Making McCain Exciting

My new favorite thing. The brilliant people at The Colbert Report took note of a recent John McCain speech in which the GOP chosen one not only was robotic, monotone and lifeless, but he ALSO was standing in front of a green screen. Thus, the "Make McCain Exciting Greenscreen Challenge" was born, and the floodgates opened. Some of these are so funny, they are awe-inspiring. Something the candidate himself was several decades ago, (not funny, but awe-inspiring). A long career in politics causes one to lose all awe-inspringness, though.

My favorites: Gray Ambition

Street Racer McCain


Bucktooth Bunny McCain

Star Trek McCain

Toto, I don't think McCain's in Kansas anymore

Putting kittens to sleep


And finally, this weird little Mini McCain



Ahhh...life is good, with a bit of computer enhancement.

Big Brains

So, I get spammed occasionally by a Speakers Bureau called "Big Speak." Since I'm a PR person, Big Speak assumes I'll book one of their people for a keynote at some gala or special meeting. Reasonable enough. Yesterday, I got a postcard from them that advertised "Big Business Minds" and the speakers, presumably, who had them.

What struck me about these Big Business Minds was there were 16 of them. But only one was female. I felt depressed.

I go to the Web site. OK. Buzz Aldrin. You can't argue with that. He's a legend. And Lance Armstrong. Same thing. I scroll down the page and find one female speaker and her topic is...menopause.

Have to take my wee little brain off to work now. Thank goodness we have such smart men running everything for us. Like the White House, Federal Reserve, EPA and the Pentagon.

Toodles.

Pawn Shop Guitar

I'm listening to a tasty little band called "Computer vs. Banjo." Two guys who give lie to the old Steve Martin aphorism that you can't be depressed while playing the banjo. But, what got me thinking, and blogging, was this catchy line from their song, "Guitars need a sinners touch":

We all need a good sinner's love because we've all been pawned and beaten up. Maybe you'll find a good sinner today.

You could use a button or two because we all deserve to be found and groomed. Maybe you'll find a new suit today.

Along the way...you'll find someone else you won't forget. But you'll do something else that you'll regret.

Speaking for us pawn shop guitars, I must say that a good sinner's touch is the only thing that can unlock the music inside. And, (who would've guessed?) we beaten up guitars can make the sweetest music. So take a minute and listen to an incredibly bluesy banjo and tell me what you think...

Oh, and in case you're wondering. The picture above is Willie Nelson's famously battered guitar. I don't know if it's ever been in a pawn shop, but Willie certainly has...back in the 1960s, before the trademark red braids and Outlaw days. He had oily, short hair, wore scary ill-fitting suits and made commercials for the local Ford dealer.

We've done things we regret. That's what makes our music sweet, even when it's blue.

Wheezing Earth, update

The little tree Mark lovingly nurtured through its first 5 years died this summer. Too much heat, too little water. We should listen to the big message that little tree is sending all of us...


I found this neat applet that gives a quick and powerful visual of the carbon emissions different countries generate. It also displays the birth/death rates in those countries.

I'm not doing enough to make a difference, and I do more than most people I know. But, one of my new heroes, Annie Leonard, made this wonderful observation about the sorry state of things.

"The good thing about such all-pervasive problems is there's so many points of intervention."

See why she's a hero? She's not just an environmental wacko without credentials, either. A Columbia University graduate who went on to study city and regional planning at Cornell University, Annie traveled to over 30 countries, including Haiti, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, Pakistan and South Africa, in her work investigating and promoting anti-pollution issues internationally.

Annie also produced The Story of Stuff a 20-minute video that opens your mind and your eyes to the insanity of our unsustainable lifestyles. Watching it is like swallowing the red pill in The Matrix, except it's just a cute little video with stick-figure animation and Annie talking...



We have to change, or change will be done to us and it will be more painful than $4 bucks to feed the gas guzzler. But then, pain's what motivates me. As my dear friend Nolan says, "I move, not because I see the light, but when I feel the heat."

And oh, it is getting hot out there...
If you were wondering, in the time it took me to create this post, 969,000 tons of CO2 were admitted into the atmosphere, and 5575 people were born, while 2420 died.

You should be so lucky to die in class

Tonight in Bikram Yoga, the instructor asked the brand-new students how they were doing. This was about 85 minutes into the 90-minute class.

"I think I'm going to die," one of the newbies said.

The instructor repeated a Bikram saying, "You should be so lucky to die in this class."

I know what he means. Death would be the easy way out.

But, on the other hand, what a lovely way to go...

Doing the yoga has given me a lot of things. Patience. Humility. Acceptance of myself and others. And a very high tolerance for sweaty, stinky humanity.

I loved this article on Bikram yoga and "deeper sweat." It talks about one of the best things that happens as a result of sweating, twisting, stretching and breathing in that torture chamber. Eventually, you become "bulletproof." Meaning, that you can detach from the things that bug you and annoy you enough to find peace.

No matter what. No. Matter. What.

Now that's a pretty cool thing to find in a 105-degree room with sauna humidity.

Yes, he did

Since I'm a woman on the downhill side of 45 and I even have this blonde hairdo that looks pretty much like hers, I was supposed to have voted for Hillary.

But she just didn't connect with me.

I feel sad for her. I remember watching Bill speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and feeling so nostalgic. Oh, Bill! I missed you and I missed the '90s and I thought how nice it would be to turn back the clock to happier times.

He talked about how we're all in the same boat, about what unites us rather than divides us. He talked about forming a more perfect union.

But then Bill resigned his job as ex-President and turned into this peevish, perturbed and abrasive dude. Bill Clinton, Mr. Charming, abrasive!

Then I remembered that for most of those so-called happier times in the '90s, I was personally pretty miserable and mostly chemically impaired. So, was I really feeling nostalgic, or was my memory just too foggy to be trusted?

And besides, he wasn't running for President, she was. And she reminded me of Laura Johnson, the valedictorian of the high school class two years ahead of mine. Older than me. Smarter. Well, sure she was smarter. And she knew it and we all knew it. We figured she'd be successful in her life, but we didn't like her. We didn't want to hang out with her.

Do you vote for someone for President because they're someone you'd want to hang out with? People generally say this is where we went wrong with Dubya, but I disagree. People voted for Dubya because Karl Rove saw how well it worked for Nixon to get people motivated by greed and fear, not because Bush was such a swell guy. Although I think I'd rather hang out with Obama than Hillary, that's not why I voted for him.

Obama appealed to our better natures. He had uplift.

Hillary, frankly, was a drag. She appealed to the bitter, resentful, fearful parts of people. Not too different from the Republicans, who score big with resentful, fearful rich people. Hillary's voters are similarly grumpy, but they don't belong to country clubs.

Understandably so. If you're a 55 year old woman who's watched dumber, less qualified men rise in the corporation while you plodded along earning 75 cents to their dollar, you're pissed off. And, if you lose your health insurance at the same time that you are undergoing chemo, then you're either terrified or going ballistic.

But it's hard to argue that you're any more entitled to your resentments than, oh, I don't know, a black man whose dad absented himself from his two-year-old's life and left him to grow up with his white hippie mom and lepers for neighbors in Indonesia. I mean, if anybody has a right to be bitter...but I don't get that from Barack.

Slate ran an interesting piece that argued Hillary failed because she wasn't enough of a feminist. She fell into the trap of trying too hard to be "one of the boys," slamming back whiskey shots, talking in that deep chest voice that ultimately grates on your nerves, never for one minute backing off of her vote to send boys my son's age to die in Iraq. Blaming her failures not on herself but on our gender bias, she didn't embrace a more relevant feminism that affirms the value of being female. It is not advancing the cause if you advocate that women aspire to be men or even mannish in the worst aspects: hawkish, arrogant, combative, patronizing.

Yes, it was doubly sad the day Obama clinched the nomination and Hillary finally read the delegate count on the wall, also was the anniversary of the 19th Amendment's ratification. Who scripted this? The first serious woman contender for President sees her hopes dashed with finality on the anniversary of women getting the vote.

And yet, there's a lesson in history, too. The women's suffrage movement was inspired by the Abolitionists who succeeded in overturning slavery. So, it stands to reason that a black man would have a real chance of becoming president long before a woman in this country.

And here's another lesson if we're willing to learn from someone outside our borders. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland. Former United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights. Current member of The Elders. What a cool, strong, powerful, extraordinarily talented and intelligent woman leader. When she speaks about human rights, international law and the right of every person to be treated with dignity, she shows the creativity and imagination that a woman could bring to the highest office in a nation and the global community.

I don't think women have to vote for a woman if she's the wrong person for the job. If Mary Robinson was running, I'd vote for her. Obama is the next-best thing, though.

Zipped up

Just back from 10 days in Costa Rica, where we visited waterfalls, rain forests, volcanoes, mountains, beaches and two- and three-toed sloths. (We're not talking about our travel companions).

We went up to Arenal Volcano, where you can ride a ski-lift tram up and down the mountain, or you can ride up then zip down, courtesy of 8 zip lines reaching a top speed of 50 mph. Wavering and feeling a powerful need to visit the Damas, I heard Mr. Wonderful say, "I didn't come this far not to zip."

That did it. We zipped. If this blogger/YouTube thingy works, you can zip along, too. Our trusty guide Carlos videotaped a zip trip we'd just made--600 ft above the rainforest canopy. You'll see Arenal Volcano and Lake Arenal if you look quick. And you can hear Mr. Wonderful at the end, when asked "How was it?" He says, "Beautiful!" Pura Vida!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTfLL9nYaMs

How hard can this be?

I found this lovely item for sale in the on-line store of a very hip little shop. http://domy.myshopify.com/products/shikito-brown

Really? Seriously?
This item (ahem. "Vinyl Toy") retails for $25. It is the icon for the B*Shit line of streetware. And for those of you who don't use "streetware" in your daily vocabulary, I suppose it means T-shirts you use to make a statement, instead of those that emerged from near the top of the laundry hamper. But, back to the vinyl toy. It struck me: someone manufactured, packaged and marketed it.

I'm thinking that the rest of us who are not in this line of work, well, we are just a bunch of uptight overachievers.

Me at five

The person I am was born five years ago, on January 20, 2003.

At the time, it seemed accidental.

That other me was miserable, lonely, depressed, worried, muddled, anxious, flabby, fearful, morbid. My life was passing me by in excruciating slow motion. And I was like a spectator at a Kabuki theater show, uncomprehending and confused about the plot, the characters and the point of it all.

I drove the streets of Houston, dreading to go home.

If I swerved my car into that telephone pole, or this concrete embankment, would it look like an accident? I couldn't stand my children suffering the abandonment caused by a mother who committed suicide. Plus, they could collect my life insurance.

But I'd screwed up so many other things in life, I'd probably screw up my death, too. I was chicken--thank goodness.

Despite (because of?) being so crazy myself, I was on a mission to fix the crazy people in my life. If I could just come to grips with my screwed up family members-- as my addled reasoning went-- then, THEN, I'd be happy.

So, I headed into Al-Anon, looking for serenity, trying to find the secret to fixing them, searching for the magic mantra or fail-safe strategy to straighten all of them out.

I even screwed that up.

I walked in the wrong door, into the wrong room.

Sitting on that folding chair in the back of the room, the fog in my head and darkness in my heart was heavy as I'd ever known. The God of my childhood was pissed off and vengeful, and I was sure He was deeply disgruntled with me. My family was estranged. I felt awkward socializing and retreated from the few friends I hadn't pushed away. My business was stumbling. My third marriage was spiteful and loveless. I was afraid my son would die and my daughter had left to go live with her dad.

But that night, a white-haired man with twinkling blue eyes and kindness like drops of warm rain on parched earth smiled at me and said, "There's only one person in this world you can change, and that's you."

"Just because you get sober, that doesn't mean your life will suddenly be wonderful," he said. "It may not get any better. Life will still be life. But YOU will get better, and that will make it so much easier to deal with life."

He was right.

My life didn't get better. In fact, it got worse immediately. Then a lot worse.

Then it got different.

Then it got better.

Then it became miraculous.

In five years, I have:

Gotten divorced.

Taken a year's sabbatical from romantic involvement.

Sold a house and a business, bought a house, sold it, and changed jobs twice.

Confessed my most shameful, guilt-inducing secrets to a priest, then to my dearest friend and gradually made peace with my past.

Reconciled with my daughter and rebuilt our relationship better than we'd ever dreamed.

Celebrated the miracle of my son, shared Thanksgivings and Christmases with him--after spending previous holidays not even knowing if he was alive.

Met a lovely man. Fell for him. Moved in with him. Proposed to him. Married him.

Seen sunrise over Tikal and sunset over Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.

Attended the funeral of a man who ODed six weeks after his baby son was born.

Looked down from above the clouds at Machu Picchu.

Celebrated Easter morning fireworks in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with cherished friends.

Made my friend Doug's wish come true by asking him to be flowergirl at my wedding.

Felt snowflakes melt on my face at Lake Louise. Watched clouds drift through the treetops in the Canadian Rockies.

Walked on the floating Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca.

Roasted marshmallows around the campfire in Wimberley.

Prayed over a comatose man in ICU who overdosed after a few months sober.

Helped repair flood-battered homes in New Orleans.

Felt good knowing my parents have finally, after 40+ years, stopped worrying about me.

Seen a dear friend conquer breast cancer while losing her health insurance and her job, yet emerge with her marriage and prodigious sense of humor stronger than ever.

Lost a friend to cancer, while watching him deny that disease victory by maintaining his grace and never succumbing to self-pity.

Sung karaoke sober.

Danced sober.

Made love sober.

Discovered that every cell in a body not deadened with massive doses of a depressant feels marvelously alive and vibrant.

Survived the Bikram Yoga Challenge.

Not too bad for a five-year-old.