The intention we bring to our acts, affects the outcome of the acts.
The Net and the apps and creative acts that make it grow have been built, for the most part, out of a desire to connect and a desire for open-ness, which speeds genuine connection.

Any geek knows how to feel validated by others and even themselves by fixing problems. It’s a way to make ones head useful and feel present and appreciated by those for whom you solve problems. But any validation and sense of self worth/valuation or (company valuation) built on that alone will lead to an empty looping (something familiar to any geek who has felt befriended only for their laptop tech support skils).

This empty looping possibility is just as true for any organization or system. What makes the connection really genuine and ore self-sustaining is when it is the intentions that connect, not merely the acts.

The best thing about the geeks, the artists, the children or anyone who has maintained their genuine sincerity (with which we are all born) is that they live truly. And the connections made with an honest and vulnerably sincere person and their sincere acts don’t have to be fed by constant problem solving.

I see this on a huge level embodied on the Net. Only geeks would have built it. Not because the have the mad coding skills, but because they wanted to connect as they are with others and the temerity to *assume* other want to as well. This motivatation drives how the Net is being built and which structures, including those operating as businesses work on those structures.

So we have the Net, the digital era, a physical manifestation of the growing web of connection that is wrapping closer inside of us and or thoughts and our questions and our minds and hearts. It is helping shrink the earth like any empire before it.

It is the sincerity that truly links us. All 6.6 billion of us. We all came into this world with it.

This is what I look like 1 week after surgery. Now I know why Frankenstein was green. It’s amazing how the body can change from trauma. Also amazing that it knows how to heal itself as well as it does.

Many thanks for all of your good wishes and IMs. They really have helped my spirits.

Many thanks for all the good wishes and all the lovely friends who have been cooking + visiting. The surgery went well and my arm is in a cast. Healing makes you hungry! I’m resting up for the SXSW show next Monday: Continuous Partial Attention.

I’ve found that it’s us who is the biggest obstacle to what we want. No matter how objectively “hard” anything out there is, it’s never as hard as our own skulls and assumptions.

Can you handle wanting?
Wanting without a fear of disappointment that overwhelms snd the dejection that follows that. Then wanting is not happening.

Before we ever do anything that we actually do, we want.

Forget Nike.
Just want it.

This stuff has been sitting on my coffee table for weeks. Every morning I am sure it’s going to get done. And at every bedtime, it’s still there.

I’m sure that it’s the thing keeping me from writing, shooting, getting my real work done.

Perhaps that’s why I have kept it there.

What would it be like to have absolutely nothing sitting over my head?

I fantasize that with a clean plate, fresh start, insert random metaphor here, it will become obvious me what to do next.

Patti Smith Lights up Our Lives (1979)

What is heartfelt is always compelling.

photo by Annie Leibovitz, another great.

Patti Smith, the Susan Sontag of Rock ‘N Roll will be inducted into the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame this year.

There is not an ounce of “pretty good for a girl.” She rocks. Period.

It is so nice when things are just that simple. Excellence tends to make things so.
She is beyond gender and both genders, like most great creative minds.

Virginia Woolf said that’s so, so it must be true.

Who else is great and beyond gender?

Here she makes “You Light Up My Life” moving and cool. They are the same thing. Earnest is the new edgy. The old cool.

Cynicism is not an automatic indicator of authenticity. It is a broken shield to hide behind.

It is the banner of comedy now, the crippled truth.

Take back your own heart Jon Stewart.

Rejoin us David Cross.

Truth does not wink.

This amazing person was the first woman to teach women’s history at Harvard and began the Schlesinger Archive at Radcliffe. I was fortunate to live with and work for her right after I graduated in 1990.I did research for her and drove her to chemotherapy. She inspired me greatly and helped me lose my fear of aging. She mentored an entire generation of women historians and they were very much in her life. Her joyous life of the mind kept her life rich even while her body was giving her trouble. In those days, I’d only just stopped being a varsity hockey player and couldn’t imagine life without the focus on athletics and the body. After my recent injury, I’m having a new experience.

I remember helping Barbara clean out an office and found some old business cards her husband Peter had had printed up which read “House Husband.” He’d been the CEO of Stride Rite, but was so proud to be Barbara’s husband in an era in which women were not expected to have professional careers.

I lived with Barbara in Cambridge MA, when another feminist inspiration, Prof. Mary Jo Frug, was stabbed to death across the street. Barbara passed more peacefully a few years later. I miss them both.

Ancestors and Immigrants
In the Company of Educated Women

LtoR: Jason Shellen, Zvi Septimus, Heather Gold and Judye Hess

The more I thought about Partnership, the more I saw it everywhere. Isn’t a job like a a marriage? Great interviews are like hot dates: “You’re ideas, we love your ideas! And your rolodex, yes yes!” And then 3 months in, that same manager is wondering why you’re also “yapping up” with suggestions and you can’t just keep your head down and underline the stuff you’ve been told to find. Aren’t Israel and Palestine literally stuck together without any hot sex to keep things going?

How do you grow with someone without giving up your self?

Jason Shellen from Google (previously from Blogger) has been doing deals and relationships for a while now in the professional realm. This is now called “new business development,” a position I used to hold myself at different companies. At some companies this looks a lot like sales (aka “pimping”). What this comes down to is that both companies benefit from the relationship in an ongoing way. It’s more than fee for services (which is legally + historically, what marriage looked like). Jason is married (in a life, not business kind of way) to Alison whom his been with since they were 18.

A chevrusah is a Talmudic study partnership. The Talmud is like the literary criticism of the Torah (Hebrew Bible) and studying it is a major part of life if you’re a relgioius Jewish man (the man is a traditional thing) or a PhD candidate in Jewish studies like UC Berkeley, doctoral candidate Zvi Septimus.
Zvi talked about his most traumatic chevrusah chevrusah experience:

Me, my chevrusah Yoni, his wife and his two kids, all moved to Israel together because we thought we’d be able to study better there. And then, like, a month into it, he gave me the “It’s not you, it’s me” speech.

It always happens right after you move for them.

Veteran couples counsellor Judye Hess (who brought her boyfriend of 81/2 years) had the line of the night.

“Judye, is there any way to keep a relationship good all the time?”

“Denial”

“Does that work,” asked Zvi?

“It works for my sister,” replied Judye.

Highlights and Links

• God help my cynical roots, but here are books I found helpful. Just filter through the covers, fonts and much of the language for nuggets of truth
• > The Dance of Anger – Harriet Lerner [there is a basic dynamic that you are always part of. When you chnge, your partner will absolutely change.]
• >Passionate Marriage – David Schnarch [differentiation–holding on to yourself while in close connection with another–is the key to a healthy relationship and hot sex]
• Zvi leads study with partners on Sundays at the Mission Minyan in San Francisco
• The Cluetrain Manifesto. If markets are conversation, then all business is now relationships.
• Judye: “It’s hard to put all your eggs in one basket.” Heather “Is that why relationships are so hard?” Judye: “Yes, especially if you count on this person for everything…Nobody can really fill the bill for anybody if you’ve gotta be everything.”