42 posts tagged “qotd”
What's one of your favorite quotes?
Submitted by Georgie-boy.
"The biggest obstacle to creativity is attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you're doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities."
- Gordon Mackenzie, Former Creative Paradozx for Hallmark. From the article "How your Company is like a Hairball" Fast Company, Dec 1997
I found this poem in a book meant for children. It's a rather dark poem, and I only read it once to Cassandre, before she was old enough to really understand the words. I love it, but I don't think it belongs in a children's book of poetry.
'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.-T.S. Eliot
What's your method for calculating a tip?
I'm going to steal my answer from Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven:
It's not tipping I believe in. It's overtipping.
But the best answer to this question so far, comes from Spike.
What song best describes your current mood?
Submitted by Section31.
I sure wish I was smart enough to get the cover art to appear on top of the song...
How did you pick your Vox name? Does it mean something?
Submitted by LeendaDLL.
ser·en·dip·i·ty (s
r
n-d
p
-t
) Pronunciation Key
n. pl. ser·en·dip·i·ties
- The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
- The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
- An instance of making such a discovery.
Serendipity has always been one of my favorite words. The way it rolls off the tongue reminds me a little of Mary Poppins (supercalifragilisticexpialidocious), or Cinderella (bibbity bobbity boo). Serendipity is a happy word. It's also a fantastic dessert shop in Manhattan - their frozen hot chocolate is to die for.
So really, what's better than something good that happens totally unexpectedly? Well, I suppose you could say hoped -for happiness, as in a wish-come-true. Ok, I'll buy that. But this is a very close second and much more fun to pronounce.
Blogging in Vox, for me, is all about serendipity (yep, it's all about me). You hop over here, skip over there, and lo, what's that? Something cool. Something interesting. Something discovered that you never ever would have found had you searched for it all your life. And of course you never would have searched for it in the first place. But there it is: serendipity.
P.s The spell checker does not like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but it does like bibbity bobbity boo. Go figure that.
In honor of Vox's launch tomorrow, what's your favorite feature or aspect of Vox?
Take 2, this time with feeling:
When I first heard about blogging I was very skeptical. Why would anyone do it? Why would a person put themselves out there, live in the public eye and open themselves up to public comment (aka ridicule)? My sense was that you had to be a special kind of person to do it well, and that the blogoshere (damn I still really hate that word) was full of pontificaters. People who loved to hear the sound of their own voice.
Flash forward a bit, and I'm contracting for Six Apart, mecca for blogging. It was a surreal and wonderful experience. I got to meet some incredibly smart, articulate and talented people, several of whom have since become friends, but I never really felt like I was one of them, I never felt like I should try to blog. In fact my experience working at Six Apart had kind of a boomerang effect; I could see why others would blog, but not why I would do it.
I started a TypePad blog quietly, to try it out. I did it sporadically, mostly to assuage my guilt at not keeping in touch with my family or even keeping a decent record of my kids' childhoods. I told my parents about it, and my sister. I was a little embarrassed about it.
Then in the spring I was invited to try Vox. I was working someplace else by then but Ginger generously invited me (thank you) to try out the alpha. It was soooo fun. Safe too, because it was just a bunch of friends in there. And it was liberating. Suddenly I found myself writing about things that I hadn't thought about before and I found that I wanted to write and to share in a way that I had never done before. Growing up I was a voracious reader. And though I was good with words verbally, I never showed any talent for stringing stories together on paper. My personal expression was always music, never writing.
So it was strange to find myself needing to write. I started carrying around a notebook because I would get these ideas for posts that I didn't want to lose track of. Some were just titles, some were full blown stories, and some were visuals. As the Vox beta went on and new functionality was added I realized that I had found my medium. I could use words, pictures, video and music to express myself. But the core is still writing. I love it now.
I find it so interesting that I could find this out about myself at this stage in my life. I wish, I wish that I could get my friends to try it and to do this too. But it could be that they already know who they are and don't need this kind of outlet. Or maybe they do need an outlet, but don't know where to begin. Or maybe they just don't have the time.
I certainly should not have the time. I steal this time away from other things: my husband, my kids, my projects, my sleep...
Anyway, I owe some thank yous to some of my favorite 6Aers and this launch seems a good time for it: Thank you, Barak, for introducing me to this whole crazy idea in the first place and bringing me on for six months of fun. And to Ginger and Lilia for encouraging me to write when I was sure I was too old for any of my stories to be interesting or relevant. To Sippey, Anil and Mena for being such amazing role models for blogging. Andrew too. Your style is completely different and frankly you're the one who made me feel like it was ok to blog things that were silly or mundane (I really mean that in a good way). Alaina and Miz Genevra, who encouraged me to blog my attempts to get fit, along with my lunch. And just like the Academy awards I'm sure I've left some important people out, not the least of whom are my newly found non-6A Vox friends. And I will remember everyone I've forgotten to thank just as soon as my head hits the pillow (in about three minutes) with an "oh shit." Please forgive me for that, Byrne.
Thanks to all of you for building such a great place to hang out.
I love it here.
In honor of Vox's launch tomorrow, what's your favorite feature or aspect of Vox?
The fact that I can insert the perfect song, complete with the cover art.
What was your very first job?
Submitted by Laurel.
Of course I did babysitting. But the first job that involved a schedule - and a uniform - was at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was a cashier. The best part of the job was getting to eat chocolate cream pies for free. All the food at the end of the day went to the employees, and though I soon OD'd on extra crispy chicken, I could eat those chocolate cream pies all day long. (Oh for the days when I could do that and still weigh 108 lbs.)
In order to get the pies I had to go to the giant refrigerator in the back. In order to get there, I had to skate across a permanent grease slick on the tile floor. The aisle was small and there was a stove with an open flame on one side - if you didn't get the slide just right you could easily land on the stove. First it was a game, but after a while it became tedious. Why should I risk my life for pies?
I complained to the manager about the "dangerous work conditions," but he did not take my fifteen year-old concerns very seriously. After several weeks of skating and sliding, and having eaten all the chocolate pies I could manage, I quit and reported the store, with its fire hazard to the school principal.
Yes, I was a pain even back then.
If you could write a book about anything, what would it be about?
Oh my. Who has the time or energy to write a book? I can barely keep up with this blog.
Taking a cue from Scott, my favorite class had as much to do with the teacher as anything else. Larry Vilaubi was one of those once-in-a-lifetime teachers. He taught art history to a tough crowd: high school seniors. He did it with a fantastically sarcastic and irreverent sense of humor. No one was safe, not even Caravaggio.
Larry insisted we open our eyes and really look at the world around us. He gave us extra credit for seeing movies like Erendira, Gallipoli and Montenegro. Two of those movies were borderline porn (ok, art porn, so they were moody, pretty and had plot lines). The other was the most serious condemnation of war I had ever seen. Ok, I was 18 and didn't know much about war. I wasn't even sure I wanted to vote yet. Larry fixed all that.
Every year Larry took a dozen graduates on an art history tour of Europe that covered six countries in 30 days. For most of us it was the first time we'd left home much less traveled overseas. We hit all the big museums and lots of private galleries. We stayed in youth hostels and traveled by bus. We drank - a lot. We saw the Parthenon. The Eligin Marbles. The Sistine Chapel. The Tomb of the de Medicis.The Mona Lisa behind bullet proof glass. And so much more.
In Pompeii I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life. I suffer from motion sickness and we were set to travel by ferry to Greece that afternoon, so in the morning I took some Dramamine in anticipation of the trip. Then, suffering from a very sick stomach, I took some prescription medicine I got from "my dad's a pharmacist" Billy. Then, because I was perhaps the silliest girl on earth at the time, and I thought that being 5' 7 and 108 lbs was not thin enough (I was an extremly picky eater at the time) I skipped my meals that day.
Pure brillance.
Sometime around noon we were walking around Pompeii marveling at the perfectly preserved city. It was fantastic. Until the room started to spin and I could no longer walk. I looked at Larry and said "I think I need to sit down" and he turned white as a sheet. He called his wife Adrian and the two of them took me outside to sit down. I didn't move again under my own steam for many hours.
Adrian kept telling me to breathe in and out, which was really annoying. All I wanted to do was go to sleep, why did they keep talking to me? It was so bright that I couldn't keep my eyes open and all I could hear were Larry and Adrian talking to me. "Breathe Karen. In and out. Good. Take another one. Really deep this time." Then, "Drink this." Someone pressed a can of putrid orange soda to my lips and made me drink it. GROSS! It helped right away. The shock of the sugar was enough to keep me from going under.
Larry picked me up and carried me across the city. I still couldn't open my eyes and had no idea where we were. We walked through some kind of outdoor cafe and bumped into a woman. "Oh my God!" she gasped. I thought, wow, I must look really awful right now.
Behind the cafe there was a place to lay down (I guess people pass out in Pompeii a lot) and I laid in one of those little beds for the better part of a day and night. Adrian, Larry and my fellow travelers took turns feeding me ice chips, and then tiny, rolled up balls of bread. After many hours I could sit up, but it was a full day or more before I could walk without assistance.
It turns out that when you mix Dramamine with anti-diarrheal medicine they play a fierce game of Fight Club in your brain. One drug is saying "move faster, move much much faster." The other drug is saying "slooooooow waaaaaaay dooooooown." Guess who wins?
No one.
The brain, in response to all of this stimulation, throws up it's hands and says "I quit." And since the part of the brain in question handles breathing and circulation, quitting is a really bad choice. If Adrian and Larry hadn't forced me to breathe, I might not have ever done it again. Wild, don't you think? (Of course this was not my mother's reaction, but that is a different story).
So I love Larry (and Adrian too). Not only did he take me on the best trip ever, and open up my life to the world of art, but he saved it as well.
What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?
