Tin was Skyping with Tete yesterday and he pulled out his Trumpet and played then sang When the Saints Go Marching In, then he sang It’s a Wonderful World. This morning, he recited all of his Croatian nursery rhymes perfectly.
We bought Tin a photography book of New Orleans Jazz greats because he loves looking at photographs of people playing instruments. He loves to name all the instruments. He sits on the couch and reads this book as if it were the holy word. Houston, I think we have a musician on our hands.
A friend of ours came by to fix the toilet handle in Tin’s bathroom, she also teaches Tin how to drum. One subject led to another but we found ourselves on the topic of being young, black and male in New Orleans and I told her that it was a worry that crossed my mind now and again about Tin. She said the good thing is that Tin has already been in the paper twice so that if he keeps his face in the public eye, people would know him, and it might prevent the NOPD from harming him.
I was speaking with my neighbor who told me they just lost $80,000 in business as three clients stopped their projects – why? The economy, stupid. She said she went to the bank to figure out what to do and someone had told her to get a line of credit. She said all small business are getting lines of credit to keep them afloat.
Just what America needs – more credit.
I am now managing multiple personalities and I’m not the only one. Remember when you were one face to your family, one to your friends, one to your employers? And a lot of people were very concerned when those worlds met and overlapped. I won’t use the now ubiquitous term REAL but I will say that having never had very firm boundaries between these worlds has enabled me to move into this new world we are living in seamlessly.
See I am me in all of these roles I play and I don’t shy away from laying my soul bare even when I have done outrageously stupid things in my life. The consequence is that there is no one who doesn’t know me who doubts that I am truly trying to learn from my mistakes.
Last night, on the front porch, our neighbors came for a visit and then a pizza was ordered from Italian Pie. My voice is still not working, but we managed to celebrate TGIF in grand bayou style. I might have been slightly winsome that hanging on my front porch might soon be compromised by our new plan to rent out the LaLa, but I wasn’t. I had overwhelming feeling of freedom from any preconceived notion of what any future day might hold. I decided to live each one as if it were a day of reinvention rather than a planned or foreshadowed event. That my dear reader, is freeing.
We will be posting the LaLa in all of its rentable configurations very soon on VRBO and AirBnB but most likely we’ll be starting with a two month renter starting in January. For now we have to outfit the laundry room as our kitchen and laundry. We’ll get a bed and change things up in my office. And the results are going to be fantastic because we can expand or contract as needed without changing Tin’s room and bathroom which keeps his life consistent as we shape shift as needed.
I also did a better survey of Google+ which I’m very interested in developing for my business ideas. There I can explore new versions of my business self and find out more about other topics in life that I have an interest in besides the seldom prosaic postings that I find on Facebook every day. Really Twitter feeds give me more insight into the world than Facebook. Facebook, as one student so well articulated, is where you show your best self – the one that goes to a job interview happy and sunny.
Reinventing yourself is a wonderful way to sort through superfluous baggage and get rid of all dead weight notions – it’s so freeing – sort of like a personality enema. Try it, you’ll love the new you.
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
It’s a funny thing about life: No matter how much you try to prepare, plan and push things in a certain direction, you never really know where you’ll end up until you’re there. This uncertainty could disorient a lesser person, but today, you’re ready to embrace the fact that life is full of unexpected detours. You’ll surely get somewhere today, but it probably won’t be where you expected to land when you woke up this morning. The good news is that you’ll be very happy regardless.
I’ve had such wonderful relationships across all sectors of my life that I am going to take a moment to say I’m grateful. I’m grateful to have known so many warm, smart, talented, and gracious people in my life. That is why I love the work I do because I get to build on those relationships. I remember when I started working at my company we were all a bunch of people that we said no corporation would ever hire. A close dear friend and colleague did an interview with a source from a kayak in the midst of a pond in Poland. Well so many stories come to mind, but instead of going down memory lane, let me just say I am rich because my friends, colleagues and acquaintances have made me so.
Here is the website of a friend I met through Tatjana – a poet no less – I’m such a fan of anyone who can turn a word. I love the poem on his home page – Eight O’Clock in the Morning and the last line of the narrator who is watching his lover sleep – I don’t know if I am part of his dreams/Desire is a scale and I don’t know if it catches up with dreams.
OCHO DE LA MAÑANA
Le miro cómo duerme enredado en la sábana.
La esponja del descanso le borra los sentidos.
Deja pasar dos planchas moteadas de luz
la ventana entreabierta
picotea en el borde de un tiesto de geranios
un gorrión tremante
con ojos de cabeza de alfiler
y el picoteo se hace
del ritmo de una frase inquisitiva.
Pero no se despierta.
Se abraza a la almohada, se hunde como en nubes
y me atrapa al volverse alzando una rodilla.
No sé si formo parte de su sueño.
Querer es una escala y no sé si alcanza al sueño.
The woman across the bayou who is 95 years old said that in the Great Depression, five members of her family lost their job in one week. In one week, I have spoken to sources and clients, five of them, who have lost their job. Don’t underestimate that right now in our lives we are undergoing severe hardship. What most of us are going through on the inside is amplified on the outside daily, minute by minute, across every touchstone. What we need right now is to see clearly, is to feel compassion, is to know that this too shall pass.
In the past 24 hours these are the missives that have arrived:
A fellow blogger/writer sends me a poem he carries in his wallet:
What I point out to you
Is on that
You shouldn’t allow yourselves
To be confused by others.
Act when you need to,
Without further hesistation or doubt
People today can’t do this.
What is their affliction?
Their affliction is in
their lack of self-confidence.
If you do not spontaneously
Trust yourself sufficiently,
You will be in a frantic state,
Pursuing all sorts of objects
And being changed
By those objects,
Unable to be independent.
–Linhji (d. 867).
My life coach sends me a message from a fellow tweeter:
James Van Praagh (@JamesVanPraagh)
9/22/11 1:01 PM
We must live through our life experiences, the good and the difficult, in order for the soul to gain wisdom and fly higher.
I open The Te of Piglet and it is on this page:
You can be a guiding star,
If you make the most of Who You Are.
And the sensitivity
That you’re now ashamed to see
Can be developed even more,
So you can find the hidden doors
To places no one’s been before.
And the pride you’ll feel inside
Is not the kind that makes you fall–
It’s the kind that recognizes
The bigness found in being Small. (p 51)
I lost my voice mid morning – in my business that is not a good thing. I have a horrible cold, brought to me by the little germ buses that populate Tin’s nursery – why I oughta. But the good news is that I found my voice too – my inner voice. I had a long talk with a dear confidant of mine, a very uplifting talk with my new life coach, and then another colleague called and I had a good talk again and then I lost my voice. Just as well, I couldn’t get the people I was trying to get on the phone all morning anyway.
We had a dramatic thunderstorm roll in and Tin was home early from nursery school – his teacher was back from her three day vacation and he was in a better mood. Toddlers like consistency. There is Pancake Day, Tuna Fish and Crackers Day, and on and on.
Adults think they want consistency but that’s not true – consistent what? Even the best thing would be the worst thing day after day after day. While I have been unable to utter a word this afternoon and into this evening, I’ve found that I have the most to say. It’s actually a cause célèbre the whole entire day. Stay tuned for the details, because I myself, love it when a plan comes together.
Remember the Corporate Spring and CEO Spring that Marc Benioff was talking about at his Dreamforce conference? Well I say there is a Culture Spring going on. The wheels are turning for everybody – not just me – it’s not like I’m the one who made a lot of foolish decisions that has led me to this point – we were all headed down the wrong path, as a nation, as a culture, and now we are being zig and zagged and forced to look at things from a radically different point of view.
Talking about a revolution, here’s one for you.
Imagine your life radically different for just a moment – imagine you are not getting up and getting your kid off to school, and pouring a cup of coffee and going to your computer to do work that someone else has envisioned for you. Imagine you are everywhere – your entire being is everyone – and you are not longer silo’ing your life into parent/worker/partner. Imagine you are everything to everyone and they are everything to you and now you have radically turned the notion of who you are and what you do on its nose.
Why would you do this – well let me ask you a question – if you could pick between making more money than anyone in the world and improving the world for everyone, which would you choose?
The Universe is chatting with me, I threw up an idea, and suddenly not one call but many, not one email but many, not one idea buy many came strutting through the door. You know why? Because, that’s why.
Today’s thought for the day – the world is conspiring with you to be a better place.
Marc Benioff called for a Corporate Spring at his Dreamforce conference in San Francisco not a few weeks ago and it seemed this Saturday 1000 protestors gathered on Wall Street hoping to get it going. Big Media tried to quiet down the protest such as Yahoo blocking emails calling for people to gather.
Corporate Spring
CEO Spring
Big Media Spring