Desire, Drive & Disconnect

November 2014 - Houston, TX.  Patio on Sabine.

November 23, 2014

Houston, TX

I’m kicked back on the patio wearing slippers I put on after spotting spiritual guru Gabby B wearing a similar pair in a Facebook post.   Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map is on my lap and the first few pages have energized me to plot how I want to feel instead of what I want to do.   Just ten minutes ago I was curled up in bed on Sunday morning, reading on my iPhone Eric Barker’s weekly blog Barking Up the Wrong Tree.  Today he features the work of Daniel Pink, author of Drive:  The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. [bxA]

I discovered Pink’s Drive last July on the bookshelf in the guest room of Sandra’s lakeside cottage outside Toronto.  I met Sandra in Beirut in 2009 and finally got to visit her this summer on my trip to the Montreal Jazz Festival to see Charlie Musselwhite, whom I met during my days in Phuket a few months after Beirut.  About a month ago my boss read Drive and it’s all he can talk about, but I’m still into Simon Sinek’s work on inspiration.

July 2014 - Near Toronto.  Sandra's Cottage on a Lake.

I’m swimming in a stew of stimuli.  

I want to email my boss about Drive, which makes me want to Facebook message Sandra about my boss, which makes me want to send a postcard to Charlie about my trip to Canada.  I also want to finish all these books and maybe write about how these concepts apply at work.   

Jun' 14 - Montreal Jazz Fest.  Charlie Musselwhite & Ben Harper 

Instead I do nothing: socially and intellectually overwhelmed.

 

The digital age disconnect.

Just when things were getting existentially interesting at the end of my travels circa 2011, I ditched the blog because I’d been afflicted with what I call Blogger Brain.   I viewed my life through the lens of how I’d write about it in my blog.  Kinda like how nowadays people can’t stab a fork into dessert until they stop to Instagram it. 

Not that I’m not totally on board with the social media culture.  I’m for sure one of those people.  I just stop myself from posting most of the time because I’m not so sure we can have our cake and Tweet it too.

Santa Monica Pier Pressure

Santa Monica, California 11/6/2014

November 9, 2014

I had only fifteen minutes to stare out at the Santa Monica Pier last week during a quick trip following a string of endless weeks of almost continual travel.  In the past couple months I've had the privilege of seeing countless inspired thought leaders speak live (including Oprah, Simon Sinek, Elizabeth Gilbert, Malcolm Gladwell and Danielle LaPorte), had my Beirut BFF Derek spend two weeks with me on his inaugural trip to the USA (Texas), moved some cool stuff forward at work, spent a lot of time with my guru sister, and reconnected with four of my Wayfinder friends (thanks to angelic Abby for enticing me to California on a whim).

My brain is an amusement park right now and there are lines at all the rides.

A House in the Sky

April 2, 2014
Grapevine, TX

My banker took me to lunch today at an upscale restaurant in a trendy hotel at an intersection of two massive Dallas freeways.  He ordered the blackened tuna something-or-other so I said, "I finished a book this morning about a woman who was kidnapped in Somalia and held for 15-months.  On release she said she'd never eat tuna again."[bxA]

"The Somali pirates fed her a lot of tuna?" He asked, prodding his rare tuna steak with a knife.

"Yeah," I told him, "cans of tuna and rotten bananas."

"This is served with garlic and pepper aioli."

We laughed and then talked for an hour about how best to manage the company's cash surplus while I imagined Amanda Lindhout trapped in a hot dusty room outside Mogadishu, starved and tortured for over a year while her family put together half a million dollars to pay her captors.

Mogadishu, Somalia (lifted from internet)

Her

Kiss Album Cover - Dynasty (1979)

March 10, 2014 - Grapevine, TX

Tonight I saw the movie 'Her' about a guy who falls in love with his computer's operating system.  I felt the plot improbable until she was able to cleanup his email box by extracting the 64 funny-nostalgic emails and delete the 8,000 others in less than three seconds.  I'd fall in love with that too. [bxA]

Everything about the information age reminds me of the Kiss song I listened to about a thousand times as a kid (because my brother was a huge fan, member of the Kiss Army, etc) called 2000 Man. It's got a line that goes:

You know my wife still respects me 
even though I really misuse her
I am having an affair
with a random computer.

That's quite a lot of information for a 9-year old at the cusp of 1979 and 1980, one of those ideas that piques the imagination and you spend the next few decades quietly waiting for it to happen.

And then it does.

Flint & Forleo

March 3, 2014 - Grapevine, TX

I just signed up for an 8-week online course on entrepreneurship.  One of my favorite Wayfinder friends texted, "cracks me up that you love all the entrepreneur stuff but don't want to be one..."  She's right, I don't know why I'm doing it.[bxA]

Kelli, the one who got me my current job and always offers to let me live in one of the guest rooms in her palatial house (my fallback plan), texted me tonight with what she says is my dream job:  Organizational Talent Consultant.  It's funny, I also profess to loathe HR.

Always the contradictions.

Still, Marie Forleo is a bursting ball of positive energy and I love it when she tells me, "the world needs that special gift that only you you have."  I am excited about taking her course.

Meanwhile, my Syrian friend has not popped up on Facebook in too many days, which renders meaningless anything I choose to distract myself in this supercharged, over-privileged American Life.

Even if he's okay, he's not okay.  It sucks over there.

But I guess we all just keep doing what we do on our patch of the planet while the Earth keeps turning on its axis.

Houston in the Blind

RAQs Media Collective, Photograph shown during a lecture

Glassell School of Art, Houston

February 22, 2014
Houston, TX

One of the three members of RAQs Media Collective, a trio of art curators and polemicists, opened the lecture today mentioning a quote from the movie Gravity, "Houston in the Blind."  It means, "Houston, we can't hear you, but if you can hear us..." [bxA]

As the lights dimmed in the auditorium, he said he wouldn't know if the work reached us unless we ask questions at the end.  People need to be around other people for art to happen.  Exhibitions are waiting for us to show up, just like the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil was there today, waiting for the three of them. 

Kairn, my academic friend with whom I traveled to Nigeria last summer, invited me because the RAQs trio is here to scope out Houston with focus on the oil industry, somehow or other.  At the end of the lecture they mentioned something about hydrocarbons being the memory of life. 

In the interest of time (no pun intended) and at risk of sounding like a wanker, here's a quote from an article describing what's going on with the clock in the original exhibit:

Escapement was an attempt to pass comment on a very contemporary form of existential crisis – one familiar to BlackBerry-obsessed, airport-bound, biennial addicts – that would feel more at home in a 1990s anthropology reader than in a commercial art gallery and that bears scant relationship to most people’s lives. Nicolas Bourriaud’s recent ‘Altermodern’ manifesto also explored similar themes, as he set out his vision of cultural hybridization, perpetual travel and a new universalism, each a manifestation of contemporary globalization, to him signalling the end of Postmodernism. Could the clocks in Escapement ironically symbolize Postmodernism’s own 12-step recovery programme? As the clocks strike ‘epiphany’ (if you’ve managed to make it through the heart-racing 12 hours that preceded this), the enlightenment of altermodernity is presumably attained.

article: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/raqs_media_collective/


 

Virtual Valentine's Day

Arlington, TX - Photo for Webinar Powerpoint Presentation

February 14, 2014

I pasted the heads of our leadership team into cupid bodies and sprinkled them throughout the Powerpoint slides for our Everyone Update webcast today.  We're forever looking for little ways to keep our virtual company connected.  I'm always never sure I can survive this job because I am what Glen described the other day as touchy feely. [bxA]

At lunch I told my CEO that the cupid slides are an example of the virtual vacuum that sucks the life out of me.  I create something meant to humanize a humdrum webcast that we present to an audience on "mute." The only indication I got that my silly effort was worth the sleep loss, was an an early morning email from my CEO asking Glen & me, "Can we add a graphic to the IT Update slide?  It's boring."  

In response to my vacuum issue he told me, "Yeah, a lot of people have problems presenting public webcasts because there is no audience response or interaction."  Our company has been presenting twice-weekly public webinars to technology users for many years.  

We don't know what to do about me so we changed the subject to choosing the venue for our annual company trip.  This year we're taking everyone to the Caribbean, either St. Martin or Jamaica.  Since I'm the finance person, people question me about the extravagance, but I am in agreement with the CEO on this.  We must invest in connection.  In person.  On site.  Every now and then.

Plastic Baby Epiphany

Houston, TX - King cake baby on a Valentine's Day plate at my parents' house.

February 9, 2014

I've been traveling too much for too many weeks while the "next steps" ideas percolate.  I'm on the cusp of either becoming more settled, or blowing everything up again.  I don't talk about it much because...[bxA] I don't talk much anymore...but I seem to be making things happen despite myself.

I dunno.

The idea was to come back to this country and reconnect.   It's been three years and I've done a decidedly disastrous job of blurring into the virtual impressionism of American Life.  I miss the ocean and the moon and knowing exactly how much garbage I produce because I have to keep it in a bag with my belongings until we get to shore.

I scoped out an apartment today to see if maybe moving to Houston might make me feel grounded, or otherwise compensate for how much I miss Everywhere Else In The World. 

Nikki took me window shopping on 19th Street in the Heights where we saw a sculpture of a little yellow bird in a cage.  We agreed we could never do that to a bird. 

I then quietly lamented for several long minutes that I may never live by Regents Park again.  Gosh how I miss those birds. 

That reminds me, a good friend of mine recently killed a chicken to write a story that... well... I guess I shouldn't say until it's published.

It's just that it always goes back to the chickens.  I went to a chicken farm in Lagos last summer, btw.  Another story that never got written.

Anyway, I was thinking that since I got the piece of cake with the baby, maybe I'm due for an epiphany.

So right now all bets are on that baby.




 

Women & Wine

Grapevine, TX - Eatzi's Bag

January 19, 2014

I was at a little wine & cheese thing with a bunch of women at a house in the suburbs last night.  They were all very beautiful, fit, totally together women.  They know each other from the gym.  Most of them were about a decade older than me, several were recently divorced.[bxA]

We talked about dating.  The really tall athletic one, about my age, has extensive experience with online dating and told us how to spot the weirdos.  If a guy posts only one photo, no way. He's not attractive.  One photo from a distance, even worse.  If they're willing to travel in from another city, think twice.  Personalities, she said, come across in the email exchanges before the date.  Trust your intuition. If something seems weird in the email, it'll be weirder in person.  If he comes across as a good person in email, it'll probably pan out. Never go to dinner, just get coffee you don't want to be trapped.  A lot of guys talk incessantly about their divorce.

The whole thing sounds excruciating.

I moved to the sofa and compared notes with two women who work remotely.  "We're virtual.  We communicate by Webex."  I wanted to know what their Webex meetings are like, do they use the video features.  We don't.  We show the screen of the person hosting the meeting, but not the face.

Do you like it?  I asked, about not going into an office.  "It's a blessing and curse," she said.  Working alone, in house clothes, with flexibility to do whatever you want whenever you want, but.... "I need people." So do I!

I told them I'm struggling with the work-from-home thing.  Should I work in the office?  Should I make my team?  I keep meaning to google Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo! who made all the remote workers return to working in the office. "I believe in the synergies that occur when people are in the same room together," I felt their presence as I said it, "This conversation would be different if the three of us were Skyping.  I like being her in the room with you."

But then we started talking about what it would be like to have a real job again.  Showering early in the morning, putting on real clothes and then there's the commute.  Traffic.  Every day.  

I can't even imagine.

Memorials & Mourning

Dallas, TX - JFK and Jackie

January 15, 2014

Today I took my houseguest to the JFK Memorial in downtown Dallas.  We paged through a book in the museum gift shop, slowly reliving the national tragedy of the assassination.  Afterward, [bxA] we hit a Mexican restaurant that's been featured on Diners Drive-ins and Dives.  We've had a great few days together, connecting over our shared loss of connection.

Dallas, TX - JFK Memorial Plaza

Tonight I came home late to learn on Facebook that a good friend's brother was killed by extremists in Syria. For many months my friend's been posting photos of all his slain friends.  Helplessly, today I "liked" his posts and changed my profile pic so as to remove my smiling face, marveling all the while at how well Facebook keeps us connected to our disconnectedness.

These Boots

Ft. Worth, Texas - Boot shop at the Stockyards

January 14, 2014

One of my Wayfinder friends is visiting from NJ so we went to the Stockyards in Ft. Worth to feel like Texas and search for the perfect pair of cowboy boots.  Tonight after eating scrambled eggs with leftover Mexican food, we brainstormed names for her yoga class and reminisced about the retreat where we met for the first time last March.

Just before midnight I filled out a form and wrote a check intended to change my trajectory.

One of these days these boots...  

Incredible Cloud

Office of my morning meeting.

January 9, 2014 - Dallas, TX

This morning I used the Waze app on my iPhone to navigate the traffic laden journey to a meeting at the technology company that provides managed services to my company.  Basically they are our "IT guy" now that we're too big to have just a guy.

The offices were cutting edge cool with lots of comic book memorabilia.  My team sat with their team in bright colored high back chairs at a round table in a glass office.  A couple of their guys had "Cloud Experts" embroidered under the logo on their black polo shirts.  We talked about laptops, virtual environments and what on earth to do about Windows 8.

When the expert told us, "if you bought Windows 8 Pro it comes with a free downgrade," I burst out laughing.  What a great marketing campaign: if you spend extra money for the "Pro" version of Windows 8, it comes with a feature to make it seem like you never bought 8 in the first place.

Brown Haired Girl

Screenshot from my iPhone.  

January 8, 2014 - Grapevine, TX

Today I texted my sister a photo to show her my new hair color.  I guess you could say I'm getting back to my roots. 

Roller Coaster Repair

Six Flags Over Texas - Arlington TX.  Amusement park across the street from my office. 

January 7, 2013 - Grapevine, Texas.   Stasis sucks, but sometimes you gotta stop the ride and do a little maintenance work.  

On the Ball

January 6, 2013 - Arlington, TX.  Outside my office (Texas Rangers Stadium)

I've lost command of my technology.  The Google+ app on my iPhone "backs up" every photo then adds special effects like snow falling and Christmas lights twinkling.  Almost everyday I get alerts that [bxA] these auto-awesome photos are ready for viewing.  I don't know how to stop it and I don't really mind that it's happening.  But it's weird.

Kelli, the friend who got me my crazy job back in 2011, sent her farewell email to All Employees today because this is her last week at work. We talked a lot this morning and late tonight -- she's handling it better than I am.  It's the end of an era ~ 5-years for her, 3-years for me working with her.

Things are changing quickly.

I don't know how to stop it and I don't really mind that it's happening.  But it's weird.

The Notebooks

 January 5, 2014 - Grapevine, TX.  Work notebooks circa 2011-13.

I was about eleven years old when my Language Arts teacher assigned us to write in a journal every day of that semester.  Since then I've always seen empty notebooks as blank canvases on which the details of an unknown future would unfold.

Nowadays it's old school to write on paper, but [bxA] the thought of keeping electronic notes slays me.  I love the spirals and the covers and the college rule and my favorite blue ballpoint pens...and the pockets where I cram bits of paper that transport me back in time.

Today I organized the work notebooks I've been throwing in bins for almost three years.  I tried not to get swept into the memories of the notes or preoccupied by the unfinished tasks.

Not sure why I used heart-shaped post-its for these peculiar 'things to do.' I did, eventually and surely at the last minute, complete my 2011 taxes.  I didn't tend to the executrix issue so I believe I lost the gig.  Not sure if I meant "resume life" as in start living again, or update my resume ("CV") to reflect my current life.

I probably meant start living again because 2012 wasn't a piece of cake, but, I'm not sure I did such a good job of that in 2013.  It's been feast for famine.

I went to Nigeria in 2013, which was definitely a feast phase.  My sister and I hosted my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party in Boston last summer, another feast.

Not much to say about the famines.

Oh, and this notebook is a gift I got from Martha Beck on a life coaching retreat early last year where I learned what it means to be a Wayfinder.

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." 

- Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Blind Boys & Books

Album Cover:  I'll Find a Way, Blind Boys of Alabama.

January 4, 2014 - Grapevine Texas.

After my haircut at Tony & Guy this morning, I ended up on a cushy chair at Barns & Noble reading Coming Apart, about the unprecedented class divergence in white America, while the sound system played gospel songs by the Blind Boys of Alabama.  

It's one of those days [bxA] I'm not sure how I'm going to figure things out, so I tried not to try.

Just when I needed it, one of my former neighbors from the Phuket days posted on Facebook a delightful short film created by her daughter's friend.  It was named best of 2013 by USA Today.

I needed some delight and so this made my day:  

the Scared is scared from Bianca Giaever on Vimeo.

"When the scared feeling comes into you, the scared is scared of things you like."

Yup.  I'll go with that.

Paint It Black

January 2014 - Southlake, Texas.  Nail salon next to Ethan Allen.

Today while my toenails were being painted a color called "Voodoo You Do" I lamented that my life needs some magic, black or otherwise.  It took several attempts to stop texting on my iPhone and relax into the foot massage, at which point [bxA] the pedicurist's cell phone rang and she talked to the caller in another language for the remainder of the treatment.

Earlier I'd watched a film on Netflix, Me and You and Everyone We Know, where an art reviewer asked of each post-modern piece submitted for an exhibition, "What does this tell us about the digital age?"

I'm tired of the digital age.

What comes next?

Big Time Bottleneck

 June 2013 - Arlington, Texas.  Refrigerator at work.

I haven't blogged since May 2011? Sheesh. I tripped and fell head first, smack dab into the center of American Life. Busy busy busy. Buried.

I’m suffering from an interpersonal bottleneck [bxA] of epic proportion.  Back in September 2010 when the global adventure skidded to a halt in Texas, I was wholly unprepared for the return to real life.  Somewhere between the ashram in the Himalayas and the bungalow in Thailand, I stopped expressing myself verbally.  The blog dwindled, the journal writing waned, and the mile long emails to my friends stopped entirely.  

It turns out this is not a healthy existence for me.  But I can’t seem to dig myself out of it.  Many months ago I stopped replying to emails so people started texting me.  Now I don’t reply to texts.  I almost never listen to voicemails and I rarely return phone calls. 

I talk incessantly at work, about work, but those are my only words.   It hasn’t been good.  I haven’t been happy.  My job is cool and my life is comfortable, but the bottleneck has been tough.

And so I’ve decided to force myself to write.  The blog, the journal and email.  One a day.  Each.  They may be short, they may be bad, but I’m committed to busting the bottleneck.

Oh, and I’m leaving for Lagos, Nigeria on Monday.

Camel in My Closet

Apr'11 - Southlake, Texas Art Festival (Artist: DaNisha)

May 22, 2011 – Grapevine, Texas

This morning I found the camel with my karma sound asleep in one of my closets. Mad at me. Again. It had taken me days, possibly weeks to notice he’d gone missing.[bxA]

“What are you doing in here?” I turned on the light.

“What does it matter?” his sulking eyes spoke.

“You know I can’t help this, right?” I defended. It was the first time in a long time I had a moment to catch my breath. I did not feel like having this discussion again. So I didn’t. He’s still hiding in the closet. Or resting, as he says. I’ve worn him out.

Acclimating to the plugged-in, high-tech, worker bee frenzy of American life is like juggling on a unicycle while peddling across a tightrope. I can’t remember why anyone would ever want to be so busy doing so much. But everybody does.

I can’t keep up.

Emails, Facebook messages, Wall posts, blog posts, Skype chats, and even good old fashioned letters in the post pile up with the simple loving inquiry: Where are you and what are you doing?

I rarely respond and never answer the question, but it’s pretty simple:

I’m in Grapevine, Texas, working at my new C R A Z Y job, settling into my apartment and trying to make amends with the camel with my karma. He wants to know why I ditched him in Beirut last August and what I was doing all those months he couldn’t find me.

It has all been such a whirlwind; I don’t even know where to begin…