A short trailer on Music and Memory

http://vimeo.com/40094339

I guess I’ll never be done learning about the promise of being elderly, until I’m done. When I use the term elderly,  I mean end of life, the inability to no longer belong to the world on any perceptible level. I think it’s at the point that pleasure disappears that we become elderly. This short clip of a much longer documentary on music and memory offers a road back.

I don’t know how many of these recovery moments are in the actual movie but this one is profound, especially as I recall the little pleasure that Dad had beyond sleeping in a comfortable chair at the end of his life.

More Useful Life of Things — What makes for good junk?

You know how you have stuff sitting around your house that’s not quite junk ’cause you might just have a use for it? And it sits around, sometimes for years until one day the magic happens. Then you don’t have to feel like a guilty hoarder any more because all of that rat holing was justified, ’cause LOOK WHAT I JUST MADE!!!!!

It all seems to make sense at one time. For us, the garden and parties supply a lot of the impetus. First, the garden junk. I bought four bowling pins at a junk store about 3 years ago ’cause they were a dollar and bowling pins are just cool. They found their way to a corner under the house. A year ago, when we were first putting in the garden, a friend had some shoe rods that were too good to throw away. She kept them for me. When I saw them, I concurred. I brought them home and put them in a corner of the garden shed.

This year the two neglected items came together. Who knew that that bowling pins had a hole in the bottom? I widened the hole using Dad’s bit brace and pounded a shoe rod into the bottom. Then we pounded the entire thing into the ground. They are now my new  hose bumpers. And since I have bowling pins in the garden, now adding the bowling ball made sense.

The other coming together was much more rapid. We found cast iron stork legs at the flea market for pretty much nothing. We had a broken ostrich shell which was too good to throw away, even when broken. Ta-da! A Tim Burton Style scarecrow.

Now the party-driven needs.

About 5-7 years ago a round glass patio table that we had for about 12 years met its useful end as a table. Cyrus, our 60 pound dog, leapt on it, collapsing it in a hail of tempered glass. No one was hurt. We put the table ring onto the might be useful someday too big to get in the garbage can pile. Time passed. Actually, quite a bit of time. We moved it around and looked at it but it never found a useful purpose.

This year is Eric’s 60th and we celebrated All Fool’s Eve as clowns are a favorite theme. The celebration required decorations. A happy coincidence that the blue rope lights bought for another purpose fit exactly into the groove of the table ring wrapped twice round. There was a need for a hole filler to fill the middle of what was now a blue lit hole.

I pulled out the canvas scraps that Mom had given me about 9 years ago. One fit. Now Harry stands above the gate to the yard. Although Harry first honored Eric’s birthday, he’s a permanent (or semi-permanent fixture.

What do you think the UPS drivers think when they drive up?

Oh wait, they’ve already seen the scare crow and bowling pins.

Piano Lesson

I bought a used grand piano on Craig’s list. Phew! What a lot of lessons. The one that I thought I was learning is that dedication to learning an instrument requires a substantial investment, in time and in the instrument itself. But that’s not what I learned. . . yet. I expect the obvious lesson to play out over the course of many years but the less obvious ones are front and center.

1. Trust in Allah but tie up your camel — I bought the piano from a man named Carlos. At least I think that’s his name. His address is 205 Northfield Dr. in Universal City. Carlos seemed to be a lovely man, very generous, very helpful and very straightforward. I took him at his word. Carlos lied  to me. . . about the fact that he had the piano pedals attached in the past and that reattaching them would be routine. The pedals as well as other parts on this piano don’t belong on this piano. And in fact, they don’t work on this piano.

Carlos lied to the piano movers when he omitted telling them that they would have to haul this grand piano up a full flight of stairs. I assume that he lied to me about pretty much everything else, except the fact that he was a failed mortgage banker. He isn’t returning my calls. Who’s surprised?

2. Frankenstein deserved love too. I could hate this piano because it isn’t what I wanted and it’s cobbled together out of loose parts that were lying around in some piano technician’s workshop. That technician took those spare parts and made a monster. I got the monster, a changeling.

My piano technician said, “Dump this piano and get a good one but do it truthfully. Don’t do what Carlos did you you.” Right. I wouldn’t but I also wouldn’t buy a piano with a story like this one. Would you?

He said, “The baby you have adopted is ugly and will never amount to anything in this world.” I am choosing to love this piano, because it’s the one that I have.  (Thereby subverting desire — see below). I may never amount to anything in this world of piano playing either. So there. At least we’ll have each other.

3. There really are very few bargains left in the world. We all know so much about the value of things. It’s like the stock market. Most adjustments in value are made in micro-seconds. You get what you pay for, unless you go to Busse’s Flea Market. Then you get something else entirely. I’m not sure what.

4. Just because someone else has something so lovely that you desire it, doesn’t mean that you can or should have one too. Oooooh, this is BIG! I have a friend who is a beautiful, professional musician with a great singing voice who plays many instruments successfully. Yes, all those things, dammit! On top of all that, she has a piano so sweet that it will make you cry. It is a VERY expensive piano and one that I can’t keep my hands off of when I am in her house. The way the action works invites you to touch it. It’s a Claude Debussy piano. I went in search of that piano experience and settled on big sound. But then, all grand pianos have bigger sounds than spinets. And they direct the sound into the room through that open top. The piano I got is more of a Jerry Lee Lewis piano.

5. Precious things require special care. This piano isn’t a precious thing. See above. That means that anyone can play it. Kids can play it; people who don’t know what they’re doing can play it (we will stop short of setting drinks on it). And once the legs are stablized, I can sit on it, or lay across it, in a red dress. Not with the lovely piano above, but then my friend is tiny so maybe it’s not the same for her. My piano is not a worry; it’s a toy.

So that’s my set of piano lessons. You’d think if I can learn these, I can learn to play even this piano better than I play today. I expect that’s true. But I need a working LOUD pedal. Surprised?

Casting About

Welcome to my new readers, young and brilliant! And a Happy 2012 to all of you but why don’t we have flying cars?

I’ve noticed a personal behavior that I thought I’d share. My noticing is a product of memory and aging, which currently is amusing. I hope it remains so. My application is much broader.

Yesterday, my husband lost his work cell phone. He searched in a mad Monday morning scramble, insisting that I must have moved it from the spinet, now in the entryway.

Does this look too crowded to you?

Backstory — part of the process of clearing out my parents’ house to prepare it for the next owners is gathering treasures and incorporating them into my already treasure-laden house. The melding causes some casting about (little letters), as we remove and restack that which we will keep.

“Where do the mixing bowls live now?”

“Where do we now put the little plates?”

“What happened to that BIG glass pitcher; Where is it now?”

Anyway, back to the story. It was not the way to start a Monday, especially after a long weekend, which involved moving a small grand piano up a flight of stairs as well as moving all the other furniture about to make room for the new piano. Did you wonder why the spinet was in the entryway or did you imagine piano music from the moment you enter the house?

We looked in all the normal places, the tops of flat surfaces, the bags of Goodwill items, pockets of coats, under pillows. He found it in the junk/tool drawer in the kitchen, next to the tape measure that we had used liberally over the weekend. Funny. Oh. I didn’t take it off the top of the spinet and put it there, but I’m tempted to the next time. Except I would have to leave myself an obvious note somewhere to remind me of my joke. And he wouldn’t think it’s funny.

Which leads me back to the subject . . .

I am developing two practices to make things easier to find. I feel as if I develop them now, they will serve me throughout the rest of my life. The first is to always put stuff in the same place, like parking your car in the same section of the parking lot at the grocery store — developing memory as habit. You can imagine how our housebasket turnover has messed with that practice.

The other is casting about – scanning the room, turning my gaze to look upon flat surfaces for stuff that I might have set down when something else distracted me that I still  need to remember something about. It’s amazing what else I find when I do that. Oh Yeah! That. I wanted to do something about that yesterday! Oh yeah, and that. I’ll take care of that right now. Great. Now, what was I doing. Cast about. Oh yeah!

I think there’s a broader practice of Casting About (big C, big A) that’s fuel to creative practice as well. Casting about = unfocused wandering/wondering  to see/absorb what is there as potential fuel, roaming without purpose; with wonder. I tell myself that’s why my house is full of visual stimulation.

I can Cast About, while casting about. But it also means that there’s loads of visual distraction. Hmm.

I’m looking forward again. . . to cocktails

I didn’t know it until recently, but on the day Mom died in 2009 my perspective shifted 180 degrees to the past. I felt that if I didn’t immerse myself in her life, I wasn’t honoring who she was.  Dad died in 2010; repeat the performance. However for him, my immersion was to re-experience regret that I hadn’t actively made his last year a better year, that his passing was painful although his life was a joy. Then Mel died in 2011. Repeat, but with slightly different flavors.

I kept one of my favorite photos of each of them on my monitor, where I could see them and remember. Every day. Until yesterday when I replaced it with a photo from the beach trip.

See, we spent Thanksgiving at the beach with friends this year. It wasn’t the first holiday that I hadn’t spent with family but it was the first in a while. And it was obviously the first of many that I won’t spend with family. It was a trip that my family might not have enjoyed much, so it was pretty much for me this time.

Passing through grief into the present is an interesting process. It took much longer and claimed more energy than I was aware of.

This week, it feels okay, no, if feels good, to move forward. The big final forward step is to empty out and sell the family house which is full enough right now of both Mom and Dad’s personalities as to be somewhat shrine like. I’m looking forward to seeing it shrink down to a nice, mid-century modern house, as stuff comes out and it becomes more anonymous.

One of the moving forward steps was to put away the photos of those who were physically present in my life and replace them with a photo of those who are still physically present in my life. The funny hat theme is a connector, however.

So what’s this cocktail thing? I love the way the 30s, 40s and 50s depicted cocktail hour, one hedonistic elegant hour spent entirely in the present in conversation, with fancy drinks with swords and umbrellas served in special glasses used for nothing else. I’ve learned a lot about how to put food together, but cocktails are another thing entirely. It’s a set of flavors and combinations with which I am not yet conversant.

The drink that I’m currently enthralled with is a Blood and Sand, a 1922 cocktail created to launch a movie of the same name, starring Rudolph Valentino and Rita Hayworth.

4 equal parts

1. Good Scotch
2. Cherry Herring
3. Sweet Vermouth
4. Fresh-squeezed Orange Juice

Shake violently with ice in a shaker. Strain into a coupe glass. (I was thrilled to find that I had 10 of those same glasses in the cupboard, bought cheaply years and years ago and rarely used. Aha!!!)

My present involves wonderful cocktails shared with dear friends in pleasant conversation focused in the present.

Join me?

Graphic Facilitation — I’m so EXCITED!!!

I just signed up for a 6 month graphic facilitation course on line through Alphachimp Studios.

If you too are  interested, there are a few seats left. You can find out more at: http://thatcreativespace.com/play

I don’t have a picture yet for the new course which begins next month, but here’s my visual introduction from a short, fun course that I took with them that merely got my feet wet. It was $250 and was worth that, but not more.

This next course is a full blown graphic facilitation course online. At first thought, it seemed expensive, especially if if weren’t 1/2 off as an introductory course. Half off is $2000.

However, here’s my reasoning for why it’s worth $2000:

1. There are two online modules per month for 6 months. Estimated working time per week is 60-90 minutes. That means that it’s 36 hours of learning time, or $55/hour, the cost of an in-state tuition college class.
2. The content is coming for experts in the graphic facilitation industry.
3. They’re willing to share ALL of their knowledge, not only about graphic facilitation skills but the total practice, all the way down to pricing. Pricing anything has always been a struggle for me.
4. It’s equivalent to the cost of a conference.
5. It’s tax deductible as a business expense.
6. It’s a framework for forced practice.

I’m hoping that it’s much more interactive than the fun course and that it contains MUCH more technical information, which it appears to have. So few of these courses, Sketchnoting and others have how to stuff. They seem to attract people with plenty of drawing how to who are looking for a way to apply their drawing skills to a new medium/methodology. I don’t have that kind of drawing skill, although I’m working on it.

I toyed with the idea of spending this kind of money and time on drawing rather than this specific application, however, they said seats were running out and before I knew it, my fingers had entered my PayPal information. Does the autofill in Google Chrome make purchases speed faster than thought for you too?

I’ll be sharing what I learn through this blog, which for a while seems to have become All Sketchnotes All the Time. Or mostly sketchnotes most of the time, anyway.

What do you think? Does graphic facilitation interest you? Want to know more?

The second economy, a neural backbone for the first economy

I just read a really readable, cogent article sent to my through McKinsey’s e-newsletter and written by W. Brian Arthur, who is described in the article as:

a visiting researcher with the Intelligent Systems Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and an external professor
at the Santa Fe Institute. He is an economist and technology thinker and a pioneer in the science of complexity.

I say BIG BRAIN. The paper is incredibly readable and quite fascinating. It provides both a believable pessimism on the overall jobs market while providing an optimistic perspective on the economy.

 

Twenty years ago, if you went into an airport you would walk up to a counter and present paper tickets to a human being. That person would register you on a computer, notify the flight you’d arrived, and check your luggage in. All this was done by humans.

Today, you walk into an airport and look for a machine. You put in a frequent-flier card or credit card, and it takes just three or four seconds to get back a boarding pass, receipt, and luggage tag. What interests me is what happens in those three or four seconds.

The moment the card goes in, you are starting a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines. Once your name is recognized, computers are checking your flight status with the airlines, your past travel history, your name with the TSA  (and possibly also with the National Security Agency). They are checking your seat choice, your frequent-flier status, and your access to lounges.

This unseen, underground conversation is happening among multiple servers talking to other servers, talking to satellites that are talking to computers (possibly in London, where you’re going), and checking with passport control, with foreign immigration, with ongoing connecting flights. And to make sure the aircraft’s weight distribution is fine, the machines are also starting to adjust the passenger count and seating according to whether the fuselage is loaded more heavily at the front or back.

His point is that this second economy is made up of the bits and bytes of information that are collected, related and shared about practically everything – soon to be everything that doesn’t require human judgement. People who are responsible for business processes had better watch their backs (or their fronts or futures or something). And that is where many of the jobs have disappeared, permanently.

The other point is that this neural underpinning of the first economy will be responsible for the productivity improvements that will drive the growth of GDP. The basic problem is that if jobs are the ticket to prosperity and there are fewer jobs, fewer people will have tickets to this new prosperity.

This was a very short book report but you have to read the book to find out how it ends.

Jokes in translation

I read this enewsletter as soon as it comes in. Or I save it as a treasure to read when I need an idea or a boost. I suppose I should consider making a donation because there has always been something of value in it. But it’s the Internet, and I don’t pay for the Internet. Do you? A quandry.

However, I found this story on Thiagi’s site, the author of the newsletter. The title intrigued me but the story was even better. See what you think.

9 seconds to increasing learning engagment

I thought this was a great quick tip to improve facilitation. I always knew that holding uncomfortable silence was a strong factor in active facilitation. This quick tip suggests an actual time to hold. Read the 9-second pause rule here. http://trends.masie.com/ And try it out the next time you’re eager for a response to a question, even if you’re only holding a conversation.

My other favorite thing, besides Sketchnoting

I’ve been pre-occupied with Sketchnoting and doodling for the past few (or more than a few) posts, but this week’s enewsletter from the folks at Vital Smarts led me back to another treasure, personal story. Here’s what they say about personal story in the context of encouraging workplace safety, but it has applications to all things.

The typical mistake we make in motivating is to rely on verbal persuasion: data dumps, lectures, sermons, and rants. These are the least effective ways to motivate people.

The most effective way is personal experience. For example, we found that nurses who suffered a hospital-acquired infection were much more likely to remind their peers to wash their hands. Their experience turned hand hygiene into a moral passion.

But people don’t need to be injured to become motivated. Personal experience isn’t required. Our nurses were just as motivated if they’d had a family member or close friend who suffered an infection. Vicarious experience can be just as powerful.

There’s always something good each week from the folks at Vital Smarts. Their book Crucial Conversations includes some very simple tips for getting through tough conversations, if I can just  remember them when I’m in the middle of one.  See what you think.