Almostgotit.com

It’s so new it’s not even in Wikipedia, and baby that’s SAYIN’ something!

Invented (according to Web Worker Daily) by software developer Brad Neuberg, Coworking is “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.”  Mostly young, mostly hip independent workers are trading their pj’s and isolation for shared work space where they can network, meet clients, and enjoy some of the time- and space-structuring benefits of “going to an office.”

Click here to watch Brad and some of his colleagues in a “learn more about it” video.

While it’s not an entirely new concept, the current “coworker movement” among the growing number of (mostly web) workers is clearly taking advantage of the social connectivity provided by the internet to collaborate in forming a number of “coworking” spaces  already available (or currently being formed) throughout the US. 

It’s a really neat idea.  What I want to know is whether they accept anyone older than 25, and if you can still get a mocha?

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Related posts:
We are ALWAYS networking
Trying it on for size: permanent 9-5 expat?

10. Just keep trying.
9. Try to determine what is working.
8. Try to determine what is not working.
7. Try to find someone who’s done it.
6. Try to ask for help.
5. Try it again tomorrow.
4. Try it a little differently.
3. Try once more.
2. Try again.
1. Try.

Kind of beautiful, isn’t it?  I saw this on a giant poster in an educational supply store.  It’s also featured in November 2006 issue of The Lorraine Hansberry Library News, and that’s about it.  I gather then that these words are meant for children.  Perhaps adults are too cynical to hear them, or have discovered already that trying isn’t always enough.  Or is it?  At what point in our lives do we lose our limitless potential?  When is it that we can no longer grow up to be the president of the United States? 

Just keep trying.  Find mentors.  Ask for help.  Focus on the positive (what’s already working) while carefully defining any remaining barriers (what’s not working.)  Take a break when you need to and try it again tomorrow.  Instead of giving up entirely, try it just once or twice more, or try it with a slightly different approach. 

The Economist, among others, has been busily debunking the enduring American dream of endless economic opportunity and upward mobility.  That dream is dead, they tell us, and we need a new one.  The realists, these adults among us, are insisting that we read their reports and statistics that show us how limited we truly are by our educations and our socio-economic status.

The reports are true.  The inequities are real, and they are growing.  

But.

No population study can ever define an individual.   This is why, in addition to The Economist, we also have stories.  This is why we have The Lord of the Rings and The Little Engine that Could.  We buy these books for our children but, if we’re honest, we know we need them, too. 

And if we are not only honest but decent, we will not be content with lying to our children about things we don’t believe any more ourselves.  And what we are telling our children is this:  no set of aggregate numbers can ever describe a single person.  No statistical level of improbability ever stopped a hobbit.

So just keep trying. 

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Related posts:
Chapter Two-ing
Success!! 
Hanging in (and blonder, too)

Penelope Trunk  recently wrote a wonderfully iconoclastic column in The Huffington Post entitled Hold CEOs Accountable for Their Bad Parenting.   It seems that corporate boards don’t mind their CFO’s having mistresses, or even having three mistresses at once: they just don’t like it when all three mistresses go public and embarrass the company. 

Even more horrifying, however, is how universally this “success” culture celebrates bad parenting by lauding wealthy fathers who work 100-hour weeks and assure their colleagues that “My Family is You.”

Trunk writes:

I can’t decide which is more pathetic — the way these men approach their role as a parent, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.

How can there be no mention of the fact that these CEOs are neglecting their kids?

We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids, you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

Don’t miss the article, nor the comments, either.  One is by Harvard Business School’s Bob Sutton.

Who washes his own family’s dishes.

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Related Posts:
Woman vs. Rabbit Hole

It’s a canal boat on the Thames, near where we once spent a year in Oxford.  It is also an experiment in very rudimentary PhotoShop…

Photo by Goldring (Creative Commons)

A friend of mine lives in the country, and her old farmhouse is surrounded by acres of trees, which on summer nights are  full of  twinkling fireflies.  Before she built a deck off her 2nd floor bedroom, we used to climb out her bedroom window to sit on the porch roof with a bottle of wine just to watch them.

We went there on Friday.   Some of us picked blackberries while others made pies, barbequed, and laid out dozens of salads.  The house was full of people, as were both porches and the yard.  The people were mostly writers, lawyers for special causes, and other passionate folk who seem to love what they do. 

It was marvelous, like drinking limoncello straight from the bottle. 

I especially enjoyed joining the upstairs-porch crew of wonderfully-eccentric, uncensored, pissed-off women.   I came in just as a woman wearing a pink cowboy hat with sequins was half-way through an animated story about dog-poop, jerks who steal parking spaces, and other perils of downtown living. 

I didn’t catch half their names,  but it was a total trip listening to women who get even more irate about things than I do, have no interest in being reasonable, and would frankly make very alarming neighbors.

And who Just. Don’t. Care.

All of these wonderful, firefly people have something I want, and these women in particular were living something like my own suppressed female “id”,  with no apologies whatsoever. 

To be honest, it was very refreshing. 

I suspect that I too would love to tell someone that if their dog craps in my yard just ONE MORE TIME, I’m going to get out my gun and blow their fucking heads off. 

In my universe, though,  I’d just get sent to jail!!

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Don’t miss the cool firefly links, at right!

Dale Carnegie is my flavor of the week.  The Universe dropped him into my lap a couple days ago when my daughter and I were rummaging through the “free bin” at our favorite used book store, where I found his How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job – a perfectly good copy that was rejected by the consignment counter for no apparent reason. 

I do love serendipity so very much, when it happens!

Carnegie suggests we should always start by asking what’s right rather than what’s wrong.   Nevertheless (serendipity being one of your stranger animals) this week also brought me a good column by Mike Gunderloy called What’s wrong with web work?   While it’s already very difficult for any working person with a family to find the right balance, Gunderloy and subsequent commentors (me included!) discuss several problems which are particular to free-lancing and working at home.   Food for thought, indeed. 

Another blog I’ve been enjoying is “The Anti 9-5 Guide: Career advice for women who think outside the cube“  which is published in my home town (Seattle) and sort of makes me wish I could go back and live there just to participate in author Michelle Goodman’s world.  Even if I can’t,  the practical (if slightly anarchical) tone is perfect even as Goodman wisely avoids any temptation to jump into the Mommy Wars.  The “profiles” feature (of Goodman’s “fellow 9-5 expats”) is especially wonderful.

Don’t know yet if these are my peeps, but the journey’s kind of fun. 

 ”Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

We shamelessly put the kids to work last weekend and “put up” more than half a winter’s worth of heating wood in one day   (3+ cords)  The log splitter doesn’t make wood nearly so pretty as an axe does, nor even as fast, but you can run it all day long – a thing you can’t do with a set of axe-wielding arms. 

Summer rhythm never seems to set in around here until summer is half-way through.  To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how to do it all very well, with kids and work — what there is of it — and Everything Else never quite fitting into whatever time we’ve allotted for it. 

Here, surely, is part of the solution, though.  Living, green things.  This is part of our whiskey barrel garden (hic) which we fenced off and built on what used to be the end of our driveway.  

It is wonderfully peaceful to get up in the morning when it is still cool and stand over the cucumbers or beans with a hose.  Everything smells good in the morning, too.

Later in the day, when Everything Else gets to be too much, I can slip out the back door without telling anyone to dump some stuff into the compost bin, lean into the barrels to pluck a few weeds, see how the volunteer tomatoes are doing, or rifle through the foliage to see if it’s time to pick the beans again. 

It’s not highly-productive time, it’s Being Time.  And I’ve (almost) learned that I can’t live without it.

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Related posts:
Chapter two-ing 
In defense of thoughts

Here it finally is, as requested, for my two sisters, who bought me a pedicure several months ago when I had a family member in the hospital.  I couldn’t do it until yesterday, but it was quite fun getting my feet all sanded and varnished.  And glued.  There were no magazines to read, but you can’t read anyway because the lights are really low. So instead your mind just wanders.

For instance. Have you ever seriously considered how really weird toes are?

I also couldn’t help but wonder about all the other women who were also getting spa-ish things done to themselves in the middle of a week-day, and about what interesting choices we first-worlders make with our disposable income.  My “nail technician” asked if I’d come from work, and I told her that no, I’d been home chopping wood.

That made me feel really interesting and different from all of those other shallow women, until my technician told me she’d grown up on her Asian family’s local dairy farm.  And also that she is dyslexic, wants to be a famous scientist, and has an ex-boyfriend who is probably going to go to film school.

I wonder if my dairy-farming nail technician had shown a particular talent for prying foreign objects from cow hoofs, and so made the logical career decision.  And do you think she may have trimmed one of my big toe nails a tiny-bit-crookedly?

Not that I’m calling anyone’s wrongs to mind or remembering them this week with any obsessive particularity, especially while a person I want to hug is ministering so carefully to my hooves.  But here’s a new set of gospel verses I wrote while I sat there without reading material.  The first one is called “it is easiest to forgive other people for calling you names if you are first allowed to dismiss them as wee, snotty little dweebs.”  One of the verses that follows a little further down on the same page is ”It’s also good to remember the many advantages that can accrue for those who really are, at least occasionally, (1) nasty (2) lazy (3) uppity (4) a princess (!!) and (5) even capable of “having hissy fits all over the web.”  

Uppity Royal Pedicures, for instance.  And also, *bonus feature!*  the little pink foam-core sandals they gave me when I left are already being redeemed into wonderful new things by my 11-yr old artist daughter.

My new website  is already up and running, thanks to my brilliant brother, so stay tuned for the new URL sometime in the next couple of weeks.

What would you do if you had no fear? 
Living your dreams
while quakin’ in your boots

By Diane Conway,
with foreword by Anne Lamott

One of the things I’d do is be the first to comment on Powell Books’ website on a book I hadn’t even actually read yet. (they give random prizes for first-persons-to-comment, and ever since I won Door Prize #3 that one time, I’ve grown a bit cocky.)

I keep googling this book. I’ve been wanting to buy it for about a year now but keep running out of book money (I’m a little bad).  But look: it’s got about the world’s best title. And it has a foreword by Anne Lamott, how cool and irresistible is that? Because that’s enough reason to buy the book right there. And another reason is because I wish I had written it. Do you think I could use the same title, and get Anne Lamott to write my foreword, too?

I did submit a review for Powell’s, and even rated the book. I give it a “4,” not because it’s not worth a full “5″ but because giving it a 5 at this point may have been getting a little ahead of myself.  I would have edged up to a 4.5 had Powell Books given that option, but it didn’t.  

Maybe you could read this book yourself and then you can give it a five on Powell Books, and that would pull the average up to where it belongs.   Or have you read it already?  If you have, please let us know what you thought of it!

Here is what the publisher says about the book (which appears on the product page on both Powell Books and Amazon)

For this book, author Diane Conway approached a police officer, a waitress, a politician, a lawyer, a cab driver, and many others, and asked them each the same question: “What would you do if you had no fear?” The results, chronicled in this book, were both surprising and enlightening. Her respondents told her their secrets, their long-hidden dreams, and their fears. Their dreams included quitting mind-numbing jobs, applying to medical school, buying tickets to South America, finding true love, quitting drinking, or having an affair. The distance between dreaming and doing, according to Conway, is surprisingly short. In What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? her fresh voice and “Studs Terkel in drag persona” challenge readers to stop, open their hearts, and truly live. Included are self-tests, quizzes, growth exercises, and inspiring quotes for realizing one’s fear-free potential.

The author, calling herself our “slightly neurotic, frequently shaky guide” (channelling Lamott for sure) adds on Amazon that

When I saw the profound effect [asking this question] had on people, I started asking people everywhere I went. I had to overcome the fear that people would think that I’m: a) delusional or b) trying to pick them up for kinky sex.

Now doesn’t that sound like a fun read? 

And do you know what?  It fits much better when you do.  Everything settles into place, some lovely draping (which I never knew was part of the design) happens, and there is NO gaping. 

I’m sure there’s a profound metaphor in here someplace…