Category: Life

I went out with my friend, Allan, last night. He’s just returned to the States from 6 month assignment in Singapore. While in Singapore, he stopped over in Australia where he picked up a gift for me: a beautiful canvas bag with geometric designs and kangaroos in black, red, and yellow. And a t-shirt that says simply on the front: Rubgy Girl. I laughed out loud at the t-shirt, because it’s true. I’ll be wearing it with pride.

I don’t play the sport of rugby; I live its principles. My friend, Alex, has told me, “Christa, you’re the kind of person who is so nice and generous with such a good heart, but if someone crosses you or someone you love, you have no problem checking that person.” It’s totally true.

I’ve had to learn to be appropriately tough. My tolerance for whining is very low and my admiration of taking action in support of beliefs is high. I learned early on that I had to stand up for myself because I could never 100% count on someone else standing up for me. And I take it on as a personal responsibility to lend a voice to those who cannot or are fearful to stand up for themselves. In my family, if you didn’t speak up with confidence, your concern didn’t get heard. Hard lessons to learn as a child, and ones I am incredibly grateful for as an adult.

I’m all for freedom in any form, though responsibility is good for us, too. If we always had a safety net, always had a trap door or an eject button to get us out of a difficult situation, then we’d never be thoughtful about decisions. We wouldn’t have to be because even if we got in trouble, there would always be something or someone to bail us out. Enablers think they’re being nice people, thoughtful people, supportive people. What they’re really doing is stripping away the basic instinct of survival from those they enable.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball makes this same argument is a less psychological way. Though hairballs are frustrating, they are also necessary. My current biggest hairball: my student loans. I have some left from undergrad and now those from my MBA program have entered repayment. It’s a big number, second only to my rent. I was anxious about repayment, calculating and recalculating my budget. And my anxiety was only driven higher by some friends of mine from graduate school who are frantically paying down the loans and making me feel guilty for not doing the same.

The truth is as much as the large payment is painful to make now, it’s keeping me focused. If I had no financial obligations I could quit my job at the first sign of difficulty. I could spend any amount of money on anything I wanted. The Paris Hilton problem – she has no responsibilities so she doesn’t have to be responsible. The truth is without hairballs, we’d have nothing to orbit around. We would be adrift…

So while I wish the cost of education and life in general was not so high, I’m trying to look on the bright side. Things could be worse – I could feel that there really is no reason to get up in the morning. I know I have to get up and do my best because I need to survive and all I’ve got to help me do that is me.

“Celebrate what you want to see more of.”
~Thomas J. Peters, writer and business management expert

Isn’t it amazing how often we draw attention to behaviors we don’t approve of, disappointments, things that make us unhappy or angry? And yet when we see things that make us proud or make us smile or make us rejoice in the wonder around us, those feelings fade too quickly because we have too much to do, too many places to be.

During the holiday season we are bombarded by how much a certain retailer is ahead or behind, or what promos are happening to make us buy more of things we won’t remember we received by the time the next holiday season rolls around. Where’s the celebration? Why is the recognition of good deeds sequestered to the last 30 seconds of a news cast?

Between the nightly news and my favorite prime time TV shows, I have Access Hollywood on in the background while I wash the dishes from dinner or straighten up my apartment . Today they told a story (at the end of the show, of course) about a mountain biker who has been paralyzed from the chest down and is now fighting with everything she’s got to walk again. And the lead in to the story was “and now we’d like to tell you a kind of story that we wish we did more of…” Well then for goodness sake do more stories like that and stop reporting on every time Britney Spears stops at the Dairy Queen or Jessica Simpson says something well, typical of Jessica Simpson!

We get what we ask for in this world, and if we want to see more actions that contribute to a world we’re proud to live in, then we had better hold up those actions for all to see, and hopefully, emulate.

I was grateful to find a parking space on 95th Street despite that it was 6:30. Most of the time, the spots are gone right at 6pm when parking becomes legal on the right side of the street. It was colder than I planned so I was rushing up the hill to 92nd Street, and had to stop to snap this photo to the left.

Several things could have happened to cause someone to put this posting on the widow of his car. 1.) The car’s been broken into before or 2.) He’s completely panicked about having a car in New York.

Either way, I understand. The news lately is enough to make anyone paranoid. This is what our lives as car owners in New York have come to. Forget getting the club, installing an alarm. Deter them with honesty, and keep them from wasting time trying to find the good stuff where it doesn’t exist. A last ditch effort to keep misfortune from heading our way.

On the way home today, I heard on NPR that Zipcar and Flexcar have merged. The CEO wants to build a $1B business convincing Americans to think differently about car ownership. According to data, 50% of urban car owners could have their driving needs met and spend far less money by using Zipcar. That would cut down on congestion, remove pollution, and decrease road rage. Not to mention what it could do to drop the number of all crimes related to car ownership. Imagine if we could remove half of all the cars from urban areas in America. Then maybe my neighbor wouldn’t have to be quite so paranoid about his radio, or lack thereof.

I was scrolling through one of the blogs I check for work and came across an article about our on-line lives. Everyone is writing about this phenomenon these days – how we have re-invented ourselves through personal pages like Facebook or in virtual worlds like Second Life. I’m kind of tired of hearing about it in all honesty. I like my Facebook page because it helps long-lost friends find me and keeps me from creating long-lost friends in the first place. I’m not home in front of my computer pining away for my “avatar persona.”

I must have been feeling particularly less “know-it-all”-ey than usual because I kept reading the blog entry and stopped to consider its sentiment when the author said how much he appreciated these on-line personal tools because it allowed him to curate his life, the way museum designers curate the lives of famous, and sometimes not-so-famous, artists. I loved that idea. These sharing-tools allow you to create an on-line, multi-dimensional gallery celebrating you. I was feeling better already and kept reading.

The author of the entry then goes on to talk about how “being acquainted with” someone now has a completely different meaning as a result of these sharing platforms. My boss continually uses the line “Do you know (insert name of famous published innovator)?” I always thought this was a little odd – clearly Bob thinks I am a bigger fish than I actually am if he thinks I would know these people. Now I realize what he was saying is “are you acquainted with….”, meaning do you know what their interests and areas of research are? Have you read their books? Do you have a sense of who he or she is without ever meeting?

As a result of my job, I spend a lot of time on-line watching presentations from people like Chris Andersen and Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to technology and the increasing desire to share insights with a wide audience, many presentations at conferences are not offered up for free after, and sometimes during, the events. Technology has allowed me to know Malcolm, without ever having met him.

This got me to wondering who knows me without ever meeting me. Who is acquainted with me because they read this blog or my facebook page or the other writing I do for some very small publications? What does it mean to know someone today? Or has there been a shift of the paradigm – is the goal now not to know someone, but to merely have an idea of how they think, what they think about, and what interests them? Is that enough?

When I think about curating a life and sharing it with others, the real art is in the edit, just like in writing. Knowing what to overlook and leave out is as valuable as the contents that remain because it gives those remaining a larger stage and greater emphasis. What remains is truly what our lives are about, the rest is just noise. It’s the cutting through that counts so that what’s left hangs together in a picture we can be proud of.

I also like this idea of curating life because it allows me to see where the holes are. For example if I step back from my life and look at what I’ve pasted up on this blog, and bucket the contents, I can immediately see what’s lacking. I’m not writing about volunteering in my community. If this blog truly reflects me, and the best of the insights I gain everyday, then I’m either not volunteering or the volunteer experiences I’m having are not fulfilling. This observation of my “museum of me” helps me start to consider whether volunteering is as important to me as it used to be, and if it is, it will encourage me to actively change my behavior to create fulfilling experiences in that realm.

This is the real benefit of these sharing technologies – to inspire us to action in “real life”. If we use them as a tool for self-reflection, to learn about ourselves the same way that we use them to learn about others, then they help us to step out into the world and build the collection of experiences and relationships that can truly lead us to happiness. These technologies allow us to step back and consider what it is we’re building with each passing day. As a result our lives on-line will have the added benefit of creating a richer lives out in the world.