I get by with a little help from my friends

Wednesday, I agreed to drive a good friend of mine to the airport. We were supposed to meet for lunch but he was running late, after doing last minute errands, and we skipped it. Both hungry, we were a little crabby and the traffic didn't help. I had spent the morning crying after getting rejections from jobs I had applied to, jobs that I was completely qualified for. I was telling my friend how frustrated I was and said "I'm seriously concerned about my ability to support myself in the future."

He scoffed at me. "Why didn't you apply for the job at my company, the VP asked me today what happened to my candidate?" I was busy telling him why I wasn't qualified for that job, writing, producing and editing commercials for a cable network. "Shut up," he said, "just apply."

So I did. The next day I had an interview. I don't have the job YET but this guy was predisposed to like me, because of my friend. It was easy to feel relaxed and confident because even though I don't have the experience he was looking for, he was looking for a way to make it work. It's easier to teach people to edit, he said, than it is to get good ideas and he could "see the creative vibe coming off of me." He could see me! He recognized my talents!

There's a scene from Ratatouille (be prepared, I might be talking about this movie for a long time!) where the gourmet rat tries to explain his appreciation for food, his gift to recognize taste, to his brother. "Try this," he says, handing him a piece of cheese, "now try this," a strawberry, "NOW, try them together." The brother rat does and after a long build up comes back with "yeah, I just don't get it" then goes back to eating garbage. See, there are things you can't teach people. I keep getting feedback that I don't have enough experience and I think, screw experience, I have intuition, I have ideas, I have my finger on the pulse! Why don't they recognize my talents?

If I get this job, I'll be making the same money I was, working two miles from my house in the same building as one of my closest friends, learning a new skill (editing) and getting the opportunity to direct professionally! It's a possibility that I had not foreseen and could not have imagined. When everyone was saying that there was a reason I wasn't getting any of these jobs, that the perfect job was coming, I thought they were just being nice. Turns out, they were right!

Come and see the real thing

A few years ago, I was babysitting for a friend's niece while her sister was visiting. They went out for a night on the town and I stayed at the hotel with Sophie, a precocious and adorable 2-year old with a penchant for telling people what to do. We had a rocky start. I had not yet proven my worth and she had to put me through the tests. Would I scold her if she misbehaved? Would I obey her if she gave me a command? Would I entertain her if she was bored?

When I got there, she was watching The Incredibles. I hadn't seen it since its release and had forgotten how much I liked it, and what a genius Brad Bird is as Edna Mode (and for writing and directing it). When it was over, Sophie wanted me to scroll through the menu to find another movie. I must have been reading the titles because she's only two, and yet I can't think why I would have read Shrek out loud because she pointed her little finger at the screen and commanded, "Shrek!" I wanted to make her happy, I wanted to pass the tests but there was no way I was to sit through that Dreamworks crap. Ugly animation, obvious storylines, fart jokes? No. I turned to her and enthusiastically suggested "Let's watch The Incredibles again!" I don't know what thoughts went through that mind of hers, insubordination, troublemaker, but after a long pause she finally squealed, "okay!"

We watched The Incredibles two more times before I was able to put her to bed. I passed all the tests and the next day, I was her new best friend. But I was still wondering, how many movies are enjoyable three times in a row? I could have watched it again. There's something magical about Pixar. They're everything that Dreamworks isn't: beautiful, intelligent, clever, real, unexpected.

I saw Ratatouille last night and was blown away. I haven't disliked a Pixar film but some are definitely stronger than others; Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc. being among my favorites. Ratatouille might be the best of all. Pixar movies take me back to my childhood, watching the old Disney animated films. By picking up where Walt Disney left off, Pixar has saved Disney from being a meaningless media conglomerate, a relic of the past.


Unapologetically smart, richly layered, stunningly beautiful and with heart, Ratatouille is the real thing. Ocean's 13 may as well be George and Brad having a conversation about what big box office draws they are, it's that boring and pretentious. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is like one of those building facades. It looks like a movie, it has all the characteristics, and yet it isn't. It's hollow and meaningless and there's nothing there. As soon you stop looking at it, it evaporates.

The Pixar films take years to make and it shows. They are a labor of love. How often do you we get to witness the product of so much talent, creativity, passion and joy? It made me laugh and cry and at times I wanted to cheer at the audacity of Pixar to make something so AUTHENTIC. There are six major characters with arcs and conflict and related storylines. It has a fantastic message and is worth seeing just for the a monologue delivered by Peter O'Toole at the end. It boldly challenges our perceptions and throughout the film, you feel them falling away, making room for something new. It's the best movie I've seen in a year, maybe two.

Driving home after watching it, I distinctly remember feeling different. I FELT happier, more grateful, more human. I thought, god, life is wonderful. A movie made me feel that, which is the reason I got into this business in the first place. If you don't see this movie in the theater, you'll be depriving yourself of, in my opinion, the joy for living. (Hey, look! I didn't give the whole movie away.)

I propose a name change: Original Cells

Last week, an exchange student from Spain that was a friend of mine in high school emailed me. Thank goodness he’s fluent in English, as I have somehow not absorbed Spanish through osmosis. I live in Los Angeles and still can’t figure out how that has not happened, but that’s another story.

He and his wife are having a baby (affectionately termed human-cub but soon to be known as Nicolas) in about a week. He’s become a big fan of the blog and has written me some very interesting think pieces of his own. When the baby is born, they are going to be preserving some of his umbilical stem cells in case a) the research provides a viable method of reversing diseases that are currently fatal, degenerative or untreatable and b) the boy develops one of those diseases.

It’s an expensive procedure, harvesting the cells, and they have to be preserved which also costs money. Richard Branson, the Virgin billionaire, is leading the charge on collecting and storing of stem cells in a bank for private citizens. It’s really no different than a blood bank. Stem cells (which, can I just say are in dire need of a name change - ghastly!) can be collected from the amniotic fluid of pregnant women and the umbilical cord of newborns.

But scientists need a LOT of cells for research. The discussed solution has been to grow embryos and then kill them for the cells or use already destroyed embryos from abortions. Understandably, this is controversial but the majority of the American public supports the research. President Bush has twice vetoed to expand federal funding on religious/moral grounds and scientists are hoping the next president will deliver in '08.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has allocated state funding for it and California is now leading the US research. Scientists are universally convinced that stem cell therapy is breakthrough technology and are taking steps to ensure ethical responsibility.

Finding a way to continue the research drives scientists like William Hurlbut to find a way to get the stem cells without killing babies. He gave a presentation to the Vatican on his homegrown sacks of cells (and hair, teeth, nails) that aren’t human but provide the cells. It’s still enough to make the average person squeamish but this is an elevated level of concern from how we've used animals for decades in the name of science and human health. (The article about Hurlbut is a fascinating read, by the way.)

My Spanish friend was commenting on the fact that given the option, how could any parent say no to preserving these cells for potential future use? Could you imagine your child developing a life-threatening disease and flashing back to five or ten years ago when you decided not to spend the money on what could have been the cure? But what if it’s a bunch of hype like being cryogenically frozen when you die?

Critics say that the procedure is taking advantage of parents since the chance of a child developing a disease treatable by this method is 1 in 10,000, 1 in 20,000 or between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 200,000 depending on which article you read. That sounds definitive. By that rationale, we should immediately outlaw insurance and arrest everyone profiting from the biggest rip-off on the planet. Without the research, how can anyone say what diseases stem cells might be capable of treating?

The fact is, scams are rarely this high profile and don’t usually involve overwhelming support of the scientific community. Regenerative medicine has already proven to be extremely effective and the days of relying on government to regulate progress are over. Across national and political lines, the public is casting ballots of support with their purchasing decisions. Individuals, like my friend, are creating our future and I for one am grateful. The chances are when stem-cell therapy becomes available, it will be someone else's cells that will save the life of someone you love.

Who wants a second life?

Isn't one life more than a handful? I'm trying to figure out the Second Life phenomenon. I read a while back that it was the most played video game ever. Of course, call it a video game and immediately announce that you are not one of the residents of Second Life. And, a video game it is not. It's more like a cyber lounge. Visit an alternate universe, change your image, take a class, go to a nightclub, meet another player to share some (ahem) indiscretion.

I have to ask, why walk around on a computer when I can walk in real life along the coast and actually get exercise? Why watch a woman play the guitar in a virtual club with virtual people when I can just go to a club? Are the people playing too unsightly to go outside? They live somewhere with no live music available? Are they paranoid schizophrenics who have a hard time dealing with strangers? Or are the streets where they live too dangerous for walking? Is it possible that there are over seven million people in this predicament? If not, it means that someone I know must be playing Second Life.

With 7,573,799 residents and growing at 36% per month (although only 1,739,352 have logged in during the past 60 days) the popularity of Second Life is difficult to ignore. Do you know that the average user spends FORTY HOURS PER MONTH on Second Life?! Holy crap, that's like a whole work week. Is it just like the rest of the Internet, people connecting via blogs and online dating? Or is it something more, the only way we'll connect in the future? I'd love to meet someone who can tell me what's cool about it.

At the risk of sounding like someone's grandmother, are people living a second life instead of a RL? (In SL, an RL means real life.) I used to work with a guy who was very sweet but seemed a little lonely. He had a four year old daughter and lit up whenever I asked about her. One day I said something about Second Life and he said he wife "was on there all the time." They have a four year old, he's working and she's living life online? It's a good thing it isn't that expensive or people would be losing their RL homes to buy land in SL.

This is what I have been able to ascertain so far:

1) The worlds are created by users so it either looks like our world or looks like someone's sci-fi version. In other words, most of it is hideously ugly. I expected it to be much weirder and "out there". This is just like the real world except badly drawn.


2) The activities, while fantastic (like flying) are only happening on a computer screen. What happened to the REAL futuristic technology of simulated reality? Let's just plug into The Matrix already! Honestly, I think I'd rather go to Disneyland.

3) Video games are created by artists and writers - they have details, a history, they have an objective, they make sense. This just seems haphazard to me. Here's a question. Does a man living in SL as a woman have the same experience as a man cross-dressing in RL? Otherwise, what's the point right?

4) It has rapidly been taken over by what else, sex. I guess most people want their second life to have more/weirder sex. Except again, let me remind you that there's no actual sex. At best you're watching your badly animated avatar humping another one. (Realistic body parts cost extra) Yuck!

5) Every business on the planet has jumped on board and as usual has no idea why. They don't even know what it is they just hear the numbers of how many people (i.e. consumers) are online and want a piece of the action.

Wired published a traveler's guide because, of course, they have an office there.

They list three minor "hazards and annoyances":
1) It's confusing and can be difficult to master even the simplest of actions.
2) Crowded places slow your frame rate to a slow crawl, apparently just a fact of life in SL.
3) It's ugly and overwhelming (already noted).

Gee, maybe I was being too harsh before. It sounds fun. I wonder if people are spending 40 hours a month on it because that's how long it takes to learn things and refresh the screen. Ha ha ha. Here's something potentially interesting. Virtual Hallucinations was created by UC Davis medical staff to simulate the audiovisual hallucinations associated with schizophrenia. Wander through and voices tell you to kill yourself. If you look in the mirror, a death mask stares back. (Educational!) This is at least on the right track, experiencing how other people see the world, but not nearly as impressive as the virtual reality chambers being used to treat soldiers suffering from PSTD.

Browsing photos on Flickr of residents' Second Lives, I get a sense of the appeal. It's a creative outlet for the average person. Without any special technical abilities, anyone can create a character, a world, or a product and see it move and interact with other people's creations. I can dig that. I still don't think it's for me but if anyone has done it and liked it, I want to hear about it!

Experience is more important than information

Last week I was invited by a friend (thank you!) to a sneak preview screening of A Mighty Heart with Angelina Jolie, about the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl. I don’t usually bother with film critiques but this movie had huge gaping holes where moments should have been and it made me think of a parallel to marketing. A marketing piece, like a film, has three distinct parts: a hook, the message and a call-to-action. The film equivalent would be the premise, the journey and the resolution. The effectiveness of these parts relies on moments – what screenwriters call turning points. My argument is that ultimately, these moments and the effect they have on the audience are more important than the context.

The trap that filmmakers fall into is the same problem that marketers fall into. They worry more about the details than the experience. The content is almost meaningless. It doesn’t matter if he’s been missing for 17 or 70 hours. It doesn’t matter if your product is $5 or $50 off. What matters is how the audience experiences the information. It’s not information that motivates them to buy or tell their friends to see the film.

What’s more enjoyable? Walking out of a movie that moved you, that made you feel something but not knowing exactly what happened and having to sort it out later, or walking out knowing exactly what happened but not feeling anything? You feel even more cheated, you have all the information and yet, you still don’t care. Clarity is meaningless if your audience is not moved.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
What I wanted to see was a story about a woman dealing with her helplessness and inevitable tragedy. I never felt like we got to share her pain. We never even saw the world. There was one instance in which the news erroneously reported that his body had been found but we never saw let’s say, the people of the United States watching it! What about when Mariane is on the phone with Daniel’s mother and she says, “You know it’s not true right?” Is she consoling her? What’s happening on the other end? We don’t know. How powerful would it have been to see Daniel’s mother having a breakdown and Mariane having to be the strong one, consoling her from Karachi? The ironic cruelty of that would have been too painful to watch.

Here are three missed moments and how I would have created them.

1) This movie was like CSI: Karachi. The whole focus was on the chase, the investigation and not on Mariane and her journey. We never see the moment in which Mariane realizes for the first time that Danny might never be found. This is a huge moment, possibly the most important moment of the movie. Where was it? She’s stoic the whole time – and maybe that’s how she really was – but as an audience we need to know why. Is she inside thinking about what it’s going to be like to raise a child without his father but stuffing her grief? Putting on a good face? Or is she in total denial and believes 100% until the end that he’s coming back? We’re not sure.

This should potentially be the most memorable moment of the movie. We already know what’s going to happen, we know how it ends but Mariane doesn’t. The moment should have been when she realizes that the kidnapping was planned and not spontaneous. She gets it, intellectually. She's the one that tells us but did she feel it? She should have changed from that moment on – from matter-of-fact dealing with a situation to suddenly feeling very small or angry, or whatever. The shift should have been dramatic.

2) The film begins with Mariane Pearl’s voiceover from after the event is over. She drives through the city and the camera pans out to show her amidst the chaos and immensity of Karachi and she says something like “How can you find one man in all of this.” Now, that moment is completely wasted. They just gave away the second turning point!

It should start in the details of her life with Daniel. Their work, the pregnancy, the home. We don’t need to know why they were there or for how long or even when. It’s not relevant. What we need is to feel his absence from her life and then see events unfold in a landscape so large and so chaotic that we feel her helplessness.

Thelma & Louise starts small, in the mundane details of our characters’ lives. Geena Davis puts the Snickers bar in the freezer over and over, only to keep taking it out for another bite. Susan Sarandon washes the dishes with inordinate care and attention. As we go on their journey, our perspective gets wider and we are able to see them in context of the world. We gradually come to realize that they are powerless against the big wide world. It ends with a magnificent shot of the women driving off a cliff over the Grand Canyon as a tiny Harvey Keitel runs after them. One man, all that space.

What I would have liked to see is the Karachi scene later in the film. It should be the first time the audience fully realizes what she’s up against and the utter futility of the search. Maybe Mariane spends the night driving around the city in a taxi looking for him. It’s a ridiculous, desperate move but now that we understand the situation, we can be floored by her strength and the fact that she doesn’t give up.

3) When the group confronts Mariane to tell her that Daniel is gone she says, “How do you know?” and someone replies, “There was a video tape.” I feel like I’m watching a movie made for idiots! We know there was a tape. We saw the tape. WE know, see? It’s not the character’s movie, it’s our movie, it’s my movie and what I want is for Mariane to SEE the tape. I want no one to speak but instead someone just hands her the tape. She looks down and realizes that her husband, the last moments of his life, all that is left of him, is her hands.

As an actress, Angelina Jolie should have thought of this and asked for it. All good performers think about their props and how they can physicalize their action, and a director should always be thinking how they can show instead of tell. Mariane takes the tape and goes into the room with it. She can still scream or cry but now she has the tape to react to. She can throw it or talk to it, cradle it in her arms or destroy it. Seeing a woman fall apart over a piece of plastic? That would have moved me.

After the film my friend asked if I would tell people they had to see this movie and I replied no. I thought it was okay. It was well shot, well acted and was reasonably interesting but there was no call-to-action, no takeaway. What was the point? I wasn’t left with an experience. How would I pitch it to my friends? And that’s what I think about in marketing. How will the consumer tell their friends about this? I start with the answer to that question and work backwards to make it happen.

I just read an article in which Asra Nomani, the good friend of the Pearl's whose house they stayed at in Karachi, criticizes the movie. Her critique is different than mine and probably more valid. Mine is that the movie failed at what I think it was trying to do - show Mariane's story. Hers is that the movie failed to do what it should have done - tell us who Daniel Pearl was. I couldn't agree more, it was a film that never found its purpose.

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.

We live in a malarious world

I was reading the new National Geographic at my last chiropractor appointment today. After six months of treatment, my neck is now 14mm off center. Normal is 5-10mm and when I started, I was at 20mm. “We live in a malarious world,” I replied when Dr. Adam asked me what was new in National Geographic. I remember reading about malaria several years ago in the magazine. It said then that a minute amount of DDT would save hundreds of thousands of the million Africans now dying from the disease every year but because of the ban, it had become nearly impossible to procure.

In the 1930's millions of cases of malaria had been recorded in the United States, mostly in the humid south. In 1948, a Swiss chemist created a compound called DDT that was nothing short of a miracle. Microscopic amounts could kill and continue to kill malarial mosquitoes for months, and it was cheap. In 1955, the World Health Organization launched a program to eradicate the disease worldwide in ten years. More than a billion dollars were spent and it was possibly the most elaborate international health initiative ever undertaken.

In the United States, it had already been wiped out. Windows were screened, swamps were bulldozed, wetlands drained and sprayed with DDT and everyone had access to a doctor and treatment. In addition, the species of mosquito transmitting it preferred cows over humans. The WHO program achieved some success, virtually destroying it in Brazil, the Caribbean, South Pacific, Europe and Asia. But this intelligent parasite persisted in the deep tropics and the program was abandoned in 1969. It immediately roared back to life in India and Sri Lanka and although it had never been abated in Africa, the ban of DDT due to overuse, caused incidences there to triple.

The malaria parasite is one of the world's oldest diseases. It's believed that it afflicted dinosaurs! It attacked animals long before there were men and affects mice, birds, snakes, bats, flying squirrels and monkeys. It has played a role throughout history, possibly killing Alexander the Great, weakening the armies of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, and ending the life of Dante, the Italian poet. It afflicted so many in Washington D.C. including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, that one physician proposed erecting a giant wire screen around the city. A million soldiers in the civil war died of it. In fact, some scientists guess that as many as half of everyone who has ever lived on the planet, died of malaria. It devastates countries and economies, killing and weakening entire populations. A survivor of malaria will suffer its effects their entire life.

There has never been a vaccine for a parasite. Viruses and bacterias, yes, but the polio virus for example has only 11 genes compared to malaria's 5000. It is a complex and rapidly evolving organism built to multiply at astronomical rates, destroy everything and mutate to resist drugs. After decades of neglect, people with money have started to care again about malaria. It now threatens more people than ever, half of the world's population. Three thousand children die of the disease every day and even with the hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Bill Gates to help eradicate what he has called “the worst thing on the planet” and 1.2 billion pledged by the Bush Administration, the allies of malaria continue. Lack of education, limited access to health care, the constant threat of war, and a weak infrastructure present formidable challenges to distributing prevention techniques and treatments.

Ninety-five percent of the malaria deaths are caused by the most virulent of the four species. It attacks the brain and does so with such speed that it can literally kill overnight. Even victims who are lucky enough to survive, likely do so with permanent neurological damage. Ninety teams around the world are working on some aspect of a vaccine but only one company is dedicated to it. Its CEO, Stephen Hoffman, has spent the thirty-four years of his life in this pursuit. In 1984, a headline in The New York Times read “MALARIA VACCINE IS NEAR” in response to the success of the company Hoffman then worked for. In 1991, the paper's headline read “EFFORT TO FIGHT MALARIA APPEARS TO HAVE FAILED.”

It isn't likely that this millions of year old parasite will go easily but we must not give up the fight. Global warming has increased the range of the malarial mosquito, increasing the temperature and allowing it to live in places once too cold. There are three things we have to combat malaria: Nets (to prevent bites), treatment drugs and DDT (to kill the mosquitoes).

Here's what we can do: Donate to organizations that provide bed nets and other supplies to malaria-ridden countries. Malaria No More and Nothing But Nets are two such organizations. And purchase the hip (Red) products that support Global Fund which fights AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, the world's three deadliest diseases.

“The Biggest Hat That Has Ever Been Made in the History of the World."

Last year I was the secretary for my local college alumni organization and put my experience to work organizing their first film festival. It featured several shorts (including my own) and one full-length film, Balloonhat in which balloon-twister Addi Somekh traveled around the world and demonstrated his unique ability to transcend cultural divides and make people smile with his creations. It was an inspiring and uplifting film. Afterwards the audience flocked around Addi to watch him make balloon art for us.


Addi just sent me an email that he has launched his own channel on YouTube. He writes:
It's been 16 years since I twisted my first balloon, and I decided to celebrate by starting a channel on YouTube called Addi’s Inflatable Minute. Every week will be completely different yet always anchored in the fascinating power of All Things Inflatable: Wild experiments with giant balloons clobbering little kids, the time I made 200 hats on the Martha Stewart Show, instructions on how to make the balloon ring (and impress the ladies) and “The Biggest Hat That Has Ever Been Made in the History of the World." Upcoming episodes include a guy in Berkeley that invented a balloon organ(?!), a balloon bikini photo shoot, a balloon hat/wheelchair parade in a nursing home and much more.

It's fantastic, watch them all!

Job-hunting is more difficult than work!

The work day is done and I only applied to one job! I have five more I was supposed to do today. These books say you have to customize each letter and resume to exactly the job description and the company. It's extremely time-consuming! Now I have go walk before it gets dark.

Here was my workday:
9am - Woke up (stayed up too late last night writing out an idea), did some research online about the non-profit idea that I have. Replied to some emails.
10am - Made breakfast, showered, dressed.
11am - Took notes about which jobs to apply to today.
Noon - Paid some bills. Went to get gas, check my mail (I finally got my unemployment check!) and buy water at the store.
1pm - Ordered Microsoft Word because the open source program just isn't cutting it for all these customized resumes (sorry Ben!) Also ordered The West Wing Season 5 (it was 50% off) and made a photo album online for my dad (for Father's Day.)
2pm - Made lunch and took a break.
2:30pm - Brainstormed ideas for the jobs' resumes and cover letters. Got depressed and drank a root beer for a little sugar high.
4pm - Sat down to work on applying for jobs.
6:40pm - Finally finished the resume and cover letter for ONE job and applied! I sure hope this gets easier.

An underground forest

I'm sorry for the absence of regular posts. The job hunt has taken most of my time and zapped my creativity. It's been an interesting, enlightening and at times, treacherous search. I'll write more about it later. Today I was reminded of something else I wanted to write about.

Something that I am very keen on is perspective. Nothing is more fascinating to me than the powerful and intensely personal idea of perspective. No one sees any one thing the same way. There are very few absolutes in this world. Einstein theorized that we don't even experience time the same way. I love anything that makes me experience this shift in perspective. An article, a book, a movie, a photograph, a trip, a relationship - all of these things have at one time profoundly revealed a new way of experiencing my reality.

There was an article in National Geographic a few months ago about the prairie in the Flint Hills of Kansas. A pull quote reads "See the tallgrass prairie for itself, and you begin to suspect that grasses are what hold this world together." I love how the quote doesn't read "see the prairie for yourself" it says "itself." The vastness of plains belies the hidden complexity of this vital ecosystem. It reminded me of the Planet Earth episode on The Great Plains.

"The plains of our planet support the greatest gatherings of wildlife on earth," says David Attenborough in his delicious accent. "At the heart of all that happens here is a single living thing, grass. This miraculous plant covers a quarter of all the lands of the earth...and feeds more wildlife than any other plant."

The article starts with looking over the plain, what do you see? The answer might be nothing. The reason that grass is almost impossible to kill is because it lives under the ground with roots reaching up to eight feet below the soil. Grazing and fire are a natural part of the lifecycle of grasses, clearing away debris and allowing more light to warm the soil, fueling growth. While our instinct is to look out over a plain, to actually see the plain, you have to look down.

"Imagine the prairie upside down - the leaves and stems growing downward into the soil and the roots of all these species growing skyward. You are suddenly walking through a dense, tenacious thicket of roots. The horizon is gone because you are over-ears in plant fibers, some spreading and slender, some tall, with strange bulbous growths on them. It is as though you were walking through a forest of veins and capillaries, each species finding a different niche - a different height, a different strategy - in the competition for resources."

"The tallgrass prairie also reminds us how we should think about the life that surrounds us. Our old habits of seeing find in all of this a familiar simplicity, the kind you push past on your way to a more human future. But in the ancient prairie...there is a new way of seeing waiting to be found."

"This article documents a current event."

We've all received the emails forwarded by someone you hardly know, a call for help, sign a petition, send money now! In the early days of the Internet, there were a lot of these and many if not most, were hoaxes. I was a regular email user long before many people I know so it wasn't unheard of for me to literally receive the same chain letter for years and years and years. I was always kind of flabbergasted when someone I considered to be intelligent and informed would forward some crap to me. I would look up the letter on the Internet, find out the truth and email the sender to let them know they can stop worrying, the call for help isn't real.

I don't get as many of those types of emails now but I got one today. It was about a kidnapped girl and it was a plea to forward a photo of her all over the Internet in hopes that she'll be found. The email, naturally, was from someone I hardly know so I was suspicious. I looked it up. It turns out it's not only real but has so ubiquitously populated the Internet that when you type in the girl's name in Google, it yields 1,450,000 results! Kidnapped only a month ago, it's been mentioned on 47,251 blogs and has a complete entry in Wikipedia outlining the entire ordeal with up to minute updates.

And yet, despite this kind of exposure that a decade ago did not exist, Madeleine McCann has not been found and there are no significant developments in the case. The reigning theory is that she was sold into a pedophile trafficking ring operating in Morocco. I imagine that this increased exposure still doesn't reach the kind of people who might actually come across this girl. I thought I would become the 47,252nd blog to mention it in hopes that I'm wrong.

The culture mash

My mother was telling me that the last time she was in England, her cousins took her to a supermall that had been built near them. It's so huge, there's an actual ski slope inside. They were especially excited to show her the "American section" of the mall which boasts a replica of New Orleans' Jackson Square, a real Texas BBQ and cowboy shops, a fifties diner and the pièce de résistance, a bowling alley! When my mom did not express the unique kind of joy they were expecting, her cousin said "but I thought all Americans were bowling mad!" Apparently not.

"Ridiculous," my mom continued, "why do they think I would be excited about that? If they came to the states, I wouldn't take them to have English tea." I thought about it for a moment. "Well, we took Chiemi to Benihana," I said, reminding her of the ensemble of exchange students we hosted in my high school years. Chiemi was from Japan. "Oh yeah, we did!" she giggled.

"And I'm pretty sure we took Jenny (from Sweden) to Solvang (the replica of a Danish town)." My mom is suddenly mock-embarrassed. "Oh yeah, we took her to the smorgasbord restaurant for Swedish meatballs!" She howled with laughter. We too, succumbed to the urge to show someone's culture to them in a foreign land. I think this impulse is one of peace-making. It's a way to say "our country values your culture." The risk, of course, is that it's more likely that our country has perverted, diminished and commercialized their culture, but it's the gesture that counts.

What I think is a more powerful expression of appreciation is a merging of the two cultures. One of the biggest attractions in Los Angeles is a restaurant that on weekend nights hosts an Elvis impersonator. It's not the entertainment of someone karaoking to Elvis that's made "Thai Elvis" a cult-figure (you need only Google "Thai Elvis" to find the restaurant), it's the tangible culture mash that's so appealing.

On my walk today, someone was practicing the bagpipes looking over the ocean as the sun set. It sounded very good and he was getting quite a bit of attention. As I got closer, I could see that the bagpiper was African-American. How fantastic! This is the merging of culture that makes Los Angeles the special place that it is.