So I gave it a go. Ended up devouring the whole tome in 2 or 3 hours. It was good for me in an echo chamber sort of way — reading obvious things in all-caps like, “CRAZY PEOPLE ARE THE LAST PEOPLE TO KNOW THEY ARE CRAZY” kinda hits the spot — but with a few “oh really?” sorts of things sprinkled in too.

But this passage from the chapter entitled “Pregnancy Insanity” has special significance and verisimilitude:

“Here is another bit of Girlfriend advice: if your friends who have been pregnant tell you that it was the most emotionally fulfilling and happiest time of their life, don’t believe them. Those kinds of comments invariably make you feel that something is wrong with you if you don’t feel equally ecstatic, and they are undoubtedly inaccurate. Some strange biological force gives women amnesia about pregnancy, so that they forget the less savory details and see the whole thing in a sort of rosy glow. This is just nature’s way of making sure that women get pregnant more than once; if you remembered too much, you might never voluntarily repeat the experience.”

Yes, it does seem that way. Of course, it would also seem to me that there are some much better neurological reasons for this to happen, such as the fact that everything progresses on such a tiny timeframe compared to the rest of human life, and also that when we are faced with a happy outcome (such as a healthy child), we are apt to “correct” our prior memories to match.

But no matter. The point is, start writing more. And so I shall. Because pregnancy, while interesting, has not been the glowy happy-go-lucky time you always hear about. Or when it was/is, it’s because I’ve WORKED FOR IT, dammit. (Which reminds me to polish off the pending blog post about Relaxation, which I based a 5-minute talk on recently.)

I’m not going to do a full auto-expose here — there’s quite a bit I don’t really want to share with just anyone, and probably shouldn’t. But I might post a few sensitive things in passworded posts which will show up as Protected. If you want access, let me know. The qualifications are that you are female (or if male, be related to me by blood or marriage), that the post is tagged “pregnancy” or “post-partum”, and that “TMI” is not in your active vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: amnesia, neurology, post-partum, pregnancy

It’s 1 am and I have a commitment in the early morning, so I’m going to bed before I start typing anything significant.  Instead I’ll cop out with a bunch of twitter hash-tags:

#fopl

#w2e

#cultureclash

#piratecatradio

#hackathon

And by the way, if you want to swing by the Web 2.0 Expo, you can get a free floor pass by registering with this code: websf09hack

Technorati Tags: expo, hackathon, the web, w2e

I’m well aware I need a haircut, a kick in the pants, and a stern talking to. And yeah, there’s some glare on my glasses from the screen. TOO BAD!

Nthmost Twitter Manifesto

What’s great about Twitter is that it’s like a party, and the type of party you’re at is defined by who you’re following, who’s following you, and how you choose to use this platform.

Maybe you’re at a sports party and you’re trading stats, betting on performance, and ordering pizza with weird toppings.  Maybe it’s a family reuniun.  Maybe it’s like a total cafe scene where you’re surrounded by underground art and obscure music.

Mine is a cocktail party. I want to be at a party where I’m engaging in conversations with wicked smart people and learning a lot, sharing ideas, and sometimes just being clever for the sake of witty banter. That’s me.

I share links and post pictures either to start conversations or to contribute to the conversations that are happening around me.  I have strong opinions and I want to encourage other people to have strong [well-reasoned and interesting] opinions and to participate in a discussion through them.

I’m not the type who’s documenting the minutiae of her life. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just not doing that.

I can be noisy sometimes, so you might wanna turn off the mobile notifications for me. I very rarely twitter about where I am, and if I want your attention specifically, I’ll send you a Direct Message.

Finally, I do not automatically Follow people back. I do check out every single one of your profiles, though, to see if you’re having the kind of conversations I want to get into. If you just have 1 message posted and it’s a link to something I’ve seen a billion times… nuh-uh. nope.  Just sayin’.

–Naomi Most, March 14, 2009

Technorati Tags: manifesto, nthmost, theory, twitter, video

Not in the “I’m outta here!” sense, but in the biological cell mitosis sense.

It was almost two full years ago that I picked up a book called “Refuse to Choose”, by Barbara Sher — the first voice I heard that told me it was not just okay but valuable to be skilled, interested, and qualified in more than one thing!  I can honestly say this book changed my life (and you can read more about that in one of my first posts).

However, I’ve lacked for practical ways to reconcile all that I do and accomplish.  You ought to see the trail of half-used blank books and shoeboxes full of ephemera that I’ve left in my wake.  It will take months, possibly years, to sort through it all.  Raw food recipes, kombucha brewing methods, programming projects, business ideas, publicity stunts — you name it, I’ve thrown it into a box and forgotten all about it, sadly.

With my new Okonomiyaki Recipes blog, however, I’ve had a taste of success in cordoning off an interest, creating a concrete project, and producing something at the end of it — something public, searchable, and thus possibly of use to more than just myself.  Now I am hungry for more.

So begins a long-overdue process of creating environments and sandboxes for myself where I can chronicle my strange and varied array of competencies.  Like buying boxes to put your toys in, and special inserts for your drawers so that your socks and undies go in all neat and tidy, it feels really good to have the proper places to put ideas.

My first title for this post was “Fractionating”.  But the sense of chopping my Self into pieces, pieces with only fractional value from the whole, proved inaccurate.

I may be splitting my “personality” and my time and setting up several different blogs.  But really it’s no different from how I was before, constantly shifting my attention between half a dozen projects in the span of a week. I’ll just be documenting it as well.

In fact, because ideas will have places to go, my brain now has “permission” to generate ideas.  Liberty through organization?  It feels good and my mind is already working at top speed.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve been burning my candle at both ends lately.

Thus I am not splitting into smaller, less valuable pieces.  I am dividing (to conquer!) into smaller cells that are equally viable and will grow over time.

As for this blog, I think I will keep it posted at least once a week. The ION drums articles I’ve been putting here will be moving to their own site on “the nthmost network“, my pet name for the multicellular organism I am.  Three more sites are in the works (kombucha, gluten free, and the metablog), all simultaneously.

All at once! It’s really the only way I know how to do things.

ps. holy crap! Amazon is selling “Refuse to Choose” for $4.03 right now.  Time to pick up another copy — my last one never made it back to me.  Not that I mind!  I think it’s being enjoyed.

Technorati Tags: barbara sher, blogging, mitosis, refuse to choose, scanner

So, apologies if the ongoing changes to my theme and layout are disquieting.

And if they are exciting and novel changes, well then, CHEERS!  You can’t displease ‘em all, can you.

Technorati Tags: layout, themes

Technorati Tags: technorati

Here’s some of what I’ve done in the past 30 days:

• Hung out in Salt Lake City
• Developed a love of playing drums
• Lost 10 pounds of fat and gained 5 pounds of muscle — went from 32% bodyfat to 25%
• Took an overnight train trip in my own sleeper car on the Amtrak Zephyr
• Consumed 6 pounds of raw ground bison (not all at once, mind you)
• Made the best mint smoothie EVAR
• Got in a motorcycle accident (I’m fine)
• Met one of only 2 gunsmiths in California, he runs a “camera shop”
• Met a former drug dealer named (no kidding) Aloycius
• Drank 40 different kinds of wine
• Wrote 5000 lines of actionscript code (threw out 3000)
• Wrote 20,000 words of articles, scripts, and reports (kept it all)
• Continued writing a book I started last year, and started 2 more books

…and all types of other crazy crap.

Thanks for reading — better blogging coming soon.

Technorati Tags: drums, wine, writing

And at that moment I realized the main reason why I so rarely feel strong enough motivation to write, and therefore usually choose not to make time for it: I lack confidence in the place that my writing ends up. To put it another way, I’ve never settled into any web space, felt like I fully owned it, felt like I could call it representative of “me”.

Not too strangely, I’m sure, this is a mirror for my “real life”. I have moved about every 2 years of my adult life without really meaning to — just feeling a strange compulsion to “scrap it all and start over”. I’m talking full-on cross-country moves, and in a couple of cases, international.

It would do me good to attempt to stick something out, whether online or in the real world, I think. So I’m gonna set up shop here on my home domain for a while. At least on my own domain I can mess with all the stuff I want and host as much media as I want (well, as much as dreamhost allows).

Technorati Tags: meta

I keep too many photos to myself.

Technorati Tags: honduras, photos, todo

In the past 12 months I went from being a system administrator at a prominent SF open source incubator to a raw vegan chef at a cafe to a line producer for a series of short documentary films to being Producer of a new production company by the name of Little Moving Pictures (Ltd).

In the meantime, I’ve had tons of ideas, which I write down on paper, and I still don’t have an efficient way of transferring these ideas into blog, journal, digital notebook, or whatever format. It’s really a big problem. Maybe I’ll start using OCR or something.  I dunno.  Has to be Linux based.

In a fit of sheer reckless glee, I obliterated all traces of Windows on this Dell Latitude D830 (intel duo w/ Nvidia Quadro NVS) and slapped a fresh Ubuntu on it.  And I’m super impressed!  The only hitches in the install were that I needed to boot in “recovery mode” a couple times to get the video working, because with the stock software it kept booting with a blank screen as it tried to load Xorg, and also the sound didn’t work until I grabbed and compiled the very latest alsa drivers.  I had to apt-get “nvidia-glx-new” and then change my xorg.conf to use the “nvidia” instead of the “nv” driver.  After I got that going, I used the nvidia config panel in X to set up a dual-head configuration.  So I am now using two screens (Twin View) both at 1680×1050.  W00t!  Never been able to get that kind of display going in Linux before (mostly due to ineffective economy-priced hardware).

Oh, and I actually giggled and shed a tear of bliss when I loaded up Firefox to check out the latest sbemail, knowing full well I didn’t have Flash installed, and found that ubuntu’s firefox modifications not only made it a cinch to install Flash automatically, but it gave me options!  Nifty.  Granted, the open source SWF player I took the chance on installing didn’t actually work too well, and I had to uninstall it and go with Adobe Flash Player.  But still, pretty neat improvement.

Ugh!!  THIS is why I don’t blog.  Too much crud in my noodle.  I either have to blog more or be craftier about picking topics.  I suppose twitter is an option…

Technorati Tags: laptop, linux, ocr, xwindows