Saravut Whanset, Photographer.
The landscapes are beautiful but it's the people I love.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Oleaginous
o·le·ag·i·nousˌōlēˈajənəs/
adjective
• rich in, covered with, or producing oil; oily or greasy.
• exaggeratedly and distastefully complimentary; obsequious.
" Though similarities exist, Ted Cruz cannot be Lucifer. Everyone knows the Devil, while also oleaginous, actually has charm." - Mrs. Betty Bowers.
Suze Orman
This seems to be more than just financial advice:
"I spend a lot of time helping people work out a plan for overcoming a financial challenge. Quite often the bulk of my work is in getting them into the right frame of mind. Financial problems are so stressful it is completely reasonable to feel depressed. But the first step in working your way out of a financial fix is to convince yourself you control your future and you have the ability to make it a great future.
My best advice for anyone facing a financial challenge is to give yourself the gift of a positive point of view. Commit to these three beliefs and you can achieve anything:
I Can. Lasting wealth is built on a foundation of confidence that empowers you to control your financial destiny. It may be natural to feel defeated when you’re staring at a statement showing all the credit card debt you owe, or when you realize how much it will take to save up for a 20 percent home down payment. That’s where framing your challenge with “I Can” will empower you. Instead of thinking “How will I ever get my credit card bills paid off,” switch your inner dialogue to “I can make progress every month by spending only on needs, not wants.” And “I can make progress by paying more than the minimum balance due each month.”
I Am. Power attracts money and powerlessness repels money. A big step in setting your mind to build lasting wealth is to embrace the power that is within you to create the future you deserve. “I am drowning in student loan debt” is not a sign of power. “I am going to make timely payments and be out of debt in 10 years” is your power move.
I Do. Catch yourself every time there is a financial issue and you find yourself thinking “I don’t understand” or “I don’t think I will ever be able to do that.” When those negative thoughts invade, identify what the problem is. For example, if you are confused by the investment options in your retirement plan, rather than be anxious that you “don’t” understand, commit to spending an hour a week for two or three weeks reading up on the basics of retirement saving. I guarantee you will soon be saying “I do understand what I need to do to.” And you will be on the road to building lasting wealth."
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Nihilistic Questions
ni·hil·is·tic/ˌnīəˈlistik,ˌnēəˈlistik/
adjective: rejecting all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless.
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Monday, April 25, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Balboa Theater
This afternoon I went to the San Diego Gay Mens Concert California Dreamin' at the Balboa Theater. The concert was great fun and the theater is beautiful.
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Take Agency Over Your Own Life
This is true for everyone:
Dear Ones -
When I think about how hard my mother pushed me to become as strong and independent and resourceful and resilient a person as possible, I believe it was because of this truth — which life had already taught her very well:
Bad things happen to women who wait for good things to happen.
Waiting to be rescued, waiting to be noticed, waiting to be heard, waiting for things to change, waiting for somebody to defend you, waiting for somebody to understand you, waiting for things to get better, waiting for a miracle, waiting for recognition, waiting for a promotion, waiting for the economy to pick up, waiting, waiting, waiting...
But here's the dangerous thing about spending your life waiting: When you are paused — defenseless and passive — the world around you does not pause. Life remains in session, which means: THINGS KEEP HAPPENING. Whether you show up or not, life will keep occurring. And as you sit there waiting for good things to happen, all sorts of other things are happening around you. And if you continue to just sit there (hoping and waiting for something "good") then things will not only happen around you, but TO you. And the less you participate in that story (the story of "your life is in session"), the more likely it is that the things happening to you will be based upon other people's decisions, other people's power, other people's demands, other people's needs, other people's manipulations, other people's will — in short: other people will show up and start using your life for their own purposes.
Other people's purposes are unlikely to be in your best interest.
This is very, very dangerous.
Please understand: I am not a forceful person, by nature. I was not, by nature, born confident and certain. My brain and heart lean more toward "worrier" than "warrior". My inclination as a child was to hide in quiet rooms, safely building nests of blankets and pillows — wishing to not have to participate. So reluctant to even be here!
But my mother had already seen what happens to girls who grow up to be women who are reluctant to engage with their own lives. She wasn't having it. It was a battle for my mother to forge me into somebody who could participate in her own life at every level, rather than softly folding in on herself, and becoming life's victim. But my mom didn't give up on that battle, because she cared about me. And when I'm feeling scared and small, I STILL have to reach deep down and find that power to show up — to keep participating in my own choices, no matter how hard it is. And to accept the consequences of my choices from a place of sober self-accountability...which is the ultimate source of power.
If there's one thing I'm trying to do on this page, every single day, it is to pass that lesson onto you.
I want you to take agency over your own life.
I know: You're afraid sometimes to take agency over your own life because you're afraid you will make the wrong decisions — but if you don't make decisions for yourself, then decisions will be made for you, by somebody who may or may not (probably not) feel the same sense of sacred stewardship over your one rare and precious life that I want you to feel.
This doesn't mean you have to do everything alone. Find your team, find your tribe, find your supporters, find your coaches, find your teachers — find those who will love and uphold you. But make sure they are people who know that you are strong — not people who fear that you are weak. Make sure they are encouragers, not enablers. Ask their advice. Listen to their wisdom. Fall in their arms at times in tears, seeking comfort.
But then — DECIDE.
Make your move. Understand that your life choices must originate from your own power — or else somebody else will lay their power upon you. And that will never be a good thing.
Stop waiting, everyone. Please don't forget this: Any move you make — born of your own volition — is better than BEING moved by somebody else's hand.
I love you, and you can do this.
ONWARD,
LG
Friday, April 22, 2016
The Evil Men Do
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
William Shakespeare
Why I Was Late to the Hypnotic, Erotic, Genius Prince Dance Party
I didn't get him ... until I did.
By Melissa Harris-Perry
Apr 22, 2016
Prince did not speak to me when I first heard his music, barely muffled by the perpetually closed door of my teen sister. I am not an artist. She is. My elder by more than six years, Beth is the girl who refused to buy a dress for high school homecoming, instead designing and sewing maroon satin knickers that scandalized the pitifully conventional boy who took her to the dance. Beth despised the restraints of small town life and eventually ran off to Washington, D.C. to finish high school at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. But in the dark days before her soul found refuge in that unparalleled community of dancers, actors, painters, vocalists, and musicians, she turned repeatedly to The Artist himself, playing hour after hour of Prince alone in her bedroom.
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I'd hear her rage drain as she belted out "Let's Go Crazy" and her self-confidence soar as she assured herself "Baby I'm as Star." She'd rewind the 9-minute version of "Purple Rain" for what seemed like an eternity.
I didn't get it.
Conformity felt easier for me. She is the dancer; I am the cheerleader. She needs a canvas; I need a spreadsheet. An impatient literalist by nature, I thought Prince was going on about an actual small, red, Chevy. I was not moved.
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Then I fell in love with a tall, broad boy whose sickle cell disease kept him off the football field where every other tall, broad boy in our town inevitably spent most of their adolescent hours. Unable to play ball, he played bass. He was utterly incapable of moderation and adored or ignored me with brutal and unpredictable equality. I wanted only to be allowed to be his singular audience, invited to listen, first to him then to track after track of his favorite artist, Prince.
I started to get it.
I never fully knew his lovely inner self, but I watched the space Prince made for his difference, for his brooding, for a manhood defined against the narrowness of our childhood. Sports defined our working-class community. We all went to the football games on Friday nights in the fall, basketball occupied us all winter, and we filled the baseball stands in summer. Those wrongly shaped blood cells clogging his veins with debilitating pain kept my tall, broad love off the field and off the court, making it hard for the town or his dad to imagine him as fully a man. But Prince expanded that manhood, let him find it in his ability to make something beautiful, to elicit something pleasurable. And by his touch, I was offered new interpretations of those lyrics I had once taken literally. Oh my. I was moved. Now I understood why "I Would Die 4 U" and why Nikki was Darling.
I wanted to be able to exist in the tension of undefined spaces, where identity and experience and possibility are visible but not reductive. I wanted to be uncompromising and fabulous. I finally got it.
Then I found Prince for myself. It took years to recognize that although Beth is uniquely talented, she is not my mother's only creative child. Years to acknowledge the reasons I fell for the ones who woke me at 2 a.m. claiming I'd inspired a new composition only to leave me by the dinner hour. I began to notice that I was composing ideas, choreographing community, painting possibilities. As a teacher and activist, and eventually as a public voice, I was working in a different medium, but I was, nonetheless creating. That means I was risking being different and risking rejection as a result of that difference. I knew the fragile creative soul needed companionship and I knew where to find it. I turned to Prince.
I finally got it—the bravado, the freedom, the woundedness, the eroticism, the dualities, the unmatched genius.
I finally got it—the bravado, the freedom, the woundedness, the eroticism, the dualities, the unmatched genius. I started to hear everything I missed when I listened with my most uncompromisingly categorical mind. I heard how the music was neither funk, nor soul, nor jazz, nor rock, but all of them. That is exactly the kind of public voice I wanted to have. I wanted to bring social science, and literature, and humor, and ordinary wisdom, and black girl vernacular together in one unexpected creative fusion that felt good if you could let go and be inside it. I wanted to be able to exist in the tension of undefined spaces, where identity and experience and possibility are visible but not reductive. I wanted to be uncompromising and fabulous. I finally got it.
I long have been embarrassed by having come so late, if so fully, to Prince. This shame kept me from fully participating in the public grief so many expressed when he passed away unexpectedly on Thursday. I felt somehow implicated in his untimely demise, as though by my childhood failure to grasp his genius, I had not clapped for Tinkerbell to prove my belief in fairies as an antidote to Hook's poison.
Today I could not hold back. Deserving or not, the grief took. It seemed like Prince was all energy and artistry and spirit and ideas. But in the end, he too was body—limited and vulnerable and now gone. The entry was halting and delayed, but I did eventually throw open the gates of my soul to The Artist. And even in this little, incomplete, and wholly inadequate way I needed to remember how he helped me to find the artist in myself.
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Rain
Last night I ushered Rain at The Old Globe. It's a new musical based on a 1921 book by Somerset Maughn. After the book it was made into a play and then 3 movie versions starring Hollywood icons Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth, and Joan Crawford. The music is complicated but beautiful and the set was amazing; a 3 story house that rotates and comes apart and rain falling on the stage.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
We Are Born in Truth
“We are born in truth, but we grow up believing in lies. One of the biggest lies in the story of humanity is the lie of our imperfection.” — don Miguel Ruiz
Monday, April 18, 2016
Procrastination
Procrastinators are less compassionate toward themselves.
For many people, a little procrastination isn't harmful — like 15 minutes lost in Facebook or putting off doing the laundry for a few days.
But then there are things like taxes. And all the people who keep meaning to start saving for retirement, but never do. And people with obesity or diabetes who constantly tell themselves, "I'll start eating right tomorrow" — but never do. For some people, procrastination creates huge problems at work, at school, and at home.
Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives.
None of it seems logical. How can people have such good intentions and yet be so totally unable to follow through?
Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.
"Procrastinators are less compassionate toward themselves"
Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.
But getting a better understanding of why our brains are so prone to procrastination might let us find new strategies to avoid it. For example, psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a paper showing that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to procrastination are, overall, less compassionate toward themselves — an insight that points to ways to help.
Pychyl, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has been studying procrastinators for some 19 years. I talked to him about why people procrastinate and how they can learn to stop.
Susannah Locke: What are the biggest misconceptions about procrastination?
Tim Pychyl: When a procrastinator thinks about themselves, they’ll think, "Oh, I have a time management problem," or, "I just can’t make myself do it. There’s a problem with my willpower." And when other people think about procrastinators, they use that pejorative term: "They’re lazy."
""Psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism""
But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions. So we see it as giving in to feel good. And it’s related to a lack of self-regulation skills.
I can simplify that and say that psychologists recognize we all have a 6-year-old running the ship. And the 6-year-old is saying, "I don't want to! I don't feel like it!"
SL: What are you discovering about how procrastinators' brains work?
TP: Recently we’ve been doing research that relates to the work on "present self"/"future self" because what’s happening with procrastination is that "present self" is always trumping "future self."
Hal Hershfield has done some really great research on looking at how we think about "future self." He’s shown that in experimental settings if someone sees their own picture digitally aged, they’re more likely to allocate funds to retirement. When [the researchers] did the fMRI studies, they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.
""If someone sees their own picture digitally aged, they’re more likely to allocate funds to retirement""
My graduate student Eve-Marie Blouin-Hudon just did three studies, and what she looked at is our ability to imagine the future self. She measured people’s self-continuity. You’d see circles representing present self and future self and choose how much to overlap them. Some people see these selves as completely distinct, and some people see them totally overlapping. The people who see the present and future self as more overlapping have more self-continuity and report less procrastination.
She’s doing a study right now using an imagery intervention. So she’s going to have students think of an image of themselves at the end of the term. And the hypothesis is that those students who engage with this imagery of future self will then procrastinate less. We [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."
SL: What's the most surprising thing to you about procrastination?
TP: I think the most surprising thing I’m still grappling with is that for many people, the experience of procrastination doesn’t match the definition that most of us are working with: a voluntary delay of an intended action despite knowing you’re going to be worse off for the delay.
If you speak to people, they’ll tell you that it doesn’t feel voluntary: "I feel like I have no control over it." For some people, it feels totally involuntary, like they can’t help themselves.
SL: What's your one biggest tip for stopping procrastination?
TP: One of my pet expressions is, "Just get started." And it’s important you don’t say, "Just do it" — that’s overwhelming. But just get started.
Whenever we face a task, we’re not going to feel like doing it. Somehow adults believe that their motivational state has to match the task at hand. We say, "I’m not in the mood."
Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."
SL: What's the evidence that just beginning a task, even in a very small way, makes it easier to follow through?
TP: We know from psychological research by [Andrew] Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being. So the most important thing you can do is bootstrap a little progress. Get a little progress, and that’s going to fuel your well-being and your motivation.
Back in the 1990s, I put pagers on students and paged them [eight times a day for five days before an academic deadline]. And when they finally started working on the project, empirically we found that they didn’t see it as as difficult or as stressful as earlier in the week.
So their perceptions of the task changed. There’s lots of reasons to think that that’s what happens to us when we get started.
SL: But what about getting distracted?
TP: [Peter] Gollwitzer and his colleagues for years have shown us that implementation intentions make a huge difference to even deal with things like distractions.
Implementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.
You can use implementation intentions to keep yourself focused: "If I’ve finished this part of the article, then I’m going to immediately turn my attention to reading the next part."
SL: Can people really overcome procrastination?
TP: I guess I’m a living case. When I was an undergraduate, I procrastinated a lot. And now that I understand procrastination, I just have no room to wiggle.
Because it’s all about self-deception — you aren’t aware that it’s going to cost you, but you are. When there’s no more self-deception and you face yourself, you either shit or get off the pot. You’re either going to do it, or you’re not going to do it.
""I guess I’m a living case""
I really like my life, and I like to make time for the things that are important to me. [Robert] Pozen, who’s written a book on extreme productivity, has the OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.
And so if I can deal with it in two minutes — this is David Allen’s work — I deal with it.
I used to procrastinate, and now I don't, because I got all these wicked strategies. And it’s every level: some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s emotional, some of it’s cognitive. And now my biggest challenge is how do I teach my kids this? That’s really hard.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and condensed for length. It was originally published on December 8, 2014.
Further reading:
Pychyl's book from 2013: Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change
"Why wait? The science behind procrastination," a review of the contemporary research by Eric Jaffe
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Saturday, April 16, 2016
The Seven Sisters
The Seven Sisters, a series of pristine white chalk cliffs, rise to about 200 feet above the English Channel on the East Sussex coast.
Mistakes
“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?
“When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.”
Paulo Coelho - Eleven Minutes
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