Love, Love Me Do

I got passed a link just by chance to a fairly in-depth tutorial on Japanese business customs, aided by a helpful, if somewhat hideous flash cartoon, concluding with a great (and by great I mean absolutely awful) Karaoke rendition of Love Me Do. To see it, you'll need to sit through the "Have A Drink" section of the program, but the exposure you'll get to a slice of Japanese business culture is well worth the trouble. This information easily beats out anything I've gotten so far from GlobeSmart.

http://www.how-to-bow.com/

Learn more than you ever thought you needed to know. And learn it now!

Yellow Belt

One of my ongoing hobbies (for the last six months, anyway), has been Aikido. Just yesterday, I pulled off a feat I wouldn't have thought possible even three months ago; I passed the test to attain the rank of a yellow belt, our dojo's equivalent of 6th kyu.

The test was filmed, and is available for you to download through the magic of Windows Movie Maker, and a streaming media server.

It's a fifteen minute video featuring the test and a few bits of practice. It's high-quality, so clean out your broadband pipe before inhaling.

Special thanks to everybody that made it to see the action; especially Daniel, my favorite fellow aikidoka who I hope will be healed up and back on the mat soon, throwing me around effortlessly.

Enjoy!

Stream the Video Here (Windows Media Streaming, 300k Broadband)
http://xpstream.winisp.net/agentcox/yellowbelt.wmv

What Will I Say If I Can't Talk About Myself?

I think I have over a million stored images - they're head-images, so space isn't a concern, neither is organization - and they're all this alone-thing with enough pride and self-importance to make it a decent black and white photo.

Me standing on the balcony of a skyscraper.
Me standing at the entrance of a tunnel.
Me. Me. Me. Me.

And I've come to realize that, through the course of events that brought us to be certainly the most earth-bending species ever to blossom from the loins of evolution, there was at heart the inherent need to be infinitely self-focusing.

What we do, we do for ourselves. Sometimes to a bitter end. Just to survive. And it takes a conscious effort of the will, supercharged ethical and intellectual horsepower to see far enough to even break the cycle, let alone make a difference outside of our own realization. Does it come from the heart, or the head? I'm not sure I have the answer to that, or why what we see we see through the "me" prism.

I can say assuredly though that while we've been told that we have everything that it takes to be a species that plays nice among ourselves, we hardly have the biological precedent. When did we ever need to genuinely think of others to keep the species alive?

I don't think the altruistic, charitable, for-the-good-of-the-species Deep-Impact-starring-Morgan-Freeman gene is coded anywhere along the strands that define a human animal. Certainly not in the genuine, religiously-backed ol' fashioned way that our elders seem so heavily rooted in, and that seems to have fallen out of the human rucksack somewhere between the 20th and 21st centuries.

Knowing that, I think I can start to figure out where it's coming from - this fear of writing my book.

Writing. The one thing that I know instinctively that I can do. The singular task that, for any opinions to the contrary, I feel dead-set on making my mark with.

Instead of Writing My Book:
I could have posted a million pictures of myself.
I could have written down a million feelings.
I could have talked of a million childhood memories.

I might have amassed a lifetime of iterative past lifetimes in the space of our new Internet publishing sphere where the details of life take on as much expressed meaning as the story of our species as a whole; where the grain of sand in your pocket means as much as the beach it came from. Where, retroactively, we seek to interpret the whole from the requisite parts, looking for the truth in minutiae now, factoring the ethereal in as we might have factored in the concrete.

It all works, until you realize for yourself that sooner or later you have to step forward.

And it scares me to no end, sunrise to sunset, that I may yet have to make that statement, for better or worse, that says far beyond my own experiences, qualifications, or seniority has given me right to, "This is what I believe."

For me, it's equivalent to donning a white suit and asking to have it soiled with tomatoes thrown from an unforgiving audience.

And all from pride. All from the me-gene. Every last piece of it from my own fear of putting a flag in the soil and staking my claim come hell or high water. For the book that I want so desperately to finish, let alone publish, says indeed that much, even in just fear alone. That's no excuse; it's what I've always wanted. To put a meaning to my life beyond more pictures of myself, more feelings, more places I've been and people I've met.

I've long known why I've always needed pictures. My pride - just to show myself someday that I really had every experience I claimed to have had. For "the record". For me to know that I didn't throw it away, that I did something with these hands, said words from this mouth that influenced the almost inflexible current of human affairs.

That I wasn't forgotten. Or, failing that, that I at least tried to do something. I've often wondered how long that desire would sustain me in its present form.

Well, if I can't say that the desire is gone - it's at least changed in form. Maybe it's trading one fear for another, but I'm trying to let it flow as it will and operate within it, instead of breaking out of it. After all, am I really going to burst out of the very person that's been developing inside of me for over twenty-three years of life? Am I suddenly going to become something else?

Of course not.

But I've grown tired, perhaps too soon, of watching without real words. The challenge will come in bringing an opinion to a world already judgmental and cold, and not feeling the frost on my toes turn me around, headed for warmth, safety, and comfort.

Folks, I'll have to tell you: I'm scared.

But if everyone who was scared sat on their ass and didn't do what it was they really knew they had to do...well, to make a long story short and horribly generic: there's a lot of pizza you wouldn't be eating right now.

I'm tired of being frightened to death of my own book.

Confessions of an Addict

It might not even be a month proper since I walked from LiveJournal. It may have been less than thirty days since I shut the doors, hoisted a bag onto my shoulder and caught the next train to Nowhere, Internet. It truly may have been less than four weeks ago that I decided to stand up, own up, and change.

But honestly, I can't remember.
I don't count the days. Like chewing on my nails, like tearing up tissue paper, it's a nervous habit that only lets the demons in once I start. I can't count like it's the sum total of all days of a sentence that, when completed, will suddenly result in liberation from a restrictive, painful prison of the mind.

It's not like that. It's ongoing.

When I consider all of the time that I put into LiveJournal - all of the posts, and the thousands of comments that I left and received, it's hard to say I don't want it to continue. But I don't. When you call upon something so much in your years of living, of growth and change, it starts to feel like what it had ought to mean is personal, evocative, and deep. And it was.

But it was also an addiction - something that fed me at the same time I fed it. And it took from me what I gave to it, pieces of my writing, my hard work, successes and failures, observations and obfuscations, and all manner of ex machina that came out of head and heart and impressed upon copper somewhere in a Seattle server room.

For a self-styled futurist-in-training, for a starry-eyed amateur chronicler of times on the near horizon, you can imagine how hard it is to let such a well-oiled machine fall asunder in the mind. I know LiveJournal is something, something amazing; the tools of database mechanics, far beyond my realm of expertise, still have a mystical quality that harkens to the old days of job security by complexity - a patchwork of infrastructure holding up an ocean of emotion, life changes, and thoughts and opinions, both personal and collaborative in scope, from over six-point-eight million viewpoints and counting.

I still wonder.

I wonder if it's all still going on, knowing full well that it is. I wonder if people took the plunge and quit with me, having the intuition that a meme spread with my posts, even if I don't know how. I wonder if anybody misses me now that I'm gone, having my suspicions that they might.

They say it takes you a time to get over a loss of what you had equivalent to twice as long as you had it. If that's the case, it'll be a while, and in the meantime, I'm trying hard not to look back; trying hard not to regret the decision I made with such finality, with such structure as to post each final day, counting down, reciting the steps on my own list as if it were a magical incantation, to keep the god of online communication happy.

Each day, one step at a time.
I still have my hard times.

I still have the urge to post my "mood". I still want to just slap "/friends" on the end of my blog URL and have magic things happen. My pictures directory on my website is still titled LJpics.
My LJ icon still blinks at me, reminding me that I told LJ to "remember me" when I visted.

"Remember me".
Maybe I really just wanted people to remember me. Maybe I still do, and that's why I'm posting this for you to read.

Maybe I'm still addicted in some way.

But I'm getting through it, one day at a time.
My name is Charles Cox, and I'm a recovering LiveJournal addict.

Ribcages

Paypal: "We hire anorexic models!"

No, seriously. Click the picture for the larger version, and check out the "ribbage".

Picasa

I'm just putting in my two cents about Google's Picasa photo program. It's great! With beautiful, easy to use menus, smooth transition effects, and one-click (okay, maybe two-click) publishing to a Blogger blog - which I happen to be using - it's easily the coolest photo storage and organization program yet.

I really appreciate being able to post my pictures easily.

On Excuses

To My Friends: This is the first of a selection of writings I'll be creating for my new site. This is one that's especially important to me in the wake of some decisions I've been making about myself. There's definitely a reason I left LJ, and part of it was the crap I'd get for something like this. Read with an open mind.

We’ll try anything.

To win, to show off, even to protect our friends, we’ll make any dirty deed seem reasonable to ourselves to fit the situation and achieve the results we have our blinder-saddled head set on.

“Just this once”, we say. And we lie.
“They’ll never miss it,” we say. And we steal.

We’ll target anyone.

Co-workers, lovers, friends and family all fall under the knife when we put our mind to achieving an effect at all costs, never mind ethical conflicts, undesirable consequences, and the very real, very important “better judgment”.

“They’d never understand,” we say. And we clam up.
“They need to know how I feel,” we say. And we explode.

It’s been a part of human history for as long as we’ve been around, and examples are everywhere in our lives, every day, in the thousands of decisions we make that shift the priorities and silently sabotage the relationships we all depend on to live the way we expect. But if humans are still anything like the ones I went to sleep knowing last night, we save our most inventive schemes, our true aces, for the most important and most vulnerable target. Ourselves.

From the moment the alarm clock goes off, whether the sun is up or not, the machine is running, full of the fuel that, ironically, is only useful for slowing down motion. It’s tarry, sludgy, and hard to get rid of. And everyone produces it in gigantic quantities.

The fuel is excuse. Exception. Special consideration. And for all of the reserved privilege these phrases seem to suggest, it’s awfully common.

We have excuses for everything.
Excuses for cutting off that driver on the interstate.
“They don’t understand what a hurry I’m in.”
Excuses for not doing your best at work.
“I have bigger dreams than this.”
And, perhaps most fatally, excuses for not taking the initiative to get up, out of that bed, and doing the best you can to make your life mean something to yourself and those around you.
“The world doesn’t really work like that.” That’s a good one.
“I’m just a normal person, nothing really special happens to me.” Right.
“It’s just fate.” Spare me.

We have a million cop-outs, carefully nurtured by society as personal escape hatches in times of crisis, times we all face with machine gun-like regularity. I’ve had a million come and go, and ten times that number waiting in the wings should I ever decide the times require such a response of non-action. For the superhero to put on his cape, ready his super powers, and then calmly sit down on the couch and make no difference in the world whatsoever.

I’ve had a recent one begin to show signs of weakness, finally unhinging its jaws and beginning to succumb to the force of the outside wind like a bug on a windshield. It’s the excuse of youth.

“I’m too inexperienced,” or, “I’m not old enough to be taken seriously.”

Every once in a while, for some inexplicable reason, someone sees fit to try to make the excuse grow fatter and more lively, by confirming my fears that I still have a lot to learn. It wasn’t really that long ago that someone I respect saw fit to jab at me a bit after what ultimately was a useful question, albeit an unseasoned one.

“Ah,” he said, following my question. “The hope of the young. I remember being naïve.”
Everyone has a space they retreat to after something like that. For me, I calmly took the punch and came back with smiling teeth. But it hurt, and did damage to me by way of keeping a nasty parasite alive just that much longer, for when making the next decision, a factor came through in my thinking that asked, quite literally:

“Are you sure you’re old enough to make this decision?”

Well, at the time of this writing, I’m twenty-three years old. Certainly, I’m missing whatever war wounds would be socially appropriate to display for a fifty-something corporate executive, but I’ve kept my eyes open during the trip, and there are a few things that stand out that I’m going to try and keep in mind as I go forward.

Most notably, that we need work. Not in the “gainful employment” sense, but in that we are fundamentally unsuited to our environment and need to wrench on ourselves until we’re ready for what’s ahead.

Each of us has been given a substantial amount of personal power that does not correspond to any of our back-brain instincts in any healthy way. If you’re my age, you grew up with more or less the same things I did. Specifically, jet travel, worldwide telecommunications, industrialized medicine, and personal consumption and production power.

In a nutshell, more power than we’ve ever had as human beings. Do you feel that? It’s another day of waking up without a gun to your head. Another day of being able to move your appendages and rise to meet the day without shackles attached.

And yet, why is it that millions of us would feel that being a hostage would be somehow easier?

The reason why is: because it’s an excuse. It’s not just an excuse, it’s the excuse. It’d be the single most liberating imprisonment we’ve ever had to become hostages, incapable and altogether unworthy of escape or free will, emancipated from the need to make any personal decisions that may imply that we, not someone else, were truly responsible for the choices we made in life.

The need for imagined subjugation is huge, and industries have been forged around it that do humans the imagined service of controlling the incoming information and possibility to present “reasonable” and “informed” choice.

Media has created a market in information “products” that emphasize an imaginary coherence, and at the same time diversity, of opinions, studies, and first-, second-, and third- hand reports of “important” events that will help us shape and make shallow, needless debate among our fellow human beings so that we can feel that by these unimpressive actions, we are representing our true beliefs, and holding up some kind of standard that identifies us to the rest of society.

Critics have spawned in huge irresponsibility complexes so that consumers can be unafraid to profess their support for a “meritorious” achievement, and speak universal scorn on ideas that didn’t pass the critic’s muster, without the consumers themselves having to take a stand on ideas that they feel unable or unwilling to argue. I am aware of the other uses of the critical profession, but on a grand scale, we must be aware of the massive passing of the buck we do with respect to reviews of the goods we produce.

There are other ways we have industrialized our need for excuses into prefabricated “excuse economy” that allows us to feel better about not taking control of any aspect of our lives, up to and including our own daily choices.

It’s gone so far as to spawn a line of entertainment that depicts our lives as the sorry set of excuses they so often are, complete with unhappy jobs, uncomfortable relationships, and lackadaisical parenting, at which we are conditioned to laugh and deny to ourselves that we really did create the situation that now appears to us as farce.

We watch the funny shows, point at others we know and identify them as the overblown caricatures and wonder how the shows can be so correct in their assessment of other people.

When a hero finally shows up, we all identify with them but realize the excuses as foremost blockers to our own personal greatness. It’s fiction. It’s impossible. Life doesn’t work that way.

Maybe not, but name one emotion or virtue that a hero has in any measure that you couldn’t possess. You won’t have the seventy-pound minigun that sprays lead like it were water from a garden hose, but you can have the strength and compassion to help your teammates. You may not be able to break government encryption protocols with your mind, but you can have the burning desire for knowledge.

You can see all of the machinations around you that have kept you mired in excuses for your entire existence, just the same as they have with me. But is anyone else tired of this business? Does anyone else feel ready to give life a go and stop complaining?

I’m not saying you or I will make the world’s problems go away tomorrow, or even in our own lifetimes. And I realize that the collective pool of humanity has had less than a glowing track record of empowering people to actually get up and do something with their lives instead of make excuses as to why they have no power beyond their own bed, but you each have the power to realize the cards that are stacked against you, expose them to your mind and heart, and discover that they aren’t enough to stop you.

Whether your ultimate goal is to write a book, fly to the moon, motivate a loved one, save the world, or just save yourself, chances are good that you’re not doing it right now.

It doesn’t matter if you aren’t ready.
It doesn’t matter if you want ten more minutes to blow it off.
It doesn’t matter if there are a million more excuses standing between you and what you really want.

To each of you that are waiting, in bed or not, in limbo or not, wanting or not, already on the way or not, I ask you right now to look deep; go behind the curtain and know what’s running your show.

I’m asking you to do what’s right for you and turn off the clock, turn off the excuse machine, and get up.

Get up.

GET UP.