"No identity" Ouch!

I use 1password to store my various log-ins (not that I'm great at it because I get really annoyed when I'm not able to log-in at another computer just because I can't remember that stupid string of random letters and numbers). But I like the concept and I'm willing to let 1password take up a line of vertical space in my browser header. However, it's right above my tabs and whenever I miss "Google Reader" and hit "Use identity", 1password harshly tells me I have no identity! Alas! all my soul searching is for naught. Sigh...

Brain Crack and Bird by Bird

Months ago I blogged about brain crack in regard to grad school. I may still have a little bit of that. Gosh I had several conversations in the last week about why I wasn't in school and what was going on and I kept feeling kind of like a phony for insisting that I was good enough for a ph.d. program when none of the programs I apply to accept me into their programs.

But that's not really what this post is about. It's about a book and a confession.

The book: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It's a fantastic book on writing and life by a woman who holds nothing back. I read Anne Lamott and she encourages me to be honest with myself and (within reason) with others. I read aloud excerpts to my husband, and he just shakes his head while I laugh and empathize with the situation. Check it out. It's up there with Walking on Water as a book on writing you should read even if you don't want to write.

Anyway in Bird by Bird there is a quote of Annie Dillard that Lamott paraphrases as "day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more" (p. 202 if you care which I will in about 7 month). That, my friends, is a prettily worded solution to the phenomenon Ze Frank describes as brain crack. Instead of saving up your GREAT IDEA, you try it out.

And it's really hard to do. I struggle with it in various parts of my life, but I have to confess one right now. My brain crack of late is that I'll become a freelance writer. I have a (non-paying) project lined up. I get excited when I do the research. And then it languishes. And I'm sad. But I don't do anything about it. I put it on a vague list. I schedule a time to look at my notes and get re-excited and I put it off. I think it's because I'd really like to be a "writer" but I'm really scared that I won't be any good. I have a critic that's really really loud and repeats a particularly painful phrase that I'd link to because it's on the internet, but I don't want to let that person know exactly how much it bugs me. And so my article, the idea of becoming a writer, it's all brain crack.

Reading someone like Anne Lamott is helpful, because she admits to not having it all together. I read myself in her words of doubt and self-criticism and procrastination. She inspires me to break my addiction to brain crack. Lifehacker says that sometimes it's not a good idea to share your goals because it functions more like bragging than motivation, but despite that I do want to finish this particular writing project by September 1st, and my blog readers have permission to come to Cincinnati and kick my butt if it doesn't happen. :-)

Two Returns: Naming 2.0

Oh hi! Yeah, I do have a blog. It just got buried under masses of media and personal angst not worth blogging about. So I've returned and I have several blog post ideas in the works so I even might stick around for a while.

What brings me back to blogging? Well, an obsession with naming, books, and writing. Without further ado, my most recent encounter with the naming phenomenon:

I received another early review book. This one was a work of fiction by Janet Skeslien Charles entitled Moonlight in Odessa. After I reminisced about the Kansas City's version of the Arch (a St. Louis landmark) which is founded along I-70 at a little town called Odessa, I dove into this beautiful book about a practical, smart woman making a life for herself in Odessa, Ukraine (oh I get it), but who dreams of life in America particular achieved by the fiance visa. She finds this guy, a gentle teacher and boy scout troup leader, and visits Emerson, CA to see if they are compatible. Tristan's a woodsy guy and Daria's a city girl. It's not an eharmony match by any stretch of the imagination.

But there's this one scene where he takes her hiking like he promised to in every letter he wrote her. They're going down the trail and she asks the name of a flower. He replies, "Liza Jean," and she laughs. She asks the name of a tree and he replies, "Melissa." She goes to shake hands with the tree appreciating the joke. However, when the scene repeats later on after the relationship has deteriorated and she realizes the fraud and despises it. An Odessan man would cover up his lack of knowledge by studying up on plant names for the next time he is put on the spot. Tristan just langors in his ignorance. His disregard for names is continues when he criticizes Daria's accent. It's not Tree-stan; it's Tristan. Never once did he apologize for calling her Dora even once she corrected him.

Lack of knowledge, lack of knowing. Knowing someone or something's name is a key step on the road to knowing and understanding that person or thing. Naming helps give form and shape. The uniqueness of naming reminds us that we cannot simply imagine that all things are the same. Back in the day of AOL, email forwards, and junior high, I received a forward that dozens of boy's names and gave similar characteristics of all Aarons and Jeremys. No matter how fallacious that assumption is we catagorize people according to this specific label--a name. So Tristan's persistant mis-naming is really a symptom of his willful misunderstanding and shows a lack of attempt to even try to understand.

Anyway to salvage the book review, Moonlight in Odessa is a truly beautiful book. Sad, poignant, but worth it. I enjoyed it from the very beginning which while not rare, was an unexpected pleasure in an early review book. There are elements of humor though dark, which just serve to propel the reader further into Daria's Ukrainian mindset.

Oh yeah, you do almost get over the fact that Daria was the name of an MTV cartoon character in the 1990s (though Daria's tv show "Sick, Sad World" almost works for the book too).

TShirt Fight

I want THIS SHIRT and THIS SHIRT.

And I want a friend who would wear one of them with me and go traipsing about the country being all sorts of crazy. We'd have to stage fights or something. I think the shirts demand it.

(Sorry for all the Twilight-ness. I'm not even reading the books right now. I'm seriously obsessing over other YA. It just keeps showing up. I can't help it.)

Best of Bootie

Since I posted the Buffy/Edward mashup yesterday, I thought I'd share my other current fav in the world of mashups, Best of Bootie. Today I can't get the mashup of Fergie's London Bridge and Cake's Short Skirt/Long Jacket. These songs have become my go to playlist for cardio workouts and anytime I just want a smile on my face. I mean seriously who can't appreciate a mashup of Big Shot/Big Pimpin' or The Safety Dance/This New Bootie or Beethoven's 5th/Golddigger. Oh my goodness, some of the tracks are just inspired, others are songs that I always confuse and think they should be the same anyway. And really, I think that's just how songs travel. Maybe I have songs playing through my head more than most, and I do claim a high level of rapid associations, but songs never get finished when I sing them. They always morph into a song I like just as much or better or worse. (Ha! That's all the options there.) So the fact that a dj has done the same already just validifies my screwy thought process. :-) Anyway, check them out.

I do have to say that though they claim the "bootleg" title, these are as transformational to me as the Buffy/Twilight clip so I think they pass copyright restrictions. Maybe it's because they tend to use the whole song, but even then it's just specific track layers... Anyway, it's grey area in copyright land so use your best discretion.

Buffy/Edward Mashup

Buffy and/or Twilight fans! This mashup is too hilarious to pass up. It's nice to see a girl have an appropriate reaction to Edward's stalker behavior. The fun game is to see if you can figure out which Buffy episodes Jonathan pulled from.



H/T Bookshelves of Doom (I get all my good YA from Leila.)

In Defense of Twitter

I twitter. Not well. Not in the most significant of communication experiments connecting a global community in 140 characters or less. Mostly I just use it to update my facebook status. And keep up with my internet obsessions (fiveawesomegirls, vlogbrothers and the nerdfighters) and some other tech saavy friends whom I don't see often.

But this weekend I used twitter in an entirely new way. See I joined twitter right after the big earthquake in China last April. Impressed by the role Twitter played in getting news quickly in and out of the shambles of the Chinese province, I thought that this was something important to check out. I've watched various people adopt and wonder and criticize the shallowness of the Twitter format. And you know for 99% of communication via Twitter, they aren't wrong in their assessments. But in the aftermath of the Iranian election, news media has been incomplete and therefore in most mainstream media feeds light. There are not enough solid facts. So be it. But there are eyewitness accounts and they're coming in at #iranelection.

In Tehran, twitter was used to organize rooftop chants of Allah O Akbar (sorry don't know what it means) as evidenced by Youtube (h/t Daily Dish again)


It's an imperfect media source. Eye witness accounts are mixed with lots of messages of support and encouragement and not a few sarcastic/parody tweets. (It's gone now, but there was an amusing pseudo-feed from Ahmedinejad saying things like he won because he trended higher than Mousavi on twitter and that he would celebrate by going to an off-Broadway musical.) But it gets information out there. Not the tested and confirmed information that we expect from our mainstream media, but the best we can get right now. And scrolling through the tweets broadcasting safe proxy settings and new satellite coordinates to get BBC news, that this must be vital for Iranians right now.