1) Read this to decide whether you want to wait for the second generation.
2) If you just can’t wait to be like all the cool kids, buy it here. Free shipping and I think no sales tax.
3) Get this stand. It’s la ultima. I lay in bed, put the groovy stand on groovy torso, and walah, primo pad reading/viewing.
4) And here’s my case if you want to be like the grooviest kid.
Title of an excellent article in last Sunday’s NYT with one disruptive “how the heck are retailers going to sell to people if they become more thoughtful consumers who prioritize relationships” thread that detracted from it. That article lead to a Sunday afternoon of blog and e-book reading about minimalism, content I was mostly familiar with already. I continue to be interested in positive psychology and living more simply.
Favorite sentences from the afternoon of reading. From Leo Babauta’s e-book titled “The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life”. Leo’s Zen Habits blog has 185,000 subscribers. “Plan your ideal day. Then strip your life of the non-essentials to make room for this ideal day, for the things and people you love.”
Okay, I’ll try.
This just in. “Prosecutors and investigators can corroborate Lance Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs without relying on testimony from Floyd Landis, an admitted doper.”
I don’t take any joy in (apparently) being right.
For the sake of his phenomenal cancer fund raising activities, I just hope he doesn’t borrow from Roger Clemens, but instead comes completely clean and expresses genuine remorse at not being forthright for so long. Bonus points for making amends with Lemond and Landis.
There’s a chance he may not read Positive Momentum, but even if he does, I’m not optimistic he’ll follow my advice.
The New York Times’ commentators have been writing a fair amount about how to revive our moribund economy and related issues like consumer and government spending, taxes, and unemployment. Sometimes I find the readers’ “recommended comments” more interesting than the essays themselves. They’re liberal and decidely cynical about life in the U.S. today. Their most common rallying cries are corporate greed, class warfare, out-of-touch politicians, and right-wing media.
Recently, they’ve been most fired up about members of Congress being out-of-touch with ordinary citizens, many who have been laid off, and too many that appear to be entering into permanent unemployment.
The question I haven’t seen asked is how does one, whether a member of Congress, or a college professor, develop empathy for the under-employed or short, medium, or long-term unemployed? The best answer of course is direct personal experience, but giving up one’s job in the interest of greater empathy doesn’t make much sense.
There have to be better ways, whether documentaries, essays, novels, photographs, music, and plays, that can help humanize the out-of-touch among us. The arts seem especially well suited to this task. I wish The Times’ irate, cynical commentators would each choose an art form and begin telling their stories with the out-of-touch Congress as their primary audience.
Just missed Cypress High School’s class of 1980 30th reunion. I vaguely remember the 10th and 20th, but I’ve now officially left the stage. I have to confess to an “out of sight for a long, long time, out of mind” mentality. Skimming the reunion website and checking on people’s updated profiles has been sufficient.
I’ve kept up with a couple of friends from high school, but maintaining sporadic long distance relationships isn’t a strong suit.
I’ve lived in a lot of places, traveled far beyond the “Orange curtain”, been extremely blessed to have lived a fulfilling life, and don’t have much need to relive high school.
I don’t remember half of the 700+ graduates when skimming their profiles. It was a large, relatively impersonal suburban high school. My memories of my teachers and classes are vague. I remember sneaking out of English once to get to the golf course early. I remember exploding for five goals against Western in a junior varsity water polo game. I remember getting drunk and hurling in the parking lot at the “happiest place on earth”.
Why bother trying to catch up with 95% of my classmates when they are strangers? My life is and has always been focused on and enriched by family and friends where I’m living at the moment. I’m sure that’s also true for most of the people who attended, so maybe I’m just not as social.
I’ll always enjoy visiting SoCal (especially if my brother ever finishes his house), but it’s in the rearview mirror. Everyone that played in the reunion golf tournament Tuesday is no doubt celebrating that fact.
Seventeen, who will be eighteen shortly, grew up playing soccer. She was usually one of the weaker players on one of the better teams. Probably the fault of my genetics. Also, soccer was first and foremost social, so she hardly ever played between organized practices and games.
Her uneven play never bothered me because the effort was there, she usually enjoyed it, and she learned how to compete. At the beginning of high school, she applied those lessons to a new sport, swimming, and continues to improve in the water as a result.
This summer some of her former teammates and her formed a recreation team for one final run before they head off to different colleges. No practices, just two games a week. Last night was the final game so I thought I better turn up.
Arriving late, I see the opposing team’s forward streaking down the field all alone set to go in for an easy chip shot. But wait, Seventeen has the angle and she’s FLYING and she disrupts the girl’s momentum just in the nick of time. Is that my daughter? Amazing. A parent tells me she had rolled her ankle pretty badly a few minutes earlier.
I detect a slight limp, but she’s a gamer, loving every minute of it. No pressure, playing with great friends, for FUN. She’s a different player than I’ve ever seen, relaxed, confident, making smart pass after smart pass, checking girls, face red, sweating, focused, animated, just plain getting after it.
Parents, teachers, all adults who work with young people often suffer from “present tense myopia”. We get mired in young people’s physical and social awkwardness without any sense of their more physically and socially competent future selves.
I remember when Seventeen was in second or third grade and was making lots of simple spelling errors (yeah, yeah, probably the fault of my genetics). An elementary education colleague suggested “chilling” because it would naturally improve given her love of reading. He was right.
Parents should prominently display a “This too shall pass” sign somewhere in their kitchen as a reminder that children are constantly evolving.
In the end, it’s far less important how capable a seven or eight year old is in football, baseball, basketball, golf, soccer, swimming, spelling, reading, writing, or math than a seventeen or eighteen year old.
What a kick (pun intended) watching Seventeen last night. Nurture and support the young and then expect them to surprise you too.
As I age, I’d like to avoid many middle-aged and elderly people’s penchant for complaining that “compared to back in the day, the world is going to hell.” Much of that pessimism rests on selective perception. Except for the clinically depressed, isn’t life a constantly shifting mix of good and bad?
Here’s a related NYT book review excerpt from a new novel “Super Sad” which takes place in the near future.
“Mr. Shteyngart has extrapolated every toxic development already at large in America to farcical extremes. The United States is at war in Venezuela, and its national debt has soared to the point where the Chinese are threatening to pull the plug. There are National Guard checkpoints around New York, and riots in the city’s parks. Books are regarded as a distasteful, papery-smelling anachronism by young people who know only how to text-scan for data, and privacy has become a relic of the past. Everyone carries around a device called an äppärät, which can live-stream its owner’s thoughts and conversations, and broadcast their “hotness” quotient to others. People are obsessed with their health — Lenny works as a Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) for a firm that specializes in life extension — and shopping is the favorite pastime of anyone with money. It’s “zero hour for our economy,” says one of Lenny’s friends, “zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves.”
Is your relative optimism or pessimism based upon the quality of your nation’s governance, economy, and military, or as I suspect, more on the nature of your personal budget, the status of your family’s and your health, the quality of your friendships, and the relative purposefulness of your work.
I’m feeling positive about life today in part because of a post run lake swim, an enjoyable dinner with three friends, and an amazing sunset over the sound.
I have downer moments, days, and weeks like everyone.
I prefer spending time with people who reject the myth of a golden yesteryear and what sociologists refer to as “deficit model” thinking and show empathy for the truly unfortunate. People whose thoughts, words, and deeds are more hopeful than cynical.
Social psychologists suggest our brains are filled with mental file folders of sort that enable us to take short cuts when bumping into or first interacting with people. Labels such as male, female, rich, poor, overweight, African-American, professor, Wall Street banker, southerner, foreigner, libertarian, conservative republican, liberal democrat, elderly, homeless, aspergers, gay, lesbian, environmentalist, evangelical Christian. We also have thinner files that might be (awkwardly) labeled, “male, conservative republican, evangelical Christian”.
Without our mental file folders, we’d have to make sense of each new person from scratch; consequently, we’d be too overwhelmed to function normally.
The question though is how thick are our respective folders? In our increasingly diverse world, we can get into serious trouble when our folders are so thin that we succumb to inaccurate stereotypes. Everyone has preconceived notions about other groups of people. The best antidote for negative preconceived notions is getting to know a wider range of diverse individuals through direct daily experience. Only then can you get a feel for a key cross-cultural insight or sensibility, that the individual differences within each file folder are typically greater than between them.
Our challenge as multicultural people is to do two things simultaneously, to recognize that there are group patterns, themes, and differences, and to recognize that the individual differences within each group are usually greater than the differences between groups. There’s lots of evidence that not everyone is up to this relatively sophisticated, multitasking, social psychological balancing act.
Fast forward to Thursday night’s training ride with about thirty other cyclists. Early on, heading out-of-town, I was spinning casually in the back (like Lance Armstrong) when a new rider introduced himself. At 20mph we talked for the next ten minutes. A military officer with about 20 years experience. Our worldviews couldn’t have been more different. We discussed drones in Afghanistan, the McChrystal firing, and his work more generally.
I’m about as dovish as they come and he was all hawk. I was unpleasantly surprised by his “I sleep well at night” lack of introspection. Cue the “military personnel” folder. Fortunately in that folder are a few “pieces of paper” representing the marines I met while teaching in Ethiopia. They were based at the US embassy and would travel to our school to hoop it up with us once or twice a week. We became friends. They invited a few of us to the embassy in the middle of the night to watch the World Series, and without knowing it, they helped me rethink my preconceived notions of military personnel.
So I’m adding my new cycling acquaintance to my “military personnel” folder, but not overgeneralizing about all military personnel based upon my admittedly brief interaction with him.
Joe Gassmann.
From the LA Times.
Outside the Beverly Hills courthouse, a gaggle of fans were thrilled just to have caught a glimpse of her. “It’s Lindsay Lohan — she’s the greatest actress,” said Joe Gassmann, 27, who wore a “Free Lindsay” shirt and drove four days from Grand Rapids, Mich., to be there. “I think this is a serious injustice.”
The “this” to which Joe is referring is two counts of being under the influence of cocaine, no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.08%, and one count of reckless driving.
Based on recent reviews. Book—To the End of the Land by David Grossman. Films—1) The Kids are All Right; 2) Winter’s Bone; 3) Udaan.
Pressing Pause 