High Holy Mass of Contradictions

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.

We’re back! And so far it doesn’t look like jet lag should be too much of an issue: I’ve been up since 8 AM this morning, which is a little later than usual for me, but only by an hour or so. Karsten is still sleeping, but this is fairly normal for a Saturday morning. He’ll probably be up soon, if my schedule was any indication.

Here’s the details of the sleep schedule, for those who are interested in jet lag avoidance:

We were up late on Thursday night at a bar called Velvet Lounge (kind of a gay bar, apparently, though a very mixed crowd), and didn’t get to sleep until 3 AM. Then Friday, as is my habit no matter how little sleep I get, I woke up sometime between 6 and 7 AM. Our flight out was at 6 PM (mind you: that’s 5 AM Central Standard Time). Around 10 PM China time, I started getting really sleepy, so I gave in and slept for about 4 hours, and then was awake until we got home around 10 PM Central time (which is 11 AM China time).

So I got to bed around 11 PM last night and was up at 8 AM this morning. Seems not bad for having been 13 hours off schedule for the past week.

ANYway, enough of that. I’ve missed the last few days’ worth of updates here, but it was a wonderful trip. I felt like we did just enough sightseeing to get a feel for the place and the culture without wearing ourselves out. That was balanced with getting a taste of living like locals (or at least like ex-pats) by doing things like going grocery shopping, etc. And that was balanced by getting out to lots of great restaurants and eating some of the best food of our lives. And all that was balanced by a comfortable amount of time in our friends’ modestly luxurious home, which gave us a very relaxed feeling of being on a sort of staycation.

Or perhaps more meaningfully, it also felt quite a bit like being on a cruise, where there are comfortable periods of time spent relaxing and enjoying the amenities of the ship, interrupted by excursions and sightseeing, all highlighted by wonderful food.

I think that’s a pattern that works really well for me, so maybe I’m a cruise-type vacationer after all. Only I think I prefer big city ‘cruises’ over tropical islands. I suppose that makes me weird, but hey. I’m just not that crazy about hot sun and sand, whereas exploring urban areas never gets old.

I guess, like anything, it takes experimentation to learn your ideal vacation style. I think we got pretty darned close to perfect on this trip. (Sure, it would have been better if I hadn’t been sick for the first third of the trip, but even that wasn’t as bad as it could have been had we not been staying in such a wonderful home.) And we both loved Shanghai enough to go back, which is saying a lot considering 1, how many other interesting destinations there are in the world, and 2, how long it takes to get there and back. But it’s an endlessly fascinating place and we only spent a little bit of time exploring its neighborhoods. We could easily do another two weeks there and not get bored.

So maybe we’ll try to squeeze in one more trip before our friends come back to Nashville or move on to wherever they’re going next. Or maybe we’ll put it on the list for some future year and just look for an apartment to rent or something. It’d be a totally different experience without a Chinese-speaking friend to guide us (so I should probably improve my own Chinese skills beyond numbers and simple greetings and ‘bu yao’ or ‘don’t want’ which is immensely useful in the shopping areas) and without a driver. But it would almost certainly shed more light on what it’s like to live in Shanghai.

At any rate, I would love to publicly thank Paris and Charles for their warm and wonderful hospitality and for not only putting up with our vegan pickiness but for making sure we were well taken care of. Because Paris spent all week with us, we enjoyed the luxury of having a trusted and knowledgeable guide as well as the wonderful company of a friend. Thank you so much, Paris and Charles!

And now: back to our normal lives, with taxes to file and deadlines to meet. But also kitties to pet and friends to see and favorite places to go. Vacation life is good, but our home life is pretty darned nice too.

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

This has been an odd vacation: I’ve been struggling with still being sick (I came down with a virus infection less than a week before we left) and with having no energy due to weirdness with the timing of taking my Synthroid.

The Synthroid thing really threw me — hard. Here’s the thing: this is a medication you’re supposed to take at the same time every day. And for me, I’ve found that I need to wait at least an hour and a half after taking it before eating, and then wait at least four hours before taking my calcium supplements, which interfere with the effectiveness of Synthroid. But I have also found that to go back to sleep after taking Synthroid seems to concentrate it in some weird, intense way, so that I wake up jittery like I’m on speed or something. So trying to juggle all those restrictions and requirements while 13 hours off my normal schedule? Not easy. I initially tried just taking it at the same actual time (about 6 AM CST), which meant evening here, but that meant I was trying to fall asleep when I was just starting to feel energized. Yesterday morning that meant that I woke up (well, I never really slept) all shaky and with my heart racing. So I waited through the time difference and switched to taking it first thing this morning, and am just now starting to feel more normal, but I’m still a bit weak and woozy.

So I have truly been in the apartment almost the whole time we’ve been here. The only exceptions were on Saturday morning when we went out for a walk around the block (which wore me out) and for lunch when the driver took us to a Thai place for lunch, and we briefly walked around the Xantiandi area (which also wore me out). Yesterday I just resolved to stay in all day and let myself recover so I don’t ruin my whole week with this half-assed weak crap, but yesterday was also the day I was hardest hit by the Synthroid timing discrepancy, so while I was off my feet almost all day, it wasn’t exactly restful.

Nonetheless, I think the virus infection is almost gone (I still have slight sinus congestion and a trace of a cough, but it’s very minor) and I expect I’ll have my strength fully back within a day or two. Of course, we’re only here three and a half more days. So I’m going to try getting outside today, and see how it goes.

In the meantime, I have to say, if you’re going to be stuck indoors, our friends have an awesome place to be stuck. I’ve taken a few pictures from their panoramic picture windows and have played with ColorSplash on the iPhone with the one shown above. More pics are here, and more will be added in the coming days, I’m sure.

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

Idea borrowed from Jae from her updates about her most recent vacation. I love the idea of documenting highlights, but not bothering to write up whole sentences and paragraphs to describe what can be 90% summed up in loose phrases.

Day 1:

Survived 14 hour flight with massive head congestion: blew through 3 pocket packs of kleenex; stayed high on Sudafed; read several chapters of ‘War and Peace‘ (seriously!); watched ‘Burn After Reading‘ (good stuff); ate too much; slept a bit. Happy reunion with Paris at airport (Charles is away on business but will be back Saturday mid-day). Introduced to Tom, their driver. Rush hour traffic into town.

Tour of apartment (wow!) & shown to our guest room suite (wow!). Paris should win awards for being super-thoughtful friend and hostess. It helps that their place is amazing.

Much-needed sickie nap for me while Karsten & Paris chat over snacks & wine.

Dinner of vegan fried rice and dumplings with tofu & spinach (and more wine), prepared beforehand by housekeeper apparently despite confusion because  “egg is not meat” so it should have been OK to include. She did an awesome job anyway. Can’t wait to meet her and thank her for such a delicious meal.

Amusing overview of content on Chinese TV stations. Introduced to ‘True Blood‘ - watched first 2 episodes. Alan Ball is a genius. Belgian chocolates and yet more wine. Paris points out that we can see The Bund from where we’re sitting in the living room. Have I mentioned their place is amazing?

Off to bed. Cozy with Karsten. Not a bad night’s sleep.

Day 2? Coming soon.

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

The woman sitting next to me in the doctor’s office waiting room
noticed all this writing on the cover of this issue of Newsweek. Maybe
people are so used to commenting on blogs that they can’t resist
defacing property to make their voices heard. Or maybe this cover was
just too irresistible. Whatever the case, I knew I had to take a
picture of it and share it.

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

I know you can’t tell but this is Maroon 5 at Omniture Summit. They’re
better than you might expect. Cool show.

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

Teaching girls how to make a video fir YouTube. Rock on.

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

From the cushiony comfort of my home office chair. Bill paying can
wait.

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

Never seen h monthly before, but they came up on a Google News alert for Daryl Hall (yes, I do care that much, shut up) and had a well-written quick review of Hall’s Sacred Songs album:

So, in perhaps one of the most befuddling pairings of all time, Hall teamed up with King Crimson’s prog-rock progenitor, Robert Fripp, for his debut solo album, Sacred Songs.

[...]

The results of this unlikely pairing are strangely brilliant. Hall’s soaring vocal delivery is complimented by Fripp’s maniacal guitar work and layered production, and Fripp’s experimental touches offer some intriguing soundscapes that leave you to ponder what Hall and Oates would have sounded like if Fripp was in the group.

[...]

Oh, and we can’t forget the glam-punk songs [...] that could have endeared Hall to the 70’s punk scene if the album had been released in 1977 (when it was recorded), instead of 1980 (RCA apparently didn’t know what to do with it and shelved it for three years).

It’s such a cool alternate reality to imagine.

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

From an article on writing the perfect pop song in the Guardian:

For Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, songwriting is not a choice, but a therapeutic necessity. “When I’m not writing songs, it’s cryptic crosswords and Countdown on the telly. Everything gets a bit fuzzy, a bit bleak.”

Yeah. I’ve been in a funk lately, and I think this is partly why. I need a healthy dose of songwriting fairly regularly to make sense of, well, everything else.

Is everyone like this in some way? Is there some thing that you need to do for the world to be right? What is your thing?

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