices aren’t heeded, I tend to be the one handed the broom to clean up the mess afterwards. If a decision is made without consulting me, I seem to be in charge of putting out the wildfires before I even get a chance to see the smoke rising from the grass. People assume I am comfortable being the one to take care of the situation, regardless of the cause, and that I have nothing else happening in life. I can drop everything to accommodate others, but no one ever drops what they are doing for me. I feel like this is rather unfair to me and I keep wondering, “What am I doing that brings this onto me?”

Life is certainly much more complex as I grow older than it was when I was in University. Life then was much more linear: attend classes, study/do homework, work, repeat.[1] Everything was in my control. Get to class on time, do the work, the grades would rise. Now, I feel like I am one of those Cormorants on the pier, watching the world spinning around me and I am not entirely sure what direction to focus on. What I do in one direction seems to make a change happen on the other side and never affect what I was hoping to change in the first place.

A part of me wishes for a simpler life where I have clear goals to work towards and I can actually put a plan in place in how to do my work, care for my daughter, care for myself, and maybe even find someone to share my life with.

The other part of me doesn’t want anything to change, because I would probably grow restless on not having problems occurring to keep my mind churning. Having nothing to focus on is far worse for me than having too much to think about.

The only thing I can do it seems is continue along the same path I have been on lately: take care of my daughter to the best of my abilities, take care of myself, and do what I can for other family members.

Because at this point, honestly, nothing else matters.

  1. I didn’t learn how to drink until I was in my late 20′s. I missed out on a lot of tequila shots and beer pong. ↩

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Bad Memories

But what’s a memory worth if it only breaks your heart? If it doesn’t make you smile or give you butterflies, if it doesn’t give you a reason to think positively, what’s the point of keeping it around. Someone who associates me with the idea of being a mistake doesn’t deserve my time; I was obviously a waste of theirs, so … it only makes sense right?

– Jennifer Thomson, Mistakes and Memories

Jennifer has been in a world of hurt lately after a bad heart-breaking breakup1. I can only imagine how deep the pain truly is since I have only been getting glimpses of it through her writing since coming across her on Twitter a week ago. It has been a bit difficult to read through since my own breakup continues to be fresh in my mind. Not so much the act of the breakup, but the constant reminder of this new reality I am in of only having my daughter around most of the time, not all of the time, like I would prefer.

I tried not to reflect on it too much these days, but this tweet from her triggered some more thoughts in my mind:


While it is never easy to fully forget someone – how many of us have wished for a mental trashcan to be the equivalent of the one on our Desktop/Dock? – I am faced with an incredible challenge. I can’t forget my ex completely, because she is going to remain in my life forever since she’s the mother of my daughter. While we definitely talk/text daily, communicating at some point is a must in order to coordinate matters with our daughter. Meeting face-to-face is also difficult, making friendly conversation for the sake of our daughter and not wanting to create a scene in public with all the underlying tension that most likely exists.

Even more difficult is looking at pictures with my daughter, going through all those moments that her mother was definitely there for – birth in the hospital, home from the hospital, first bath, the subsequent birthdays. All of those moments were joyous ones. Should my feelings for her mother now affect how I think about those memories?

It is difficult to do now, and I am hoping it will get easier over time when looking back at these past events. I also try not to think about the inevitable questions that will be raised about why we aren’t not together anymore, or why she has a new boyfriend/husband in her life instead of me.

Regardless of what happens in the future, I try to frame these memories in the most positive light possible. I do not think about the reasons why the relationship ended, and instead focus on all the challenges that were overcome at the time, the amount of change my daughter has gone through in such a short time, and the other challenges overcome since then.

Jennifer’s conclusion of a what a memory is worth is parallel to what I concluded in the post I wrote shortly after going through my own breakup.

What do I have to lose in writing this? She was willing to give me up in order improve herself with another person in another location. Certainly, I can forget about my fears of backlash, unfriending, rude comments to better myself.

Weathering the Storm – A Story of Moving On – NSFW

What is a negative memory worth?
What do you have to lose in throwing that memory away and facing life with a renewed focus?

Nothing

If she’s reading:

Jennifer, stay positive and keep moving forward, because you will find someone.

 

  1. Ever wonder why entrepreneurs keep talking about how we need to fail to attain the next level of achievement, but no one talks about the value in failing relationships? I do, all the time.  ↩

Marcus Aurelius – Inward Power

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces — to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What’s thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it — and makes it burn still higher.

– Marcus Aurelius

More on Medium

The media has not become a medium. We've failed at creating cohesive digital formats.

Jay Dolan, What the F is Medium?

After writing about Medium yesterday in Verbosity, I came across the above post exploring how Medium fits in alongside Tumblr, WordPress, Twitter, and so forth. Fresh with my ideas about Medium, I decided to take the plunge and wrote this lengthy comment:

I had a different take on Medium, which is yan extension of another product they backed/helped create, Branch

If you read their introductory blog post, they mention how there are a lot of places to create content, but not enough quality content. Tumblr is a site that already allows you to post a picture with text or video with text, or just one or the other. The problem (in their view) is that people only view their site when creating, or reblog something someone else has done. There is no real building upon an idea. There are extensions of ideas (i.e. memes exploding in popularity) but no shared experiences.

With Medium, the individual pieces aren't what matters. It's the shared collection that matters. People read one person's story, video, picture, and want to share their own story/video/picture with that collection.

With Branch, the individual message isn't what matters, but the "branch" of curated conversation. You don't refer to one item from a branch, but the entire branch.

In a way, it's like Pinterest, because people create their own collections there, but most often there's nothing meaningful behind each collection. It's just an easy way to organize our own thoughts. So Medium takes the visual style of Pinterest, but allows people to create shared collections.

The main thing that helped clue me into this is what happens when you click the author's name. On every other site on the Net, it takes you to a profile page which has information about the author and other items they've created on the site. On Medium, it takes you to the Twitter profile (go figure, really). Right now, there's no way to discover what other authors have written, just explore other ideas more thoroughly.

Of course, this is only the alpha release, and who knows if this is going to change in the future. To me, Branch is a much more appealing service, like Quora but you invite people into the conversation, and make it public or not. I see a service like that being more valuable and replacing email. But why would I share a piece of writing on Medium instead of my own site? That's the biggest question facing Medium, and one I don't see a clear answer for.

Verbosity

… my verbosity leads to another, much larger, problem: since longer posts take more time, I’m often hesitant to even start writing.

MG Siegler, Brevity

The past month or so, I have been reading about various authors’ thoughts about content – primarily: the length, what warrants being published, when should a link be included off-site. I have also explored the layout of this site after wanting to focus on the content that I write, instead of the other busyness sites normally include. Both strains of these thoughts have come together recently.

I am like MG in the way that I read a lot of stuff online that I want to respond to, but the weight of what I want to write stops me in my tracks. After reading The War of Art, I realized that this is a major form of Resistance. Writing short “link blog posts”1 was a way for me to break through that Resistance, because it kept me writing, but it wasn’t really doing my writing any service.

I spent time reading through my archives and noticed that there has been a steady length to most of them, and very few (if any) links to other sites. I am not referring to a lot of my writings in the past year or so, but from way, way back… like this one, the return from 2007. There were a lot of personal thoughts and memories bottled up in my head that I wanted to get out. Blogging was a means of me to discover my voice since very few people were listening to me in person. I am even more isolated now than I was then, and have started to wonder if part of the reason I have felt a bit off is because I haven’t been voicing the personal side as much.

Less philosophizing, more personal.

Content has always been a major struggle for me here. I don’t know how many times I have written about the direction I would like to take this site. The more I think about it, the less it moves. I think I need to stop being so concerned about what people want to read and treat it more like my place: decorate the walls with the paintings and newspaper clippings I want to reference in the future, litter the floors with my thoughts and sort it out later on, and if I happen to leave a few coffee stains of garbage posts here and there, so be it.

Being able to call this space my own is one of the issues I have with a new site, Medium. This is what they say on their welcome page:

Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others. And in many ways, the web is still mimicking print concepts, while not even catching up to it in terms of layout, design, and clarity of experience.

Medium comes from The Obvious Corporation. Most people aren’t aware of the company, but they are aware of several of their offerings. Evan Williams was the founder of Blogger. Along with Biz Stone at The Obvious Corporation, they created Twitter.

Right now, Medium makes it easy to collect stories into collections for others to discover, but there is no easy way to discover what else those authors have written (clicking an author’s name goes to, where else, Twitter). The author falls to the side and the collection of ideas becomes the focus point. The one problem that will most likely arise is how do you curate it to keep spam out, and how do you distinguish between the well written pieces and the crap pieces?

Their other service, Branch, I wrote about previously, Do We Need to Branch Out?. Medium is an extension of that product, but organized differently. Branch has restrictions on the length you can enter, just like Twitter, and you respond directly to another person instead of an idea.

I bring these services up, because in order to explore your voice and allow others to see it, you need to make a choice: the medium, and the place. You can post video blogs to YouTube or Vimeo, or you can do audio to Soundcloud or a podcast. With text, there are many options now. Some with restrictions, some without.

I choose to publish my work here, and aim to keep it between 500 to 750 words2 with the hope that the words will continue to flow for years to come.

  1. Posts that include a blockquote with the purpose of directing traffic to that site, with minimal commentary – see kottke or Daring Fireball. For more, see Marco Arment’s post Don’t Blame the Link Blog  ↩
  2. This being an exception.  ↩

Making the switch


Even though the official start date for the fall season is September 21st, Labour Day is a big day of transitions. It is most often associated with the beginning of the school year, especially most Universities and Colleges. It also the last major weekend of the summer holidays, so tourism tends to trail off. And in some years, like this one, it lands close to the first of the month, which means a lot of people are moving.

I happen to live in a vacation rental condo complex where all of these events collapse into one. All the tourists flood the building on Thursday-Saturday, making one last ditch effort to taste the warm weather, before departing on the Sunday to give themselves the Monday to prepare for the week.

On the 1st, the moving vans started to pile up on the streets as people moved into the building – most of them renters for the winter season, but some of them new owners. The majority of these new residents are students, since the complex is relatively close to the College campus here, and convenient to the bus routes to get to the University campus.

Watching one mother help her daughter move into the building took me back to my first days of University when I first moved away from home. There is an aura of excitement in the air as people get ready for the school year – new computers, setting up desks and living spaces, meeting new friends for the first time, buying stacks of textbooks and waiting hours in line in the University bookstore with the other hundred students talking about how broken the system is. 1

The leaves slowly start to change, and in the far north, the snows have already started to settle into the mountains. The Pacific salmon run is just finishing up, and the Kokanee salmon run will be beginning in the coming weeks. Baseball seasons start to finish up, as hockey seasons begin. And people go from having glasses of wine on the patios of restaurants, to warm cups of tea or coffee in their local cafes.

Last year at this time, I had moved into my new place. The first week of September was a month of exploration, discovering which coffee shops were best, how far it took to walk to the grocery store, and spending time at the beach soaking up the last hot rays of sunlight for the summer.

This time, another switch is happening. I have found myself more energized to do my work, and wanting to explore other avenues for work. I have been pushing myself harder with exercise this summer, but want to push even harder this fall and see where it takes me by next spring. Most people switch their diets around in the springtime to clean it up for the summer. I want to do the same right now and further improve my discipline away from having cheat meals.

My focus in the past has always been on others, and the past two and a half years on my daughter. Now is time for a switch, to put a little more emphasis on me.

  1. Maybe this is unique to the University of Regina, but when I went to school, you couldn’t order textbooks online (the web was only just getting underway), couldn’t even order by phone and have them set aside. All of the textbooks were never placed out in advance, either. Everyone was buying them the first week of classes, which meant for huge lineups running down the length of the store. Ironically, the bookstore used to be the location for the cafeteria when the University first started, so it was a space meant for lineups and waiting around. ↩

Off-Kilter

If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I have noticed something strange the past month. Whenever my daughter is away from me, something always feels a bit off to me, something is missing. When she’s here, everything is great. I have fun with her, get things done when she’s sleeping, and can fall asleep easily at night.

When she is gone, I have a restless mind. Whatever I seem to do, it never quite engages me like my daughter does. The normal activities that capture my attention and help me settle down aren’t working any more. Last night was probably the worst it has been in a while.

After having a productive morning and afternoon with a long hike to enjoy one of the last hot days of the year, I came back and wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. There was plenty of things to do but nothing that fully interested me. After several hours of putzing around with things, I finally gave up and laid down in bed to read.

I have been hearing about The War of Art for a while, but only started to seriously think about the lessons in the past few years after reading Linchpin and discovering Gwen Bell. No matter how many times I saw his book mentioned, and even after reading through his free book, Do the Work, I never got around to actually reading his book.

Until now.

I’m not entirely sure why I resisted reading the book. I suspect it may have been because I thought the book would be a dense and difficult read. It’s not. Not by a long shot.

After one sitting, I was over a third of the way through. After last night (the second sitting), I have 40 pages to go. This is a very inspiring book that’s made me realize a few things. I knew I had Resistance within me after I first heard that term years ago. What never occurred to me is the different types of Resistance there are. After reading the section describing the different varieties of Resistance, there were several I could relate to.

I am thankful that the last section of the book is about battling through the Resistance. Ultimately, it comes down to me to just do the work, which finds me here writing after waking up without an alarm at 6:30 am, going for a quick walk to the Starbucks to grab a drink, and setting up the iPad to work on.

I have already queued up the latest Pressfield book, Turning Pro to read after I finish The War of Art this afternoon. If you haven’t read it, and you do independent work of any kind, I suggest reading it.

If you have read it, please share some other like-minded authors for me to further explore.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.

Goethe

Reworking Art

Material from earlier theatre can be brought into a production in the same way as personal material is brought in. Just as the performer refines, distorts, condenses, and selects from his life experiences, so fragments from earlier dramas can be worked into the play at hand. Only since the intrusion of stupid laws and notions regarding originality has this rich vein of creativity been stopped. Shakespeare and Moliere without their plagiarisms would be much poorer playwrights. An art that is in essence transformational and transmutational should not surrender any of its sources, its deep springs. The modern idea of originality is a lawyer-capitalist construction geared to protecting private property and promoting money-making. It is anti-creative, and inhibits the reworking of old themes in the light of new experience. It is the constant reworking and elaboration of old material- call it plagiarism if you like- that is the strongest sinew of tradition.

– Richard Schechner, Environmental Theatre, published 1973.1

 

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

– Steve Jobs, Interview in 1994.

Two separate incidents happened this week which I found to be interesting when juxtaposed against each other.

  1. Samsung was found guilty in the case of copying the iPhone.
  2. Cecilia Gimenez ruined a 100 year old fresco.

One of these acts was mocked openly and laughed at; the other had people laughing at one party, and fearful of what would happen with the other.

One of these acts basically destroyed a work of art; the other stole ideas to create something new.

One of these acts was a forgivable offense; the other is going to send a tsunami of repercussions that will not be completely felt for years.

The punishment brought down against Samsung is pretty negligible considering the size Apple is now. The final fine they have to pay is over 1 billion dollars. Which sounds like a lot, but Apple is profiting around 30 billion dollars a year from just the iPhone alone (does not include the iPad, Mac, iPod, etc).2 Apple doesn’t even know what to do with the cash they have on hand now, so I find it puzzling that they were concerned about what Samsung was doing.

Meanwhile, Cecilia Gimenez ruined a fresco, because she was upset about the way it had been deteriorating over the years. She isn’t being punished, because the city believes she acted with “good intentions.” The fresco is unlikely to be recovered to its original form, but that hasn’t stopped people poking fun at the problem (see image above).

It could be argued that Samsung was acting with “good intentions,” as well. I don’t believe Samsung (or Google, the makers of the Android operating system) were trying to make an exact copy of the iPhone to fool people, but rather are in the process of reworking the original iPhone design. The same can be said of Apple reworking some of the features from Android, most noticeably the notification center (check out this post from Android Police).

I think Steve sums up my thoughts exactly in his comment at the bottom of that article:

I, for one, am sick of the running legal battles. We, as customers, benefit from the innovations that occur from the competitive atmosphere. Our products improve with the minor attempts at reverse engineering, making our devices improve at a rate not possible in a less competitive environment. They win over customers with superior products, not great legal presentations. Wave the white flags, guys, and get back to doing business.

Apple set out to reinvent the phone, they succeeded in doing that, but the iPhone is not as widely accessible as most of Samsung’s phones. Android phones come in a variety of sizes and feature sets, plus various prices from pre-paid to premium phones. iPhones are still trapped in one size, and are only now starting to branch off into all price tiers.

I wonder if the mobile world would have exploded like it has the past five years without Samsung’s work on smartphones.

  1. Excerpt available in The Director in a Changing Theatre ↩
  2. Business Insider, The iPhone is 5 Years Old  ↩

Who were the Brazilian performers during the London 2012 Closing Ceremony?

Its eight-minute presentation during the handover of the Olympic flag was a Carnival in miniature. Brazil’s top model, Alessandra Ambrosio, led a parade including 82 drummers, the samba dancer Renato Sorriso, the classical singer Marisa Monte and the rapper BNegao. Women in gold lame dresses, with “2016” pinned in their afro hairstyles, danced alongside men in orange suits, with the country’s Olympians represented by Maurren Maggi, the gold medal-winning long jumper, and the double gold medal-winning yachtsman Robert Scheidt.

The Telegraph, London 2012 Closing Ceremony

Like countless millions (maybe billions) of people, I watched the closing ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Also like a lot of other people, I recognized majority of the British performers, but had no clue about the Brazilian portion of the show. I love the culture in Brazil, from the mystique of the tribes of the Amazon river basin to the dangerous lifestyle in the notorious favelas of Rio de Janeiro. One of my favourite movies of all time is from Brazil, City of God (my original review from 7 years ago).

So, the hunt was on to find out who these mysterious people were since the CTV telecast was void of explanations. Oddly, they did supply captions for the British performers (as if I needed an explanation of who the Spice Girls were).

After browsing through the major newspapers in London, I found an answer that pointed me in the right direction.

First up:

Alessandra Ambrosio

From her Wikipedia entry:

a Brazilian model. Ambrosio is best known for her work with Victoria’s Secret and was chosen as the first spokesmodel for the company’s “PINK” line. Ambrosio is currently one of the Victoria’s Secret Angels and has modeled for brands such as Next, Armani Exchange, Christian Dior, and Ralph Lauren.

Ambrosio serves as an ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.[5] Ambrosio was also selected by AskMen.comas Number 2 out of the “Top 99 Most Desirable Women of 2008″

 


 Renato Sorriso

Renato Sorriso is, incredibly, an actual street sweeper. He works at the Rio Sambadrome, where competitions are held for the various samba dance schools in the city. He  was noticed because he started dancing while working.  Apparently, he has been doing this for years, because I was able to find several videos on YouTube of him dancing through the years. He performed the same role for the closing ceremony wearing his uniform. Here is one of my favourite videos of him dancing:

 

Marisa Monte

Marisa Monte is probably of the better known performers at the ceremony, because she has been around much longer than the others. It also helps that she has sold over 10 million albums world-wide. Her story is quite fascinating. She moved to Rome when she was 19 to study opera, singing in bars to earn money on the side. She was spotted during a performance by a producer, who developed a stage show that she toured across Brazil. She became a cult hit, recorded an album, and went skyward afterwards, doing several world tours. During the ceremony, she was the woman who was being carried by the ocean.

Her website is in English if you wish to learn more about her. Her Facebook page has over 400,000 followers, so she is still quite popular around the world.




 BNegão

BNegao, otherwise known as “Lightbulb Man” during the ceremony, is a Brazillian rap and funk artist. He has an interesting story, as well, having bounced between bands exploring his sounds and performance style. His current group is called BNegão & Frequency Selectors. Although his style is a bit different, his message is very similar to Rage Against the Machine, being critical of the Brazilian government. He has also released his music as Creative Commons, allowing people to download and mix it for free. His current style is more funk, with some great music on YouTube. Here is Funk.

I prefer this, a live performance and interviews with the members of Planet Hemp:

Seu Jorge

Seu Jorge was the man in the white suit on stage with Alessandra and Renato. He is a musician and actor, having appeared in the previously mentioned City of God. He later appeared in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou directed by Wes Anderson. He also performed most of the sound track, which consisted of David Bowie songs done in Portuguese.

Here is his cover of Life on Mars:

I believe this covers all the major performers that were highlighted during the Brazil portion of the ceremony. There is one more “performer” that I will mention quickly.

Pelé – the greatest football player of all-time, ever.

Lincoln

Lincoln, which is coming out November 9, will follow the country’s beloved 16th president in the days leading up to his assassination. It’s adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, which tells the story of how Lincoln stocked his cabinet with a bunch of guys who disagreed with him so he’d have a whole slew of perspectives on his presidential decisions. I know — this sounds like science fiction and not historical fact, but it totally happened. If all of that isn’t cool enough, the screenplay was written by Tony Kushner (Angels in America). So there is a very good chance that a historical movie about Abraham Lincoln that is written by Kushner, directed by Spielberg, and starring Day-Lewis will win some Oscars next year. In fact, maybe everyone else should just stay home.

- Jamie Frevele, Daniel Day-Lewis completely disappears into Abraham Lincoln | BoingBoing

I think I have seen more rumours and movie trailers for films I want to check out this year than in any year past. Bringing on someone like Kushner to adapt a book is a brilliant move on Spielberg’s part. I hope more Hollywood films tap into the world of playwrights since they know how to craft dialogue better than anyone – and it’s usually one of the big things that drags down a film. I think people can overlook a bad plot-line or effects if the dialogue and acting is better than average, but if the dialogue is poor, people tend to avoid going to that film.

Apart from the films that have already opened (Prometheus, Dark Knight, Savages, and Moonrise Kingdom), here are some of the others I’m looking forward to seeing (links go to the trailers):

Life of Pi

Skyfall

The Hobbit

Cloud Atlas

The Master

Les Miserables

Hyde Park on Hudson

 

 

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