Cleaning Out My Closet

The exceptionally bold act of cleaning out the bedroom closet can be so liberating.

This past Sunday I set to it, and sent 18 articles of clothing away to new lives elsewhere. (including the rag bag.) Note the "going out" pile.

One item had to be commemorated with a portrait: the jaunty sunglasses skirt, which has traveled with me to many a memorable occasion. Unfortunately the black background has started getting that rusty green cast that aging black fabric gets.

I don't understand why cleaning out a closet, pruning a bit, is so invigorating. But it is. And I was so energized afterwards, I went outside and cut a few branches off of big shrubs, opened the place up to a little more light.









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Ambitious and Feminine

See, it's possible to be both ambitious and feminine. These graceful rambling roses are already to the second-floor of our house. And they're not strident or driven.





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Get Your Message Across

See this yellow-backed vehicle? The owner of this car was seizing an opportunity. Written on the back is a message that says, in essence: okay, while you're sitting in traffic behind me, why not write this phone number down so you'll have it when you need it. The number is for a towing company. I thought it was a fine piece of advertising. I felt as if I was being addressed personally.


(Sorry about the worse-even-than-usual quality of the photography: it was one shot with a cell phone on a rainy day while driving a car with a dirty windshield with hand-painted morning glories on the hood and my arm in the way.)

My own car has a license plate that says SISINDIA for my novel Sister India. But that's really more for fun, for vanity, than anything else.

I'm wondering what other surprising inventive everyday ways there are for a writer/artist/entrepreneur to get his/her message across. Some artists cringe at advertising and self-promotion. Though we vigorously want publishers and galleries to invest heavily in promoting our work. And some madly promote and then pretend to be shy.

To me, to create the work and then decline to help it out into the world is like not taking care of the dog. It's falling down on the job.

So this past week I started running a wee ad for my critique services for writers. Never did this before. It's one of those little boxes on the right side of a Google page, the copy below, but with lines around it.

Get Book Feedback
Intensive Report: Novel/ Nonfiction
From NYT Notable Writer
www.peggypayne.com/service.html

The "NYT Notable" means that Sister India was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Google Advertising wouldn't allow me to use the whole name in the ad because of trademark worries or some such.

So far it has appeared 65,937 times (when someone enters a phrase like "feedback on my novel"), been clicked on 11 times, and cost me $9.59. Haven't heard yet, that I know of, from anyone who clicked it, but we'll see. It's kind-a fun, like having a fishing line in the water.



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Term Paper? Essay? Help Is at Hand

The bad kind of bold: a website called Free Essays that offers 32,000 "Free Essays for All Students."

The student who is eager for knowledge can find a paper on any of a huge and sometimes hilarious selection of subjects. For example: "Plagerism" (sic). And a search for papers that deal with personal courage turned up 317 choices, one labelled Values.

Click on PeerPapers on this site and you'll find an archive of 190,000. "Less Work, More Weekend" is the slogan. Browsers are informed that using one of these papers as a guide is not plagiarism, copying it is.

Type in the keyword "honor," and a list of an even 1,000 essays and term papers comes up. One of them begins: "Why do students cheat? This is an age-old question...."

It's even possible to find a paper on "Why I Want to Become a Nurse." Surely, if one wants to be a nurse, one is the authority on why.

...Though I once knew a man whose first writing success was a grade school personal essay on the assignment "Why I Love the Detroit Symphony." He was having trouble writing it. His much-older sister helped him with it a lot. He won a highly-publicized award for the work. His sister asked him if he had any doubts about accepting full credit. He absolutely did not. He went on to become a respected novelist.

I doubt if his story is typical.

A few other ironic topics in the essay libraries:
Apathy
Critical Thinkin (sic)
The Time I Made a Fool of Myself
Are We More Creative Today
How People Learn

And some charmingly specialized ones:
Slime Molds
Raving Is A Lifestyle
Biotreatment Of Wastewater Using Aquatic Invertebrates, Daphnia Magna And Paramecium Caudatum
Pear Culturing in India
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc.

Visitors are invited to donate papers and to alert headquarters if any papers on the sites are discovered to be of questionable quality.

Custom essays are available starting at $19.95 a page.

Approximately 368,000 google searches were done in April for the phrase "term paper" and over 9 million for "essay."

This rant is making me feel like a back-in-my-day old blowhard. So I'm doing a search for a paper on the hackneyed "old-fart" question: what's the world coming to? All I get was a paper on Mad Cow Disease.

So I look up "hookups" and get an essay: "Is The Traditional Date Dying" It's worth a visit.




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Thinking (and Acting) Outside the Therapy Session

I'm a huge fan of psychotherapy. One stretch of 11 sessions over a few months when I was 32 years old led me to start writing fiction and to get (happily) married. We celebrated our 25th anniversary in December. And, BTW, I married a therapist.

At the same time, I think it's important not to act like the whole world is a therapy group. Both self-questioning (to which I'm prone) and processing every human interaction can get really annoying--and counterproductive!-- if they turn into a full-time thing.

So I was delighted to find a wise blogger who agrees with me: a singer who writes about vivid living. Christine Kane's blog has lots of good lists of tips. Here's item number 7 from "10 Ways to Set a Powerful Intent."



"Move out of therapy thinking and into forward thinking.

Therapy is and has been a great help to many of us, AND it can be easy to get stuck in seeing yourself as flawed. It’s a habit. Therapy thinking says, “I have to get it all fixed before I can move on to better things.” Forward thinking says, “What would happen if I acted in spite of how I’m feeling about my life, or my capabilities?”

When it comes right down to it, we’re all complete train wrecks. Have a little celebration about your own train-wreck-ed-ness (invite the rest of us too), and then move forward, take actions, and learn that it is possible to function well without having figured it all out."


My fellow train wrecks, she's right. My own wise Mom tends to say: "Life is not about getting ready." And: "Do something, if it's wrong." This shorthand does not mean to go rob a bank, it means take some action that would appear to be toward the good and if that doesn't work, modify it or try something else. In other words: rock on!

(And have a Happy Mother's Day today.)






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Bold Roses

Came home from work last night to find that my rambling roses had exploded into bloom. They're very pale pink and they looked spectacular (by the standards of my garden) even in the dark as I drove up.

Last year (first season) they bloomed a little, and then grew like crazy everywhere, up to the second floor, pushing up against a window, etc.

I like their doing this all at once, instead of tiptoeing out, a few and then a few more. It seems both bold and generous.






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Itchy for a Call

Since Monday I've been on the alert for a phone call. Monday is when the itching started. First my head, then an arm...and so on. It took me four days of scratching to think what is usually my first thought about any physical complaint: could this all be IN my head rather than on it?

That thought, as well as a chat at dinner with psychologist/hypnotist husband Bob put a sudden and total end to Itchy-and-Scratchy. The problem was gone. It should always be so easy.

And: I should refrain from using my creativity and magic in this way. There's no end to the trouble I can make for myself. Better to make up novels.

Bob reminded me of a New Yorker article on itching and the mind, aptly titled "The Itch." that talks about how the mind may be filling in info from tiny bits of data: connect-the-dots. Called the "brain's best guess."

My research also turned up someone who itched during yoga, another whose feet itched when she washed dishes, and one who itched whenever her hands were full with two bags.

With me and the business of a phone call, I think it may come down to the fact that I'd rather be active than passive, rather do something than wait. Surely I can find something better to do.

I'm starting to feel a faint tickle as I write this. Must stop now.





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New Flavor, New Law

Four times a day forever, a friend of mine has to drink a tall glass of water with a vile pink powder stirred into it. It's medication.

Yesterday she called the manufacturer, their Customer Service Department, and asked if they would please develop a new flavor. The customer rep fumbled about and then sent her call to the Regulatory Department. They're probably not going to be the ones to add mango or licorice or bubble gum to their stock. But someone may. I wouldn't be surprised.

What I like is her taking the initiative to go to the source and ask for a change. It costs nothing to dial an 800 number and sometimes it works.

By contrast, another friend said to me once, "But it's the law. You can't change the law."

Yes, you can. I covered the NC state legislature for years for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper and on NC public TV. This gave me the opportunity to see that laws are made up, just like fiction except that lawmaking is done by committees. In this country, we elect the committees, and we can go talk to them. See: "How to Lobby a Bill into Law." It's a lot of work, but it can be done. Realizing that is a reminder of how many other things are also possible.




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Creating for a New Generation

Since posting about star designer Philippe Starck, I learned that he gave one of those famous TED speeches, where you give the talk of your lifetime in 18 minutes: a great concept and a great series.

So I went to listen to Starck's TED talk. A little frustrating, a lot inspiring. This man looks at the truly big picture in order to design the humblest objects (he has also designed some pretty grand ones.)

To design a toothbrush, he says, you have to think of the mouth and the species the mouth belongs to. And that subject took him back to the origins of life about 4 billion years ago. The bacteria back then had no idea what we would be like today. "Today we have no idea what we'll be in 4 billion years....Every generation thinks he's the final one."

But we're not the final one, and we're still evolving. So, the job of each of us is "to be a good mutant," and help to create the tools that the next generation will need to do their best for those who succeed them. That's what keeps him working, he says, even when he's designing something as lowly as a toilet brush.

It seems to me that that kind of thinking can take the pressure off. If what I'm doing is just taking the next step, then I'm simply playing my part in a group effort. Starck says that we don't have to be geniuses, we just have to participate.






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One Brave Flower

This year's crop of irises at my house turned out to be a total of one. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, whether it's the increasing shade, the fact that the rhizomes are buried in periwinkles or the wrong fertilizer, but my once lush iris patch has pretty much given up. (And I have divided them!)

Still, this year there is the one bold yellow iris that has the spunk to stand alone.

I just googled this iris and the website I read said it's a pest and told how to get rid of it. I don't need help with making things not grow. I say: celebrate this hardy individual.







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Your Formula for Creativity

The astonishing designer Philippe Starck told Fast Company magazine his formula for creativity: "Every morning, take royal jelly and omega-3 oil, eat oysters, and have a good sexual life. Don't care about anything, and never listen to anybody. Be free."

Do you have a formula for creativity? Mine is show up and write. But I've yet to reach the Starck level of success. Maybe I should rethink.

(Royal jelly is produced by the salivary glands of worker bees and fed to up-and-coming queen bees.)






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The Puppy Portrait

The puppy-in-the-garden-with-Bob portrait is a tradition at my house. I've taken a picture of Bob holding each subsequent pup, but we waited too late to shoot this one.

Aura at 5-ish months weighs about 75 pounds. She may look uncomfortable, but she was fine. Bob, on the other hand, says he's not hoisting any more dogs this size.

Aura will weigh in at about 140 when she's grown. It takes a bold dog person to take on a dog this size. And he already has another mastiff type dog who outweighs me. It's a team of canine Clydesdales.







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Sunlight Shining Through Cobalt blue

Simply because my new novel is called "Cobalt Blue" and I'm in a novel-aggrandizing mood...



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Launch Your Own Adventure

It's Friday, day of the planet Venus, the Roman goddess of love. It's spring. The weather is gorgeous, at least here in Raleigh. So think of a good adventure to launch, large or small, to celebrate the day and the season. (The beauty bush at the edge of my woodland garden is celebrating.)



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Godwinks

I never heard the term before yesterday, but now I'm completely charmed by the idea. "Godwinks" (on Beliefnet.com) encourage courage. How could they not?



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Live at "Dancing Like the Stars"

On Sunday afternoon, Ruth Sheehan, one of my intrepid sisters-in-law, engaged in a public dance competition at the N.C. State Fairgrounds on behalf of children with special needs and the honor of the newspaper industry. She and her dance partner won!

That's her in the pink sequins, as photographed on my phone by her nine year old son Tucker who was sitting beside me at Dancing Like The Stars. She's dancing with Dick Hensley, a dance instructor who performed in the movie Dirty Dancing.

Ruth is a columnist at Raleigh's News & Observer, and she was competing against TV people (accustomed to performing in person). Each of the media contestants had a professional dance partner who rehearsed with her/him for six weeks. Then they all got dolled up like those on the TV show, "Dancing With the Stars" and each couple danced for the live audience.

People could vote on-line, after watching a video of a rehearsal, or at the performance. Votes cost $10 for the first and $1 for any additional. The money went to the Bubel/Aiken Foundation, for programs that promote inclusion of kids with special needs. The show was emceed by Clay Aiken's mother, Faye Parker. (Clay's from here in Raleigh.)

Ruth and Dick got the most votes. No way could a devout newspaper person let a broadcaster win. Never mind that one of them was a former Washington Redskins cheerleader and Ruth has long been known for bumping into doorjambs and the edges of things. But you can't beat a crusading columnist like her; as one of the judges, a waggish Simon Cowell wannabe, said: Ruth, your dancing, like your column was all over the place and leaning a little to the left.

I don't know how much money the children's foundation took in, but I'm guessing it was a fair amount. Because the competition was seriously bold. One 6'5" sportscaster did "the worm" across the stage and jumped over his partner. The dancers went all out, and what a lot of fun it was.... There's nothing like getting fiercely competitive and bold in pink sequins--and for a good cause.




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Dancing Like The Stars

The dancer in pink took action beyond-bold for a good cause on Sunday. More to come on this story tomorrow.




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Never Shake a Baby

Seems like it's either Pickle Day or Fork Lift Operator Month or some such, every time the calendar page turns over.

This month is one we might take notice of: National Child Abuse Prevention Month. Here's something you can do in observance that is so easy it barely counts as bold. But it's important: Go to the site of the Child Abuse Prevention Center and take the Never-Shake-A-Baby pledge, on the right below the kiddo with enormous eyes and a pacifier. Raising awareness of the danger will help to educate and pacify babysitters and parents who have run out of patience.

Here are a few other actions you can take. Intervening in child abuse is truly bold.



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Raising Children Who Shine

"I want their lives to always feel full and purpose-driven. I want to watch them as they continue to sprout new feathers on their wings and as they share their gifts with the world." From the blog of regular contributor Debbie, who writes about her "four angel daughters."

You have to see the photos of "Little Miss Fierce," Angel Daughter Number Four dancing hip-hop. They're as good as hearing the beat of the music itself. You'll want to dance to your own lively beat.

And don't miss what their momma has to say. On an earlier post, she talks about the kind of encouragement she received:

"My dad is a tough man, but he is also an incredible cheerleader. In so many ways, I am who I am because of him. A realist who chooses to believe that we can all do great things.

Strive to do something great. Not perfect, just fantastic."




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Stand By Someone

Take some inspiration from street musicians around the world who "Play for Change." Listen to "Stand By Me." Click on the big screen-filling picture of Grandpa Elliott in New Orleans.



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