Michael Palin, forever my favorite Python.

Daniel Day-Lewis | nytimes.com

I hit the poetry section, my first stop in every bookstore. I picked through the names, spines, and covers. I picked up "Walking North" by Beverly V. Head, and the first poem I read convinced me to buy it.

I walked to the register, and the shop owner told me the price. It originally was marked $4, but it now was only $1.20. I didn’t have a scrap of cash on me. I said I could run to the ATM – was one nearby? A man sitting in a chair nearby told me there was one across the street, in the CVS. I asked them to hold my book and said I’d be back.

It took maybe two minutes. I walked back to the shop and offered a 20-dollar bill in payment. The shop owner looked through his change drawer and asked if I had anything smaller. I said no. The man in the chair laughed and said, “That’s what you get when you go to an ATM; that’s what they give you.” The shop owner sat back and said, “You know, I think I’d rather just give it to you.” “Are you sure?” I asked. “I can bring you change tomorrow.”

The shop owner waived me off and said, “I’m satisfied.” I meant to speak again. But he looked at me and repeated, simply, with a faint smile, “I am satisfied.” And so was I.

I wrote in April about joining the Mozilla Foundation to work on educationally-oriented projects, including the amazing, citywide badge-based project Chicago Summer of Learning. Nearly four months into my work, I'm seeing true results – thousands of Chicago youth earning badges that mean something and can be shown on their future job applications and social profiles and pushed to their backpacks to show what they know.

Today I had the opportunity to make that connection even more concrete. I spoke at Smart Chicago's #CivicSummer event (along with two dear friends who also are fellow Obama for American alumni, Jason Kunesh and Rayid Ghani) to an auditorium packed with teens about what it meant to work in technology without a CS degree, what I do, and why I love it.

They had questions! Lots of questions. One asked about my job's sustainability and profitability. Three asked for resources online to start to learn how to code. (During an answer to a young woman seated toward the front, the fire alarm started going off, and I apologized for breaking 1871 – which made them all laugh and cheer and clap.) And one asked if there were moments when I was frustrated and didn't want to keep going.

"Of COURSE!" I said, rocking back and forth on my heels and smiling. "Of COURSE there are moments when I want to stop doing what I'm doing. Anything worth doing is going to have moments like that. But you move through them and past them if it's the right thing for you to be doing, and you keep going."

The young man who asked me that question gave me a big, broad smile as I answered. And I felt that rare, undefinable link built when two people are earnest with one another. I feel you. I get you. I understand. 

I closed my talk and walked off-center to watch my colleagues describe their own roles, their work. As I watched, I felt the energy of the conversation I'd had ripple through my body and mind. I felt charged; electric. Working on the Obama campaign has afforded me some amazing opportunities, but talking to a room full of young, bright minds who are eager to build the future is among the most notable. I'm excited for them, I'm primed to help support them in whatever way possible, and I can't WAIT to see what they do next.

* Since a number of the audience asked about educational resources, I pulled a Google doc listing sources where a person can learn to code, as well as find like-minded community. If you know of something that should be on this list, give me a shout on Twitter.

* Some Chicago residents don't have easy access to the Internet, but there is help available. I pulled together a separate Google doc with free and low-cost resources for web access, although these also are included at the bottom of the first doc.

* With grateful thanks to Jacqui Cheng and Dan X O'Neil for the opportunity to speak today. First photo by Dan X O'Neil, second photo by Lorie Fernandez.

The Fourth of July always makes me think of two things.

One is my dear mentor, a wonderful man who immigrated illegally to the U.S. as a teen, hidden aboard an airplane to escape the Cuban government, which had threatened him with execution for his dissidence. He arrived with very little but his heart was earnest and strong and true, and he grew up to earn two doctorate degrees and become a teacher, a Coast Guard translator, a husband and father and grandfather, and he always voted in every election because his pride in and gratitude for this country was powerful and alive, and he told us all this every Fourth of July while wearing a white T-shirt adorned with an American flag. He is gone now, and he is sorely missed.

The other is my love, my husband, with whom I shared our first date six years ago today. He asked me to go watch the fireworks along the lakefront, and he has lit up my life ever since.

My praise for these two men and, indeed, for *all* those who work and have worked to leave behind a trail of good things, of courage and hope and honor and what is *right* in this world, who have done so and lingered and gone, could not be more perfect and profound.

I am grateful. I am grateful.

Witnessing the biggest, brightest rainbow of my life. You can't tell me that's not a sign. #loveislove

Scenes from last week, snapped as I walked through my beautiful city while my head and my heart tipped powerfully toward the East Coast and my loved ones there. I trod lightly over the familiar grooves downtown not to find normalcy but an appreciation, an anchor, in what always has seemed normal and unremarkable. I am aware that many are waking this week to new meanings for those simple words.

I try to pick my way gingerly through events like these but fumble over an inability to find the right things to say, the right things to share, the right ways to help. My empathy and need to understand why crash painfully into the wall of anger and pain upon seeing the outcome of what.

I root for responses, but I am lost. I am a fish wishing for wings. I am a bird warbling at my reflection in a window just seconds before I crash.

Red, white, and blue. Reaching across the miles for Boston – and now Texas, too.

how to help ::
redcross.org/charitable-donations 
redcrossblood.org/donating-blood

It's interesting today to reflect on the path I've taken to my current work and how that course sparked it. I detoured slightly from building on the web to work in curriculum development starting in 2003, but I jumped firmly back into the digital sphere in 2008, shepherding curriculum products into existence on the web. And over the arc of my various roles, I've worked heavily in education, both online and off, watching and absorbing how people learn, communicate/share, and create. 

My interests haven't narrowed, quite – I maintain a voracious curiosity for a plethora of different subjects – but my focus on where I want to make an impact has narrowed into the fields of web education, community interaction, and maker evangelization. I want to see more people embrace the web as a conduit for sharing their work, exploring that of others, and contributing to a greater global dialogue. It is through community that we identify and solve problems; few of society's ills ever are diminished solely through an individual's aims. The more we can help the world understand how to use the web as a force for good, the more we can build great things together.

It is in this spirit that I am proud to say that for the next 6 months, I am joining the team at Mozilla, which is celebrating its 15th birthday today. Doing good is, as it notes, is part of its code, and it open-sources all its work. I can't think of a finer way to embrace the mission I've made my own, and I'm proud to work alongside visionaries who want to help others shape the world in a brighter fashion.

So here's to the past 15 years – and, ever more importantly, to the future. Let's keep moving the web forward.

Because the internet is a medium, it doesn’t care whether it transmits love or hate. It is what we build and who we are that make it what it is. We can build things that diminish our humanity or build things that bring us to human flourishing.

There is great work to be done, and the women will lead us. So I say: Astonish us with your genius. Inspire us with your creation. Work with one another. Endure the tribulations. Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful.

Caterina Fake

In the modern world, we’re all interdependent, we’re all interconnected. You just can’t say that you’re only going to deal with your own kind of person, or you’re only going to meet your own kind of person, or you’re only going to listen to your own kind of person. That’s not the way the world is going to work. And we’ll either figure out how to be more integrated, or we will disintegrate.

Hillary Clinton

I cannot emphasize enough these two points: We are connected and becoming ever more so. The world is not going to reverse and become less jointed.

We can build beautiful and useful tools. We can celebrate one another's triumphs and help up those who are stumbling. We can work with compassion and good hearts. We can continue to reach. It is a choice, and we choose to accept the better path.

We can. We must. We will.

But if 2012 was the year I sacrificed my personal practice of self-health, then 2013 is the year I am reclaiming it. Emerging from a fog of healing and stretch of mental resting, I’m focusing acutely on food as a first step.

One of the biggest problems my husband and I face is having all the ingredients on-hand, as well as knowing what we’re going to make each evening for dinner. To counter this, I mapped out a recipe each night for a week in a Google spreadsheet, including where the recipe is located, ingredients we have on hand, ingredients we need, and the total prep and cooking time.

Having a blueprint takes out the waffling decision-making process and makes eating well far easier. I can compile quickly a list of groceries to pick up each Monday morning and be ready to go for the week by Monday afternoon. It also helps us monitor what we’re eating – a key for having a well-rounded diet.

This year I also am starting a garden to grow more of our own food. This is important to me for a few reasons: I want us to have a better understanding of what goes into farming and growing produce; I fully want to have a practice that involves slowing down and tending something other than myself so that I can bring that understanding back to myself; and I just love the idea of filling our sunroom with green, leafy plants instead of the current accumulation of motorcycle and bicycle parts. After ignoring home life for a long time, I’m definitely in the mode to make my space more comfortable, inviting, and hygge – having life in it directly corresponds to that wish.

Thanks to a generous friend, I’ll be able to get a jump start on some seedlings like broccoli, lettuce, and kale while I research growing conditions for the other things I want to grow – strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and more – and prep the sunroom with the necessary supplies. I’m excited to see what my efforts will yield, and I promise to share some of what we’re able to cobble together.

To 2013, to better living, and to hopeful green thumbs everywhere. ¡Salud!

Marina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the ’70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again. At her 2010 MoMa retrospective, Marina performed “The Artist Is Present” as part of the show – a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing it, and this is what happened.

A word about this piece: I did not ascribe to the sensibility of performance art for a long, long time in my life. That mindset only changed recently, in the past handful of years. But the looks that pass between these two are a prolonged expression of tenderness and beauty. And I appreciate that expression – the distance, the closeness, the love, the sense of this being very open-ended while simultaneously bearing a heavy finality.

I can’t describe it; I can’t explain it. All I can say is – I love it.

Amanda Fucking Palmer explains the art of asking, how celebrity can be dismantled by the Internet, and why more musicians should stop worrying about telling people to pay for music:

I didn't make them. I asked them. And through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. And when you connect with them, people want to help you.

For most of human history, musicians, artists – they've been part of the community. Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. But the internet, and the content that we're freely able to share on it, are taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough....I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is 'How do we make people pay for music'. What if we started asking, 'How do we let people pay for music'.

Amanda hits two of my recurring pain points precisely in this talk. The first is that the music (and, I would add, film/television) industry moves explicitly and pointedly to elevate its stars as that – stars, celebrities – rather than members of their communities: storytellers, observers, connectors. Being 'famous' or a celebrity for an art form is not new, but the constructs around this widely accepted convention have risen to ridiculous, implausible, and scolding heights. Those constructs need to be torn down. Amanda is living, actively, one way to undo it – through a globally connected community that is rallying fiercely around her method of asking, not telling; by being surrounded by people rather than forcibly elevated by an industry and directed to accept being held as an object of fascination (and, often, untouchable lust) – but more of our artists need to accept and practice and live this mentality to break down the industry from its insides.

The second point at which she strikes hard is that artists must set a price point for their work. She negates this unequivocally and explains that by connecting with others, we are able to ask things of them. Amanda makes personal requests of her fans directly through Twitter; one of the commonly cited examples in her talk is finding a place to sleep for the night, both for herself and for her band/crew, when touring. She says residences are given freely, openly. People share what they have, even when they have very little. Asking, not telling, has worked beautifully for her. It can work beautifully for others.

I see you, Amanda Palmer.

Thank you.

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life, and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.”

Amelia Earhart

Now, a word about action: In my original post, I noted that we needed “to elevate the profiles of successful women so that others will see them and want to work alongside them – so they will know what roles are available and what roles they can make.” This – along with education, access to tools, and mentorship – help to open the field both to women and minorities, especially non-Asian minorities. I’m working on a few ideas to address these pain points and will share more information on them soon. It’s not an easy problem to solve, and I want to be thoughtful and measured about the steps that I propose we as a community take to address it.

In the meantime, I’d like also to elevate and recognize our female volunteers on the team, including Genevieve Thiers, Storm Weppler, and Behice Ece Ilhan, among numerous others, as well as the project manager for the DevOps team, Betsy Huigens. Amazing women, all of them, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work alongside them – and the entire Technology team, staff and interns alike. Thank you, all of you. Truly, it was an honor and a pleasure.

Now, let us be clear about a few things:

1. I was on that team.
2. I’m not at all bearded.
3. I’m definitely not a bear.
4. Nerdy? Sure. I’ll own that one.

And other women were on that Technology team, too – smart, savvy women. One managed the creation of an incredible system that our vendor integration and other technology components all could hit so we could operate as synced as possible (Carol Davidsen). One trained an entire digital SWAT team of interns and volunteers to handle Dashboard support (Brady Kriss). One spearheaded the development of our voter outreach and GOTV technologies (Winnie Lam). One reached into the tech community and rallied volunteers to help us build certain pieces of our infrastructure (Catherine Bracy).

Yet some articles skipped mentioning women almost entirely. Rolling Stone named one; Mother Jones listed zero before backpedaling under scrutiny and adding a handful at the bottom of the article. Both were chided and scorned for it. It was surprising but not unexpected that so few of my sex were included in articles about winning the election – recognizing women has been a historical, long-standing problem. But these women in particular had done outstanding, difficult work – they had just re-elected a president, for heaven’s sake – so if not now, when should they expect to be recognized for their contributions?

I write this now, in the waning halo of winning the election, because in the past few months, I’ve come to see in a painfully clear light how important it remains to rally and recognize women working in technology. From the dearth of women as speakers and panel members to the lack of diversity on development, IT, and product teams, we have a serious listing that needs to be righted. As I wrote at the end of 2012, we need to elevate the profiles of successful women so that others will see them and want to work alongside them – so they will know what roles are available and what roles they can make.

I want other females, young and old, to feel encouraged by the women who worked on this re-election campaign and in technology, civics, and government as a whole. I want girls and young professionals to find their way by the determined wakes we leave. We’re doing important, satisfying, fun work – we should broaden and extend our purview so more can wade into the fray.

Now, I want to make this next point as clear as the glass ceiling beyond which many women in technology have yet to climb: I love, support, and cheer on my tech brethren, bearded or bare-faced, because they are completely, indisputably awesome and deserve every word of the recognition they receive. I have sat in the front row of the conferences at which they presented and beamed and clapped hard while they stood and spoke. I have touted them publicly on social channels and privately in emails and discussions with others. I wish them every success and am fantastically proud to call them friends and co-workers.

But equal consideration and recognition for the work, contributions, and fur-free faces of the ladies who rocked alongside them?

We need that - not just for this campaign or election, but for all we do. Let’s make that happen.

Resources:

• Swiss Miss is compiling a list of female entrepreneurs; you are welcome to add to it.
• Change the Ratio works to improve the balance between men and women and ensure a diverse workforce.
• Suggest others I should add by writing me on Twitter @marihuertas.

Next up: Some thoughts on how we can help get more women and minorities in technology.

While he is chiefly famous for being one of cinema's great actors, Daniel Day-Lewis is also famous for his reticence. Although ostensibly a public figure, he seeks solitude far more readily than he does celebrity. Later, he will tell me that he can spend upwards of a week, "just staring out of the window, watching the wind whip across the Wicklow hills. Some people will consider this shamefully neglectful when one considers that there are always more pressing matters at hand, but for me, I have to tell you, it is time very well spent."

Daniel Day-Lewis has had a reputation for years as an eccentric, almost fanatically focused actor. I don't watch a lot of films – I'm a highly sensitive person who can find it difficult to cope with things on screen – so, perhaps regrettably, I haven't seen much of his work. But the latest accolades he is receiving for his turn in "Lincoln" ignited my curiosity to learn more about how he approaches that work, so I started researching what he had to say about it.

As a former journalist, I'm far more interested in what people actually say than the authors' padding between those utterances. Taking this approach, I gather that Day-Lewis is not necessarily the 'famous recluse' that many publications seem to enjoy portraying – rather, he's enormously curious, genuinely interested in rendering his personal best efforts in his craft, and loves having his life – HIS life, not the life that someone else would have for him, or one that is expected of him, especially in his profession.

This quote, which seems highly reflective of that mindset, was a particular pith of truth to me. Picking a path between what felt appropriately necessary (trained or learned) versus what felt needed (inspired) has been a sometimes-painful struggle in my adulthood. I don't profess to know how not to give a fuck about what other people are thinking or saying or doing, but in my solid, still-transforming age, it's getting easier. Knowing what works for me is a creative and mental boon. Heeding it is a relief.

But how to hew to it? It takes practice, and experience. Today, working from my marrow, and with an always-clearer understanding of self, has acquired an urgent poignancy as I answer a new call in my life. It is filled with beautiful, stark, terrifying uncertainty. The work will not be easy but it will be necessary. In truth, it already is. And whatever the outcome, it will be time very well spent.