Marty and I are visiting our families in Ohio for Thanksgiving this year. For some crazy reason, I bought our flights through Southwest.

Why did I do that?

If I had bought American Airlines, I could have gotten wifi on the flight. Hell, if the flight was empty enough, I might have been able to upgrade our seats to First Class for a couple hundred dollars. I would have had a power port for my computer, in any case. If I had bought the flights through Continental, I probably could have had a power port, or wifi, or both.

Why did I buy them through Southwest? Southwest doesn’t let me do any of those things.

When Marty and I flew to Vegas—our first Southwest flight ever—this really cool flight attendant rapped the safety instructions instead of just going through them point by point. This blew our minds. However, I have no reason to expect this experience on other Southwest flights. Maybe the next time I go to Vegas, but I doubt stuff like that happens all the time.

Furthermore, seating is first come first serve on Southwest. So if I pay $10 per flight (that means $40 for Marty and I, round trip) we can get preferred seating and find our seats first. But on American or Continental, I could just choose my seat beforehand and know what to expect.

Of course, Southwest won’t charge us for luggage. But the flights have seemed (so far) a little more expensive on Southwest, anyway. So that doesn’t seem to make much difference. I’m paying for preferred seating instead of luggage, but it feels better to pay for preferred seating instead of luggage. With the luggage, I feel punished. With the preferred seating, I feel like I’m getting a bonus. This is still not a huge point—though I think it’s part of the final effect.

I have examined and examined. The truth is, there’s no logic here. I must have bought Southwest because Southwest seemed NICER.

All of my rational thought suggested that I should go with a different airline—when it came to buying these tickets, I just did what my gut told me to do. Their website is definitely friendlier. Their staff seems friendlier, too. All the seats on Southwest flights are the same. There IS no First Class. But actually, the seats on Southwest flights all seem nicer than your typical run-of-the-mill economy seats. Whatever decisions they have made in their hiring and their design and everything else, they have made me feel positive vibes about Southwest. And these positive vibes have resulted in me buying tickets with them instead of someone else, even though it means going without internet and power ports and the fleeting possibility of a cheap First Class upgrade.

You know how integral my web access is to my ability to make it through the day. So you know how wacky this is.

Even better, I don’t regret the purchase. I’m still perfectly happy to be flying Southwest, even considering this whole thought process.

The power of emotional decisions in marketing, am I right?

Enjoying oneself in life—as in sex—depends on being able to take a step back and not take yourself so goddamn seriously. If you’re finding yourself beaten down or depressed, or anxious, or overwhelmed, or over-critical, or self-destructive, just hold your damn horses for a minute and lighten up. LIGHTEN! UP!

Don’t look so stern. Smile.

Stop trying to convince me it’s the end of the world. It isn’t.

Don’t work. Don’t strive. Don’t stress.

Play.

If you don’t relax for a minute and enjoy the great wide world wriggling around you, you’re going to give yourself an aneurysm and fall over dead. THEN where will we be? CHILL OUT. Smell the flowers. Crack a joke. Enjoy yourself.

This is the life you’ve got. You’re going to take that factory classic you were born with and mod the bejesus out of it, and you’re going to love every minute. And the only way that’s going to happen—the only way you’re going to be happy—is if you learn to mellow out.

Yeah. You’ve got the idea. See?

Yes, I did go gallivanting about Las Vegas with Marty—and learned how to play Blackjack. I didn’t play, though. I watched Marty win. Our companions were generous with their blackjack know-how and I think Marty was up $200 at some point, before he lost $60 of it. (Then he stopped. We’re smart!)

And yes, I did come home and get sick with a lovely flu bug (swine flu, anyone?) and a 103 degree fever and become a captive in my own apartment for the last—oy, the last week or so. I’m teetering towards healthy, and I’m still feeling a bit like crap. Ugh.

But yes, I do seem to have survived, albeit by a very slim margin.

Providence!

I also hurt my knee (though strangely, not at CrossFit), breezed through six more Spenser novels, crashed a hard drive, learned to fear data loss (again), and upgraded my office (mmmm, new and/or refurbished Apple hardware). I also discovered how bizarre it is to not want food for a whole week… and mostly not eat it, either. That last one is just crazy, and I’m still coming to terms with it. In fact, I’m still getting used to eating again.

I lost my voice, too, but it’s coming back (slowly). By later next week, I expect I’ll be mostly back to normal. As normal as I’m going to get, having met Las Vegas. Yow!

All this is beside the fact that I talked to BBC Radio Wales on Monday, on the air. You’re laughing, because on Monday I was shivering under three blankets and two hot water bottles, and wouldn’t have been very good company. But Roy Noble, clever soul, pre-recorded us the week before. Not bad, hey?

You can listen to the archived stream here (I’m at 1:04.17) for another 12 hours or so before they take it down. Or, you can listen to my fairly crappy bootleg’d mp3 right here:

Roy Noble Interview, BBC Radio Wales (MP3, October 19 2009)

The lovely folks at BBC Radio Wales promised me a nice CD, and once I get that I’ll put up a more permanent recording for your listening pleasure. It’s just a little fifteen minutes, but it’s my fifteen minutes. ;}

And what else is on the docket? I’d like to get better. Can I be healthy, please? Do you know how sick I am of being a prisoner of my bed, or the couch? Lying down is exhaustingly boring. Blech! Potions? Cordials? Magic powders? Somebody fix me!

Well. Not like THAT.

I found this video at the CrossFit Central Women blog, and thought it would be awesome to show you the place I go many mornings and the sorts of things I do. My workouts are nothing like the one Chris does in this video (mine are scaled way down and take me much longer to finish!) but it’ll still give you a rough idea.

Chris, by the way, runs the CrossFit workout I have on Wednesday mornings. His classes are awesome. “Christine” is the name of the workout he’s doing. Check out the look on his face when he’s almost finished and has to (maybe!) convince himself to keep pushing.

The way he seems to have his shit together is something that’s going to stick in my mind the next time I’m almost done with a workout. For some reason, that really resonates with me.

Right now, I’m at CrossFit Central three days a week, Tuesday through Thursday. My Mondays and Fridays got interesting, so I dropped back from the five days a week just for a month or two. I’m still getting a HELL of a workout. And I’m sure gonna miss these while I’m in Vegas!

It continually amazes me that I’m still actually doing it, loving it this much, considering everything going on in my life and various experiments (especially food experiments) that make CrossFit particularly challenging. A few years ago, I doubt I would have stuck with it. Exercise was important to me, but it was still way at the bottom of my list—and something as hardcore as CrossFit would have fallen off the bottom fast. It’s a real pleasure to know these people. I can’t wait to go back to having classes every weekday. Dude.

Can you really believe that something this badass has made such a positive impression on me? That thinking about it makes little happy hearts and rainbows fly around my head? Stars. Lights. We’re talking tinsel, people.

Human beings are complicated and wonderful.

I had this problem forever, and I finally fixed it, so I’m going to tell you how I did it. If you haven’t ever had a problem with TweetDeck, you won’t find this very interesting. Feel free to skip along if that’s the case. ;} The next time some poor crusader searches Google for “TweetDeck URLs do not open in browser” or “Adobe AIR URLs broken” or “Why is TweetDeck / Adobe AIR opening all URLs in TextMate?” or “OH GOD WHY WON’T ANYONE HELP ME FIX TWEETDECK!?” their sad and lonesome prayers will (hopefully, possibly) be answered.

Here’s what was going on…

Every time I clicked a URL in TweetDeck, it brought up an error message in TextMate. I tried everything I could think of—reinstalling TweetDeck, Adobe AIR, and both, wiping out the preferences, fiddling with browser settings, trying to find a utility that could tell my computer that ALL web addresses should point to Firefox. I had no idea what was going on, and therefore, nothing worked.

I even tried emailing the TweetDeck folks and the Adobe AIR folks, but nobody could help me. I was completely confused, and finally, pathetically, I gave up.

And here’s what I did that fixed it…

But this week, full of chutzpah from my uber-exciting hard drive failure and the consequent series of miracles that ended in my complete recovery of all files and a very successful backup restoration (yes, I’m posting from that computer now—and because Apple no longer makes 100gb drives, I got a 250gb space upgrade. NICE, right?), I decided to try a few more things. Bringing over the Application Support & Preferences from a computer with a functioning TweetDeck didn’t work…

But here’s what did:

With the knowledge that I had it backed up in several different places, I deleted TextMate. Poof!

Then I clicked a URL in TweetDeck. Incredibly, it went to Safari (not my default browser). But it was a start!

Then I went into Safari’s preferences and made sure my default browser was, in fact, set to Firefox. Then I closed Safari, closed TweetDeck, reopened TweetDeck, and clicked another link.

It went to Firefox, new tab and everything. SUCCESS!

When I restored TextMate to its former happily-installed glory, the URLs continued to go straight to Firefox. And I was fixed!

That’s all I have to say. I have information, and I shall disseminate it. What’s the internet for, after all? ;}

(This was originally posted at Social Work prn, where I write on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you get a chance, check them out. They’re nice folks!)

I’m starting to build a Rules of the Road document (in my head, at least) while reading a book by the excellent Clay Shirky called Here Comes Everybody. Some of these things I knew, but some of them are recently-cemented concepts for me and that’s very exciting. I am madly obsessed with people projects—where many people come together over the internet and accomplish something previously unlikely or impossible. Shirky is talking about this very thing in his book, and it’s making my whole life awesome. Downright thrilling, I should say.

My Rules of the Road so far:

1. The relationship between you and the people you lead is a bargain. You give them what they want (assistance, entertainment, meaning) and they give you what you want (they spread your ideas, give you authority, help your project succeed). If you forget about the bargain—or strike the wrong bargain—you lose that essential relationship. It’s imperative that you find out what the bargain really is before you assume, crash and burn.
   
2. There will always be a cost to the organization of a large number of people. If you lead, you know that a B.I.G. part of that cost for you is time and energy—not necessarily money. But anyone who has been in a leadership position knows that time and energy is often a bigger, more interesting challenge than money. Thinking you can organize a big group of people without dealing with some cost in these terms is unrealistic, but if you can walk into it knowing what effort will be necessary to expend, you’re a step up.
   
3. Our circumstances have changed on a spectacular scale (one word: internet) and they’re not going to stop changing. Get with the change game now and start to expect things to shift—you’ll be ahead of everyone who’s still fighting it. Things may look the same in a lot of ways… but they are not.
   
4. We can have anything we want, if we are only willing to reach out and create it. This is truer now than it has ever been in the past. Our limits, as suspected, are in our heads—not on our capabilities.
   
5. It is less efficient to try to build something you want, and more efficient to wait and watch, keep your eyes and brain open, and seize an opportunity when you see it. A great book I talked about awhile back, Made to Stick, made this point often. A struggle to make something out of nothing is often not as efficient as an ability to see opportunities and leap on them.
   
6. Give them tools instead of instructions. If you can give a group of people the means to self-organize their passion, it’s more effective than trying to tell them how to do it. Self-organized efforts on the internet are often more effective and successful than similar initiatives by large companies with many resources (and many managers). Don’t worry so much about oversight. Give them systems. Give them tools. And then let them do their thing.
   

We’re capable of self-assembling now in ways we never were before, and it’s changing the entire landscape of “people projects”—or PR, or business, or community initiatives, or anything else you can name that has to do with how groups of people interact and make things happen.

I can’t wait to finish this book. Wow.

Music has been taking a back seat for a very, very long time.

See, music doesn’t really pay the bills. Even if you “do it right”, you are in school and in young artist programs for a long time before you make very much money. For a gal who ran out of money to finish college and spent the ensuing years building businesses to make money to help her family keep the bills paid, of course music was going to take a back seat. Fifty bucks for a handful of rehearsals and a local concert doesn’t buy very many groceries.

The trick is to get innovative, but I admit I’ve been distracted. I have a lot of interests and passions and I’m pulled in a hell of a lot of different directions. People in college who thought I should pursue one thing were not big fans of me. Opera, art classes, musical theater. Not to mention the drawing and writing and business-building I did in my notebook while I was supposed to be paying attention. I was so enamored with my multitasking, I never got in my required courses (math, science, ha!). Not before the money ran dry, at least.

While I am passionate about music, music has taken a back seat because I am passionate about other things that do pay the bills. Those things have always had my first attention, not because they’re particularly more interesting than music (and not just because they make money) but because I liked them and it made sense at the time.

But I’ll tell you, music taking a back seat has always bothered the hell out of me.

“If I just had a little more money,” I’d say, and be frustrated, and stare dolefully at the expanse of red Schirmer opera scores on the bottom shelf. “Someday, huh?”

Someday!

Yeesh.

The part that (maybe) makes it complicated is that I’m not all that interested in giving up anything else. I will still gleefully run my business, Marty’s business, and help anyone who seems helpable. I’m still going to write and go media crazy (overdue for a videoblog, wouldn’t you say?). I’m still going to take on design projects. Because I love these things. They make me happy.

But music makes me happy, too.

Really, really happy.

There is nothing in the whole world like getting up in front of an appreciative audience and pouring out your soul. Nothing like spending weeks learning one annoying aria and finally hitting the sweet spot where you know all the words and all the notes and it just gels, it’s a part of you, it’s natural and has no taste, like saliva, it matches you perfectly and flows right through you. You’re it. It’s you.

When I see shows, I get jealous. I try to figure out what I did wrong that meant I wasn’t up there with them. I try to understand how this happened. But I know how it happened. The money wasn’t there.

John—my Welsh cousin and my voice teacher, too—tells me that he sees it happen a lot. People stop singing because they don’t have the money. Any music takes time and resources, but classical music takes more than most. Studying and rehearsing and performing all take a lot of time, especially if you’re driving two hours to your lessons the way I am (and back, oh god, the traffic from San Antonio to Austin!). Music costs money, of course. Lessons and rehearsals cost money. Let’s not even discuss concert gowns, or makeup, or, for that matter, traveling across the country to compete.

Right. Money.

So you can see how this all came about. I was working hard for money, and the money I made pretty much just barely covered my music study if I didn’t schedule lessons too often, or competitions almost ever. Taking more time off paying work in order to study more often wasn’t something I was going to do. There were still bills after moving to Austin and ditching my safety net. (Oh, who needs safety nets anyway?) So I drove down to see John and Kim (his lovely wife who plays brilliant piano!) once a month, maybe once every few months. Sometimes less. That was the way it was. It could change later, when more funds were available.

The problem is, “later” doesn’t cut it. “Later” never happens. Waiting for something nebulous to just occur is a lot like making peace with never getting it at all. Which is why I’ve had a bit of a plan up my sleeve.

You see, I left a lot of wonderful supportive music-lovers in Ohio. There were many lovely, lovely people in the Welsh community who looked after me and supported me and wanted to be kept in the loop. They wanted to see me succeed. Many of them came to support me when I had my fund raising concert in Pittsburgh, before I headed off to Wales for the first time. I’ve always been really bummed that moving to Austin meant leaving them behind, not just because their existence made me feel good (and boy, did it ever!) but because they were such kind people. They were the kind of people I wanted to stay connected to.

So a few months ago, I decided I could stay connected to them. I doubt you’ve missed my Social Connection Via Internet rants. Yes, that’s exactly where I’m going with this.

I’m setting up a site.

It’s going to be called Megan Makes Music. (Because she does. Even more now than ever!)

What Megan Makes Music is going to allow me to do is something I’ve been mulling over for a long time. The questions were these: How can I let my supporters support me the same way they would if we were local? How can they feel like a part of my progress? How can they keep track of my career? How can they feel how integral and special and important they are to me and to how far I’ve come already?

One big dilemma was how to let them feel involved when it’s impossible for them to travel 2200 miles to sit in on one of my lessons, for instance, or a rehearsal. But I think I’ve solved that problem, because by God, I have a video camera. And a (passable) internet connection. (Time Warner, do you realize they have eighty-billion megabyte net connections in Canada? WTF!?) And some very reasonable business know-how. And a hell of a lot of motivation.

So I’m going to build a membership site. And I’m going to let my supporters pay whatever they want to help me out on an ongoing basis, and I am going to start sending private blog entries and new audio recordings and even the occasional rehearsal video down the pike, so they can actually be involved. It won’t be perfect when we start, but we’ll refine it as we go—and it will mean regular, wonderful music under circumstances that greatly improve my ability to schedule regular lessons and rehearsals—and increase my chances of creating music-related income and getting me safely to Wales in 2010. We’re not aiming for second place this time, folks. We’re aiming higher.

And you can help me do it.

Right now, Megan Makes Music is one sign-up page for more information. I’m moving as quickly as I can to get everything figured out and running, so depending on the number of people who turn out to be interested, I may have it settled and ready to go in the next few weeks. I’m really, really hoping that everyone gets a lot out of it, and I’m very excited to have a good excuse to make music again. This is going to be really freaking fun. ;}

If it makes you as happy as it makes me, drop on by and let me know.

Thank you for listening, guys. :}

PS. I was not kidding about cool people talking about me on BBC Radio Wales yesterday morning. Here’s a link to the recording that looks like it will only be up until Monday October 12th—works great in Safari, not so great in Firefox. (Meh!) Alan Upshall is one of the nicest Welshmen I know, and he’s the one talking to Roy Noble on the air. Alan’s bit starts at 36-and-a-half minutes in and goes for about a half hour. If everything works out, there will be another BBC Radio Wales recording for you to listen to in the next week or two. ;}

While I was in Youngstown last month I discovered—completely by accident—an incredible documentary called RiP! A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor. It was the joy of my Saturday night. Watching it heralded a revived obsession with Cory Doctorow’s Content, a book I began to dog-ear and mark up as if studying the new bible. I started That Idea Blueprint Girl knowing there was information I needed about copyright. Apparently, it wasn’t going to take me too long to find it.

My hunch has always been that ideas are free—or should be. Brett Gaylor’s documentary explains a lot about how free ideas allow new generations to build on the culture of previous ones. Without the free ideas, everyone who innovates and makes better is a criminal, because they’re all infringing on someone’s copyright. That’s the world we’re living in right now. Ever feel odd that everything from the public domain is trillions of years old? This is why.

I think my urge here has been that even when ideas aren’t free—even when people try to restrict them with laws and fines and general pissiness—they still essentially are free. If someone patents the ground under your feet, you can still stand on it until someone drags you away. A plant used by hundreds or thousands of years to cure disease in some foreign culture might get patented by an enterprising American capitalist, but that doesn’t mean that its foreign practitioners can’t still use it (at least until that same capitalist, in a fit of righteousness greed, figures out how to take the plant away from the practitioners, or the practitioners away from the plant.) And a Doctorow quote from a recent Boing Boing post: A law that no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all.

You can’t really restrict ideas. You can pretend to do it, but it doesn’t really work. You can enforce it unnaturally, but someone else can always have the same idea and the returns on this kind of enforcement are always going to be limited. Someone else can always alter your idea just enough to make it theirs. Our attempts at proving otherwise are a sham. Ideas are free. They were free before civilization and commerce, and they’re free now. We’re just fooling ourselves.

The question, I think, is this: How long are we going to try and enforce an anti-cultural paradigm that absolutely does not function?

Originally, we didn’t have a lot of argument over whether ideas were free. Copyright was created when one day, ideas were suddenly easier to spread—and it gave creators a way to benefit from their creations. Authors had the exclusive rights to their work for 14 years, and then the rights passed to the public domain. Compared to our current system, this seems overwhelmingly reasonable. In this scenario, an artist—any innovator—continues to come up with new ideas and new ways to implement them in order to survive.

But ha ha, us, we got lazy. We didn’t want to have to come up with something new after fourteen years. We wanted to continue to milk that cow as long as we could (until it keeled over useless). Now copyright extends almost two hundred years in the United States, which slows down the conversation. What conversation, you’re wondering? The conversation is cultural; it’s our ability to build new culture, which is always based on culture that went before; a way of learning from the past to create the future. What’s slowing is our ability to move forward and learn and understand and speak out. Our ability to build things we need, or solve problems, or heal diseases (literally!).

It strangles us, as a civilization. Our cultural conversation now must stretch out over hundreds of years in order to be… legal.

We don’t sell ideas. We don’t sell content. We sell the packaging—we sell the format. If I’m doing idea consulting, my clients don’t so much buy my ideas as they buy a person to help them find the right solutions to their problem. The ideas are out there; anyone else might come up with the same one I do. I just have an easier time doing it—or a different personality than some other consultant—or so on and so forth. Anyone can sell that idea; the idea isn’t unique all by itself. But the way we put it together, that’s really something. That’s worthy of note. The paper book you can hold in your hands. The story about the idea, the personal experience. The pretty brocade bag with a bow. The feeling of accomplishment or of appreciation. The knowledge that your money goes somewhere that counts.

People have always asked me about copyright, because I always say that ideas are free. My gut feeling about copyright, these days, is that copyright law as it stands now is utterly bogus and should not be played with. What I want to say is, I’m taking my ball and going home. Fuck you guys.

Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. I do live in this country, for the moment. So I won’t be screwing with your copyright—at least not today. I don’t know how radical my plan of action might really be.

But my god, I’m thinking about it. And you should too.

Time moves fast. Have you noticed?

One day you’re thinking about the great things you’re going to do as soon as you get out of this rut, and the next you’re looking back and going, Shit, I’ve been in that rut for eight weeks!

And then maybe a few months, you know? A few months can turn into all kinds of time.

If you don’t do the things that are supremely meaningful for you now, when will you do them?

Tomorrow?

Next year?

Never?