Last Minute SuperBowl Plans — Who’s your buddy? Sunday, Feb 7 2010

SuperBowl XLIV kicks off in less than three hours.
Here's a couple of places to catch (or ditch) the game in Los Angeles — no planning required.

If you're on the westside and live music is your thing, "All the Pretty People" will be filling in for the Who during half-time at Mosaic South Bay's SuperBowl gathering, located at the Knob Hill Community Center in Redondo Beach. All the Pretty People features Pete Mitchell of No More Kings and jazz singer-songwriter Adjoa Skinner. David Magidoff will also be on hand to bring the funny.

Oneonta Congregational Church in South Pasadena is hosting a SuperBowl party. Feel free to bring some snacks and come watch the game on the big screen.

Don't really care for football? The Mosaic dance team debuts a new piece today featuring Lano Medina, Patrick De Los Reyes, Morgan Carroll, Jacob Patrick, Renée Wong Mytar and Kathryn McCormick. Service begins tonight at 7pm at the Mayan nightclub in downtown Los Angeles.

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Leesean Hepnova and the Tao of Flat Thursday, Jan 21 2010

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Brother Jon and the Theory of Awesomesauce Thursday, Jan 21 2010

Was chatting with my brother tonight (for him, it's already Thursday in Iraq) when he let me in on one of his theories on life:

"everything in life has a flavor, and that flavor is either awesomesauce or lamesauce, and how awesome or lame they are depends on the ammount of sauce, for instance long line at walmart is dipped in lame sauce, finding five bucks on the ground is dipped in awesome sauce, a bear in a spacesuit fighting a robot shark on the moon is DRENCHED in awesomesauce"

So now you know.

Mazel Tov
– Rems

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Haiti — Slivers of Light Wednesday, Jan 20 2010

From Virginia at That's Church:

"Ali McMutrie and the children from the Brebis de Saint-Michel de L’Attalaye (BRESMA) orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, arrived safely at Pittsburgh International Airport … Jamie McMutrie will be following behind shortly."

From CNN World:

Boy, 5, pulled alive from rubble in Haiti January 20, 2010 3:58 p.m. EST
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2010/01/20/cooper.haiti.5.year.old.cnn
"It was unclear whether the boy — named Monley — had access to food and water, but doctors attributed his survival to resilience and the strength of his young body."

This is good news indeed, but the U.N. estimates that three million Haitians still need food, water, shelter and medical assistance.
Haiti had one doctor for every 11,000 people — before the earthquake. Medical staff have been overwhelmed and under equipped, performing surgery with rusty hacksaws cleansed in vodka.

On top of all this, a 5.9 aftershock hit Port-au-Prince this morning.
If you are able, please continue to donate.
If you are available to travel to Haiti, Mosaic in Los Angeles is organizing a team — email janice@mosaic.org for details.

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Take Care of Yourself First Sunday, Jan 17 2010

A little over a year ago my mother and sister launched Marchen Studios, a start-up dedicated to providing community, space, and materials to your inner artist. Since November of 2009, I’ve taken on the job of resident towncrier, getting the message out about all the cool things going on here and how you can be a part of it.
I’m evaluating different web solutions — just like having people over at home or going out to a restaurant, it’s important that the host picks an environment that fits the conversation. Currently we use Ning for membership services and web content management. Today I discovered some pretty cool features Ning offers for branded media hosting — that definitely tilted me towards keeping our business within their “network of networks.”
I still haven’t decided if Ning is the best solution for us, but after reading this article by Michael Arrington @TechCrunch, I really want it to be.

The story:

Widget Laboratory is a 3rd party developer that made widgets that Ning users could use to add special features and functionality to their sites. A lot of people found these widgets really useful. Unfortunately the code didn’t scale very well — the more people using the widgets the more the widgets kept causing problems for the growing Ning network. 
The folks at Ning and the folks at Widget Laboratory tried to work out a solution.
They didn’t.
Read the PDF below and see if you can figure out why.

Download now or preview on posterous

5023463.pdf (1002 KB)

After seeing how she handled the boys over at WidgetLaboratory, I’m totally crushing on Ning CEO Gina Bianchini.

These days, what I find most attractive about someone — male or female — is how they treat themselves. Do they view their time as a precious resource? Are they gracious, but uncompromising on their values? Do they own their failure, and their success? Do they believe, as the Romans did, ut viam inveniam aut faciam — I will either find a way or make one.
Seriously, whenever I come across these qualities in a person, I get a little hot.

Improv performer Mick Napier makes a great point in his book: you can’t do anything for your partner if you don’t take care of yourself first. If you step into a scene and don’t provide yourself with a strong quality or intention to play with, then you’re passing that buck onto your partner. And if your partner does the same thing, both of you are asking the audience to like you — without giving them anything to like.
Awkward. 
Take care of yourself. It’s true on stage. It’s true in business. It’s true in life.

– Rems

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The Lesson Monday, Nov 30 2009

On a certain day I attempted to drown myself.
I say attempted, because my body refused to yield.
It was not suicide — I had no wish to die.
Though driven by the miserable shaking failure of the moment.

Perhaps that is what drew me into the pool
In the back yard of my parents. I had earned the money
For driver’s school here, years ago, clearing away the trees
That stood where the water now covered my head.

My driving was dangerous, earlier. Flailing, finding
The way of the road while sobs barked
from my face, breaking upon the spongy cold skin
like late afternoon waves depositing exiled jellyfish.

Sean Penn would have taken notes, observing the father
Who failed to pick up his daughter at the agreed time.
The clock had lied, continually, frozen on an early figure.
Only overwrought by the voice of outrage, that voice once sweet.

Sweet and simple, three letters and two words.
But all of that is gone, beyond reach now.
My hands only skim the surface from beneath the waters.
I scream all the air I have, let it all go, then breathe deep.

My lungs refuse. I crash forward into the air, coughing.
Recover. Plunge in again. I am going to teach myself a lesson.
A baptism. Either I change or I remain. But I can’t stay the same.
Again the water refuses to participate fully in my punishment.

How do they do it, those actors? Drown so well on screen?
Why will my body rebel so well against physical harm,
But crave relentlessly treatment caustic to my soul?
What is in me? And who can hold our breath longer?

A third time, and it is enough. I lie on the concrete. Water pools
in an outline of my body, like it did when I was a child.
The sun warms and my chest swells with air. Something in me
Knows what is natural, what is right. Something strong as life.

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Memes and Me — Experimenting with Validity Friday, Sep 4 2009

Discovering the hidden power of STFU & GTFO.

Chances are pretty good you encountered the health care meme bouncing around the Internet. Here’s the first I saw of it yesterday on Facebook:

“So-and-so believes that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and nobody should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

I did not react positively to this. My inner-teenager resents being told what to do. Flipping his hair out of his face, he points out the moral extortion swimming along just beneath the smooth surface of the post: if you DON’T surrender your Facebook status and help spread the word, well then… I guess now we all know who thinks poor Americans SHOULD die and sick Americans SHOULD go broke.

You uncaring monster.

Being young and so-so-sensitive, Emo-Jung wants to call someone a monster back. He puts me to work on a really biting status update, letting everyone know how morally inferior they are for alluding to everyone else’s moral inferiority. Then I remember that teenagers, no matter how bright and right they can be, still need guidance. So I tell him “No. We’re not gonna do that.” He glowers, flips his hair out of his face AGAIN (why don’t you just get it cut?) and wants to know what we ARE going to do. He’s daring me to ignore it. Smirking.

I can, but I won’t. The sentiment being expressed does bother me. And I’ve learned emotional discomfort is the same thing as physical discomfort: a message from unthinking-me to the thinking-me: “Something is off and would you please take steps to adjust, thank you.”

Whenever I catch myself struggling against what I perceive as an outside attempt to define me, I choose to give that definition a trial run instead. In other words I don’t fight it anymore… I experiment with its validity.

The message I got from the status update was essentially “People are suffering and you don’t care enough to really do anything about it.”

What’s important isn’t whether that is what is actually being said, or was intended to be said, or anything else having to do with other people’s choices. What’s important is acknowledging my response, and investigating the truth of it.

Are people suffering?

Yes.

Am I doing anything about it?

Nope.

Do I care?

Yes, I do.

And now I know why I was bothered. There was a contradiction hiding in the folds of my life, and my emotional center seized on the opportunity presented by the cascading meme to shake that blanket out and let me get a look at what was nesting there.

Now I could do something about it. I posted two status updates to Facebook through Twitter yesterday.

1: “Your Riverside Community Hospital Auxiliary Volunteer Information Form has been submitted. A member will contact you soon.” #py$wymi

2: Thank you to whoever started the #healthcare meme. You got me thinking–so I volunteered at my local hospital. b/c that matters more.

The first is quoting from the form response I got at Riverside Community Hospital’s website. #py$wymi is short for put your money where you mouth is. As a reforming yammer-mouth and armchair-everything, I’m discovering that the usually insulting STFU and GTFO are very powerful when combined and applied to oneself.

In this case, rather than debating health care, now I get to provide some.

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The Crack in the Floor Sunday, Aug 16 2009

The last couple of days were rough. It feels silly and stupid to write that in the past tense — the roughness only stopped about ten minutes ago when I left my bed and logged on. I didn’t expect that to make me feel better, but for some reason giving up on sleep and listening to some woe-is-us break-up music has soothed me.

Resentment and I have been slugging it out, toe-to-toe, and it’s been to the gym since the last time we squared off.

I know it’s no good, these thoughts of blame and anger directed at someone else. It’s chewing over rotten meat — all you’re left with is mold on your tongue. But it’s such a challenge to escape.

I try to keep an even keel. I remind myself of my own one-sidedness, recall my own persistant failure to love. I acknowledge that the way I feel now that we are no longer together must be very similar to they way my wife often felt while we were. I admit to all the time I was given to change and make better choices, choices that considered someone else’s feelings over my own. Now I don’t have that time anymore. Now it’s my feelings left in the dark.

It’s only fair.

But that doesn’t make it right.

And there’s the crack in the floor I fall into. Because whatever fed into it, the ripping apart of two people joined by vows is a betrayal. The fact that my daughter doesn’t live with me anymore, she visits; soap gets in her eyes during her bath and she cries for mommy — the simplest, most natural request of a child — and I have to tell her she’ll see mommy tomorrow, because mommy’s somewhere else.

You feel powerless and it’s natural to point fingers at someone else.

But that’s the lie. I feel powerless. But that’s only how I feel. And I’m learning to perceive through the illusion.

Anger is a threat response. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, you feel endangered, you yell in your car. Doesn’t make you any safer.

I’ve been wrestling with resentment and anger and bitterness. Somehow, tonight during the walk from my bedroom to the office, I stepped out of the ring. Somehow my soul recognized that everything that upsets me is a lie. And a lie only has power over you if you engage it. Fight or give in, you are subject to it either way. You win by not fighting.

So I didn’t come through as a husband. I’m a better man today then I was yesterday.

So I was betrayed. That’s a result of someone else’s choice to believe a lie. I don’t have to believe it too.

So my daughter got soap in her eyes. We rinsed it out. She went to sleep. In the morning she’ll wake up and see her mommy.

And that’s something to be grateful for.

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”
- John W. Gardner

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On Poor Writing Thursday, Aug 6 2009

I’m sitting at a red light. To my right is a video store. In this day of the download, those old brick-and-mortars don’t look so hot. Oh, they try — but so do the trannies in fishnets back on Santa Monica boulevard.

Still no green. I look at a very large poster for a movie I’ve never heard of.

The design elements are:

* a whole lot of white space

* a title I don’t remember

* a tagline in a font too small to read from the street despite the poster’s window filling acreage

* a man

* a woman who is Beyoncé

* another woman

* the arrangement of man-woman-woman to imply a love triangle of menacing nature

So, an awful poster for what looks like an awful movie.

I grew up in this neighborhood. I know this is the longest red light in town, but still — get me out of here.

Then everything that is on my right resonates with everything that is off in my life:

What if I write a movie like that? What if I write a screenplay and I think its really good because its the best I can do but then I see the poster and its something like that because frankly the marketing guys just don’t have a lot to work with? And the movie is awful and uninteresting and even I want to change the channel because I caught it on TV — didn’t even bother to DVR it — because frankly the director and actors and even the art department didn’t have anything more to work with than the marketing guys?

What if I write a bad movie?

I relate this story over sushi to my friend, a business director in her position and a novelist in her soul. The sun is now disappearing outside.  “Well,” she says, handing the black check presenter back to our server with her credit card inside,  “At least you’d get paid.”

My friend is very clever, and she’s right: I should be so lucky.

Back in the car, and now I’m looking out at the morning sun in the rearview mirror.

You should be so lucky, to write a terrible movie. If your first draft is coherent at all, it would be a happy accident.

I think of a screenplay sitting in my closet at home: a copy of an early draft of The Last Samurai. Its radically different than the story that Edward Zwick actually filmed, and not nearly as satisfying. Captain Algren isn’t a drunken soldier of fortune haunted by memories of genocide — he’s the darling of West Point. Katsumoto is the enemy and he stays the enemy. Algren is married, and his wife dies — predictably. All in all, rather bland.

“I’m like that too,” my friend says between sips of water. “I want it to be perfect the first time.”

“I guess it’s like what Hemingway said about first drafts,” I reply.

We smile at each other. We’re both writers; we know the quote. No need to curse during dinner.

The light turns green, and I pass through the intersection and continue towards the onramp. Time to go home and write something awful.

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Constants Monday, Aug 3 2009

Caught Eminem’s video for Beautiful.

It’s him walking around in Detroit. These are not nice neighborhoods.  They are economically devastated. There’s even a stadium being torn down.

I’m watching Em. He’s got money. Being in this environment isn’t the trap for him that it is for almost everyone else.

Of course, this album is the one he made after disappearing for five years into addiction and depression. Money was a bigger trap than poverty was.

Something about the look on his face, it just hit me.

We will always feel the way we do.

There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no achievement that will erase this strange soul-ache.

There are moments. Connections. Foretastes of heaven. But satisfaction? No. This body isn’t capable.

This isn’t depressing. It’s freeing.  I felt happier when I realized that no matter what changes, I’ll never be happier. No more chasing the wind.

Most unhappiness in life is a result of false metrics — being unsatisfied with your perfectly good apples because they aren’t the color of someone else’s oranges.

Yeah, it’s a cliche, that whole destination vs. journey thing.

But maybe a cliche is just a truth everyone has heard but few have felt?

Link to the video.

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