High Holy Mass of Contradictions

At a Chamber of Commerce mixer the other night, the woman who is my membership representative was telling a story about how she met me to someone else there. (She was in the audience when I was on a panel on women in technology at last year's BarCamp Nashville.) She mentioned that, at one point, when the panel was discussing children and family and I said that I had no interest in having kids, the woman next to her in the audience muttered something like "what an empty thing to admit."

I'm glad she told me that story because I do like to have a read on people's reactions to my choices and lifestyle. But that woman in the audience? Fuck her.

(P.S. - Also? I can't believe I didn't already have a "child-free" tag. Have I truly never talked about this here before? I mean, Karsten and I organized the Nashville Child-Free Meetup for the first few years we were here. How did this never come up before?)

I've decided to switch to a raw diet for a while. Again. I've done it a few times before and I always feel incredibly healthy and energetic, but it takes so long to prepare enough food for a day that I usually find I don't have enough time.

And that will probably happen this time, too, but at least I can get a few good days of it in, hopefully, or learn to mix it into my lifestyle as a day or two each week of raw eating.

The other side effect I'm hoping for, predictably enough, is to shed some of the extra me I've gained since my thyroidectomy last year (and there's a pretty generous amount of me gained). I'd prefer to be a somewhat thinner me again. (I want to stress that I'm not dieting in the women's magazine sense of the word - I'm changing my lifestyle in a way that feels great and has historically resulted in my body dropping some of its excess.) We'll see how it goes.

(Ooh, and I went for a pretty decent run Saturday for the first time in weeks, if not almost months. I think just the idea of eating raw gives me energy. :) )

Anyway, the above article caught my eye because Karsten and I were just chatting yesterday about making a trip to Germany. We weren't specific about whether we meant for our next vacation or just sometime in the indefinite future but I kind of think it might be within the next year, which is exciting! I haven't been back to Germany since I spent a summer there as an intern in 1993. But I was also not vegetarian then let alone vegan, let alone raw vegan, and I was totally unaware at the time of the groundswell of alternative diet support there seems to be throughout pockets of Germany. This time it will be essential, but also exciting to explore and discover veggie-friendly places to eat and shop. Basically, I want to be a food tourist. :)

From The 237 reasons women have sex - Holy Kaw!

"Nobody has really talked about how women can use sex for all sorts of resources." Their main reason was "orgasm, orgasm, orgasm."

That this was in any way elusive is a mystery to me. :)

In my Remember the Milk account, my lists generally correspond to the greater goals I have for my life. (I borrowed that concept from Life Balance, actually.) I just changed the name of a list in Remember the Milk from "Reach Out" to "Develop Relationships." Functionally, the tasks that go into the list are basically unchanged, but I think this renaming appeals to me because it reflects a significant shift in my thinking over the past months, which is two-fold:

1. The nature of the company I started this year lends itself to meeting a lot of people, all the time. (It's a web marketing agency, and the billable work is done almost entirely by freelance and independent talent so that we can fit the right people to the tasks. So I'm always recruiting.) I naturally meet a lot of people that [meta]marketer doesn't have any current work for, but I have been paying attention to when I can make introductions between people who might be able to help each other. So I'm interested in developing relationships between other people. So some of the tasks that go into this list read like "send email introducing so-and-so to so-and-so."



2. My social networks are growing, and I'm less interested in having a vast collection of people around me that I have no connection to than I am in having at least SOME connection with most of them and always deepening the connections with as many as possible. So I'm interested in developing relationships between myself and others. Some of the tasks that go into this list, then, are things like "Follow up with so-and-so from the mixer the other night."

I also have a daily recurring task that reminds me to check Facebook for birthdays. I really enjoy wishing people a happy birthday, and it means that I can count on at least one interaction with most of the people in my network (some don't list their birthdays) every year. That may not sound like much, but that one birthday wish has often led to messages back and forth catching up a bit and getting to know people I may have only gone to school with or hung out with at a conference.

How do you approach developing relationships? Is it something you just do, or do you have methods of organizing it into your life, as well?

I know, folks are probably sick of me having so many sites. But I like the idea of a Posterous-style tumbler blog, and I want to see if I actually use it.

Subscribe or don't, it's up to you. :)

Posted via email from Kate O'Neill and then some

I'm trying to get a local sushi place to create a menu item based on a custom roll I devised. Some friends have since named it the "Kate O'Roll."

It's avocado, cucumber, and mango inside with seaweed salad over top.

Yummmm.

I decided on Wednesday to attend Social South in Birmingham and drive down the next day with Karsten along for the trip. I love spontaneous trips, and we hadn't done one in a while.

All was going well -- the conference was good, more about that at my Social South recap post at [meta]marketer -- until we pulled into the hotel last night after dinner with other conference attendees. We left the car with the valet and were moseying to the elevators when the valet came running up to us saying he couldn't get the car in gear.

Long story short, an hour and a half later, AAA was towing the car to a transmission place halfway between Birmingham and Nashville (AAA covers you for a 100-mile tow, so we tried to get it as close as possible).

Then this morning set out on foot in downtown Birmingham to find food and rent a car. Again, editing for brevity, our search covered the depth and breadth of downtown Birmingham but finally led to a good coffee shop: Urban Standard. We briefly visited the downtown Enterprise Rent-A-Car before calling a cab to the airport car rental counter where Avis ultimately tried harder and won our business.

Then it was on to the Alabama small town where our car was waiting, because the mechanic had explained to Karsten meanwhile that it was a broken cable that runs from the gear shifter to the engine, but that he couldn't get the part until Monday. Still, he said the car was driveable... if you weren't too particular about needing to shift gears. Because in order to do that, you'd need to put on the parking brake, lift the hood, and turn a crank in the engine by hand.

Which is exactly how Karsten drove it home.

Whew.

Meanwhile, here's our sporty rental in front of the house:


And here's a sign we noticed in that small town in Alabama:

I got it into my head yesterday that I needed yellow flats. This morning I was browsing online shoe sites, trying to find the ideal pair. I'd narrowed it down to a few, of which the lowest-price pair was $35.

Then Karsten and I randomly stopped in a thrift store on our way to a party, and I found yellow shoes. Not quite flats, but low wedges, so they're almost better, because flats actually make my size-11 feet look huge. (Well, they are huge, but they don't have to be so obvious about it.) 

And they were only $6. Yay!

> From: karsten soltauer
> Date: July 15, 2009 3:25:12 PM CDT
> To: Stone Fox
> Subject: techno sapien
>
> have you seen this? would you like one? let me know.
>
> http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2106/2414194397_9a484b1d75.jpg
>
> love you.

I walked to Zackie's for a veggie dog at lunch, and although it was drizzling and although I am miserably sick, I was safely under an umbrella, so I took it slow and snapped a few glistening pictures of the neighborhood. I'd like to show some to you.

High on our list of criteria for a livable neighborhood when Karsten and I were house-hunting was that it had to have sidewalks. Some cities take this attribute for granted, but many of Nashville's neighborhoods don't have extensive sidewalks, so this truly was a limiting factor in selecting a location. In moving to Germantown, not only did we get sidewalks, we got charming brick sidewalks:



One of the best things about this neighborhood (and maybe it's to do with the culture of the South in general) is just how much gardening goes on. There are some beautiful gardens just on the blocks we walk the most, and we never take them for granted.

Here, the lilies seem to be peeking up over the hedges. If you could only take a picture of scent, I could have let you smell how deliciously wonderful these smell.


Even a simple decorative purple border of petunias looks better when it's drizzling:


And this? This is the best garden in Germantown, if you ask me. A whole side lot dedicated to a lush, gorgeous garden, filled with what must be hundreds of varieties of flowers and other plants.


I love living here.

It's not very motivating to do one's hair or makeup when the stupidly large bathroom has no air and only a ridiculously tiny window.

I'm just saying.

From Lifehacker - Zoning Out Is A "Crucial" Mental State, Studies Say - Focus:

Discover Magazine references several studies on the importance of zoning out, including a University of Santa Barbara case that asked participating students to read from—what else—War and Peace and to tap on a computer key when they weren't thinking about the book.

They make it sound like such a chore! I loved War and Peace.

Posting from the road. My dad Hall of Fame induction ceremony was great, could it gone better. And I'm now driving back to Nashville and it's pouring rain but I'm trying out posting via Jott. So, here goes.


listen:
http://jott.com/show.aspx?id=c43d282e-9182-46c5-8cf5-1f3357e18713
Powered by jott.com

(edited to say: Not quite, but close.)

There's a huge flock of cedar waxwings gorging themselves silly on the hackberries high up in the trees around our garden. And crapping all over the garden, which means the planting I was going to do can wait.

It's OK; they're beautiful. I don't mind waiting on beauty.

I've disabled the cross-posting by default from my Honey Bowtie Music blog. This is for several reasons:

• It's too repetitive, and I dislike the fragmentation of comments. 
• I'd already planned to separate my posting there and here, but didn't really follow through on it, and I think the cross-posting feature was a crutch.
• I've got several other blogs now besides the one at honeybowtie.com (there's my internet marketing blog and the Corporate Idealist blog), and it seems a little arbitrary to cross-post only the content from one, but it would be overkill to cross-post the content from all of them.
• I keep trying to get myself to write more consistently about music and songwriting over at honeybowtie, and instead I keep thinking about it as my personal blog when, really, this is and has been my personal blog.
• Thanks to therealjae, I created a Dreamwidth account and I want to give it a fair try, but I want to use it more for the features that probably make it a good community blogging platform and not what might make it a poor mainstream blogging platform.
• I'm trying to get back to setting time aside each day for blogging for a variety of reasons, so I think I'll be better prepared to keep up with having separate places to write, which was a problem of priorities for a while.
• I felt like I was doing myself a disservice here by largely posting content that wasn't intended for this format, and I don't think my friends were reading as consistently as they would have if I were standing in the community and actively participating in it rather than throwing stuff over the wall from outside. And non-acknowledgement is a pretty fair response to non-authentic participation, if you ask me, so I want to change the way I participate.

So there you go. The upshot: more content written here, intended for here. Hope you like the change, and if not, let me know why not. If you want to follow my blogging elsewhere, the links to the blogs are above but I'll make it even easier for you: here are the links to the RSS feeds: 

Kate and Karsten's songwriting blog feed
[meta]marketer web marketing blog feed
Corporate Idealist blog feed

From the announcement: 

I hadn’t heard about the Depeche Mode iTunes Pass fiasco:

Just recently, Apple introduced its iTunes Pass program with Depeche Mode, only to find the proposition dismantled by the internet itself.  The Pass builds extras around a formal album release date, and packages everything into a multi-week program.

But all of that is predicated on scarcity and control.  What happens when the album leaks?  That is exactly what happened with Depeche Mode, to the surprise of few.  Buyers were left holding the bag on an $18.99 extravagance, while those paying $0 were granted access to the entire album - and various extras as well.

(via Resnikoff’s Parting Shot: Not Your Father’s Release Schedule… — Digital Music News.)

Interesting attempts to innovate and consequences in the music industry right now. I’m just realizing I didn’t blog here about the Leadership Music Digital Summit Karsten and I attended a few weeks ago, and what my impressions of that were. This was basically it: there’s so much disruption in this industry right now, and some very bright minds are trying many different approaches to make something new work, find a new model, build out lucrative side businesses from that model, etc. But it seems that the disruption is happening faster than the innovation, and that’s really freaking everyone out.

I mean, truly, that was my overriding impression from that conference: not one of hope and excitement, but one of a general anxiety and fear about what happens next.

But the flip side of that is, it’s just about anyone’s game right now. Anyone with an idea could come along and innovate on behalf of music makers, and on behalf of music lovers. There certainly are innovators already. It’s just that there’s so much room for more.

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

Did you know I started a new blog yesterday? It's called Corporate Idealist, and I'm really excited about it. I think it will be a source of encouragement to people to feel like more than cogs in a corporate machine, and to do something positive in their workplaces and in their lives beyond the pursuit of money. (Hey, I like money as much as the next capitalist, but it isn't enough by itself to feel good about.)

I hope you check it out, and subscribe to the feed, and comment on the blog, and spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested!

I also want to attract contributors and eventually pay them, as well, to provide a really diverse set of perspectives on how to be happy at work, what constitutes good corporate citizenship, how to advocate for positive change within a company, and so on.

Sound like anyone you know? Send 'em my way and we'll talk.

I know I shouldn’t have a favorite, but I do. I can’t help it. I mean, just look at her:

More puppies - just waiting to be adopted! - over at Newscoma.

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

Because I have not much of my own to say right now, and because this is such genius:

Read Vito's poem: I fucked your mom.