I don’t have time to listen or watch every audio or visual doodad I encounter in a blog entry, so I imagine even some of my most loyal Heymarci readers didn’t listen to the podcast I posted yesterday after I went on Karen Salmansohn’s radio show for a discussion on women/work/balance/fit/glass walls/fish and lots of other good stuff.
I still hope you’ll to find some time to listen to it; but if you can’t, this is your lucky day because Hannah Seligson, a smart young writer whose work I just discovered, nicely summarized the whole thing. She also highlighted the new word, “imperfectionist,” I coined during that radio talk. Read the post, and work on becoming an imperfectionist. I think it is the key to achieving happiness.
Deborah Siegel also blogged about the podcast this morning over at Girl With Pen. Deborah is a thought leader and excellent resource on pretty much anything related to women’s issues, so I was tickled to see my name in one of her posts.
Last week I took part in a radio chat with a smart and opinionated group of about writer/thinkers about what’s going on with women these days. Think Chris Mathews’ Hardball meets The View.
The panel was hosted by Karen Salmansohn, the author of 29 books and host of the daily radio show, “Be Happy, Dammit” on the Lime channel of Sirius.
The other guests were Eve Tahmincioglu, author of From the Sandbox to the Corner Office/columnist for MSNBC.com; Cali Williams Yost, work+life strategy consultant/author of Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You; and Leslie Bennetts, contributing writer at Vanity Fair/author of The Feminine Mistake.
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I started writing this column while spending the weekend at the Jersey Shore where my mom has a home, and where, for most of my childhood life, work and life blurred together. My parents, who owned a series of beachfront motels while I was growing up, made little effort to separate work and life.
If we went out for dinner, we always stopped by the motel on the way home. On these visits, I sat in the car, listening to the radio or dozing, wondering what was keeping them. Sometimes my mom waited with me while my dad went inside. After my dad passed away and my mom took over the business, she was the one going inside.
When I finally joined her a few times, I realized why she stayed there so long. She enjoyed talking to the night clerk and whoever else was hanging around. They chatted about mundane news and local gossip: a guest disliked the room and wanted a refund; a family had driven all the way down to the shore only to learn of a crisis that required them to turn around; a crowd of drunken promgoers had ransacked the motel next door; the local convenience store now stocked vanilla-flavored coffee. These moments were more than merely catching up on business. My parents were checking in on another child, something they had built, nurtured and loved.
Click this sentence to read the rest of my NYT.com column, “Blurring by Choice and Passion.”
The Heymarci Blog is going to be dark for a few weeks as I am going on a cycling trip in Europe and then spending some time at the beach. Looking forward to bringing back reports of workplace trends in Croatia and Fire Island. Or maybe just tips on unplugging.
Dan Milstein and Bonnie Duncan, a married couple, can’t help being creative. Dan is an actor/director/theater company founder/computer programmer. Bonnie is a dancer/puppeteer/costume designer/trapeze artist/arts educator. But those labels are too limiting because every time I hear from them they are cultivating new slashes. Most recently, they have become indie YouTube filmmakers. Their debut short is Killing Time, soon to become a cult classic, I’m sure. They’ve got two more in production and I’ll post those as soon as they’re ready.
Here’s the film. Following it are excerpts from my email Q&A with the filmmakers. Wait to read it until you’ve seen the film as it kind of gives away the plot. I apologize for the funky spacing below..some kind of Blogger glitch I can’t seem to fix.
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In today’s Shifting Careers column at NYT.com I revisited the always-popular terrain of self-promotion, with a specific focus on introverts, who tend to have an even more difficult time than most tooting their own horns.
The first time I saw the word, “meme,” was on Dan Pink’s blog, causing me to realize that it is probably a word I should know.
I like learning words by seeing them in context. Here’s the blog entry where Pink used it:
6 words, 6 sentences, no waiting
The ultra-short story meme continues to thrive. Virginia Backaitis has launched a blog devoted to mini-tales that asks, “What can you say in six sentences?” Also, if you haven’t seen it already, Wired‘s November issue asked a bunch of novelists to try their hands at 6-word science fiction. Margaret Atwood’s is my favorite: Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
Posted on 01/03.
{CORRECTION 08/20 – The “Six Sentences Blog” was actually created by Robert McElivy. Virginia Backaitis is a contributor.}
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Recently, I did something strange. I called a fellow journalist for something we would normally talk about through email. It was so odd that I started the call with a caveat, “I don’t usually pick up the phone, but it seemed about time we had a conversation.” She and I typically communicate by email, my preferred mode of communication with just about everyone in my life. It keeps me productive. But lately I have been so saturated with email that I am starting to relish all those conversations that I long ago relegated to email.
Clearly, my phone call got that colleague (Eve Tahmincioglu) thinking because she blogged about it at her new small business blog at MSNBC.com, which is worth checking out even if it didn’t have something to do with ME!
This week’s Shifting Careers column online at The New York Times, Blogging Your Way Into a Business, is about using blogs to build a business or make a career change. I wrote this piece because I was tired of reading stories about how blogs can harm one’s career — and while I know that blogs can do damage, they are also one of the easiest, most-effective ways to test out an idea, get a business off the ground, or build a following in your niche.
Jeremy Blachman, one of the bloggers I profiled, wrote a great piece (available through Times Select) for the Times about why employees blogging about their is good for the public good. It was a bit off-topic for the column, but it’s relevant to the whole “are blogs good for your career?” conversation.
Months ago, when my book first came out, Gery Deer, from Ohio, wrote me one of my first real “fan” letters. Here’s how he started his note:
I have been a ‘slash’ as you call it my entire life. I have always had multiple interests and had more than one ‘job’ or ‘business’ running at a time. I wanted to thank you for putting down into words what describes my lifestyle. I have always bumped heads with ‘normal’ people and folks who believe that your occupation is who and what you are – period. To them, I’ve always seemed like someone with NO focus since I was capable of many.
What I loved about his note is that he included links to various URLs that helped explain the different things he spends his time on: an entertainment and talent referral agency, a computer consultancy (“supposed to be the breadwinner but is falling behind”), his whip artistry studio, the family band, and his freelance writing. It was all nicely explained in his online bio describing him as a writer/speaker/entertainer/consultant.
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