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Living Without a Net: An Odyssey into Self-Employment: The Crock Pot Approach to Living

B-friend loves his crock pot. Every time we use this vessel--a standby of graduate students and people with no time to slave over a stove--he makes it a grand event. Several times a month he makes a list of ingredients that will go into his latest concoction. He always prepares the morning before--slicing and dicing vegetables, throwing in spices--some of them frighteningly random, and tossing in some sort of meat before setting the timer on slow cook.

I look in on all that raw stuff sitting there, unconsolidated, in the pot and think to myself, how could this possibly turn out? And yet, every time, as the house becomes fragrant with something that could pass for a special at Chez Panisse, the dish turns out to be the best--whatever it is--I've ever had.

"Man," I say to b-friend. This stuff is amazing!"

"Of course," he says, without laughing at himself. "It always is. It always will be."

I resent his confidence. How can he be so sure that his recipes will turn out brilliantly every time? I cringe when he dumps in what strikes me as an irresponsible amount of Cayenne pepper, or I suck in air as he dumps in a teaspoon of cinammon--something completely inconsistent with a savory dish--"to give it a nice kick." His ingredients don't always make sense to me. And sometimes, I just want the simple, tried-and-true things--a sweet and sour cabbage soup without cumin, or a beef stew without any curry. Yet I can't recall a meal that turned out poorly using his gut-inspired method.

People like b-friend, I realize, who make sumptuous feasts from seemingly incompatible ingredients, and who never question that they will turn out better than Emeril's, have the stuff of true soloists. No matter what--their projects will always turn out.

Everything I Needed to Learn about Business I Learned on the Runway

We're hanging out here on the East Coast--literally doing nothing. B-friend got a horrible cold, which basically means everyone suffers. (Side note: In my admittedly limited experience, illness is taken much less personally by women.) We haven't gotten up yet. That's the thing about the sectional couches with twin recliner ends; we just sort of sit here and change the channel.

What joy that it was a Wednesday last night which meant not one, not two, but three episodes of Project Runway on Bravo. Truly a masterpiece reality show. I never realized how much the fashion world mirrors the corporate world. This show is a better indicator of the ably corporate than The Apprentice.

ThirdAge Blog Carnival is at The New Charm School

Jennifer Warwick has graciously taken on the last stop of the ThirdAge Carnival in 2005.

Of course, stop in for all the goodies, but also take a moment to check out Jennifer's site. I stumbled upon Charm School early this year and found a kindred soul who sees the personal and professional as the same thing. She infuses her posts with her personal experience and sass. I love it!

Professional Blogger--has a nice ring to it

I was at a party on Saturday night, visiting with friends who'd thought I'd fallen off the Earth. It had been a while. I realize I hadn't kept anyone up to date; some of these folks knew I'd left corporate life in January, but they only had a vague sense of what I was doing.

One friend introduced me to someone this way: "This is Jory. She's, like, into the blogging thing."

I felt like a bit of a fraud. Sure, I consult with companies in areas surrounding social media; I co-founded BlogHer for Chrissakes! But, alas, can you call me a blogger?

Not judging by my performance over the past year. I'm an essayist, memoirist, writer. I talk about ad revenues on blogs, cover bloggers in magazine stories, and attend parties with people who have bloody fingertips from being ripped away from their computers for two hours. I hang with a crowd that has to say, before telling me anything private--"This is not for blogging, 'kay?" I went on a business trip recently with Susan Mernit; jetlagged after the first day I crashed early for the night. Before she retired, she squeezed in a blog. Cripes! She's in Hawaii this week and I see she's still blogging!

And let's not forget the critical second half of blogging--reading blogs! I have a personal distaste for self-proclaimed bloggers who write but don't read blogs. That ain't blogging, in my book, that's advertising, or free associating. Web 1.0 in drag.

Hip and Zen Hosts the ThirdAge Blog Carnival!

Ahhhh! Meant to mention this earlier this week. The ThirdAge Blog Carnival is now over at Elisa's Hip and Zen Pen, a traveling show of Health, Work, Money, Family, Life and Relationships content for the Boomer Set. Take it from me...Xers are allowed to crash.

On Listening

I can't remember who turned me onto Johnnie Moore, but the first time I visited his blog I felt like I was in the living room of someone I admired, looking at his library--I wanted to read everything! I got agita just looking at the number of entries he had written under "Authenticity" (86 at the time, now he's well over 100). This man knew something, and I wanted to know if for myself.

When I heard that Johnnie was going to write about Improv as a business metaphor in More Space I felt a great deal of admiration and skepticism at the same time. Having worked at an executive development firm, I saw the disparity between the good intentions of ED managers, who understood that people were too complex to control, and their VPs, who wanted measurable results for the money they spent on this woo woo crap.

Check Out My Lenses on Squidoo!

These are two of my favorite series. I'm creating one for More Space next!

http://www.squidoo.com/Here_to_Autonomy/

http://www.squidoo.com/Relationship_Chronicles/

Chase Visa: Quit Harassing Me!

The sick saga continues...

Last month, I wrote about a fun little surprise I found in my mailbox--and no, it wasn't from the Publishers' Clearinghouse. It was my quarterly credit report, and the first indication that some schmuck has been traipsing about Pacific Heights using a credit card in my name.

Needless to say, if I ever find out who has rung up (now) $8,700 in my name I will press charges. But what can I do to Chase, the banking behemoth who has handled this rather big mishap by criminalizing me instead of figuring out how their system failed?

On Breakthroughs

I have this vision of my life that I've been working toward. It involves a fluffy chair next to a window looking out on a lush, green garden. I've got a book in my hand and a notebook close by. I plan to do some idea generating for a while, then I'll break to cook a new Indian dish I'd attempted for the first time in my cooking class. I make sure I get this time for myself at least once a day, even when I'm traveling and speaking all over the world. I'd maintain a harmonic balance between connection with the business world and my personal creativity.

I suspect that if God made this vision a reality today I'd hear a "poof" and turn into Lisa Haneberg. I'm not sure what formulated this impression. I think I wrote a story once about issues I had with finding the perfect coffee shop for writing and she chimed in. I imagined her in Seattle, in-between consulting gigs, with her Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a latte.

Lisa, save me a chair. Someday I will join you. And we won't have to sit and kvetch the whole time. We can sit in silence, reading and thinking, and occasionally bouncing our ideas off one another. After reading Lisa's chapter in More Space (something I should have done LONG AGO), "Breakthrough Experiences," I was even more certain of this cosmic connection.