This is it!

After about a year of thinking about it, I'm shutting down FBB. I thought for a long time that I was just taking a break but now it's clear that it's over. I think of entries and write them in my head, like I used to, but now they float right out of my brain after I've "written" them. They don't linger like they used to, pestering me until I put them on the page for you all to read. The reason, I think, is clear.

I started this blog a few years ago as a way to make me write, on a daily basis, and as a way to counter my corporate existence. Now, I write daily on my scripts and I no longer have the corporate life. Weird how that works. Perhaps the blog willed my new life into existence. Now when I have thoughts that I might have explored in the blog, I explore them in my stories or jot them in a journal to be explored another time. The personal exposure got me into a bit of trouble as well and turned me off of the full disclosure feeling of the blog. But again, a script is as personal as writing can be and everything I am not putting down here will end up at some point on the page.

Thank you dear friends and readers! This site will remain archived at: http://fluffybunnybutts.blogspot.com/.

It's never too late to be what you might have been

I just finished reading Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, and like his previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, it's a fascinating look into why things are the way they are (one of my favorite subjects!) In Outliers, Gladwell debunks the myth that people are successful because of their "individual merit." Using established research and case studies, he shows that culture, family, luck and timing are powerful factors in whether a person is successful. It's very interesting and it made me think quite a bit about my own culture, family, luck and timing. It's not a self-help book so there isn't a chapter on "What to do if you didn't get the right combination of the four factors" but he does demonstrate that knowledge is power and if you understand who you are and how you came to be that way, the more you can change the outcome.

Here's an example from the book, very briefly encapsulated. In the nineties, Korean Air had three times the number of fatal accidents of any other airline and was on the brink of being shut down. It was discovered that because of the culture and the language, the co-pilots were not able to directly tell the captain when there was a problem. Here was an issue that would seem to stem from mechanical or technical problems but was actually a cultural problem. It was solved in two ways. One, the roles were switched so that the captain was in the co-pilot's seat and the junior pilot would fly the plane. That way if there was a problem, social protocol did not prohibit frankness. Two, the language of flying became officially English. Without the social stratification built into the language, it was easier for everyone to speak plainly without fear of offending.

As you might expect, people who are nurtured in their talent and interests while young, tend to be successful in those areas especially if culture, timing and luck were also on their side. It can be difficult, if not impossible, as an adult to put yourself in a situation where you can get the practice and confidence necessary to be good at something new. If that pursuit goes against how you've been raised or your culture, it is also more difficult. Or if you're born in a time when that field is extremely competitive, it will take more luck to get in. Luck is what you call all of those times when you were given access to equipment, training, contacts, information, money, a mentor or some other leg up that other people didn't get.

It's probably not a coincidence that I started this blog at around the time that I stopped acting and went back to work in marketing. I knew that I wasn't yet on the right path and must have known that the blog would help me focus on that quest. In another stop on the journey of self-discovery, I've just this week turned down what is basically the best job offer I've ever had. The non-profit that I had been working for pro-bono asked me to be their Director of Marketing and Communications, a brand new position. I had presented a plan for how to strengthen the brand, establish processes for the company and develop a strategy to grow the business over the next couple of years. I would have worked with some of the brightest and nicest people I've ever met and been able to make a tangible difference in education.

The problem is that marketing is not the path I'm supposed to be on. It's something that I'm naturally good at but no matter how much I accomplish, I never get any satisfaction from it. At the same time my inner critic keeps wondering why, if I was meant for something else, I'm not already doing it. Why is it so hard for me to know what I really want? I found the answer in Outliers. People who are successful are assisted by external forces in such a way that they don't have to wonder what they are supposed do with their lives. Mozart, Bill Gates, Michael Phelps and almost every movie star there is, were doing what they do when they were children. They had discovered their talent -- or it had been discovered for them -- and the four factors colluded to put them on a path to success before they were even old enough to ask what they wanted to do. In reviewing my life, I realize I've been all over the map, and back again.

Here's a synopsis:
Child: Wanted to be a teacher, Shirley Temple or the President of the United States; my mother wanted to take me to auditions but my dad said no.
Jr. High/High School: Wanted to take drama but was not allowed.
Jr. College: Took engineering classes because my dad made me; thought I might want to be an attorney (to blend my love of issues and performing) and got a job at a law office; considered acting school but believed I should be properly educated; started taking improv and acting classes on my own.
College: Dropped engineering for Women's Studies (which cost me the financial support of my dad); thought I might want to be a politician but continued to act; considered getting a masters in education; got feedback from professors that whatever I did should involve writing.
Post-college: Worked at creative agencies as a project manager (and although good at it, I was miserable); enrolled in acting classes and started performing in plays and short films.
Late 20s: Quit my job to be an actress, moved to Los Angeles and planned to give it five years before re-evaluating.
Early 30s: Worked in marketing and got laid off twice and felt like every interview and offer was a death sentence; continued to write scripts and make short films.

Obviously, I have three strong interests: Politics, education and filmmaking. Politics is too nasty for me and frankly I'm not very good at saying the right thing at the right time. I'm also quite happy expressing that part of me on the blog. I decided long ago that I didn't want to be a teacher but the job I'm turning down would have allowed me to make a difference in education with my marketing skills. That made the decision very difficult because unlike other jobs in marketing, this one might have actually fulfilled me.

Filmmaking, though, has definitely persisted as the strongest interest. I remember seeing Goodfellas and Thelma and Louise in the early nineties (Jr. College era) and saying to myself "I'd do anything to make movies like that!" The reason I didn't plunge into it then or at every other opportunity is because of my upbringing, which is a very valuable thing to know. I also noticed something else in my list. All of the careers I've been interested in utilize the skills of communication, performance and persuasion; Teachers, politicians and attorneys all need these skills in abundance. Despite his misguided advice, my dad has told me he recognized these things in me at a very young age.

Of course, even a person who already knows what their talent is and has been put on the path to success could mess it up. What I think is the biggest obstacle to success, however, is fear. I can't imagine what fears might have sabotaged the success of Mozart or Gates or Phelps but I know that I am a long-time victim of fear. Fear is what has kept me in marketing and away from what I really love! I've been hiding in jobs instead of taking the plunge into the unknown, where the things I know are scarier than the things I don't know. The two layoffs might, in retrospect, be seen as the luck and timing I needed because they've made it more difficult for me to hide.

Who cares what I have to say

Last time I talked to my dad, I was recapping the last round of interviews I've had. I told him about the one company, looking to me to run an established film festival, that asked me to make a presentation of ideas. I spent three days on it, and it was twice as long as they'd asked for but I had done an incredible amount of research and thinking about this brand. I had something to say and I was really excited about it. My presentation was totally positive, enthusiastic and I spoke as a representative of the brand. I stated my excitement for the festival and the brand throughout.

This was the second meeting but the first was a phone interview, with the woman who would be my boss. She was there with an HR gal and a "half person" that supports the role. I got the feeling throughout the presentation that they weren't impressed, or more that they just weren't responding at all, like maybe they didn't get it. It was a pretty big idea. Basically I said that they had enough reach, they'd already done a lot of the things I thought of. Their problem isn’t exposure; it's their message. The tagline is limiting and uninspired, their pitch doesn't do the festival justice and the website was not a destination that communicated the uniqueness of this event. I presented a number of solutions and that would take their brand (and festival) to the next level.

This is a presentation I could have charged a lot of money for if I was a strategic consultant. Yet at the end, I got blank faces and dumb questions that had already been asked or just seemed irrelevant after showing them how uniquely interested and qualified I was for this job. "Why do you want to work here?" "Why do you think you're a good fit for this job?" "How would you expand the festival?" I had already said expansion is not the problem; that they aren't expanding because their story is too hard to tell. I said, make it a fun and easy story and people will tell it for you. Bloggers will write about it, people will tell their friends.

That's when the HR lady asked me how, when there were SO many blogs, could I possibly choose which ones to target? I don't know why that struck me as a particularly stupid question. Maybe because it was coming from the HR gal who later told me she used to teach classes at the company gym before getting into human resources. Or maybe because it epitomized the point that they were missing. I was talking big picture and a holistic approach where you change something that will affect everything. What they wanted was logistics. Some magical formula for selling tickets. Like buying a third-party email list, printing posters to put in coffee shops, handing out postcards at Whole Foods, or buying those flags that hang from the lampposts on major streets. Is that what they wanted from me? I think it is.

Anyway, while telling my dad this story, he suddenly says "I don't even know what a blog is. It's just someone's opinion right?" Before I can even answer he continues on this opinionated rant. He says there's a guy on the finance channel that's always talking about his blog, someone he obviously doesn't like. "What makes a person so egotistical that they think their opinion is so important? Do they really think people want to read what they have to say?" Then, even more disturbing, he said something about how if it was really important, it would be on the TV. He completely misses the point that the Internet is by the people, for the people and the TV is run by the corporations for the people who are too dumb to know otherwise.

It was so shocking. I mean, he was so upset about something he doesn't even understand. Which is probably the point. He's looking for a job right now too. He's been independent for ten years but with the economy slowing down thought he'd be better off with a job. It's not going well for him either. Hearing his daughter talk about things he doesn't know about probably makes him insecure about his age and looking for a job after being out of the loop. Knowing that the whole world is blogging is probably upsetting. It made me grateful that I never told him about this one. I never wanted to argue about post he read, some topic I wouldn't choose to talk with him about. He also comes from a generation of people that don't talk about themselves.

Calmly, I explained that a blog was like a diary, or could be more like a book or a column in a magazine. I gave him examples: a mother wanting to share the details of bringing up her children for other mothers, or for family and friends to follow along; a lady who grows a garden in the Bay Area and records her trials and tribulations, photos of what she's growing and maybe even what she's cooking with her harvest. I couldn't tell him that people harass me if I don't keep up the blog regularly and that people really do want to hear what I have to say.

Then I told him that he could keep a blog. A diary of his progress in building houses. He could share things that he's learned only after building his third house, tricks of the trade, and establish himself as an expert. I said that people are very interested in getting information from someone they can identify with, not just some guy on the TV. He was very quiet and shook his head a little. He might even have been thinking that I had a good point about starting a blog. I'm going to send him a few examples and the Blogger link to get started. I really think he'd take to it like a duck to water.

Raging at the dying of the light

I am very excited. A friend of mine in L.A. has finally started a blog. One of the most interesting, informed and opinionated people I know, he writes as he speaks and his blog is eloquent, witty and a delight to read. The reason I'm so excited, however, is because his passion is for politics and he has started his blog just in time to cover, blow by delicious blow, the 2008 Presidential Election. I am also opinionated and interested but don't seem to have the inclination to follow politics in quite the same way.

Now, I can read a well-spoken and summarized rally cry without the misery of slugging through The Economist or watching television. Topics covered in his impressive first week: The excitement of having Obama as the Democratic nominee, why Clinton did not lose because of sexism, how Obama's camp is using the Internet to squelch rumors and who should be his V.P. It's great stuff and I recommend that you check out Free Radical.

Don't they have the Internet in Alaska?

In a couple of weeks, my little map covered in red dots is going to be archived. It will have been a year since it was started and they have to start over. I've had around 8,000 visits in the last year and before the map went away, I wanted to document where the dots are.


The majority of visits are from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia with a couple of other sizable dots in Iran (that's Sam's cousin!), India, and Indonesia (that's daysofturmoil).

Here’s where the rest of the dots appear with the notable absences in parentheses:

Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Guyana, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Mexico (No Cuba)

Hawaii and Newfoundland (No Alaska)

South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Canary Islands, Guinea, Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius (all major cities or capitols of those countries) and Morocco

Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, (One dot in China), (Only two dots in Russia: Moscow and Siberia), (One dot in Kyrgyzstan and no other former Soviet “stans”)

Pakistan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Bangladesh, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon and Jordan (No Afghanistan)

I find it fascinating. It's a potentially good indication of the prevalence of the Internet (or at least Blogger) around the world. In the case of China, it's especially indicative: only one dot for a country that has more Internet users than any other and for a blog that mentions China in 22 (make that 23) posts.

Lessons from the week

I haven't blogged in over a week, putting in my first March post at the end of its first week, and I'm not going to flog myself over it. I'm not Catholic so why do I live with so much guilt? I just keep wondering when I got to be so flaky. I used to have lists and goals and always knew what I wanted and where I was going. Then somewhere along the way I looked up and I was lost. I looked back down at what I thought was my map but it there was nothing on it except a couple of things from a "to do" list crossed off. Get a degree, travel in another country, move to another city, become an actress, make a film, find true love. Huh, now what? LESSON: There's never been a map. Get used to it.

There's a stone around my neck about this documentary that I volunteered to make for a non-profit in June. I then promptly moved and proceeded to put it off for about six months. Now it's due and I'm utterly uninspired by the footage they've sent me and pushing much to hard to figure out how to tie it all together. I keep thinking brilliant inspiration is right around the corner. In the middle of trying to make that movie, I made a little movie for the Bicycle Film Festival. Shot it, edited it, recorded voice over, even got a friend to make a soundtrack, burned a DVD and submitted it - in about two days. Today, I got a call from the woman at the non-profit. Crystal Light hired a production company (real filmmakers!) to make their own movie and she wants me to hold off for a while until we see what they're doing, and thanked for my flexibility! All this time I've been feeling guilty and she's thanking me. LESSON: Guilt is a waste of time. So is waiting for inspiration.

I read this great article about the advertising world and how mean the industry is. I was so thrilled that someone was finally saying it's not cool anymore. After a work experience at a small ad agency that left a very bad taste in my mouth, it's refreshing to hear an industry insider chastise these guys for "ad campaigns based on a hardening spirit, a lack of tolerance and an egocentric meanness that characterizes so much of today's advertising." It's not like I'm one of those goody two-shoes who only wants nice things in the world (or maybe I am!) but advertising is particularly rude, sexist, insulting and seems to delight itself in humiliating others. As someone who has auditioned for commercials, worked with the people writing them, and worked for the "client", I've seen it inside and out. Ad guys (and they are almost all men) conduct a brainstorm meeting like a pow-wow in the locker room after a game. The things I used to hear these guys say in would make their wives divorce them. The writer ends the article by saying that "it behooves marketing professionals to understand the difference between subtle irony and idiot snideness and aim for an advertising denominator cognizant of the maxim that expansive, confident consumers part with their cash far more readily than do angry, fearful ones." Shortly thereafter, I saw the film "Be Kind, Rewind," and realized walking out of it that it was actually, and truly, a film about kindness. No one was made fun of or belittled, no one acts like an ass for our amusement, no one is called ugly or fat and yet no one is held up as the ideal for us to worship. It's a movie about regular people coming together to make something beautiful. LESSON: Kindness is cool!

After all my blah-blah'ing about not caring that only 12 people read my blog, I have to say that I still wish my blog would show up in Blogger's "blogs of Note." There are some pretty cool ones in there and they prove my theory that popular blogs have shorter postings, more frequent postings, a single theme (a garden, photos of Paris) and lots of pictures! People like pictures. So I'm going to try that. Instead of not posting because I'm composing some big essay on things I know nothing about, I'll just post a photo and some tidbit. LESSON: Keep it simple.

My one-year anniversary

Today is my one-year blogging anniversary! 215 postings in a year, an average of four posts per week, which isn't as bad as I thought I was doing. I started out with a goal of five posts a week and am now only doing 2-3 but hanging in there. I've been having discussions with a friend recently who is thinking about starting a blog, and whether or not mine is "successful." She uses that word a lot when talking about blogging and when I asked her for a definition, she said "if you see blogs with 40 comments on a post, you know a lot of people are reading it."

Certainly there are blogs that attract a lot more attention than mine like the Daily Coyote written by a woman who's raising a coyote with her tomcat in Wyoming. But she doesn't really write much, it's mostly photos of this beautiful animal and people pay her $5 to receive it in their email on a daily basis. There are blogs about celebrities that get a lot more traffic and sure, comments galore, but I don't see the point in criticizing people and asking others to join in the fray. Many of those comments are downright disgusting. I'm not a well-known writer, I'm not an expert and I'm not a collection of bloggers. I didn't do it to sell advertising, create a persona or market my skills.

My plan was just to write and see where my interests lie. Maybe at some point, I thought, I would specialize in something and start a new blog just about that. I was never sure about revealing my secret identity to those who don't know it as I was a little freaked about about cyberstalking. Yet, it's not a personal blog either. One of those photos of the nephews and a post about going to grandmother's, a diary for friends and family.

I've been wondering, I suppose because of my one-year anniversary, if it's time for me to decide what it is and where it's going. Is it important for more than 40 people to read my blog? I'm not sure. There are definitely times when I wish I could share it with more people but worry about the scrutiny that would invite. It's a funny conundrum, my friend pointed out, because the Internet is all about exposure. You can't expose yourself partway. Some of the reason that I've written less in the last several months is because I'm more inwardly focused at the moment and find that I'm not comfortable writing about what's really going on with me.

It's not uncommon now for people to post photos publicly on Flickr of themselves and their families, and once when Googling a woman organizing an event I was attending, I found her personal blog that had her wedding photos and posts about her Indian husband and meeting his family, their baby, etc. It's highly personal and yet, in some ways not. It's all standard info: I'm a woman, I'm married to a man, we have a child and here are our photos. I find it far more revealing, for me, to talk about dating a 24-year old and all the issues and questions that has brought up. My interest in sharing such stories isn't about being an exhibitionist, although I worry about that being the perception.

Recently, a coworker made reference to my blog in an explanation for why she included me in an email about her work frustrations to her boss. I felt violated and betrayed, and yet, I did put it out there so from her perspective, it's public information. I suppose the question is whether there is value in me sharing my intimate thoughts and experiences. I'm reading a book now, "Eat, Pray, Love," that it seems every woman I know is reading. Much of it reminds me of my blog, actually, and I'm enjoying it so much that it seems to answer the question: Yes, if it makes another person feel understood and less crazy, there is value in sharing those personal experiences. This woman shares incredibly personal things and has her real name and her photo in the book!

On the other hand, I could see going the direction of a news blog. The New York Times just wrote about a blogger who turned his blog, Talking Points Memo, into a newspaper, and himself into a journalist by connecting the dots of what was already out in the media. His business plan was deceptively simple:
Begin as a tiny operation. Manage to gain a following. As the audience grows, ask readers for donations and accept advertising. As the advertising and donations grow, add reporters and features. Repeat as often as needed.

I could do that. I might even have interest in doing that. I certainly WANT to engage more people and wouldn't mind revealing my secret identity (I love referring to my real self as that) but I think in order to do so, I need to decide if it's personal or business. One thing is clear, I am committed to this thing called blogging. Cheers and thanks for reading!

No time in the present

Folks, I'm just not sure how to keep up the blog. I'm depressed about it, in part due to my feeling of responsibility to people who want to read the blog but mostly because I LOVE to blog and I'm really despondent about the fact that I don't have the time to do it. I can't figure exactly why I have no time; I feel like I have no time to exercise, read the newspaper, call friends and a multitude of other things that I used to take for granted. In a corporate environment, we put in10x more effort than what comes out in terms of product (what I can say that I actually did). So there's this feeling of always working hard, being totally consumed by a job, yet never getting my work done and at the end of the day, not having much to show for it.

On the way back from Portland on Monday morning, after spending two days with my nephews whom I love love love, I was on the plane having thoughts of wishing the plane would just crash into the ground. It started with the whole emergency exit thing which I realized is one hundred percent bullshit. Do you realize that the exit is ONLY for a water landing? And do you know the chances, when flying over the continental United States of a water landing? It's pretty much zero my friends. If you're going down, it's into a mountain or into the ground. There's no f'ing water to slide down the wing into. It's a fantasy, a false sense of hope and yet they make you listen to this shit as if it's really going to make a lick of difference.

I don't normally have suicidal thoughts and I'm not even sure that's what was happening. Maybe it's the fact that it's my birthday tomorrow and I often have very "final" thoughts around that time, like what is life all about anyway? Maybe it's because I really don't like transportation and have had to do so much in this job that I feel like I've dramatically increasing my chances of dying. I mean, by percentage flying isn't safer than driving but certainly a person who travels by plane once a week is at more risk than someone who travels once per year? I also, while looking down on the world, had thoughts about how ugly human life is from the air. (And frankly, it's pretty ugly inside the plane as well) The world without us is beautiful and awe-inspiring - mountains, lakes, clouds, the sky and stars, the ocean - but everything human made is pretty much disgustingly ugly from up above. Rooftops, roads, airports, shopping centers. None of this is designed to be looked at from above and it all looks like a blight on beauty and I start to think about what a disaster humans are...and hence start wishing that I weren't one of them, but I am.

So here I am, way past my bedtime (already!) on a Tuesday night with a pile of handwritten blog entries that haven't yet, and may never be posted on the blog because I don't have the time. And I don't know what to do about it. How do I post when I'm on the road when my "spare" time is spent flying? I'm hoping I'll get this whole time management figured out, but it's possible this is just my life for the moment.

I'm back (sort of)

Another month is about to pass with an abysmal number of entries. I know I shouldn't feel this guilty, it's just a blog, but it feels like giving up and maybe I've just given up on too many things lately. I see my friends on TV, they're creating TV shows and acting in big feature films and I wonder if I've made the right decision.

I started exercising again which always seems to be the first commitment. A person who can commit to exercise, it seems, can commit to anything. Maybe it's because our everything in our culture is created to allow us the luxury of not exercising. We are encouraged to use our brains, not our bodies for work. We drive, instead of walking or biking, to that job. At jobs like mine, a big beautiful cafeteria full of good - and healthy and cheap! - food is at my doorstep so again, I can return more quickly to sit at my desk. Once I get home, I've already spent the last ten hours training my body to sit, it takes a mentally strong person to say "now, I'm going to move only for the sake of moving."

I finally got an Internet connection this week (like getting a membership to the gym) thought that would instantly restore my blogging activity. Blogging, it seems, is like exercise - once out of shape, it's harder to do. But there are other barriers. I found myself one day feeling a little overexposed after someone I met found my blog. I've always thought of this project as my secret identity. A place where I can talk about things without worrying about people getting bored and without being judged. Once my identity is discovered, I don't feel safe anymore. I can't write about trouble at work if I think my co-workers are reading. I can't write about sex if someone I might want to date is reading.

So today, I Googled myself to see just how exposed I am and discovered the root of the anxiety. A number of sites that I have information on, or buy from, have chosen to use my name, my location, my interests and my purchases for marketing. It seems that someone might want to buy a book from Amazon because I bought it, or join a Meetup because I'm in it, or put their resume on LinkedIn so they can link to me. It's funny because my name has been on the Internet for a long time associated with acting jobs but that never felt invasive I guess because I was playing a character. But having my personal habits show up online as a piece of advertising feels like too much. And why can they do that without asking?

The privacy settings for these sites are buried and took a while to find. On LinkedIn, I couldn't hide some of the information, I had to hide all of it. I ended up deleting my Meetup profile because they didn't offer privacy settings at all, but Amazon, surprisingly, was the most difficult. A Google search revealed friends names, items on my wishlist, and items recently purchased! What if I was buying something to help with an embarrassing condition? (I'm NOT but what if I was?!) Privacy restored, for the time being, I feel a little more able to blog. I have lots of notes, things I've wanted to write but haven't yet, and I find it very comforting that Malcolm Gladwell hasn't updated his blog since January (of course he's probably writing a book, darn!)

I've said it once and I'll say it again: I miss letters

I got a lot of reaction to my post on cell phone mommies. Some comments came directly to me in email and all of them were saying that I should be more compassionate towards moms and parents. I never intended to be one of those judgmental people that think they know how to raise kids. A friend explained to me that getting the kid in a stroller sometimes is the only time a woman can have quiet time to get some adult interaction. I can dig it. I just remember getting a lot of attention from my mom. She talked to us, sang to us, took us to the park and on walks, made us food, played music and read books.


So I noticed that the global phenomenon of increased methods of communication that go with us everywhere has led to more chatter - in L.A. nearly everyone in the car is also on the phone - it makes me curious to know what the generation of kids growing up in this chatter will be like. I just joined Facebook after getting the sales pitch from several friends. I've already had a couple of conversations with people on it that I wouldn't talk to on the phone and haven't talked to in email, we just haven't been that close. Which means, we're trying to keep in touch with a lot more people than we used to.

In high school I had penpals in Europe that I wrote letters to. I corresponded with my grandmother in Ohio and a couple of friends in other parts of the world through the mail and they were special relationships. Catching up on the phone was a big deal, and you had to actual be home to do it. I had less friends than I do now, but the same number (and for the most part the same actual friends!) of close friends because despite the cell phone, email or Facebook, I can still only be close to the same number of people. One of the mommy comments was from a friend in Spain who wrote that he came home from work one day to find his wife and newborn crying together because after an hour and a half of trying to calm his baby, his wife had become desperate. It broke my heart and made me appreciate that we're in touch through the blog, although in 1989, we used to write letters!

Soon, we'll ALL have blogs!

A couple of years ago, my brother was visiting and we took his nephew to the Ventura Harbor and there was a live sea animal display and information about the Channel Islands and its unique habitat. All five islands are protected National Park and camping reservations have to be made three months in advance. Because it's an island chain, it's home to many unique animals including the cutest little red fox that lives only on these islands. There are fantastic photos of the islands on this photographer's site.


So it was with great enthusiasm that I asked about my co-workers trip there last weekend and was delighted to hear that it was highly eventful. She stayed on a boat, setting foot on land for only about ten minutes out of three days. They cooked on a stove suspended by the ceiling that swung with the boat so pots and pans wouldn't slide off. Does it work I asked? "Kind of."

Her Sierra Club group took rafts into sea caves and were stampeded by a herd of sea lions who appeared to be trying to sink them. She and a friend discovered a 26-foot shark carcass on the beach and later returned to the sea caves in scuba gear to explore the pitch black water. She then made reference to other trips like a shark diving expedition in which she threw up in the ventilator (apparently it's made to handle that, somehow) and I was just so amazed at her level of adventure.

Turns out, she has a blog! She promised that the Channel Islands trip will eventually be posted and I can't wait.

Moving into the light of discovery

I am just coming out of what has been one of the darkest moments of my history. Hard to believe because I only lost my job. I am still healthy, everyone I love is still alive, and I have not been swallowed by destitution. Far from it. My darkness is from within but that does not necessarily make it easier to overcome. It's ironic, or perhaps appropriate, that I would become unemployed at this moment in time.

I have been wrestling the last couple of years with my purpose in life. Almost seven years ago I gleefully left my job in marketing to move to Los Angeles and pursue acting. I felt very strongly that it was my calling. I said at the time that “I wanted to make people feel.” I suppose I have always in some way wanted to influence and inspire. Whether via my interest in politics or marketing for that matter, or more recently, filmmaking and writing. However, the pursuit of show business can make one weary and diminish the fire that once burned. I made a decision a little more than a year ago to give up acting and, tired of living in poverty, went back to marketing.

That's where the darkness began. I started questioning my motivation for staying in Los Angeles since I had begrudgingly moved here from beautiful Seattle. I miss the clouds, the rain, the fresh air. I despise driving in the city so much that it has, at times, made a recluse out of me. At the same time, marketing was never something I wanted, just something I fell into and happened to be good at. With a beautiful apartment in Santa Monica and a full-time job, I stopped doing anything other than working and one other thing: writing my blog.

It is probably this blog that has saved me from despair since I feel compelled to explain myself. I started it and I can't give up on it. The blog demands to know what's on my mind. Yet I have not written about the guilt I struggle with. What gives me the right, I wonder, to require that my life have meaning? That my work have meaning? Why do I not seem capable of just having a job? I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and at the same time a sense of fate. I am meant for something valuable, I know that I am. I know that I have something to offer the world, something yet to be discovered. It could be a film that I have dreamed of making, a blog entry that I will write, it could be a non-profit that I am to launch or a bid for public office that I have not yet made. My greatest fear, the blackness that surrounds me, is that I will live an unexamined life.

I'm reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, And Steel, the 400+ page Pulitzer Prize winning book that seeks to answer the question “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?” I'm only a quarter of the way through and yet I've already learned something very fascinating. Diamond seeks to explain how it is that in 1532 Francisco Pizarro with only 62 soldiers on horseback and 106 on foot was able to defeat Atahuallpa's army of 80,000 in modern-day Peru?

Even though the Spanish conquest of the New World began in 1510, no news of this had reached the Incas, 600 miles to the South. When Pizarro first landed on the Peruvian coast in 1527 he was not seen as a threat because Atahuallpa didn't know that only a decade earlier, the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes captured and killed Montezuma in Mexico, defeating the Aztecs. The people of the New World did not yet have a written language and no way of sharing such information.

While Pizarro replicated Cortes' strategy exactly, published back home, the Incas had never heard of anything like this happening. When Pizarro demanded a ransom of a gold-filled room for the release of Atahuallpa, the latter believed he would be let go when they provided it. But he was executed just as Montezuma had been. While it is not the sole cause of the defeat, literacy – the ability to learn and know about other peoples' experiences – gave the Spanish an advantage over those living without knowledge of anything they themselves had not experienced.

Several years ago, when I was in a similar place of not knowing what I wanted to do, I considered going back to school to study archeology and instead chose acting (naturally!) But I still love to read about history because I think there is so much to be learned from our past and from other cultures. I think this is how the blog fits into my life. It is where I examine and attempt to understand humanity and myself. It motivates me to be literate, it forces me to look beyond my life and ultimately live life in the light of discovery.

Life raft

I'm working on a project for a friend on mine and came across a fantastic blog all about book designs, covers and such. It's really interesting and well done. I have friends with blogs about t-shirts (there are actually dozens in this category) and soda and have come across the most unusual specialty blogs.

They remind me that 3.5 months into mine I still have no idea what it's about. Ha ha ha. Sounds like the perfect metaphor for my life. I've always wanted to be some kind of expert or specialist (it's supposedly a very Scorpio characteristic) and yet I find myself adrift in an ocean while interests of all kinds drift by offering to be my life raft. And I cannot decide.

A shout out to Algeria!

I know I'm the only one who gets a thrill out of the little red dots on the map of who's showing up to my site but yesterday I got my first ping in AFRICA. I'm so excited...it's from Algeria! Little do they (the Algerians) know I am a lover of their music.

It all started in 1995 when I saw the movie Party Girl at the local independent cinema in Seattle. The movie was cute and funny but what struck me most was a certain "Middle Eastern sounding" song. I rushed out to buy the soundtrack to find out what the song was (this is before you could listen to clips on Amazon) and found it was Khaled's "Les Ailes."

I bought an album of Khaled and eventually, four of his CDs. I bought Rachid Taha (also of Algeria) and saw the Master Musicians of Jajouka (Morocco) play in Seattle. It was a fantastic show, a magical experience. I bought Césaria Évora from Cape Verde, off the coast of Senegal, a beautiful blend of African, European and North American sounds.

A friend introduced me to Passion: Music For The Last Temptation of Christ. I have still never seen the movie but the soundtrack is unbelievably beautiful. I bought Passion Sources, the music and musicians that inspired and contributed to the soundtrack. Its traditional North African songs (many not more than vocals) are probably too exotic for most but I love them. I collected all of Dead Can Dance's music, also heavily borrowing North African themes. This rich music ironically goes very well with the dark, wet winters of Seattle.

Although my tastes have become more varied since moving to Los Angeles, (I'm loving Central-African-by-way-of-Belgium Zap Mama's latest) this music still holds a special place in my heart. In the last couple of years, I've even got my mother hooked. She can't get enough of Natacha Atlas (Egypt) and has listened to nothing but Cheb i Sabbah (Algeria) for the last few weeks. (This is a great disc.)

Seemingly unrelated, today has officially been declared Star Wars Day in Los Angeles but there's no mention of North Africa's special role in the sextet of films.

According to the official Star Wars site, North Africa has provided most of the films' shooting locations:
Tatooine was originally named Aquilae in the draft scripts of Star Wars, before adopting a name very similar to the southern Tunisian city of Tataouine. Being the most explored planet in the Star Wars films, Tatooine required the greatest number of real-world filming locations. In Africa, Djerba, Matmata, Tozeur, Medenine, Ksar Hadada, the Chott El-Djerid, and La Grande Dune doubled as Tatooine locales; in California, the production crew visited Death Valley, and in Arizona, the sand dunes of Yuma.

So, from California to Algeria, Happy Star Wars Day!

Expose yourself

This blog is starting to sound like a dream journal but I have been having some vivid and bizarre dreams lately. Last night, before going to bed, I decided to blog about an article in this month's Wired.

Five years ago Bangladeshi-born Hasan Elahi, a 35-year old artist and Rutgers professor, was detained at the Detroit airport by the FBI on suspicion of stockpiling explosives in a Florida storage facility. He was released when they were convinced they had the wrong guy but it landed him on the US terrorist watch list. A list that's apparently very difficult to get your name taken off of.

In response, Elahi started a website where he posts his location via a GPS he wears, a feed of his credit card transactions and, since he travels frequently, photos of every meal he's about to eat on an airplane. He also calls the FBI before every trip so they can alert their field offices. He hasn't been detained again.


Elahi says by flooding the market with information about himself, he deters overly ambitious agents from getting the details wrong in their snooping. He says with the younger generation, like his students, posting their personal photos on Flickr and writing journals on MySpace, Big Brother just might go out of business.

So last night, I had a dream that I was detained by a group of Scientologists. They told me that they had my friend's newborn daughter and unless I cooperated with them, they would not give her back. I got to see her for a moment. She was tiny like a Barbie doll and she was attached to a piece of cardboard with twisties like a doll when you buy it. I touched her little hands and started crying.

(I guess that the reason they had this particular friend's daughter is because she has a celebrity blog and doesn't say very positive things about the Scientologists. It's rumored that Scientology has maintained such a high profile list of followers by taking advantage of actors, desperate for success, and leeching their darkest secrets from them.)

They had my journals from high school and knew everything about me. They never harmed me physically but wore me down in questioning. They made me feel weak and vulnerable and then came in like my protector. "If you join us, we can protect you."

This is how Homeland Security works. Without their snooping, our cities might be bombed by terrorists every day. We don't know for sure, but we're scared and worn out, so we give in. At one point during the interrogation, I started hitting and punching the woman who was questioning me. She didn't react at all. She was like an android without any feelings. They continued to name the people I cared about that they had access to if I resisted. The dream ended with me saying "I want my life back. I want my job and my friends and my apartment and my boyfriend. I want my freedom back. I want the choice to say no to you" and I woke up sobbing.

I immediately thought about the Wired article. See, when I went to bed I thought "right on, good for you!" to Elahi taking charge of his life and refusing to be a victim. It could be his site that has kept him out of Guantanamo. But this morning I had a different view. I wasn't harmed in my dream but I clearly felt that my freedom had been taken from me. I realized that even things like the job I don't have anymore represent choices that I have, choices that I often take for granted. And I wondered, is this trend of total exposure and radical transparency really a victory?

Why I blog

For years, I didn't start a blog because I was self-conscious about having my thoughts out in the universe. In my "speaking" life, I'm very spontaneous - asking a lot of questions, stating my opinions (sometimes with little facts) and claiming things that turn out not to be true (embarrassing, but I'm used to it). Although I don't have a problem being wrong, I thought it a good idea to pay more attention to what I say WHEN I'm saying it and less time obsessing over it AFTER I've said it. Sigh, it's not easy.

So, I was working at a frustratingly stunted company, overripe with political nonsense, and I started to miss the road less traveled. I decided a) to find a new job and b) write about it. I still wasn't comfortable with the idea of putting my ideas out into the universe to be CACHED FOREVER but I thought maybe this was the best way to pay attention to what I'm saying and then let it go.

I've been blogging for two and a half months now (I wonder how old that makes my blog in cyber years) and have come to really enjoy it. Blogging (for me) is something between publishing my own magazine and keeping a digital journal. Some concepts I want to spend so much more time on: researching, interviewing, thinking about all the angles and writing draft after draft until I had created a gem. Other posts are just soul-searching ideas that without the blog would not be explored to quite the same depth.

It's much harder than it looks to sit down and put ideas floating around in the brain into coherent words. But the process of doing it I found myself going in a new direction. Finding more than just a hazy dissatisfaction, I also discovered passion in new places. I know there aren't that many people reading the blog and I'm not promoting it - it's literally just parked in cyberspace - so the fact that anyone is reading it and enjoying it is so thrilling.

The fact is, life is time-consuming, and it's easy to spend it all working, eating, sleeping, exercising, and socializing. It's difficult to take time for exploring thoughts but so far, it's been very rewarding. Thanks for listening.

A matter of opinion

Well, it was bound to happen. As soon as I found someone was reading this darn thing, I got stage fright! Couldn't think of anything to write and couldn't remember why I started the stupid thing. Everything floating around in my head seemed too serious, negative, ridiculous or just boring.

A college student in Malaysia commented last week on a couple of my posts. Apparently I had burst her bubble about work:
working can't be this bad...coz this is worrying me. Im in college now, for a 'proper education', but if it sucks, whats the point? (her comment and my response are here)

And I depressed her about being single:
why do we need to get married anyway? cant women just live on their own and not be perceived as 'old maids' and 'unattractive'? it sucks.

She said "it sucks" twice and I feel kind of bad about that! Her blog has some hilarious little gems in it. She's kind of pissed off about everything and doesn't seem to care what people think. A friend told me I write too much about things that need fixed in the world.

Last week I went to "An Unruly Evening with Harlan Ellison" at the Writer's Guild. They showed a fantastic documentary about Ellison - the award-winning sci-fi writer famous for scripting the TV shows The Outer Limits and Star Trek.

He's a lot more pissed off than I am. In between writing hundreds of stories, TV shows and novels, he's made a career of taking on the stupidity in the world. A friend told him that his problem was "he thinks all the battles are worth fighting."

He needs to relax, his wife said. "Really? Is that the problem?" Harlan retorts, "Oh great, I'll just relax then. You think I choose to be like this?"

He calls the U.S. "fiercely anti-intellectual," and contends that "You're not entitled to an opinion. You're entitled to an INFORMED opinion." And that, my friends, is exactly what makes me hesitate when I sit down to write an entry. Am I entitled to my opinion?

The bizarre world of blogging

I knew blogging was kind of a fad but I had NO IDEA how insanely popular it was until I started my own. Apparently, it's really important for blogs to link to other blogs but no one links to my blog. In fact, I think there are only about three people reading it (I ask them almost every day). And yet I still feel this enormous pressure to post at least five times a week. I get into these big essays and I'm not sure where I'm going with them and sometimes they take days to finish.

In between bouts of writing and editing, I look up other blogs just to see how they do it. One popular blog and I seem to fall down the rabbit hole of blogs. One blog leads to another and another and another. It's endless and my head is spinning. They're all referencing each other like they're in a big club. It seems like everyone and their grandmother has one! Who could possibly have time to read ALL THESE BLOGS? I can barely find the time to write, much less read, and all I keep thinking is: Are we going to get to a day when everyone is writing and no one's reading?

People aren't taking in more information are they? We've been reading, listening and watching for hundreds of years. So what are we getting from all these blogs? As it turns out, what we're getting are perspectives. It's like a diamond reflecting the light in a thousand different ways at the same time. It's the same light, we just have hundreds of views to choose from. Some bloggers are creating content (news, entertainment, advice) but most are just commenting on content already out there. This decade is all about having an opinion.

All aboard!