rabid renaissance

I hate this part…trying to get back into some “good” habit after a horrid lapse. I’ve hated it through my life with every attempted journal, every attempted new leaf of eating habits or exercise regimens. Confronting my inner demons of flakiness, procrastination, lack of discipline and will power…all unpleasant experiences.

So what have I been up to for the past 3 months? Let’s see…

I have not been back to Global MindShift, mostly because I don’t have enough time to participate at the level that I feel is productive for me.

I turned 33. Not much to report there, aside from some paranoia that I am now able to actually feel my metabolism slowing down, and that the skin of my chin, jaw and neck seems to have entered some sort of 2nd puberty hormonal breakout behavior.

I’ve been playing a lot of Mafia on my message boards. They typically start with 20-30 players and can last up to 2 or 3 months. Yes, I am a geek. Though I did manage to talk Shay into playing in the latest game, and previously talked my friend Ronnie (Hi Ronnie!) into playing an earlier game, where we were both scum and lost, quite possibly because I accidentally posted in the wrong forum. Whoops.

Shay and I took our first trip to Yosemite, where we camped over a long weekend with our friends Audrey and Lex. The four of us did a little hiking and Shay and I rode our bikes around on the valley floor. We took lots of pictures, but I didn’t manage to get one of the coyote who came through the campground chasing squirrels.

I took some of my dad’s old swords, fencing foils, and fencing masks off of my mom’s hands to hopefully sell on eBay. They are now occupying a dark corner of one of our closets, along with the box of old cameras and individual sets of antique tea cups and saucers that she agreed to let me try and sell back in the spring. Of course burning the time and effort to actually determine their ballpark value, take pictures of them all, and finally post them for sale on eBay is yet another item in my Procrastination Pile.

Shay and I flew her Mom out here from North Dakota for Thanksgiving with my extended family. Lyvon had not yet met anyone in my family except for my mom (they met at our commitment ceremony last May). It was a very nice visit and a delicious turkey feast. The Friday after Thanksgiving, we took our mothers to Monterey to see the aquarium and do some shopping. Just don’t ask about the $60/plate abalone “special” that mom and I both ordered for lunch without knowing it was $60/plate. It was good, and I love abalone, but it wasn’t $60 worth of good…

Next week we’re flying to Minnesota for our niece’s first birthday, and to spend some time with Shay’s sister and brother-in-law, since neither Thanksgiving or Christmas fit into our collective travel schedules.

More soon!

I have to say that it was a mixed bag, but overall a positive experience. A few days into the conversation, I posted a thread about GMS on the message-board that I regularly frequent. Interestingly, the gut reactions of my fellow message-boarders to the GMS homepage and apparent mission/intent were a mix of the same conflicting interpretations that I experienced during my participation with them.

My overall conclusion is that the site and organization is a good thing. They are trying to get people networked while getting ideas and information flowing towards solving some of the big problems that we face. As one participant put it, like a jam session of ideas to help solve problems and hopefully get more people to join in the jam.

There is momentum towards distinguishing between “boots on the ground” efforts vs more philosophical efforts to learn how to change the way we think as individuals and as populations. Among some participants was a consensus that “boots on the ground” efforts have their place, and that they do facilitate people becoming aware of global, systemic issues by being involved in such efforts, but they are slow and organic in the changes that they bring about in people or the environment.

If we are indeed racing a countdown clock of some kind, we need to explore ways of bringing more awareness to the masses that doesn’t require spending weekends picking up litter out of wetland habitat or protesting the by-catch deaths of dolphins in D.C.

A problem I had with the experience, was that it was difficult to compartmentalize the views and perspectives of certain other participants in the discussion and keep my interpretation of those individuals distinctly seperate from the site/organization itself. I admit that I initially suspected that some of the participants were seeded.

I was quite concerned at first, because one particular participant was very prolific in her contributions, recommendations for books/authors/media/sites that she has found useful and helpful to her. The volunteer ‘facilitator’ of our discussion was also familiar with some of the same books/authors/media/sites, and also recommended them. Some of their mutually shared perspectives did not sit well with me based on their paraphrasing of the concepts. Multiple participants were also published authors or otherwise seasoned veterans of trying to save the world.

There were moments when I caught myself wondering if the site was cult-oriented, or too elitist for my tastes. But I tried to keep my mind open and acknowledged the possibility that my point of view might just run somewhat askew compared to some of the other participants, and that each of the small finite conversations facilitated by this site would be a completely different batch of individuals.

At about the same time, other participants began to contribute more, and the elitist, culty vibes were diluted by discussion that I was more interested in participating in. I also began to consider the possibility that the site/org had a limited ability to prevent “self-appointed seeders” who could be participating in the introductory conversation over and over again, ending up with a different facilitator and group each time. Fixtures of the community vs sanctioned leadership of it.

I will not be quoting any of the discussions that took place, but I do want to provide the list of stuff that was recommended over the course of the week. For the participants who are published/credited (either in print or online), I will also include reference materials.

Cited authors/”thinkers”:

Daniel Quinn (author, cited by me)
Ervin Laszlo (author)
Buckminster Fuller (author)
Lynne McTaggart (author)
Brian Swimme (author, and of which whom the footage is that comprises the two short videos that are the focus of our “Conversation”)
Sharif Abdullah (author)

Sites/orgs:

http://www.common-society.org/csm/
http://www.earthcharter.org/
http://evolve.org
http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com
http://mattole.org (recommended by me)

Films:

“What the bleep do we know?”
“What the bleep do we know, down the rabit hole.”

Published participants:

Phil Lawson
http://www.phillawson.com/
Author of “Being Spherical – Reshaping Our Lives and Our World for the 21st Century”

And as a point of interest, one of the participants was an alternative energy engineer from Germany, but the only stuff I found under his name when searching was a filed patent for a “circuit arrangement for a photovoltaic system”. He seemed like a very cool fellow.

I will endeavor to write up something for at least some of these recommended items. Why I like some, and why I dislike others.

Some time in 1998, a friend gave me a copy of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. As I read page after resonating page, I knew that it was the sort of book that would split my life into “Before Ishmael” and “After Ishmael” eras. I wanted to talk to other people who had read it. I wanted my parents to read it. I started reading the series of sequels. I even went so far as to create an online discussion group for others in my area (I lived in Atlanta at the time) devoted to discussing the book and other works by Daniel Quinn. In spite of my lack of sustained participation, the group really took off and remains quite active to this day, thanks to the folks who put their time and effort into it.

It has been a bittersweet experience for me. On one hand I’m thrilled that an idea of mine (even something as small and obvious as an online discussion group) has evolved into a healthy medium for discourse about what I consider to be important topics. But on the other, more prominent hand, I consider it a complete and total personal failure on my part. All I really did was register for Yahoo! Groups and send out a few invitation emails. When push came to shove I did not back up my idea with effort or support. I rarely contributed to the online discussions, and only attended one of their weekly in-person meetings in the 7 years they were going on that I lived in the area.

Eventually, I relinquished my owner/moderator status that the actual leadership of the group had stubbornly maintained on my behalf, always in the hopes that I’d become more involved again. As I said my goodbyes to the group back in March of this year, prior to relocating from Georgia to California, one of the members recommended a site to me: Global Mindshift. They’re an outfit based in Palo Alto, and as I surfed their site I had the feeling that this is what I’ve been waiting for since discovering the power of the internet. This is the sort of exchange of information, thoughts, and ideas that I had been wanting to create when I registered my Yahoo! group so many years ago. This is what I had hoped the larger (official) Ishmael community site would’ve evolved into. This is the sort of site that I’ve used to rationalize my accidental internet career on those days when I beat myself up about not going to graduate school and doing something constructive in the world of global conservation with my Zoo/Bio background.

So I’ve joined Global Mindshift. I’m off to a bit of a bumpy start, but I’m going to stick with it. The site/community is designed to revolve around structured online message-board-type discussions with 8-12 other members at a time. The first time I tried to join such a discussion, the conversation never got off the ground. Only a handful of people managed to even make introduction posts, and our facilitator went on vacation thinking that everyone had flaked. My second attempt kicks off tomorrow (08/14/07) and ends on the 20th.

Here’s hoping I’ve matured a bit since the last time I tried to change the course of the world for the better, with others of like-mind, using the internet.

Willow is the latest addition to our zoo, and she happens to be crawling all over me and the couch at the moment. Plenty of other pictures will be forthcoming, of everyone. But for now I leave you with my first attempt at a lolcat.

I didn’t realize I was going to be so picky. Thankfully no one is actually reading this but me, so I was the only one who had to endure everything changing every 5 minutes until I found the right fit.

I can already hear that little voice in the back of my head asking, “Kate, you have nothing at all interesting to say right now, so why are you blogging? Why are you trying to blog at all, for that matter?”.

I may have nothing of interest to say today, right now, little voice. But I will someday. And THEN you’ll be sorry!

rabid : adjective : going to extreme lengths in expressing or pursuing a feeling, interest, or opinion

renaissance : noun : a movement or period of vigorous artistic and intellectual activity

Welcome to my work in progress. My name is Kate. I’m 32, recently hitched to my wonderful partner, Shay, and a few months ago we relocated to Silicon Valley to work for Yahoo!.

[disclaimer] While I may refer to my job and my employer from time to time, this is a personal bog and I am in no way a spokesperson for Yahoo! when blogging here.[/disclaimer]

My educational background (BS) is in Zoology and the Biological Sciences. For a portion of my young adulthood I considered attending Vet school, but changed my mind when I started falling in love with the internet in 1995.

I’ve carved out this little corner of the ether as a place to incubate and nurture my creativity, curiosity, nostalgia, wonderment, vitriol, and general world view. I fell into the lap of this particular domain name a few months ago, while trying to come up with a screen name that wasn’t already taken. Once it popped into my head, I liked it so much I snatched up the domain and set it aside for the day when I would actually start blogging.

I’m hoping that it will also function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as this is the sort of endeavor for which I have a deep and complex history of procrastination. The renaissance of thoughts and ideas spinning around in my head it indeed consistently and constantly rabid, but I have been either too lazy or too timid to let much of it out of my head.

Time is short this morning and I’m still figuring out how to exactly use WordPress, so I’m going to link to some blogs/sites of my friends and family while I figure out how to build a sticky list of such things.

My uncle, Carl, is quite the prolific illustrator. His blog inspires me to not only make the time in my daily grind to indulge in my creative passions, but to also share them.

My friend and former co-worker, Alex, can usually be found in a fit of bohemian wanderlust somewhere between Atlanta, the Washington D.C. area, and New York City. She’s a talented painter and photographer, and one of those rare friends that one somehow manages to keep (and be kept by) through life while others just fade away.

Another friend and former co-worker, Liza, is the sort of uber-prolific and widely-read blogger that makes you wonder what secret reserves of energy and focus she is somehow able to tap into.

So that’s my first post. More soon…