getting to PERMA

Jane McGonigal - On Productivity from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jane McGonigal my New Year's Resolution is to play more games.

And get back to blogging (I miss it).


Jane McGonigal is a game designer based in San Francisco, California. She is the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

ever after

Black and white guitar strobist
Originally uploaded by Merit Attention

Ask any engineer how to flatten a tension curve, which is what EverTune does, and 9 out of 10 of them will say you should use a spring-and-lever system like the one I designed.

Cosmos Lyles, Engineer, Musician & Inventor of EverTune, "a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument from going out of tune no matter how hard its strings are strummed or bent," in The New York Times 10th Annual Year in Ideas.

polymorphous perversity

Got my haircut tonight by my buddy Vance. Michael is his given name, Vance is one of his middle names, the other, he tells me is “too ghetto – I don’t know WHAT my mother was thinking” and so he refuses to give it up. I plan to get it out of him before too long. I’ll keep you posted.

Decided to go and pretend that my grandfather hadn’t died today; that I hadn’t come home mid-day and fallen into a hard sleep, because that’s what grief does to me. Knocks me flat and makes me want to nap. Cried a little, made some calls to family, wished I’d packed it up for Phoenix sooner; hadn’t realized I’d be waiting so long to see family and get some hugs. But now it won’t be until July.

Then I dried my eyes and stepped out and kept my secret, so I could hear the gossip and not have to talk about it; deal with it. I love Vance and all that we have every eight to ten weeks or so, but I didn’t want to be talking about my grandfather while my head was wet and stringy.

He was running behind, per usual, so he had a new gal shampoo me. She was tentative and failed miserably to give me what I want from a shampoo, and what I especially wanted today: strong, firm strokes. Scrub me. With confidence.

I can’t entirely blame her. When I was an undergrad I found myself shampooing strangers’ heads one summer without much warning: I signed on as a receptionist and bookkeeper in a Boulder hair salon and the owner was having trouble with his hands. Some kind of scaly eczema thing. So he asked me to shampoo his clients. No training – just dive in. How hard could it be?

Tactically: piece of cake. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the erotic impact.

Their head prone in a bowl; my hips right up close; and then the contact of my hands in their hair. The water. The suds. I had shampooed the heads of boyfriends – those who relented at my request – so I should have expected that it would be charged. But this was more than I had bargained for. I didn’t know these people. I didn’t want to broadcast how unnerved I was. But I suspect there was no hiding it.

The gal who shampooed me today attacked my head with short staccato bursts designed to minimize contact, and it reminded me for all the world of how I felt that summer, slowly working the suds into the pates of folks I had never met before. Trying not to feel what I was feeling.

But her poor attentions made me realize something else: Feeling all that? Doesn’t scare me any more.

What terrified me before attracts me now – or maybe it always did, and I’m just old enough to be brave enough to take it. Not the desire to shampoo the heads of strangers – but the desire to feel life happen, head to toes, in a way that’s open and alive.

record of invention

So I leaned over to my Higgs Bosen buddy at a break during our committee meeting last night and asked him, what with all the news on the new Collider: “Have you been to Cern lately?” (don't I sound urbane? ;) Which of course resulted in some gossip (apparently Fermi Labs has embarrassed themselves badly with an exploding magnet), and delightful use of language (when particle physicists talk about ramping up a new particle accelerator, they say that they’re going to: “get some beam up” – slowly, so as not to compromise the equipment – and then, over time, they’ll “move up to top energy”) and then led into the most extraordinary napkin-sketch conversation.

He’s just filed a record of invention – predecessor to prototyping, forerunner to any possible patent – for a tremendously cool device that would provide energy efficiently and at practically no cost – if it works.

All this he sketched on a scrap of paper for my wondering eyes and made perfectly plain sense of for my fascinated-by-physics-but-not-entirely-savvy-to-it ears.

And of course I’d like to tell you all about it, but seeing how they still need to ramp up a prototype (at the Department of Energy’s expense) that would probably be breaching a trust and the what of it isn’t important anyway, is it?

What’s important is that people think these things up. Manufacture them out of nothing more than grey cells and coffee gone cold and the pure night air. (And oh, right, government funding.)

Wandering around Rodin’s bronze folk at Stanford the other night I got to wondering the thing I wonder a lot whenever I’m moved by a masterful artist’s art: Why do I need this? And why did you, my friend the artist, feel compelled to create it? To drop everything else and just do this? For me. For all of us.

The courage of that astonishes me. I have such a compulsion to be useful – even the way I make my livelihood grew out of that compulsion – much as I love it, it was more or less accidental. I saw an opportunity to do something, something that I did reasonably well, something that other people found to be of use, something they’d pay me to do so that I could eat.

And I like to eat. So I kept on doing it.

But to quit everything else and only create things because they’re beautiful?

M’s sketch last night – the invention – the whole thing was about harnessing energy. Spinning coils and magnetic fields and laser beams – all to harness this one thing and put it to beautiful use. Born of pure imagination, it may well find a useful end. But only because he dreamed the beautiful thing into being. Only because he allowed it to be.

Beauty is its own excuse for being. — Emerson

perceivability

Elm Street: Salt & Pepper
Originally uploaded by ReyGuy.

ReyGuy's[1] Salt & Pepper shot reminded me in a rush of memory of an early morning long ago when I ran into my favorite high school teacher at the McDonald's down the block from the school where he was eating pancakes.

I was up at dawn because my family had moved across town, and in order to get to school in time (it was my Senior year and I didn't want to change school districts again -- I attended twelve different schools while I was growing up, across eight different school districts -- loooooooooooooong story) I had to get up while it was still dark to catch the only city bus that would get me to class in time. Sometimes I killed time at McDonald's where I worked an after school job.

So Mr. B was there (he was my British Lit teacher, and the cut of his beard and sweep of his hair made him look a little like Shakespeare) and, as he he had the habit of doing, he asked me what I had been thinking about lately.

How many adults ask that question of kids? Not "what have you been up to?" but "what have you been thinking about?" And then stick around to listen to the answer and engage you in a conversation about it. God bless him, he did it all. the. time.

So he asked me, and I told him that I was trying to get my mind around the idea that maybe, perceptually, folks saw things differently -- something as simple as the color red might look different in my brain than yours -- it might look like what I call blue, for instance -- and we could never really know, because we shared a language for these things that we learned relative to how we perceived them... So: Is my red your red? If your blue was projected inside my brain would I understand it to be blue? Or would I call it something else?

He took the plastic salt and pepper shakers in his hands and said something like: "That is fascinating. Is my salt your salt, or is it your pepper? What does it taste like to you? But it's even more interesting, isn't it, if you take it to the next level. When you ask yourself do any two people share the same idea about love? Or friendship? Do we perceive these things collectively, or are they unique to each of us -- and we just use the same word to describe very different things?"

I don't know. And I don't know that I'll ever know.

That conversation returns to mind often -- usually in the midst of a misunderstanding when I thought things were going a certain way only to discover that I had it all wrong. That the other person saw things very, very differently.

I suspect this is the thing that will always absorb the bulk of my energy: trying to understand how others -- the Others who matter, the Others I love -- see, feel, and experience this world. As well as I ever can.

Which I suspect will never be very well at all.


[1] ReyGuy is an old school newspaper guy who works in Dallas and shoots with straightforward wide open eyes. I can't get enough with his stuff. Start with his Klucker and the cop shot, and then work your way out from there.

stuff(ed)

I grow old
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

My grama and I used to come to just short of blows when it came time to pay the check. We’d laugh about it, wrestling over the bill, and she’d usually win, because she’s my grama.

But not this last time. She let me pay for our dinner at a little fish shack on the pier without a peep. There’s less money in the bank now; there’s less opportunity to be generous.

Over another salmon dinner last night, this one with litwit, who’s stripping the trappings of her life down to just the essentials to make a hugely courageous move to the city where she’s always wanted to be, we got to talking about the two flavors of wealth: experiential and material.

Amassing both is entirely incompatible, I think. Too much stuff requires too much caretaking and too much expense – which means you can’t get out enough to build up your brain, body and soul with experiences.

Talking here about stuff above and beyond the material stuff you need to stay well, of course -- adequate food, shelter, clothing.

My darlin’ companion is a champion of running lean and mean. If I bring something new (and sometimes ridiculous) home (a poker table top comes to mind) -- he looks it over, says fine, now what are you going to get rid of? And expects that I will shed something of equal volume and mass.

Better now than later. My grandmother has lost most of the precious things that she gathered around her in her life – peeled off to make the transition to her new smaller digs at an assisted living facility. Just a few anchors of memory are left – photographs mostly. A few pieces of jewelry. A shrinky dink of a colt that I made her in the fifth grade.

But the memories remain, and although her short term memory is shot she can still pull up stories from her past – stories of doing, seeing, being alive.

She's a rich lady.

He who possesses little is so much the less possessed.
~Nietzsche

signs of civilization

It is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilized is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess anyone else, it is none of your business.

Gertrude Stein in Paris, France.

look at it this way

Hey: look at it this way. This may not be the truth, but it's the way it appears to me.

Film director Robert Altman on making art -- heard just now on Terry Gross's Fresh Air, in a rebroadcast of a 1990 interview. Mr. Altman passed away last night.

almost nothing

a found poem

The instability of human knowledge
Is one of our few certainties.

Almost everything we know
We know incompletely at best.


And almost nothing we are told
Remains the same
when retold.

Found in «Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas got to Heaven» by Janet Malcolm in the 13 November issue of The New Yorker.

Janet Malcolm’s article also provided the Gertrude Stein quote, posted just before this one.

Do you think Malcolm was thinking of Mies' beinahe nichts when she wrote the almost nothing line? Well, okay, maybe not: but she made me think of him. And she made me think of a hundred other stories told to me by the storytellers -- some of them related to me by birth or proximity -- who have shaped my life through their mythologies, real and imagined.

enlightment (no, that is not a typo)

Q. What does a Sun Ra Symposium look like?
A. Something like this »

p.s. ask me what I thought about in another 8 hours or so -- I need to get some sleep first.


Update: The above pic, She Sax, made Gaper's Block on 13 November. Thanks to desertson for the heads up!