Me, Myself, and this blog

Introductions: The Art of Curating People

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(I initially published this piece on Medium)

Over the years I’ve often found myself in the situation of knowing two awesome people who didn’t previously know each other, and been lucky enough to put them together and see even more awesomeness result from that new connection. I’ve done this enough that from time to time people have referred to me as a hub that connects a bunch of spokes. I blame my short attention span on the fact that I’ve got a foothold in a number of different networks – technology, art, music, etc… – which helps out here as well. To skip to the point, I like connecting people.

Now I should point out immediately that I don’t just connect anyone and everyone, and this is where the “art of curation” business comes in. I could be mistaken, but I think I have a pretty good sense of what people are doing and where they might click and I take considerable care on who and how I introduce people. You’ll see why that is important in a moment. So of course, in thinking about introducing people, how you do that becomes ultimately important. In this, as with many other things in my life, I think about what I like, what works for me, and then try to apply that outward.

What I like: When someone I know and trust connects me directly to someone else they know and trust, gives context for the introduction (who each of us are, how they know us, why we’re being introducted), and then gets out of the way so that I and my (potential) new friend can chat and see what might come from this. I feel like this is the most natural way to meet someone and interact with them, with the least pressure. The best introductions that have ever been presented to me have happened this way.

What I don’t like: When someone I know puts me in touch with someone, or asks to put me in touch with someone, and then tries to play middle man on all interactions, almost holding the contact for this other person at arms length. Right away I feel pressure to say the right thing, or to jump through someone elses hoops and it becomes very difficult very quickly to interact with this new person. I’ve made a few freinds from this, but more often than not talks never go beyond the initial moderated chats.

What I really, really, really, really don’t like: When someone I may or may not know connects me with someone they may or may not know, gives no context for the introduction and then acts like the three of us are instantly best friends, business partners and possibly lovers. This is awkward on every level, and there’s really no way anyone can walk away from it feeling at all positive.

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Sustenance

bent

A month ago I took an unannounced, largely unplanned vacation with the family to Caribbean Costa Rica. We were there for a week and had less internet connectivity than we expected, but that was made up for by the over abundance of stomach viruses we picked up. I read a lot of books and wrote down a lot of notes. Getting in the place back to LA a week later I felt invigorated and wondered how I would get anything else done with all the writing I planned to do. I was exploding with ideas, and happy to no longer be exploding in other areas.

That was 3 weeks ago.

I’ve barely written a word.

I feel overwhelmed.

Everytime I sit down thinking now I’m going to write some of this stuff I realize I have other deadlines, something else that someone is waiting on, an ever growing todo list.. Then I get stressed and give up on being creative and try to get something else done. Which I actually do, things are getting done, just not the writing I was so excited to get started on several weeks ago. My notebook is sitting there untouched, scowling at me.

I haven’t been entirely unproductive though. I’ve been playing with datamoshing, databending, glitch inducing, pixlesorting, photosounding and a bunch of other weird graphic beautiful errors. Some of that will find it’s way into cmhhtd stuff, so I am glad to have that outlet and looking forward to what may come from it.

I know I juggle a lot of things, and it’s hard to fit everything in. This one is just annoys me because for the first time in a long time the thing I really want to do I can’t. Or rather, I can’t figure out how to. Just yet anyway. I’m confident that I’ll eventually figure out where all the puzzle pieces go, how they fit together. But in the meantime it sucks. I’ve mentioned starting a writing group to a few people – largely in passing, not in any real actionable invitational way – kind of hoping something like that would guilt me into getting something done, but I don’t even know how something like that would work.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this blog post honestly, I just wanted to see some words fill up the screen to make myself feel better before I go back and fold some laundry and figure out how to hang those sun sails outside to block the early morning rays from being converted into laser heat death by our kitchen window.

I’m holding on

I often say that music has been and continues to be incredibly important to me. All of the crucial moments in my life have a soundtrack, either what I was listening to before they happened or what I turned to after the fact to help me get through them. Music has been my rock and my salvation. It’s the only thing I could always count on – no matter what. Lots of people say music is important to them, but without a doubt music changed my life. No, fuck that – music saved my life. I can say with full assurance that if it weren’t for discovering a handful of bands in my early teenage years I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I might not even be here today.

I’d always liked music and as early as 3rd grade I can remember recording songs off the radio with my tape deck so that I could listen to them repeatedly, though admittedly those songs were probably just catchy musically but lacking in substance. Getting a “Weird Al” Yankovich tape for my birthday one year got me listening to lyrics. Before that I think I’d just thought of vocals as another musical element, but trying to understand all the references and jokes “Weird Al” was making made me realize the depth of the content that could be there as well. Discovering Run DMC, Beastie Boys and Public Enemy would take that interest in lyrical content to an entirely new level.

But there was still a disconnect in that those people were rock stars. What they were talking about was obviously important to them, which made it interesting to me. And educational on many levels. But there was always a bit of voyeurism because I could tell from their lyrics and photos that these people were from totally different worlds that I was, and lived very different lives. I didn’t know anything about parties or girls or global politics. I moved around a lot so I didn’t have many close friends and my family didn’t have a lot of money. And as a kid too young to get a job, I had even less. Which is probably why discovering punk rock a few years later was so powerful for me. These people were not rock stars. They didn’t have gold chains, fancy cars, airplanes.. they had jack shit. Just like me. And they often talking about how important friends were, which is something I wanted so much to believe in.

My list of “influential” bands would take days to read though (in fact very early version of my old website had a soundtrack section that listed out just a few of them) but the ones that really grabbed me, changed my world view and pointed my in the right direction is probably three. Three bands. I could easily make that ten. Or twenty without much effort. But if I’m honest about it, really honest about what were the watershed moments, which songs really made a earth shattering difference to me, there’s three of them. Of course that those three existed inside of an ecosystem absolutely bursting with awesomeness helped a lot too.

I’ve written before about trying to kill myself when I was very young, and made references to a whole host of things that kept me mopey and depressed for solid chunk of my childhood. I don’t bring that up to get all emo, but to make the point of just how much impact a few kids in garages out in the world putting words that ment something to them to music, and risking humiliation sent them out into the world could have on me.

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30 days

I really like the idea of 30 day challenges. But then again I really like the idea of self challenges in general, which should be no surprise to anyone reading this. I try, fail, restructure, try again – things all the time, but putting a “30 day” cap on it turns anything into a great bite sized goal that suddenly becomes attainable. Do one new things for 30 days? Simple.

I sent out a link to my email list from a friend who spent January detaching from digital stuff when around family. The TL;DR is that he restricted when he would look at email, restricted how much time he’d spend on it, and completely cut out phone/laptop stuff at home around family (mornings and evenings). To very positive results.

I always have my iphone near by and wonder how that translates for Ripley. His parents are always staring at these little devices. So reading Javaun’s account was relevant to my interests and I may try something similar. His jaunt into the 30 day challenge was so successful that he spent February catching up with old friends/family – each day contacting someone new.

This is another great idea that I would love to try out because I’m really horrible at staying in touch with anyone. Truth – if we’re friends and you don’t see me on a regular basis and we talk at all frequently that is huge. More commonly when I stop seeing people in person regularly they just fall off my immediate radar, but when I do see them again I’m excellent about picking up exactly where we left off. Even if it’s been years, when I see old friends I feel like I saw them just yesterday. Not everyone is like that however which has led to a lot of people who I think of as important to me, and important to my life – being out of touch. Of course, the problem with talking about something like that is if I say “hey for the next month I’m going to make a real effort to call people that are important to me but I haven’t talked to in a while” and then some people who I know but haven’t talked to in a while read it and don’t get a call they will be all WTF OMG and shit. And rightly so. Or they could call me FFS. But whatever.

I like the idea of constantly improving yourself and just deciding that you are going to make a change can be scary. Saying you are going to make a change for a short amount of time is much less scary. A week is too short to see a difference, but a month is just long enough to get in the habit and see some results. At the end of 30 days if you like the results it’s probably easy to keep going, if you don’t it’s no big deal because it was just a 30 day experiment to begin with.

I’ve talked about trying to do things every day before as well, and I can tell you that making it open ended is much more intimidating, and comes with an unavoidable sense of failure because inevitably you will miss a day and then you broke the streak. But if the streak is never ment to be more than 30 days. That’s cake.

So tomorrow is the 1st day of March. A new month. A new 30 days. Well, 31 technically.

What should I try?

A year without Facebook

I quit Facebook – quite publicly – in April of last year. Here’s the article I wrote about it explaining my reasoning. It hasn’t been a full year yet, but this week Douglas Rushkoff announced he’s quitting Facebook and several people have pinged me for thoughts so I thought I’d just put them all here in one place. I’m not going to spend any time on reasoning as I think between the two posts I just linked that is more than covered. What I will talk about is what this decision has been like to live with.

The truth is, I’ve hardly noticed it. That’s not to say I haven’t missed anything, rather I havent missed anything I’ve missed.

I’ll tell you when it has been obvious to me – when I try to sign up for a service or website and the only option they offer is Facebook connect. I’m a self diagnosed web addict and terminal early adopter so I check out and sign up for a *lot* of stuff. And in a years time I can only think of 3, maybe 4 times this issue has come up. This was actually the thing I was most worried about and it’s clearly not the issue I thought it would be at all. And actually, all of those examples have been opportunities to tell the founders (though they haven’t always listened) that only offering one way to sign up for their service, and an unreliable 3rd party option at that, isn’t such a hot idea. One of those products that I couldn’t sign up for was just a few weeks ago, but all the others I’ve never heard about again. I’m not saying that only offering Facebook Connect as the way to sign up for their service was suicide for them, but feel free to make that assumption. I won’t name names out of respect for the dead.

It’s also been a little noticeable when using things like Kickstarter – which I use all the time – I can no longer see what my friends are backing. I miss that, not enough to regret quitting Facebook, just to realize I would like Kickstarter to develop their own way to do this in house.

There have been a handful of things where someone has said “Oh, ________ posted this to Facebook, I know you aren’t on it so I’m forwarding it to you.”

There have been a handful of things where someone has said “I posted it on Facebook” and I’ve said “I’m not on Facebook so I can’t see it” and they’ve said “Oh… I’ll post it somewhere else too, hold on..”

Have I kept in touch with all the people who I was connected to on Facebook? No. Have I missed them? Not really. In 2010 I wrote that Facebook made me feel like a shitty friend, in part because it was maintaining (or recreating) connections with people that under any other circumstance would have fallen out of my life. That kid I sat next to in one class in 10th grade. That girl I had a crush on for a few months in 9th grade. That guy that is friends with one of my cousins that I met one time at a wedding or something. Without Facebook normal people in these situations never would have stayed in touch, with Facebook it was nice to connect but we never really had anything to say to one another other than “oh so nice to reconnect” then just flooding each other with random status updates. 100% of those people that I had very weak ties to I lost touch with. But I also no longer feel bad about not caring about their updates, I don’t feel bad that I don’t have more to say to them, and I don’t feel bad that they aren’t a part of my life. So I’m not convinced those loses are really a bad thing.

I will say that leaving Instagram was tougher. I had a group of people that I really liked and it was a way to connect with them that worked. I’m still in touch with many of them on other services though it’s not the same intimacy or personal kind of connection that Instagram was. Maybe Vine will fill that gap to some extent, maybe not. But leaving Instagram was definitely harder, but I do feel like it was the right choice. It’s important to stand up for what you believe in. Someone had to.

But with Facebook specifically, have I felt the need to go back? Not at all.

Not even once.

Am I any less worried about people relying so much on it? Nope.

Do I wish more people would leave it in the dust? Yep.

Do I think people are starting to figure it out? Still up in the air.

Soundtracking

Monster

I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent in the last 2 months late at night sitting in my living room staring at a blank wordpress text entry field trying to remember even one of those brilliant blog topics I thought of throughout the day. Staring blankly and typing nothing, clicking over to twitter and tumblr hoping for a spark of inspiration and getting nothing, and going back to staring at the empty screen. And then eventually I give up and write nothing and then go to bed feeling all of the failures. I’ve noticed it because I’ve been paying attention to it, but I’ve wrestled with this same thing just playing out at different times and different places all of my life.

I’ve mentioned Steven King’s On Writing before – it’s the greatest book about writing I’ve ever read. In it he talks about his writing sanctuary, a private place he goes to every day to get lost in his work and spends the same X hours every day just writing there. He talks in depth about the requirements of this space and peace and quiet and ‘do not disturb’ are huge cornerstones of it for him. I’ve seen other writers – writers who actually write stuff mind you – talk about similar spaces. I’ve tried to recreate that, again and again to be honest and each one has been a disaster. I don’t really find sanctuary in sanctuary. But I keep trying because I have some twisted perception that it’s what I should be doing.

Which is stupid, and I know it’s stupid. Everyone has their own thing that works for them. What’s even more stupid is that it took me reading this column by Henry Rollins to realize and accept what works for me. I don’t know what I was in such denial, or why I needed someone else to say it was OK for me to be comfortable with it.

The work (and I’m talking about writing here) I’ve been most proud of has never been created in sanctuaries. It’s been spit out at coffee shops and cafes. I find a corner, put on headphones that block the rest of the world out of my ears and blast music that inspires. It’s important, I’ve found anyway, that it can’t be the absolute most favorite music because then I end up just singing along and not getting any work done. If I put on Gorilla Biscuits I’m not going to write shit. But if I put on My Bloody Valentine I turn into a fountain. Seeing the world fly around me, while being protected in my little music bubble is my happy place. It’s my briar patch.

But it really is the combination of the two. Just sitting at a coffee shop trying to write is no good. The sound of the world is too distracting. When I can actually hear what people are saying to each other I get nothing from it. When I block out that reality and put my own soundtrack on the world then I create my own stories to fill those gaps. Like how your brain fills in the blind spots in your field of vision, when I cut out part of the story it’s much easier to force manifestation of some replacement.

This is one of those posts that means more to me than to you, but thanks for sitting through it regardless.