First impressions last a lifetime. I was talking to my friend Ryan the other evening at Cork-N-Bottle and he reminded me the first time he met me I had a blue-glittered face, a peacock feather hovering overhead, embroidered mirror-vest, and broom-genie pants: Krishna . . . the Embodiment of Pleasure. OK, sure, it was right after Phish played at the Kohl Center here in Madison. And hey, at least I wasn’t the guy who ran up on stage in his birthday suit.
Thinking back about how fun it is to try and keep a straight face while you know, you just KNOW the person you’re talking to is trying their damndest to keep from cracking up. The juxtaposition of ‘serious’ content with comedic context makes for some great laughs. And that, my friends, is no mistake.
I’ve been spending some of my spare time putting up a links/search engine for Mind Space. Now it’s a matter of letting enough people know about it so they can add (useful) links to it.
Detractors come in all shapes and sizes and times and moods. So often I’ll offer up some notion or tidbit to a person I happen to be conversing with, and in a manner than seems to be directly proportionate to familiarity, I too often get shot down, or criticized for the idea. For every idea that gets accepted there are a thousand people who can tell you it won’t work. It’s not like friends and family don’t want you to succeed, they just sometimes just have a difficulty in allowing you to become different than their preconceived static picture of you in their head.
Over ten years ago, when I I became a (lacto-ovo) vegetarian, everyone around me told me how I was going to starve, how I was just doing it for attention, how I was going about it all wrong. Hmmmmm, I don’t feel famished. I know I don’t look famished. What happened?
On some level I am beginning to think that as nice as it is to share things that you are excited about with those around you, it all too often gets rejected or worse, ridiculed enough to stop you in your path. At least that’s the way I am. Maybe a bit too easily discouraged by those around me who might not realize how serious I take their feedback. Yes, I have the ability to carry through with my dreams despite others. And I do. But before you butt in to what someone is confiding you, with a deconstruction of their idea(s), think about how you would feel if it was you doing the sharing of your dream. Think about how important it would be to just LISTEN. Usually most people have the ability to come up with their own solutions anyway. Taking on some ‘helpful’ paternalistic modus operandi does nothing but corral the sharer into making a quick retreat and possibly deciding you’re not to be trusted with such delicate thought-trains ever again.
Congratulations (I feel just a bit cynical, sort of like William Burroughs meets George Carlin):
“You always were a headache
and you always were a bore.” — Burroughs