small chai.

You steal a long breath from the bag of espresso beans and fill the grinder. The rain is pouring, and the grey scene beyond the glass is almost like San Francisco. There is a tornado warning in Los Angeles. The buzz surrounding this is almost as funny to you as the change in color status on the Homeland Security signs in the airport. You wonder, for a moment, if laughing at this sort of thing is like tempting fate and remember your 'new found Atheism': Nothing means anything, life is beautiful and full of contradictions, coincidences and confusions.

My thoughts are my own, my thoughts are my own, no one and no thing can punish me for my thoughts! Hmph.

In your head, a friend laughs at your attempted rebellion. You laugh at yourself and move on to the more stimulating events of the work day, conversation and eavesdropping.

Two young girls approach the counter. Both with shoulders hunched, peering up at you like stylish, little giraffes, one begins to speak, "um", she sweetly whispers, "could I get a small chai?" You want to say, "don't worry honey, I don't bite!" but instead look at her and wonder why anyone would choose to speak in such a soft and frightened voice. Is that supposed to be attractive or just the result of an inferiority complex? You hand her the hot drink and work on her friend's order as they chat about Haiti. "I really wish I could just go there and help, you know?" says 'friend'. You stare at the slowly browning pastry in the oven, the heat warming your cheeks. You wonder, what would it be like to just stop life, pick up and go to a part of the world that needs some help? What is it that is stopping you from doing just that? Greed, fear, selfishness, disconnection? What can you do about this?

What will you do?

"Ding!"

You hand 'friend' her croissant. The door opens and a gust of wind and rain blows in as the cars rush by on Hyperion.

skunk.

The skunk scurried across the street at dusk.

The car in front of me slowed down and seemed to swerve but the skunk swerved too.

There it was in the middle of the road.

Roadkill.

Fully intact except for the puncture that popped it like a water balloon.

No blood but a fountain of whitish liquid squirting straight into the air.

The smell overwhelmed me as I passed trying not to hold up traffic.

Nothing could be done.

What can I do? What do I do?

My chest was pounding and I heard myself say 'fuck' over and over with my left hand on my heart.

I felt sad and confused that a life had ended before my eyes.

No one to mourn with and no one to get angry at,

I just sat with the feeling of this little skunk and let myself smell its defense weapon as I made my way home.

Life can be short.

HowNowBrownCow?

Rostopovich digs into Bach vigorously with his bow, releasing a warm wave of sound. The cello-suites fill the coffee shop with a fullness that transports and the world is both new and ancient. Fingers stained with espresso are decorated with swirling lines that...

Blaaaaaa blablabla bla!

Scratch that. Redo.

Rostopovich.

Rrrrrrostopovich.

Rrrrross

toe

poe

vichhh

Rosss TOPOVich

to poe veeeech.

Have you ever noticed how the sound of a word makes you feel? How the 'ha' 'i' 'mmmm' in the word "him" makes you move? The quick 'ha' like a punch in the gut, the intake of the 'i' and the resonance of the 'mmm'. Himmm. Him.

Working on some Shakespeare lately with an acting teacher and rediscovering the power in every word I delight in driving alone, listening to the wind rush by and speaking words.

"Think not I love him though I ask for him. 'Tis but a peevish boy."

Peeeeevishhh b oyee.

Explosive 'p's' and 'b's'.

The roundness of "well" and juiciness of "ripe".

Sharp and cutting "but", "betwixt" and "not".

Actor or not, try it sometime alone. Speaking out loud and savoring, and playing with each word like a candy in your mouth or a river pouring out or a gong or a burst of air.

In what wondrous and wild ways we work!

Kid Rhyme Time

Only I can help me

You can't do it you see

But if you can help you

Then you're helping me too

And if you can find peace

It will spread and increase

And if I find it too

Then it rubs off on you

Cause we're all part of one

Not just one, part of none

And with care for our hearts

We make nice separate parts

Parts that join as a whole

Making one endless soul

Connected; for better or for worse, 'til death do us part... or maybe longer!?

After reading an article in the NY Times book review about a book called "Connected" I was inspired to take my "Internet break". Once the "break" was underway, I decided to go all out and delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The book, written by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, is about "The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives". Weeks after reading the review I continued to think about my connections; my friends, my family and my online social network. I kept coming back to Facebook and Twitter and started to wonder how these things might be affecting me in ways I didn't even know!

If you don't feel like reading the (very short and very interesting) article, this snippet will give you some idea of what the research is about:

Christakis and Fowler explore network contagion in everything from back pain (higher incidence spread from West Germany to East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall) to suicide (well known to spread throughout communities on occasion) to sex practices (such as the growing prevalence of oral sex among teenagers) to politics (where the denser your network of connections, the more ideologically intense and intractable your beliefs are likely to be). And while it’s hardly surprising that emotion can be transmitted from person to person, the authors report that getting a $10,000 raise is less likely to make you happy than having a happy friend is — in fact, the raise is less likely to make you happy than is having a friend who has a friend who has a friend who is happy. They even argue — and this is sure to generate controversy — that the obsessive drive to create “nut free” environments is not the result of any real increase in children’s allergies but rather something akin to an epidemic of adult hysteria, spread via network transmission.

I had chosen to participate in Facebook and Twitter for a number of different reasons and for the most part I enjoyed both and found them to be useful and efficient in terms of creating invitations for events, promoting shows, (pushing my blog), etc. One argument from the article that might tip you towards involvement with these networks is the idea that "as among primates, those humans who are best able to manipulate social networks to their advantage thrive" and we all want to thrive and survive, but when does dipping a toe in the water cross over to drowning and do you have control and/or awareness of the transition from one level of involvement to the next? Due to the nature and speed of technology, specifically the Internet, I have to wonder if the rules for every type of interaction have changed completely! Monkeys picking nits are far from websites getting hits.

What finally pushed me to drop out of two of my major networks was the feeling that they possessed a growing energy much more powerful than myself and that that energy may not be a positive one. It may not be negative but it's too big for me to know what impact it could have on my life and it almost seems to have a life or presence of its own! Scott Stossel notes, "the more interesting implications are philosophical. A social network, while not quite sentient, acquires its own agency; it wants things, and it wants us, the nodes of which it consists, to do certain things, whether to gain weight or have oral sex at age 13."

I don't know the answer but I find it interesting to ponder: What does Facebook want me to do? What does Twitter want me to do?

The idea of the connectedness of a flock of birds was mentioned towards the end of the article and although I've written about this concept before and it always reminds me of a theatre technique called Viewpoints. One of the exercises we did in college under the Viewpoints technique involved moving in unison as much as possible in different formations with our eyes closed. Not trying to listen or guess what other people were doing the idea was to sort of "open up" to an unknown sense and to follow the impulses you received. It was a strange exercise and can be difficult to do but when it's happening it's amazing to see how people really do move together.

When I injured my back and saw a chiropractor/holistic healer, one of her healing concepts was to work with everyone in the same room at the same time to increase the healing trend from one patient to the next. I can't remember the name for this but she told me the theory had something to do with pendulums put in a room that eventually start swinging together.

If scientists, artists and healers have all danced around the same idea, as difficult as it may be to believe, I find it worth exploring. The bottom line for me is that I'm trying to practice mindfulness at this time in my life and I've found that the Internet seems to suck up too much of my precious energy. I don't know if I'll rejoin or stay Facebook-free but for now I think I'm starting to feel OK without it. The pang of panic that prickled up inside me when it was time to click "delete" was a shock and an indicator. The intensity of attachment to my account showed me that deleting would be a good experiment for me to conduct. Observing my own thoughts and reactions to the process has been interesting and I recommend the challenge to anyone who's willing to try just for the sake of seeing how it makes you feel! Our reactions show the weight these "things" hold in our lives.

Stossel ends the article by saying, "network science has potential to be used for good. But then again, if all the strutting and fretting that we believe to be the product of our individual free will is really only the antlike scurrying of a collection of nodes, can anyone really be said to “use” the network? Or is the network always using us?"

I'm not sure yet but I'd love to hear what you think!

Sincerely,

Facebook-Free-For-Now

New Follow Feature -->

I broke my break to delete and to make

this

little

message:

I added a follower thingy-magiggy so you can follow this blog if you want because I'm deleting my facebook and twitter accounts. I just want to have this one online home for a bit so, follow! Since I've been using the other online social-networking sites as a means to communicate new blog posts I'm afraid I might not hear from you all again! Message me, e-mail me, talk to me! In the meantime I'll be blabbing and blogging as usual. Peace!

Internet Break

Experiment:

Stay off Facebook, Twitter and Blog for at least one month.

Be here.

Report back at some point...

(Still e-mailing)