I hired him about ten years ago, right out of college, giving him his first job. I remember when he showed up and I took him out to lunch. He told me stories about going to college, getting drunk and partying…and after awhile asked how we’d be working together. The look on his face when I said “um…I’m your manager…” was priceless.

A prayer before night
At the end of the day, as the final meditation session ends in a Buddhist zendo, a prayer/saying/gatha is chanted. After this, people move quietly to their rooms or beds for the evening. I have quoted this more often than I like on this site in the last two years.

Let me respectfully remind you,
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should awaken…..AWAKEN…..
Take heed: Do not squander your life.

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me.” -Al Franken as Stuart Smalley on SNL

There’s something goofy about the Internet’s effect on the ego.

“Shout out to my new followers. I will try to entertain and bring you into my world through words. Hope my mind doesn’t bore u. Enjoy!” -Anonymous twitter found on my “local” feed

I guess that part of it is the ability to self-publish. If you go back far enough on this blog, you’ll see some of my own grand ambitions of this nature. It’s silly stuff but at the time it seemed like anything was possible because the Internet is so big and it’s so easy to tell everybody about your brilliant ideas.

“wow like you are so smart and brilliant and that’s never been said before you wanker” -anonymous comment left on this post about two years after I posted it

Of course, as soon as anything is said, the haters emerge. What do they hate? I’m not sure. In some cases, I think it’s the anonymous … er … “loser” effect that Penny-Arcade captured back in 2004. (The comic has profanity, so is probably not work appropriate…but it’s funny in that “oh-so-true” way.)

The other question is “what happens when we no longer control what we’ve created?” -The worlds most brilliant and unrecognized writer (me)

This question that bothered me alot at first. Now I don’t really care much. Eventually, I suspect that whether it’s what we write on the internet or the photos we take with digital cameras, we will all eventually be naked on the Internet (figuratively or otherwise).

If it wasn’t clear, and it probably wasn’t, I believe that enough material to represent my personality will eventually “leak” onto the Internet if I use any of the popular tools, like facebook, where my real name is revealed. If I don’t use those online tools, I miss an experience with my friends and family. So, if I’m going to be part of the social circles that exist in “reality”, I’m going to have to represent myself to those same circles “virtually”.

Key assertion: you don’t publish it unless it’s good. -Seth Godin on How often should you publish?

I like that idea: publish when it’s good. Sometimes I’ve got nothing to say. Other times, I feel like I’ve got too much to say. Thanks to facebook, I now have a place to put the YouTube videos, goofy single links and other bits of random junk I pick up off the Internet. Writing and photographs are the most important artifacts I can leave on the Internet. Links to other sites are far less important and a place like facebook is built for that kind of junk-sharing.

In the meantime, while I share junk links on facebook, I can put my “best foot forward” on a site like this.

Of course, there’s a very good chance you got here from a link via facebook or twitter.

On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. -Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (I think)

In the end, not much I say will matter and statistically, I am nobody. At least I’m slowly getting better at writing and communicating what I believe. One day, it might matter to me to have worked through the kinds of ideas that I briefly describe here.

And finally, to loop back around to the start: It’s an important difference: (a) writing about what you believe because you want to be heard by other people versus (b) writing something “good” about what you believe and putting it out there because that’s the only way to test it.

Testing, testing, 1-2-3-4.

I don’t think I’m so old that there are “old days” yet for me. They are still close enough that I could pull off most of the stunts and still feel the burn of emotion the way I did then. Maybe this is the way it will always be. Maybe not.

I like the phrase “advice is a form of nostalgia” from the video of Baz Lurhrmann reading the essay that Mary Schmich wrote.

Recently, I watched some movies I once thought were hillarious – Top Secret, Fletch, and Mall Rats. They were all horrible. In each were a few really good one liners, but overall, each was a waste of my time. Perhaps they would be more funny if I didn’t feel like I could have spent that time differently, spent it better. And maybe that’s what I’m missing in my life, now: time. Maybe that’s what creates the nostalgia.

Either way, I don’t have as much time as I did then. (You may read this widely, considering this to mean “free time” or to mean something more morbid. Both thoughts entertained me as I wrote, tonight.)

I’ve lived in Cleveland my entire life. I made several trips between my house and the outer suburbs and downtown today. As I did, I drove through a cross section of the neighborhoods that the city offers.

I think now, more than before, I see the city as if I am a stranger here. Everything is the same and I like the city, but I see things (like bridges or how few buildings are really in the skyline) that I didn’t ever pay attention to before here…but are the kinds of things I notice when I visit new places.

This is the most interesting thing that I’ve noticed about myself: the way I look at things is different. It has changed.

Now, here’s that video of that essay being read. It’s fun to watch once.

I realized that the most important assumption is “life is a process”.

Life is is not a single decision.

This is a reason why I am uncomfortable with absolute rules. An absolute rule treats life as a single decision. It implies that there is a single question that says “I’ve decided for all possible situations in life that the answer to every single situation is xyz.”

I would argue we all know that this is false. Life isn’t like that. Life is not static. Life is change.

Even the absolute laws that seem plainly “True” need to be considered in terms of process, of a life that is change.

As soon as you deny this fact, that life is change, everything goes crazy in the worst ways.

Compassion is a complicated term. It’s one of those shortcut terms that are used by everybody as a way to gather together a large number of complicated-yet-related ideas together. So the first thing I did was try to tweeze apart the different ideas that are compressed within the way we use the term.

In the dictionary, compassion is described as the ability to feel or share the pain another feels. This single idea is at the core of the term. It’s closely related to “sympathy” and “empathy” in the sense that it’s an ability to understand and relate to the suffering of another person.

The next related term is “responsibility” because while compassion describes the ability to feel and understand the suffering of another person, it doesn’t necessarily imply a responsibility. So this leads to question number two: “What responsibility do I have to help a stranger who is suffering?”

After responsibility comes “charity” because even if I don’t have a responsibility, I may still help a person. Charity is another complicated term because it can imply an unsavory power relationship, a condescending “aid” given to a “lesser person”. Thus the third question: “How can I help a person while still respecting them as an individual?”

Segue!

All of this also has a theme running beneath it: if we are a nation of individuals, united to a common purpose, then what should I expect my fellow citizens should do for themselves and where do we need to work together? For example, slavery was a tragic problem that no single person brought into being and no single person could fix. The interaction of the individual and of the collective is a critical issue. In a nation of individuals we get question four: “How does the implicit and explicit sovereignty of the individual effect the prior three questions (asked of an individual about an assumed face-to-face situation)?”

“This isn’t personal, it’s business.”
There’s also some interesting questioning that sits next to this main line of thinking. Being able to “feel the pain another suffers” means being involved. Doctors, lawyers, and even managers in corporate America are encouraged to keep a distance. “Science” means keeping a distance. Thus, compassion is discouraged in nearly every professional arena in which we can be employed.

Additionally, there’s the question of how compassion and gender are related. When Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain” there was great discussion about how that was a “feminine” gesture. Similarly, when “compassionate conservatism” was discussed by George W. Bush, there was similar commentary. (In neither case was the description of this as “feminine” negative but instead applauded them for recognizing “both sides” of human nature.)

I’ve read a few books on these topics. I’d be happy to take suggestions, if anybody has any to offer!

I ate lunch at L’Albatros with my team on Friday at noon to thank them for a great year and to say “thanks, you’re really cool people” then went back to work to wrap up some stuff that needed to be done before I went to a 4pm meeting that had alcohol (thank heavens for the little things) and then I ran to get dry cleaning before they closed and had to hustle because I had to pick up friends to go to a birthday dinner at Grovewood Tavern where the food and drink was good but I was a grumpy jerk at the table and was not popular and so I went home to sleep before things got worse and I woke up on Saturday feeling totally sick and wished it was a hangover but it wasn’t it was just some stupid flu or something and by afternoon I made myself go out briefly to look at art for holiday gifts at the Zygote Press event (and went to an event next door where I bought a watercolor of the Cleveland skyline by Bridget Ginley but I can’t find the name of the event) and then I started feeling like somebody was using a cheese grater to tunnel out of my stomach so I gave up and went back home where I had to dial into a conference call with work to discuss a change that was being made over the weekend and to decide if we needed another conference call that night or Sunday morning and then all I could do was read before falling asleep very early and but that meant I woke up far far far too early on Sunday which bummed me out and I realized that I missed going to see some old childhood friends in ‘downtown’ Willoughby the night before and which made me feel double-uber-bummed because I was a jerk for both forgetting and for not calling and then was triple-dog-bummed as I realized my day was going to be consumed by running errands that should have been done on Saturday and as I was out a’erranding a friend called to ask “should I buy this house?!?” and I said “do you want to?” and the answer was “probably not, but I wanted somebody else to hear what I was thinking” so we talked about buying houses and the economy and life and shortly after that another friend called to say “come over and watch the first half of the Browns game” so I went to the friends’ house and we watched the Browns for about 10 minutes and then talked about life and the colors they were painting their house and then I headed home with stuff I got on errands only to realize I forgot to buy the most important thing I needed first thing on monday morning (soap) but there wasn’t anything to do because it was too late by the time I realized it so I gave up and I got online and searched for hotels for a trip I’m taking to New York next month and found a few things to confirm with the folks traveling with me then I went to bed and tossed and turned because I kept waking up thinking about the fact that the whole thing starts over again…right about now as I finish posting this essay about my weekend.

Best: I got to talk to people who both agreed and disagreed.

It reminded me that you need to always collect. Always ask. Always listen.

Or to steal quotes from conversations last night:

In other words – by listening to what others believe, I am able to strengthen and elaborate on my own beliefs (without being threatened by what they believe).

I think I read a quote somewhere that said something along the lines of “The mark of an educated mind is the ability to consider another person’s opinion without necessarily accepting it.”