2015 — Week Sixteen
13–19 April
This week was all about getting up to TEDx Charleston, hanging out with the amazing Jayde Lovell and my brother Joe… Bonus was getting to babysit two of my nephews, Adi and Kieran for an afternoon.
Monday was, hmmm, what? Can’t recall. Tuesday I knocked out a day at the office, then drove up to Charleston to scoop up Jayde at the airport and head over to Joe’s house, where he cooked us some great steaks, and we watched the first episode of the new season of Game of Thrones before turning in for the night.
Wednesday was all about TEDx Charleston; Jayde and I live-tweeted the event, and here are some of my personal favorites:
“Gardening is the most therapeutic
and defiant act you can commit in the inner city. Plus you get strawberries.” — Ron Finley’s TED talk on “Gangsta Gardening” — using vacant dirt-filled spaces in urban areas — abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs — to grow fresh vegetables.
“A closet full of fast fashion is just as unhealthy as a diet full of fast food.” — Donna Hardy, talking about using locally-available plant dyes (like indigo).
Other useful things I learned:
- Yogic breathing raises the levels of nerve growth factor and 22 other useful compounds in your saliva. So start meditating already!
- A traditional cornice prevents rainwater from running down the side of a building, thus reducing water damage and increasing the life of the structure!
- College; necessary, but not sufficient for success in the digital age.
While at TEDx, I signed up for edX, and enrolled in a course on “The Rise of Superheroes and their Impact on Pop Culture.” Bazinga!
Had great hugs, lots of smiles, good cider, good steaks, and more musical craziness when Jayde introduced me to Amy Schumer’s Milk, Milk, Lemonade song — a little different take on all the delicious things men love.
Finished the week getting my little boat cleaned up and prepped for the upcoming visit of my friend Brooke and a new batch of AirBNB guests, fighting the good fight against entropy in my office and storage unit, and reflecting on the importance of living an interesting story, as summed up in this excerpt from Neal Stevenson’s Anathem:
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a seffish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them…
So, with that, I’ll wrap up this week’s note. Go out there and make good stories — I’ll be working hard to do the same!
