Now

Power Trip

Power is trippy.

It seems to me that few people can handle power and still be open and available to other people's opinions and suggestions. Most people just grab up power and clamber on top of it, happy to have the leverage they need to beat off anyone trying to join them on the power pile. And while they are at it, they will fend off anyone with a suggestion that would make the pile bigger because they are afraid of having someone join them up there. Instead of bigger, they just want that power pile to get higher, so they surround themselves with people who will just moosh their ideas onto the top of the pile without adding anything new except the same old shit over and over again. Then when the power pile gets way too high and wobbly on the top, there is no one down below with their own ideas to either shore it up or add to the base to make it more sturdy. The fall is not only inevitable, but stinky.

I really think the solution is pretty simple. Listen to other people's ideas. In fact, seek them out by encouraging open discourse and lively discussion. It's not effective to just seek validation by finding people who will sell their soul to agree with your already established opinion. That just gets your own ideas parroted back to you. A more effective strategy would be to actually include the most divergent opinions in your decision making process and be willing to change your mind if a great idea presents itself.

If this post sounds a little angry and bitter, it is. I can hardly swallow my bitterness tonight. But I'm sure I'll be back to tasting sweetness again very soon.

Spin-off Mail

The most touching spin-off happened from the Need Less, Give More experiment. My friend, Teresa revealed on my birthday that she is doing an experiment of her own. She decided to send one card or letter of encouragement and love to someone every week until my next birthday. Not an email, not a phone call, but a real life, snail-mail card.

I love her idea and I love the response she is already getting. In fact, she said having the goal to send one letter a week has made her think of others she would like to send and she has ended up sending more than one each week since my birthday. She wrote this in an email: "Oh, interesting thing, Wendy. Instead of just writing one person I find myself sending several…those things I had meant to do,…. Sympathy, wedding anniversary, birthday…just had not done them yet. Maybe the “fruit” of this experiment is to motivate me to do the “I should." Hmmmm."

There is just something so warm and exciting about receiving a real letter in the mail. I've received a couple from Teresa myself and I always get a thrill when I see the hand-addressed envelope. It's really the only thing that makes me keep getting the mail at all. I'm not a big fan of mail usually. I would give anything to be able to stop the junk mail and intercept the unwanted solicitations before they end up in my mailbox. I try to pick off the mail slowly piece by piece by calling the junk-mail senders and asking them to take me off their list, but it's a laborious process and doesn't seem to net good results. I still get a lot of junk mail I don't want. Someday I hope they come up with a do-not-send list like the do-not-call list for telephone solicitations.

But now I'm getting off the point. My point is this: personal letters = good. Junk mail = bad. Teresa and her year-long experiment = lovely.

The List

I broke down and put my list of give-away items on my sidebar because everyone keeps asking me about it. But it's an embarrassing list and seems extremely puny and unimportant. When this unnecessary stuff is written down in a list, it makes it even more evident to me that this stuff is completely irrelevant. I'm hoping that documenting the silly nature of my junk will be the impetus I need to do something more, give something more, and try harder to make a difference that will actually have an impact on someone. For me this little exercise of finding something to give away every day just serves as a daily reminder that I want to find ways to make the world a better place. For now it's simply meditation and serves me much more than it serves anyone else. But maybe eventually it will help me to find something bigger to do. I hope so.

Bittersweet Revenge

I'm a people watcher. No. I'm a people studier. And whenever I am captured in another corporate zoo with a herd of other human specimens, I can't help but closely examine all the animals caught in that trap with me. It's just something I do. Sometimes it's the only thing that keeps me sane. And for the most part I'm pretty good at figuring people out.

But I'm a little more cautious about getting into the mix this time around. The last time I ventured into the corporate world I got bit hard by two of the wiliest members of the pack. I remember wondering at the time why I had been totally abandoned by karma. It seemed like these two were wrecking havoc all around them and not getting the requisite karmic thump. It threw me off balance and had me doubting my belief that what goes around comes around.

Yesterday I went to dinner with some of my old friends from that old corporate zoo and I learned that the same two people who made my life so unbearable were finally getting that thump--hard. And the news was a lot less satisfying than I imagined it would be. I thought I would be gleeful in hearing about their pain and instead I just felt bad for them. It didn't make me feel better about what happened before, although the news did put a little bit of the balance back in the universe. I guess that the revenge just wasn't mine and it was much more bitter than sweet.

Fire on the Mountain

I realize it's a bit redundant, but wildfire is wild. When you get the word that a wildfire might be threatening your home, it's funny how quickly you can assess what's really important and what isn't.

So, just in case you are anxious for the whole story, here it is so far: I was at work today around noon thirty in a lunch meeting on the top floor of our shiny new corporate building. We have a beautiful view of the South Valley from that boardroom. We were reviewing a corporate video and focused on the minutia of it when I heard the word fire being passed around the table in hushed tones. We tried not to get distracted by the plume of smoke spreading across our serene view of the mountains Southeast of us. I thought to myself that it looked uncomfortably close to MY mountain, but it was hard to tell from our vantage point. The meeting continued and I made an effort not to watch as the flames got more and more apparent and the smoke higher. By the time I got back to my office at 2 p.m. I had eight missed calls. The first SunCrest neighbor call I returned was my friend Bonnie asking me if there was anything I wanted to get from my house. I've thought about that question in very hypothetical terms, but I could feel the panic rising as I quickly started doing a mental ranking.

1. The cat.
2. Umm, really who cares. Maybe some pictures.
3. That random candle holder and my Kirby vacuum? Nope. Right back to who cares.

But the thought of Captain Casey's pitiful cry as he burned up in my house had me racing up the hill to "save the day." With just one tiny, quick little stop for gelato with my friend DeLaina. (Obviously didn't feel that urgent.)

At first the fire looked extremely far away, but then as I got farther up the mountain it felt closer and closer until I pulled into my driveway and could see the flames from there. I knew in my head that it was probably farther away than it looked, but I've also had my fair share of California wildfire indoctrination. It still made my heart race and I was too mesmerized by the possibility of jumping, crazy, wildfire to leave my house. If celebrity homes can burn up, what's stopping mine from turning into cinders? My neighbors just over the hill had hosed down their yard, packed their necessities, and headed down the mountain to the in-laws' house.

The next call I took was from my friend Rob congratulating me because I won't have to worry about unchecked consumerism any more. "Just wanted you to know your experiment will be rendered useless when this fire burns your house down," he said, thinking he was extremely funny.

The third call was another friend just making sure I was okay. He was watching the mountains and it looked to him like all of SunCrest was going up in flames.

Seriously? Is this really helping?

Watching the news didn't help much either. They kept playing the most dramatic footage over and over and talking about mandatory evacuations and stranded hikers. I stood on my front porch, transfixed by the scene, watching the huge tanker planes drop thick fire retardant in an orange line down the mountain.

Now that the sun has set, the bright red flames stand out even more. They are comfortably far away and unnervingly close at the same time. But I'll spend at least one more night safe in my bed. I guess that's about all any of us can really hope for anyway.

Conservative Conservation

One problem I have with conservation is that it almost has the word conservative in it. It is somewhat ironic that it's usually liberals and not conservatives who are concerned about conservation.

But not always. Nobody is better at this conservation thing than my mom is and she is one of the most conservative people I know. Because of my involuntary indoctrination on conservation while growing up, I have residual rebellion about it. My mom is naturally all about reduce, reuse, and recycle. For her, a dedication to saving the environment was only a byproduct of the necessity part. We were responsible for our own garbage. All of it. There was no big lumbering garbage truck coming down the road to take away our garbage in neat plastic bags to deposit in someone else's backyard. We had to either compost, burn, or recycle every last piece of garbage we generated. They still do, in fact. My mom collects all her recycling in bins in the garage and a few times a year she takes it to Pocatello more than 50 miles away.

But when I was young I interpreted her nearly religious dedication to conservation as meaning we couldn't afford things. I really wanted to throw things away and get new stuff rather than cleaning it or fixing it or making do. It seemed to be all about money and to me being wasteful equated to being rich. Having shiny new stuff meant you were one of the elite.

Now I think a lot about conservation and how to do it. I have to be careful to not make it about money in my mind. Once it becomes about saving money instead of saving the world I feel that old rebellion creeping in. I don't like to say, "I can't afford that." I don't even like to think it. As trite as it sometimes seems, I prefer to think of conservation in terms of lessening my impact, reducing my footprint, contributing less to the tragedy of the commons. And guess what. I save some money too. I'll try not to think about that part.

For anyone keeping score, yesterday I gave away an eye mask and today a pair of jeans.

I Need It

Just over a day into my little experiment and I'm already thinking about all the things I "need" and can't buy. I find myself making a list in my head of items I meant to get before this self-imposed deadline and just didn't really get around to buying.

I realized I've lived for years without a plastic cover thing that you leave in your microwave to use as a barrier for splattery dishes, but suddenly, now that I won't buy one, I desperately need it. How can anyone actually make due without that? And I think glumly about how much better my entire life would be if only I had thought of it before starting on this silly experiment. It's irrelevant that I rarely use my microwave and can use a plastic lid or a plate to the same effect.

And a fly swatter. How, I wonder, have I ever made it through life without that simple little gadget? It must be much better than a rolled up magazine or they wouldn't have them at every dollar store. And now I have to live my tired dreary little life without the benefit of something so basically important to civilized living.

Oh yes. The list goes on. I stomp around my house making an internal note of those things I can't live without, but will somehow have to for a year. I don't think I've realized how utterly lacking my life was before now.

On the up side to this little tirade, however, is the realization that I have plenty of things for the give-away pile. While searching my house for those things that I "need" I uncovered a lot of the unnecessary I had forgotten about. I tried nobly to convince myself that I had gotten rid of nearly every peripheral thing and the getting-rid-of part of this experiment was going to be the hardest. But that's not actually true. I still have plenty of things that can march their way out and by next year I won't even remember what they were. Today it's a pair of black shoes that look eerily similar to two other pairs of black shoes I have. Who knows why I have so many pairs of black shoes, but it's one less today.

One of my friends thought that a better way to do this experiment would be to put everything I own in the basement and only allow one thing a day to come back up. Anything left in the basement at the end of the year would then obviously be unnecessary. That's something I'll have to try another time. I just don't have the energy to haul everything I own to the basement. Plus, it would take a month just to get all the truly necessary stuff in my bathroom back.

But most of my friends just try to bail me out. They offer to give me some of their things to give away and they try to think of ways to get around any rules I may have. They are very creative in their ideas: things like giving them money and having them make the purchases or trading them for things I really want. They've all offered to give me junk that I could then give away and have great suggestions for things that would be less painful to give like pennies or food items. Some suggested before I start I buy a bunch of things I don't really need and then exchange them as the year wears on.

Who knows. I may resort to bending the rules enough to justify something, but for now I'll just keep pretending this is a hard thing to do and try to think less about stuff and more about life.

First Photos

The first pictures with my new camera: A few of the Tour de Utah racers going past my front door and my nephews by my back door. I don't know much about using this camera yet, but I'm sure I'll get better! At least I hope so.

Today I'm giving away my old pink gym bag because my friend Shelly gave me a new pick gym bag for my birthday that's much better! And who needs two?

Need Less, Give More

I believe a better, healthier world is possible. I think it may be the smallest things that end up making a difference, or at least catapulting the biggest changes.

Today is the day I've been looking forward to for several weeks. It's my birthday and it's the day I'm starting on a year-long experiment. I'm calling it Need Less, Give More. This little experiment is relatively simple, I won't buy anything (besides consumable items like food and soap) for one year--until my birthday next year. And during this year I will also give one thing away every day.

I don't know how this will really play out, but I hope I will learn and change and grow. I made my last purchase today--a camera. So, hopefully during this next year I will be able to document some of my experiences and share some of the things I learn along the way.