I’ve heard a rumor that the soundtrack to Blue Like Jazz may be filled with Portland bands. I know Steve is fond of Menomena. We shall see. Enjoy Portland’s Menomena:
04Feb, 2011
My friend Ben, who is an accomplished photographer, told me a long time ago he got rid of the takers in his life. I’ve done the same, and I’ve had it for the better. This is a harsh thing to talk about, because most of us think we are supposed to love and be accessible to everybody. But here’s the truth, if you were accessible to everybody, all the time, you’d be spent. God did not design you to never say no. Instead, He designed you with limitations, and you have to manage those limitations well. It’s a sad fact to say there are people who are takers. They take your soul, bit by bit, they use you, they make you feel ashamed or guilty when you don’t allow them to use you and so forth. If it’s at all possible, and by that I mean if you aren’t married to them or related and responsible in some way, these people need to go. By letting them go, I don’t mean be mean to them or tell them they are jerks, but you can just kind of know they aren’t going to be lifelong friends and make decisions accordingly. You [...]
03Feb, 2011
As a creator, your experiences matter. What you create over the coming year or years will be born out of how you spend your time. And there are, no doubt, a great many pressures on your time. We are fully into a new decade now, and I did a little experiment at the turn of the year that has helped me understand what to do with my time. I made a list of likes and dislikes of the previous year. What I mean is, I listed the stuff I liked doing in 2010, and also the experiences I didn’t like. I was surprised at how many experiences I liked and how few experiences I didn’t, and I was also surprised at how simple the experiences that meant the most to me actually were. Here’s a snapshot of my list: Experiences I liked: 1. Having a clean house. 2. Walking the dog by the river. 3. Having house guests. 4. The Storyline Conference. 5. Waking up and working on a book. (The list went on like this for a while, maybe twenty or so items on the list.) Experiences I didn’t like: 1. Not going to sleep in my own bed [...]
02Feb, 2011
As I follow the story in Egypt, I’m excited that the people are taking stands for democracy, and taking stands against a ruler who has only given lip service to the ideas of democracy. And yet these things are more complicated than they seem. Here are some perspectives I’ve been pondering as the hourly updates stream in: 1. Mubarak is anything but an honestly elected official, and had anything but democratic plans for his country. And yet, from an American perspective, he was cooperative. We paid Egypt nearly 1.5 billion per year in foreign aid, mostly to build the Egyptian military and serve as an ali in defending (or at least ignoring) Israel. 2. The people do not like Mubarak because of widespread oppression, but also because they saw him as a puppet for American/Israeli interests. 3. The Egyptian people, as a mass, do not like America because of our support for Israel. 4. An honestly elected leader would have trouble gaining mass support while still maintaining a neutral position toward America and Israel. 5. This revolution is not happening because of twitter or facebook (despite the twenty-something mantra that until the internet, nobody could speak to each other) but [...]
02Feb, 2011
Every successful creator has friends who think he or she is lucky. They met that one curator at a coffee shop, or Oprah’s housekeeper accidentally left that book behind in the kitchen. And the truth is their friends are right. They did get lucky. Everybody gets lucky. Luck is like the weather, it comes and goes, it makes crazy things happen randomly. But unless you actually spend the hours painting those paintings, meeting the curator amounts to nothing. And unless you put in the year to write the book, it can’t get left behind on Oprah’s counter. Luck favors the prepared. My friend Melisa told me about some people she’d heard of that win sweepstakes professionally. They enter drawings, lotteries, play bingo and sweepstakes and win an enormous amount of money every year. Are they lucky? Perhaps, but you would be too if you spent eight hours a day filling out forms and entering contests. It’s not unlike that with a creators work. Don’t worry about luck. You can’t do anything about the weather and you can’t do anything about luck. All you can do is work. All you can do is create, and let your work go into as [...]
