This is an early animation by Terry Gilliam, from Christmas 1968. Laughing Squid posted it to Tumblr this morning.

Every since my brother introduced me to Monty Python when I was about eight, I’ve been enamored with highly visual absurdist humor. And I especially adore Terry Gilliam’s ability to upend our assumptions of space, time, place, scale, and intention.

This was also why I loved the original Pink Panther cartoons, Ren & Stimpy, and Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse. And, of course, my all-time favorite film, Brazil (by Terry Gilliam, of course).

We live in an unpredictable world, where meaning shifts drastically as context changes. We’re forever falling into a new picture frame, and parts of other pictures intrude rudely upon ours. Laughter is the best way to stay afloat amidst chaos. And there is always, always chaos.

And with that, happy holidays, all!

Amy peak

Me atop Twin Sisters peak yesterday, Estes Park, CO. Geez, I hope it's not ALL downhill from here!... (Click to enlarge)

I’ve always said that my one true goal in life is to be a crotchety old bitch, sitting on the deck of my mountain cabin, a cup of tea or jug of wine and a plate of smoked salmon or trout at my side. I’ll have a shotgun across my knee, ready to cock it at anyone coming down the driveway and yell, “You from the gummint?”

I’m actually not kidding.

I’m not saying I’ll shoot anyone (necessarily), but crotchety old bitches tend to be able to get away with stuff like that, so why not?

The good thing about having this kind of life goal is that simply by continuing to exist, I’m progressing toward it. Today is my 45th birthday, and I’m starting it right — sitting on the deck of my cabin in the Rockies, still shaded by aspen…

I’ve been here for most of a week and have done two fabulous mountain hikes, hung out with good friends in Boulder and up here at the cabin, enjoyed an excellent motorcycle ride with a good friend, spent a day helping another friend in need, cooked some wonderful meals, spent lots of quality time with one of the most important people in the world to me, and generally enjoyed the peace and rhythm that settles over me once I’m much closer to treeline than sea level.

The only thing missing is my cats, who are probably shredding something in my honor right now back in my Oakland apartment. And my sweetheart George — but he got to enjoy this little slice of mountain heaven last month. And my friends and family who are too distant to join me here today.

I was saying to George last night that he’s much braver than I am for daring to be lyrical and personal in his blog. He’s a wonderful writer, and that’s his writing practice. Meanwhile, I’ve been neglecting my blog again — but dry spells happen, and it’s something I can always come back to.

So here I am, daring to be just a bit personal here. Roll with it, it’s an experiment. (UPDATE: This experiment mostly had good results, but led to a notable clueless PR encounter.)

I guess turning 45 makes me officially middle aged (unless you’re a singularity devotee, which I’m not), so that’s good in terms of hitting a milestone toward my life goal. But it does make me wonder: Is this the middle of my life? What do I want to do with the other half, at least en route toward eventual crotchety-old-cabin-bitchedness?

Right off the bat I’m striking off this list anything having to do with grand world-changing achievements or a personal legacy that outlasts my mortal existence. Someday I will vanish from the face of this world, no one will remember me, and that will be OK. The future shouldn’t be too heavily anchored to the past, and I’m happy not to become historical ballast.

I’ve chosen never to have children (and at 45, let’s say I’m safely past that risk) in part because I’m not maternal, but also in part because I seem to lack that craving for immortality that seems to drive why so many people become parents. I love kids and have had many in my life — and hope to always have some in my life. Kids can be amazing friends and teachers. But I don’t want them to owe me anything. Except maybe my Social Security check, but I’m not counting too heavily on that.

That said, I have always had an irrational compulsion to help, and to learn. I feel good about the work I do mainly because, more often than not, what I learn and say and teach about media and technology generally seems to help people.

Even when people disagree with me, or dispute me, or even prove me wrong, it seems I contribute value to the conversation so we all can try more new stuff and figure out what works. So that’s okay. I didn’t become a journalist so that everyone would like me or agree with me, after all.

I have lots of flaws, and I’ll always have lots of flaws. During the rest of my life I’d like to continue working on them. That’s been a pretty rewarding effort — if at times awkward, difficult, and painful.

I’ve realized, though, that in working on my flaws I must be guided mostly by my own internal compass about what kind of person I want to be. Too often in my life I’ve taken to heart criticism from others that’s rooted mostly in their own expectations or fears. That’s not to say I ignore criticism from others; but I need to consider it carefully, to figure out if their motives and goals jibe with mine, before attempting to reshape myself in light of that information.

Because this life I have — it’s mine. What I do with it needs to matter to me, and feel right to me. Especially since I’m eschewing the whole legacy deal.

For too long, I suppressed what I really felt and wanted in life. Often it didn’t seem to be what other people wanted, and it definitely didn’t seem to be what social norms said I should want — so just being one person, I had to be wrong, right? Wrong!

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that — despite entrenched social norms — relationships are not one-size-fits all. So when someone matters to me, it rarely makes sense to cut them out of my life just because the nature of our relationship shifts. Which is why I’m spending a week at my cabin with my former spouse Tom, who is (and has always been) one of my closest friends and confidantes.

The few times in my life I’ve had to remove people from my life, that’s been very difficult and painful for me. But mostly, I can find ways to accommodate changes, and additions.

My inclinations for almost all kinds of relationships are mostly “both/and” not “either/or” — which is why I’m polyamorous, and probably also why I’ve been self employed for so long. I’m often amazed, amused, puzzled, or dismayed when I encounter people who require hard lines and clear roles in their connections with others — as if things like monogamy, a full-time job, a college degree, a conventional family, or legal recognition will ensure safety or happiness. I’m not saying they’re wrong and I’m right. I’m just saying, it’s a mindset I have a hard time understanding. But I respect that these things mean a lot to people, including many very smart people I care about and respect deeply.

In the past decade especially I’ve really grown to love diversity in most aspects of life: Diversity of thought, diversity of people, diversity of cultures and ethnicities, diversity of age, diversity of experience, diversity of desires, you name it. And I am part of that diversity.

This doesn’t mean I need to (or can) learn to appreciate or like everything — for instance, creationism? Oppression and racism? Iceberg lettuce? The Iraq war? Anime? Las Vegas? Humid weather? I don’t think so. But I generally have found that understanding why other people fiercely embrace and enjoy things I find abhorrent helps me navigate this world better. And I don’t need to agree with people in order to learn from them.

In the last few years especially I’ve become keenly aware of how much place matters to my sense of well being. I need to feel like I have a home, in a place I can love. I can live other places for a while, and enjoy that — but eventually I feel the need to go home. I’m at one of those points now. I’ve lived for a few years in Oakland, a city that has taught me much, where I’ve found many friends and amazing love. But it’s not home for me, and I need to start searching for home.

Fortunately, I don’t have to rush. Since I’m self-employed and can work from anywhere with internet access and that’s not too far from an airport, I’m not tied to any one location for external reasons. And I also don’t have to have a hard deadline for moving. I’ve arranged my life to offer lots of flexibility, and that’s perhaps the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m not sure where I’ll live next. I’d always assumed I’d eventually just go back to Boulder, Colorado — a place that I’ve always loved and that was a wonderful home to me for many years. And I may still do that. But right now, at this point in my life, Boulder feels a little small and insular to me.

So I’m considering some cities like Portland and Denver. I need to live in a place that’s not totally ruled by cars, near real mountains, where the summers aren’t humid and the winters aren’t relentlessly frigid. And where there are people I enjoy, with a culture that’s diverse and generally friendly and flexible.

Oakland offers many of those things, but I feel constantly hemmed in by concrete and cars there. And California’s mountains are too far away. But there may be other California options for me, I’m not ruling it out. Mostly I’m hoping to find a place I love that doesn’t requiring owning a car.

Life can change drastically or end at any moment. While I’m here, I want to experience it, and enjoy it, and to be good to others and to myself. I’ve been gratified to have so many wonderful people in my life: family, friends, lovers, colleagues, teachers, and more.

I’ve been surprised to realize what a social creature I am, but I need my private time too. So I’m really glad to be around at the dawn of social media — a tool that allows me to foster and maintain a wide range of connections from all parts of my world. One of the first things I did today was post to social media, to let people know it’s my birthday, because birthdays actually matter to me and I’ve learned it’s not reasonable to expect people to be telepaths.

Anything that helps me communicate with and connect with people is probably mostly good, as far as I’m concerned. And I’ve tried to learn how communication can do the most good and the least harm. I think the ability to communicate has largely defined how humans have evolved, for better or worse. It’s powerful. I enjoy learning how to do it better — even though it hurts like hell when I screw it up.

So this post is rambling, and personal, and it may or may not make sense. But it’s just where I’m at right now, a snapshot of a work in progress. And since I’m scared to post it, for fear of embarrassment or criticism, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve learned the most from facing my fears and inhibitions.

Thanks for reading, if you’ve read this far. The direct sun is hitting my cabin deck now, so I’ll take a deep breath and post this — and then make some more tea and breakfast, and get ready to welcome some friends up here to celebrate later today.

If you come down my cabin driveway today, I promise not to shoot.

deck

Crotchety old bitch, in progress....

shepherds pie

Shepherd's pie with lamb and arugula, Strongbow cider, and HP sauce. All on offer at a great pub near my place. Nomnomnom!

One thing I really love about Oakland, CA is that there are so many good places to hang out here. One of my favorites is CommonWealth Cafe, at 2882 Telegraph. I just wrote up a review of this pub/eatery on Oakland Local:

CommonWealth Cafe and Pub: Chill out, UK-style

The main reasons why I like CommonWealth:

• They serve Strongbow Cider (my favorite!) on tap
• Simple, hearty, inexpensive food
• Dependable, free wifi and enough outlets for digital nomads
• Friendly staff and clientele
• Conversation-friendly noise level
• Ample bike parking
• It’s a short bike ride from my home.

Very interesting insights from TechCrunch’s Paul Carr.

I think there is much to be said for periodically cutting back on (or eliminating) anything that feels absolutely essential or habitual to you, to gauge how much you really need it.

In the last year I asked myself, “Do I need a house?” Nope. I’d like to have a house again, but I can be happy without one.

Several years ago I wondered, “Do I need a car?” Nope — and I’m much happier without one. Same with printed books: “Do I need several crammed bookcases around to reassure me that I’m smart or that I won’t get bored?” Again, no — I’m far happier with my Kindle and with being able to make better use of limited space.

I doubt that I’d ever entirely quit using social media because in my case it has vastly improved my life in many ways. But in the last couple of months I’ve cut back on it quite a lot — some days I post a lot, but others I don’t post at all (and a post-free day NEVER used to happen to me). I feel less compulsive about it.

However, I have definitely increased my use of two kinds of social media tools in recent months: social bookmarking tools and Facebook…

I’m always finding stuff that’s interesting or useful, and I like to be able to find it again in ways that make sense to me. Also, I believe that public curation is one of the most lasting values of all kinds of internet-based media — it not only makes stuff findable, it makes particularly good or relevant stuff findable.

This is why I’ve used Delicious for many years to save relevant links — it’s not the most usable or functional social bookmarking tool, but it syndicates nicely to WordPress and thus gives me a way to realize visibility benefits on this blog from my social bookmarking efforts. For me, that’s killing many birds with one stone simply by capitalizing on my penchant for wanting to keep interesting stuff.

But lately, since I’m engaged in some special research projects and a great deal of regular writing/editing/training for clients such as CNN.com, the Knight Digital Media Center, the Society of Environmental Journalists, OaklandLocal, I also want to track useful stuff for these projects that may represent only a highly temporary interest and doesn’t necessarily need to be syndicated to Contentious.com.

For temporary project-related links, I’ve resumed using Diigo — which I used assiduously several years ago as my main bookmarking tool when it was Furl then stopped using entirely, then resumed a few months ago. I had been using the Firefox plugin Zotero to save research-related links, but I guess I saved too much stuff in it and it started crashing Firefox so I stopped using it.

I like Diigo for project-related research because I can choose to make it public and shareable — or keep some projects or items private. I generally keep my lists public unless there’s a specific reason to make them private, since I believe in the value of sharing. Also, I use the Diggo groups feature to collaborate with people on projects.

…And regarding Facebook — despite its privacy challenges, I’ve actually been using it more in the last year. But I use it mainly for personal stuff (connecting with friends, sharing info about me and my life). I monitor my privacy settings there pretty closely. I’ve also been going back and systematically removing Facebook “friends” who I don’t actually know personally. I create groups of my friends there so I can check in separately on my closest friends, my Boulder friends, my Bay Area friends, my family, colleagues who also are friends, etc. So for me, Facebook has become a particularly good channel for maintaining personal connections.

I still use Twitter, and I mix it up between personal and professional stuff there. I like it, it benefits me, I see no reason to leave — but I’ve channeled some of that energy elsewhere. Twitter is not a good archiving mechanism, so if I find something I really want to save I’ll often put it in Diigo or Delicious. If I also tweet it, I’ll clarify what other people might find interesting about it; whereas for Delicious and Diigo, some of my notes and categories might really only make sense to me.

I’ve been writing fewer blog posts of my own (like this) mainly because I use Delicious to post interesting stuff here. Not everyone likes that format, but it works well enough for my purposes here. I’ve been doing so much writing for clients and other projects that I frankly rarely have the energy for writing for my own blog.

My remaining personal energy for writing tends to go into my personal journal, which is on paper. Really. It’s the only paper left in my life that I really enjoy handling.

…All of this is the long way of saying I applaud Carr’s choice to leave social media, since it works for him. Almost everything in life — and especially in media — is, in fact, optional. It’s always good to challenge assumptions and explore options, whether additive, subtractive, or shifting. And I challenge anyone who feels compulsive about social media to at least take a vacation and then see what you really need and want. Life is too short to stay stuck in any rut or take anything for granted.

Without going into details, I’ve been handling a lot of major personal stuff lately — and I’ve been fortunate to have a strong and growing circle of close friends who have stepped up to offer me a steady supply of energy, support, perspective, honesty, sympathy, empathy, nurturing, and fun.

And I do this for them, too. That’s the core of deep friendship and other loving connections: You give of your own energy to help sustain others who are running low or in transition. At certain points we all need more nurturing; and at other times we have an abundance of energy and emotion to offer. Life comes in waves.

Personally, I’ve always found it very hard to ask for the help or nurturing I need. I don’t trust people easily, especially where my feelings of vulnerability are concerned. I assume that any emotional need I have, however small, will be perceived as too great an imposition. I don’t expect other people to be available to me. (Yes, I’m working on changing this mindset, quite deliberately. It’s a coping mechanism I’ve outgrown.)

As I’m reaching out more to my close friends, I’m wishing I had a tool that would help me to gauge their situation before I make a request, so I can be more sensitive to when I might actually be imposing.

Here’s what it might look like…

Imagine an online social network where your “friends” truly are only your closest friends — your confidantes, the people you care for most and who care about you, your trusted support network or tribe. This is definitely about quality, not quantity.

Imagine that you could download a small app or widget that would allow you to specify your current level of available emotional energy, attention, and time — that is, what you have to offer whoever in your circle might need it. It would also allow you to specify your current emotional needs from a customizable category list, and rate them low / medium / high. You could even transmit notes like “Need encouragement to finish filing my taxes” or “feeling lonely on the anniversary of my divorce” or “shoulder massage badly needed” or “I haven’t had a good laugh all week.”

This information would not be published in any way — it would only be available to the people whom you specify, through this app. It wouldn’t be available to search engines or for syndication.

When the people in your close circle are connected through this app, you could look at the app’s dashboard whenever you feel like you have some energy, attention, and time to offer, and indicate the current resources you can offer. The dashboard would display the current needs of your close friends, ranked according to how well they match with your emotional availability. Then you could take action — from arranging a coffee date to sending a text message to stopping by to give a hug and listen — to respond to that need.

Friends with significant needs or crises would be flagged (perhaps even via mobile alerts), so you’d know if a loved one needs immediate attention and realign your current priorities if needed. Because when you experience a death in the family, the end of a significant relationship, a serious illness or accident, the loss of a job… just reaching out to contact your closest friends can seem daunting. What if you could simply alert your entire support network with just a few clicks?

…Obviously, more would need to be fleshed out — like tracking needs that have gone unmet for more than a day, or having multiple friends collaborate to meet someone’s need. But what do you think of this nascent idea? Does it already exist? Could it?

Two tweets from Wilson especially caught my attention:

crash

Mike Wilson's first post about the Denver plane crash he survived

And then, a couple of hours later…

crash2

Mike Wilson reflects on a similar bullet he dodged earlier

…Next I was making breakfast, listening to Colorado Public Radio, which was (of course) reporting on the Denver airport accident. They followed that with a story that stopped me cold for a bit: Witnesses, Families Remember Lockerbie Bombing. Yes, today is the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 — a terrorist attack that killed 259 on the plane and 11 on the ground.

On the evening of Dec. 21, 1988, I was a 22-year-old journalism student packed up and ready to head back home to NJ after spending a semester in London. I’d been at the office Christmas party for the business magazine where I’d been interning. When I entered the house I’d been sharing since August with five other students, my housemates who hadn’t yet departed for home were sitting in the living room, crying. Mindy said, “Diane’s plane crashed”…

My onetime college housemate, Diane Rencevicz, on the victim’s list of Pan Am flight 103. She was 21 when she died.

Diane Rencevicz was a fellow Temple University student. She was the quietest heavy metal fan I ever knew, and I didn’t know her well. We merely shared a house for a few months. But I liked her well enough. And I was stunned to think that, at 21, she was suddenly dead.

In fact, she’d died taking exactly the same flight that Linda (my other housemate) and I were slated to take the very next day: Pan Am 103.

The next few days happened in slow motion.

In the morning I visited a local hospital to get tranquilizers for Linda, who was so distraught she could barely speak. I remember dropping my key through the mail slot of the lovely terrace house we’d rented on Moscow Road in Bayswater. Linda and I took a cab to Heathrow airport, where we bid Mindy farewell. While we were waiting at the gate, there was a bomb scare and everyone evacuated briefly to the parking lot. Really bad timing.

Eventually we got on the mostly-empty plane and flew across the ocean to JFK. My legs trembled the whole flight, I kept getting up to pace, and the flight attendants kept making me sit down. I remember their expressions, they’d just lost several friends and had to keep functioning. I didn’t argue with them, and they weren’t angry with me.

My family met me at JFK airport. My mom was crying. Lots of people were crying. I was exhausted. They took me home to NJ. Christmas happened. I attended mass with my family at the Catholic church down the street. The priest mentioned the bombing and I felt numb. Even though I was a news junkie, I avoided the news for weeks.

A few days later, Linda and I attended Diane’s memorial service. There, I was stunned to learn that Diane had an identical twin sister. Maybe I’d known that before, but I’d forgotten. Never in my life did I have such a strong feeling that I was seeing a ghost. That really shook me, more than anything else about that experience.

WHY NOT ME?

I dodged that bullet for the most mundane and human of reasons. Linda is a methodical person, and she made our flight arrangements. I didn’t want to depart for London on my birthday, so we agreed to fly out the next day, on Aug. 22, 1988. We were staying in London for four months. So Linda scheduled our flight home for exactly four months later, on Dec. 22.

And that’s really why I’m here today.

I have very strange, mixed feelings about this experience. Not getting killed in that bombing did not change my life in any dramatic way — except that I continued to live, and I felt more aware of others who don’t get to do that. I became very aware of chance, and randomness. For a while, flying made me very nervous. Then that fear wore away.

Soon after I returned home I was introduced to Stacey, who’d be my closest friend for several years. She introduced me to her ex-boyfriend Tom, whom I married a decade later. I worked for a bad book publishing company in Philly, then a business magazine on the Main Line outside Philly, and then lived very briefly in north Jersey, and then moved to Boulder in 1995.

Since then….

Some of my sisters and cousins had kids, and one of my nieces now has kids of her own. My brother survived leukemia. My grandmother died. My parents aged, sold the home where I grew up, bought a smaller home nearby, and are doing well.

My career took off in interesting, independent, entrepreneurial directions. It’s been feast or famine, but never boring. I’ve done work I’m proud of, and made some humbling mistakes. I’ve helped, inspired, frustrated, confused, and annoyed people.

I’ve backpacked on the Continental Divide and camped under buttes in the Utah desert. I once got a 2-hour foot massage in a Beijing hutong, I left an Amsterdam Indonesian restaurant at 10:30 pm while it was still daylight, and I grazed breakfast at a farmer’s market in Rome. For a few days I lived blissfully on tapas, tempranillo, and flamenco with a friend in Barcelona.

I have many friends around the country and in several parts of the world. I learned to kickbox, and I learned how to live as a polyamorous person in a monogamous world. I’ve seen my body and mind change, for better and worse. I’ve generally gotten much stronger and more flexible, in almost every way. I’ve laughed a lot. I’ve hurt a lot.

And I just kept breathing. By chance, because Linda was methodical enough to make four months mean exactly four months.

WE ALL DODGE BULLETS

This isn’t the only bullet I’ve dodged. I remember at least two occasions when I was nearly in bad car accidents. And who knows about the near-misses I never even knew about. It just so happens that in my life I dodged one particularly famous bullet that warrants public remembrances in national media. I feel sadness for the people who died in and above Lockerbie that day. And I feel anger for the people who willfully took those lives.

But mostly, it just feels weird. Surreal. All the stuff I’ve experienced and done since that day, my place in the overlapping ripples and flow of life… it could have ended, right there.

And someday it will end. That’s certain.

I just didn’t happen to be on the plane that blew up. That’s all. I dodged that bullet. It doesn’t feel like a miracle, or grace, or even that I was “saved” by chance. It’s just how things happened to go for me. And it reminds me how very different life can become, very quickly.

Each moment is its own world, and one moment does not always determine the next. We have no choice but to roll with that. But we can choose to be aware of the ubiquitous possibility of instant, drastic change.

When I tune into that awareness, my life is much richer. It doesn’t necessarily make more sense, but it feels more meaningful.

I really used to hate stereograms.

When they became popular in the early 1990s, they often reduced me to serious frustration and headaches. I would stare at them — glare at them, really — trying to will their embedded 3D images to leap out. Everyone else seemed to enjoy these hidden illusions with ease. But my eyes and brain stubbornly refused to do the trick.

Then one day, I realized that I was looking at a dolphin. I just glanced at the cover of a book of stereogram art, and there it was. I was delighted to discover that the image wasn’t “leaping out” at me — rather, I was “seeing into” it. I wasn’t even sure how I’d started to see the hidden picture. All of the sudden, and quietly, it just worked.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that whenever I’ve identified a key mission or purpose I should pursue, it’s emerged (very much like that dolphin) from the background of the world around me. I get a sense that some vision is waiting to be seen, and I prepare my mind to be open to it. Then eventually I see it, and it feels like I always should have seen it.

In contrast, whenever I’ve tried the top-down, primarily rational (rather than intuitive) approach to choosing a course in life, I usually end up not really wanting what I’ve been working for, or liking what I’ve done — which is frustrating and demoralizing on many levels.

I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, mostly because I’ve been spending more time conversing, research, reading, and journaling. To be honest, I’ve been searching for purpose. For a couple of years now — although I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work, meeting a lot of interesting people, and learning a lot of interesting things — privately I’ve been feeling like I’ve been flailing around, seeking direction and purpose.

Finally, I feel like the picture is starting to emerge. Here is the outline so far…

• Relevance: I think I can help foster a greater practical understanding of relevance — connecting the dots between information and people. This could, in turn, help people create automated tools that can spot and convey relevance. Imagine a “relevance engine” that could scan a seemingly random group of news stories or datasets and indicate not just which ones are probably most relevant to you, but explain how each is relevant.
• Helping people discover and share useful information. On this front, I think I could be most immediately useful by helping to free professional and amateur journalists from the constraints of traditional news organizations (most of which probably won’t be around much longer, and which have also succumbed to a toxic culture that directly undermines journalism and communities). Journalists have developed very useful skills, and I don’t want that value to be lost as this particular corporate house of cards collapses.
• Energy. My work and interests keep bringing me back to energy (electricity and fuel). It truly makes almost every other good in the world possible. Plus, the fragility, unevenness, and difficulties of how energy is produced, transported, and used around the world lie at the root of many thorny problems (war, poverty, drinking water, medical care, climate change, etc.). I want to directly support the development of more diverse, less destructive, and less centralized energy sources around the world — as well as more efficient ways to use that energy.

…That’s what I’ve gleaned so far from the patterns in the world around me and how they’re resonating in me. I have a sense that there’s a deeper purpose that unifies these three missions — but I can’t quite articulate that yet. Still, I do believe it’s important to keep my personal focus on practicality, not theory — on helping people in the real world. And I am passionate about all these missions.

I’m curious what Contentious.com readers think of this emerging outline for the next big phase of my life and career — as well as my intuitive process for choosing direction.

How do you figure out what you should be doing in life? Are you rational about it, intuitive, or both? I’d love to hear how other people wrestle with this kind of quest — or if it’s even a conscious effort you make.

But yesterday I saw a particularly compelling video post by Wine 2.0 founder Gary Vaynerchuk: April 3, 2008 is GOOD PEOPLE DAY, pass it on. Take a minute and watch it, it’s short.

…OK, dude, you got me. Here’s my tribute to a particularly positive and powerful community that’s had a good influence on my life and work: Blogher.

Thanks

For the record, when I eventually die, I want my eulogy to be at least this good. If no one’s laughing at my memorial service, something’s REALLY wrong, and I’d be pissed off.

I’m spending the weekend relaxing up at my cabin near the Continental Divide. We only have dialup net access here. (Don’t razz me for getting online from here. I use my computer and e-mail for much more than just work!)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty reliant on Gmail for my e-mail — and my e-mail helps me organize and manage my life and work. I like Gmail’s functionality and conversation-centered interface — plus I’m now completely hooked on the Firefox Gmail plugin GTDinbox.

Trouble is, Gmail is Ajax-heavy — and thus desperately slow to load and use over a dialup connection.

My solution? When I’m up here at the cabin I use the mobile version of Gmail. It’s totally bare-bones, but it’s good enough for quickly checking or searching my mail.

So if you’re on dialup occasionally or regularly, and you want to use an online service or site that’s desperately slow to load, see if they offer a mobile version. It might not have everything you want, but it might be good enough and much less tedious.

Oh, and also try changing your browser’s preferences so that you’re not automatically downloading images. That speeds things up, too. Less pretty, more practical.

And now, back to relaxing on the deck, in a cool summer breeze, with a glass of rich red Argentinian wine and a book of bizarre short stories by Vladimir Nabokov… Priorities, folks…