Your computer IS your diary

My computer has been running sloooowly for quite some time and I’ve known the cause too – way too many giant image files on the hard-drive. So over the last week or so I’ve started cleaning things out (although the pictures are still there…)

I’m a little shocked at what I’ve found lurking in My Documents and sub-folders from thumb drives. All the things I’ve tried that didn’t work, the lists I’d made three or five years ago, in other words my life in digital snapshots.  It’s been a good reminder of how much I’ve learned, and how many steps I’ve taken towards my goals. Especially the ones that didn’t work out – primarily because as I deleted the file I realized that I had tried hard enough and thoroughly enough to know that I didn’t care to pursue that particular avenue further. It was done.

Now I’ve reclaimed gigabytes, ready for new adventures and projects, and a “spring clean” feel to my desktop. When was the last time you really went through your personal files, the pictures, the projects, the favorites in your browser? You might be surprised at what you find and what you make room for.

Technorati Tags: authentic happiness, getting organized

Ambiguity and the Butterfly Effect

Thursday night when I was driving home on the freeway, something caught my eye. I looked, thought, debated and finally took the next exit to circle back.  There was a cat in a narrow section of grassy median between the ten lanes of 60 mph traffic. It was clearly alive and unhurt but that didn’t seem like it would last too long. Naturally it didn’t want to be rescued by me when I pulled over and braved the center shoulder (probably not the smartest thing on my part) so… I called 911.  It felt extremely foolish to call for a cat on a freeway but they did take it seriously.  I will never know what happened to it – it was very young. Was it rescued? Did it run into traffic? Did a hawk take it first?  I really dislike not knowing and it still feels a little like I’ve become an official crazy cat lady to have made the effort.  So why did I? Because as I drove past the first time I realized how I would feel about myself if I didn’t try. Nobody else even seemed to notice it in the 20 minutes it took me to return to that spot. The odds weren’t good for a happy outcome, but do odds really impact our decisions to help? I hope not. I don’t expect to ever know that cat’s fate but I’m still hoping it turned out well.

It’s made me realize how many things we don’t do because we won’t know the end result – ever. But surely something changes in the universe when we make the attempt. The Butterfly Effect is that notion that the smallest imperceptible change will set great things in motion. I’d like to think that my reluctant willingness to appear foolish will do that, but it never seems to make it easier.

Technorati Tags: Buttefly effect

A lesson in self-identity from the U.S. Census

I don’t answer questions about race. I simply don’t identify myself or others that way. I wrote my college entrance essay on that topic more than 20 years ago and haven’t changed my mind since – even though the U.S. government hasn’t either. For awhile it seemed like we were making progress in moving away from this ‘standard’.  My older sister and I were born in the same hospital but while her birth certificate lists race, mine does not. So I always check that ‘choose not to identify’ box on job applications or the like. My ancestors came from more than one continent, but even so it’s an archaic set of choices based on Victorian values and not genetics (or even culture.)

The U.S. Census this year devotes 20% of the questions to race and Hispanic ethnicity with no box to choose not to identify. That’s a lot considering that the purpose of the Census is to count the population in order to assign the districts and number of elected Representatives – and it’s illegal to use race in determining voting districts.

While I’m answering the questions pertinent to apportionment in Congress I’ve chosen to leave the race and Hispanic questions blank. I doubt anyone is going to come after me for it, but it still feels like civil disobedience. Particularly given all the warning letters in my mail about how answering is required by law (I read the law cited and it wasn’t quite that specific). I’m not doing this because of some conspiracy theory or fear of Big Brother. I’m doing it because I refuse to be defined that way. I see myself as a lot of things; a woman, a member of Gen X, an American, but not as a member of a race. I think it’s important not to let others force us to apply labels to ourselves that we don’t agree with whether that’s race on the Census or a limiting disability. If someone else wants to check a box based on what they think my blue eyes mean they’re free to do so, but I won’t do it for them.

Technorati Tags: negative labels, removing limits, self-perception

The case against missionaries

Without getting too political, the whole “Haitian Incident” involving the American missionaries really rubbed me the wrong way, particularly the people I’ve heard defending their actions – ‘they had some parents’ permission’. And that makes it OK? If a van pulled up in rural Appalachia and offered to take kids to a ‘better place in Mexico with opportunities’ Americans would demand that they be arrested and any acquiescing parents be investigated by Child Services. Why on earth does anyone expect Haiti to have a lower standard for its children? Poverty, even extreme poverty, is no excuse to break up a family, a culture and a country. Poverty is not abuse.

Unfortunately it’s not an uncommon attitude. I see it in my fellow volunteers working with foster kids too. Surely ballet lessons with a middle class adoptive family should trump street dancing in the projects with her recovering birth mother? The problem is, it doesn’t. Connections with who and where we come from are some of the most powerful on Earth. Which is why we are somewhat inclined to believe that helping someone else means bringing them into our world and our connections; we value them that highly. But if we do it at the expense of someone else’s points of contact with family, culture, language, food and their world we are doing more harm than good.

Value your connections, your food, your culture as unique to you; special, not better.

Have a different opinion? Share it in the comments…

Technorati Tags: perceived value, self-perception

Success or identity? Do you really have to choose?

I was doing some catch-up reading of blog subscriptions when I came across this guest post, Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants, on Copyblogger. The gist of it is that James Chartrand, the voice behind the website and company, Men with Pens, is in actuality a woman and has been all along. I read it, shook my head a little and went on to other things, but it kept nagging at me.  I’m not judging her (his?) decisions, they just left me feeling sad.  She’s right, women have written under male pseudonyms for generations and gay artists and politicians have had straight covers for even longer – it’s all sad.  Whenever people feel that their best option is to deny something that is truly a part of themselves we all lose something.

I can’t deny that there is unfairness and bias out there on a number of different variables. There was a time in America when some light-skinned African-Americans “went White”, cut off contact with their darker-skinned relatives and moved to the Whites-only part of town, schools, and jobs.  My own great-grandmother denied she was Native American for similar reasons.  Better access to education, higher pay, and social acceptance are hard to turn down for yourself and your children when the alternative appears to be prideful poverty. But with that decision their descendants lost a part of their identity and their culture.

There is almost always a third choice to any either/or situation.  It just takes some work and some alternative compromise to find it.  On my first trip to Dublin, Ireland I encountered a cab driver from Northern Ireland.  Every day he drove across the border and down to Dublin to work and then back again at night because it was too hard for a Catholic to get a job in the North.  I asked him how anyone could tell and he told me it was all in the names – Patrick if you were Protestant and Padraig if you were Catholic. So I asked him why they didn’t just use another name on their applications and his reply was joking but I think it’s really a serious thing.  He would have given up something too important by the switch in spelling.  Something that had been built by generations and that was too easily preserved by simply enduring a long commute and a border crossing. Of course it’s not fair and think how easy it would be to spell your first name just a little differently? But then think about what it would mean in daily life -never talking at work about your family  life, holiday celebrations or growing up.

The online world really isn’t that different.  Trust is fragile when it’s so easy for someone to hide behind the screen and we have to take so much on faith that they are who they say are. Much of the time it doesn’t even really matter – a how-to article either works or it doesn’t. But how much more would we learn and connect if the author opened up an extra 10%? We all have different lines of privacy because most of us figure out pretty quickly that once you say it online you can’t pull it back. It’s not really that different from living in a small town. Your neighbors really don’t need to know if you buy 2% or whole milk but if you somehow feel the need to hide it and go to the grocery store just before closing to prevent people from finding out… It seems to me there is a huge difference between being private and hiding.  Hiding will eventually hurt your career and your relationships because people look for connections and things in common whether it’s in a board room or a chat room.

If you find yourself at this kind of cross roads try to find the third option – the one where you get to stay you -  because there’s real value in that even if it’s not readily apparent.

Technorati Tags: being yourself

The secret of patience

How many times have you told yourself  or been told ‘Be Patient!’?

Patience is often described as a lack of action; ‘buy those shoes now or be patient and wait for them to go on sale.’  More times than not though, when people are struggling with patience and wishing for more of it (right now!) it has to do with too much activity, not too little – ‘why won’t this work? I’ve been struggling with it for hours!’  ‘I’m ready to strangle David, he’s been whining nonstop’, ‘Why isn’t this traffic moving, I’m already late!’ etc. and so on.  Not all activity is physical, sometimes it’s passive like listening or worrying in the earlier examples.

So what’s the secret to getting back in the groove of patience?  Simply stopping.  Stop what you’re doing and switch to something else.  Getting frustrated because the computer keeps crashing and you can’t get that report done? Stop working on it,  do another task and come back to this one later.  Even if that report was due yesterday – frustration never creates much value anyway.  Caught in traffic? Stop worrying and start thinking about what you want for Christmas so you can get your list out to friends and family early – worrying does not make lights turn green or cars move (really, it doesn’t.)

Technorati Tags: dealing with impatience, patience, reducing stress

What words can tell us

life visual juliet read beauty
excuses growth feed excuse book
project motivation required posts bravery
green tidbits art adventurer entertainment
stairs happiness labels alone new
subscribe journal isn april september
meditation amazon it’s archives doing
juliet’s books fun attachment bookshelf
love journey resources august boundless
personal meditate becoming work imperfections

It’s not some new form of poetry or stream of consciousness rambling.  The list above are the top 50 words Google’s crawler says are on this site.

Earlier today I was doing some tweaking and reviewing of various reports with some occassional ‘oops, I messed that up six months ago’ here and there. It’s good to realize how much you’ve learned by catching yourself in mistakes every so often. Although it doesn’t hold a great deal of meaning in terms of web traffic the list of top 200 keywords in the Google Webmaster Tools fascinated me.  7 Green Stairs is the blog where I talk most about myself and what I’m doing, so once the site structure words like Juliet’s and October are subtracted these are the keywords that sum up “me”. Words like:  books, projects, adventurer, journey, love, romance, etc. It’s a very curious thing to see yourself in a spreadsheet of single words.

The words we use most often truly do describe who we are in thought as well as personality.  But it’s hard to be conscious of those words while actually using them. While it might be a lot of work to start blogging just to see this list, if you already have one I’d recommend taking a look from the personal perspective as opposed to your site’s performance.  What do those words say about who you are and who you want to be?  Are you surprised by them?

Technorati Tags: self discovery

How to be more creative quickly

The simple answer is to have an overwhelming need combined with no easily accessible solution – bored kids or broke adults can be some of the most creative people out there if they let themselves.

As I’ve been getting ready for my upcoming trip to Florida (today) there were two things I truly need for the trip that I don’t have the money or time to order; a loose sieve for metal detecting on the beach to separate the sand  from the treasure quickly and a sun hat that will fit my head that consistently proves that one size does not fit all.  I’ve no idea if what I came up with will actually work, and it does require a serious commitment to looking a little strange on the beach but I really enjoyed the process of solving these two problems.

For the sieve, I spent $4 at the hardware store for some plastic gutter netting and then stitched it together with some plastic cord I already had and used the rim of a large cottage cheese carton to reinforce the top – it looks like a really funky fishing basket but I think it will do the trick.  For the hat, I simply went through my stockpile of fabric and found the lightest possible one I was willing to part with which turned out to be pale pink and used the only hat pattern I had that had a brim – so it looks like a confection for race day but it didn’t cost me any money and it’s ready to go in the suitcase.

I didn’t have prior skills here, I just trusted that it was possible to solve the problem within the parameters I had set.  It was a lot more fun than buying either item ready made, although I agree that would use less of my time, but there’s no creativity in letting someone else always solve things for you.

Technorati Tags: crafting a creative life, feeling uninspired

5 tips on how and when to label yourself

Labels are tricky things.  The world might well be a better place without them, however conversations would drag on forever. If you’ve ever watched someone converse in sign language you may have seen them spell a person’s name letter by letter and then create a spacial reference point so that they can refer to that instead of painstakingly spelling the name each and every time – that’s what labels do, create a common reference point so that we can get on with what we are trying to say.  The downside is that they tend to stick and there’s no language on earth that has enough words to be completely accurate.

1. Do spend some time thinking about what labels you apply to yourself and whether they describe the person you want to be. Get rid of as many as you can and rewrite the labels that are useful but don’t fit perfectly.There’s a lot of advice out there on never labeling yourself however there are some that are a good idea – are you single or not? are you an adult?

2. Be confident in any labels you do use – be ‘independent’, not ‘trying to be independent’. There’s a wealth of power in claiming it.

3. Don’t label yourself unnecessarily. Your Facebook page probably doesn’t need any labels whereas your LinkedIn page probably does.

4. Take the time to find the right words and be open to relearning words you already know.  Words change over time and our early understanding isn’t always complete. For whatever reason I grew up defining the word ‘artist’ to mean a painter or a sculptor. I have no idea why, but that was my internal definition.  So when I went hunting for a career label that would describe jewelry design,writing, photography and other creative pursuits I was stumped.  Until it occurred to me to look up the term again – the first definition on Dictionary.com is: a person who produces works in any of the arts that are primarily subject to aesthetic criteria.

Look at that, I’m an artist!  One word to describe all those things. Even though it’s a broad term it will do for filling in the blank on websites and forms.

5. Don’t exclude essential parts of yourself, just to conform to what’s normal or expected. Watch this
Gap ad with Eisa Davis, who juggles more than one passion simply because it’s essential and doesn’t pick just one.  She definitely fits the definition of what Barbara Sher calls scanners although that’s another label I don’t particularly like because scanning implies a lack of action.

Words have power, choose wisely!

Technorati Tags: self-esteem, self-perception, self-talk

What are baby steps, anyway?

I’ve been reading This Year I Will…: over the weekend and finding even more things to think about then the last time I read it. One thing in particular that stood out for me was the chapter on making changes by taking baby steps – only these were minuscule steps. For example if you wanted to be more consistent about flossing your teeth, starting with just one tooth and then working your way up.  I’ve been used to hearing about people that worked their way up to marathons by running one block and then one mile etc but not by running past one house and then two! Possibly I need to dial down my efforts a bit and they just might stick better.

The question I’m now wrestling with though is what are these minuscule steps if the topic is neither flossing nor running?  If the goal is widening your social circle to include both friends and potential dates, does that mean simply varying your routine by going to a different Starbucks?  Or doing one web search for local lectures? Or something else entirely?  It’s a puzzle, but one worth figuring out.  The alternative path would be do jump into yet another online dating site or speed dating etc.  That might seem like baby steps, I would have categorized it that way before, yet clearly that’s bigger than what we’re talking about here. No wonder the success rate of those things is so low; people are overwhelmed.

I’m also wondering if I could start running if I did just try it house by house – whee, I’m up to running past three houses!?  It might be an interesting experiment. Who cares how long something takes if you reach the goal?

Technorati Tags: achieving goals, baby steps

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