Nippy in New York: A letter of apology to Winter

For all of us who have been poking fun at winter - calling it names, threatening it with mid-sized "autumn" jackets and stealing its lunch money on long lunch breaks in the park – we stand corrected. Because it. Is. Here.

And it is frigid. Eye-watering, knuckle-crunching, knee-bucklingly frigid. Walking to the liquor store is like breast stroking your way away from the sinking Titanic toward some distant horizon. Work has never felt so far away. The avenues have turned to arctic tundras. Cafes and bars have turned into oases of finger numbing relief. Tourists are holed up in covered buses and battery park public restrooms like refugees with street-bought hats and gloves and geeky “I heart Ny” fleece headbands. Any food or drink below room temperature becomes obsolete and from coffee cup to change receptacle, the entire city subsists on those red starbucks coffee cups that monopolize public trash cans like red wrapping paper the day after xmas. Christmas lights outside of shops along 8th avenue make you sleepy and nostalgiac, half from memories of December in your hometown and half from the eyeball-piercing cold. You’re sleeping in your socks and sitting on your bathroom floor after a shower until you are 100% dry before facing a cold living room. Morning showers and leaving the house without a hat are completely out of the question. All your outfits go into perpetual hiding and your sense of style on a multi-month sebatacle as you’re cycling through your cosby sweater collection, donning your heinous navy-and-orange NFL knit hats and shoving your canvas sneakers to the back of your closet. After a windy winter run along the east river, you’ll find that your sweat has frozen to your hair at the bottom of your neck. Most of all, the heaps of living quilts that gather in church doorways at night when you pass by create this big, awful crawling in your chest – made up of mostly sympathy, some gratitude and some just plain guilt. Being without a home or that sordid smell of central heating on days like this, let alone nights, is absolutely and stomach-turning-ly unimaginable to most New Yorkers. The thought of bearing that unhappy wind for more than your daily commute makes you outright nauseous as you pass – and the corresponding guilt of not having to makes you turn your eyes away and walk on.

We’re a grouchy bunch on these sub-arctic days inbetween the bearable ones. Even I have stepped on more than one toe pushing my way into a Starbucks door. But in general, its just about layers, layers, more layers and many different kinds of wool. Each of which you’ll know by name after you live here for one winter – lambswool, smartwool, llamawool… I can just hear all of my Midwestern friends and relatives yucking it up while reading this – and I have no excuses. This is one sally-ass southwesterner just looking for a little sympathy. And all I want for Christmas is my two big toes- I haven’t felt them for days!

I’d write more but I…can’t…feel…my…lips….

Miracle on 1st Avenue: The gift that keeps on giving

“Tonight is your answer”. And with that, we chose change. And with that we started change. And with that we felt change.

The streets of New York erupted in celebration. Shrieking, laughing, honking, singing - in jubilant rows of legs and lungs we swept New York and thanked each other. There was no floor and no sky, no edges confining us. The elixir of hope and alcohol made for one huge epic rush as that verdict turned us inside out on the world. All our stories gooping together into one candidate, one word America, one mish mash of the barrel scraping bottoms and red hot victories and bone crushing, sky-stripping loves. Each of us in debt to the next person and paying it forward to the last.

I watched the acceptance speech on my way home alone along First Avenue, edging in to a crowded bar in the East Village where I couldn’t see the television but could only hear the words. The TV could only go so loud so the crowd was self regulating its own volume so that we could all hear. And once he started talking, even the sideways drunks and the out of town indifferents fell silent. A world away my brother listened to the same words that I heard, used the little energy he had left underneath height of radiation sickness and post-transplant cell die-off to walk in circles on the tile of the sealed bone marrow transplant floor, dragging his IV pole behind him. “He’s not feeling great.” Said my mom. “But he’s up”. We may not be feeling great, America, tired of being in arms, tired of problems with no pretty faces and tired of just saying “ok”, but we’re up.
Last week I got the greatest gift I’ll ever receive – the ability to give the greatest gift I’d ever give. We always love our brothers. But they don’t always earn that kind of deep-seated, gravity-defying respect that comes when you watch someone just keep ‘getting up’ like that. They kept telling me I was saving his life. I thought that was pretty funny. As if I could take credit for perfect genetic matches, medical miracles and all the hard, dirty, blood-crusted work he'd put in to survive. I'd just flown in for a weekend holiday at the What-It-Takes-to-Beat-Cancer Motel. I wasn't saving anyone's life, only helping this cool guy (who was still my brother even without eyebrows and eyelashes) save his own. And the pleasure, as they say, was all mine. Its me who should be thanking him. For showing me how to live bigger. Give better. Love wider.


He looks a lot different now. And when he gets better he’ll look different yet again. He, we, will be different. Starting now. And there will be more - more sleepy thanksgiving dinners, more sickening losses and untidy misgivings, more falling-down-the-stairs in loves, more day by day by days of our lives that are both so big and so little. Things will never be the same again. Thank God for that. Its time – for Change.


For transplant patients who have to die before they can live, they call last week Day Zero – your "second birthday". And they count from there. Days and then weeks and then months of your new life. Yesterday was Day 7. And a new birthday for the proper noun we like to call America. Just like radiation sickness, GI tract cell die-off and the effect of chemotherapy on the kidneys, birth is an ugly thing. But beautiful just the same. One week old. And a couple of stem cells later. Let the living begin. Or continue, that is.

Some people on the streets of New York fell over drunk, some flew up in exhilaration, some cranked up the music, some jumped down into the crowds. Some used big words like “hope” some small like “Yes”. Some woke up in soft arms to bright eyes, some fell asleep across windy sidewalks and tapping feet. Some said thank you thank you, some didn’t, but more than just a few of us were grateful. Some listened wide-eyed and wild haired to Obama’s words as they carried across the country, not without their own timbre but simply bringing, in echoes, our own hopes back to us. Me, I just couldn’t stop laughing. “Tonight is your answer”.

The Road to New York Sports Club is Paved with Baked Goods: a Hero's Journey

So I’m going to the gym on a rainy Wednesday. Im already in a bad disposition because a) I wanted to do something outside and its now pouring, b) my umbrella (which cost me some outrageous amount at urban outfitters that only an idiot would pay for an umbrella) is too small to keep me efficiently dry and c) I’ve been denying myself my daily cupcake/cookie/brownie/doughnut/whatever fix under the frivolous pretense that I should try to curb my sugar intake because “its not good for me” (I’d recently read a very silly little article on Type 2 diabetes). I get to the gym with hoards of other post-office-worker-outers, many of whom I recognize from repeating this ritual every Wednesday at 7, to find that the women’s locker room is under construction – we will be changing in a janitorial closet. Its everything I can do to not let this deter me from another confrontation with my archnemisis the treadmill. But after surviving near trampling, potential damage to personal property and multiple affronts on my girlish modesty by the other ravenously stressed-out corporate women in a very small janitorial closet (it may sound hot, but believe me, nothing could be less so), I’m now on the treadmill and at last left to sweat and suffer in peace to Britney Spears “You Want a Piece of Me” (Hey, you all listen to it too when you run. At least I can admit it…).

So I’m settling into the normal spaced out zone (otherwise known as the orange stripe heart rate zone, says my treadmill. I’m waiting for the day your treadmill will be able to give you your cholesterol levels, calculate your risk of cancer and give you relationship advice), when suddenly, there it is, this uncontrolled and pervasive smell wafting through the gym. And it smells like – waffles! Funnel cakes maybe. Carmel corn. Cookies baking? Whatever it is, its some sweet baked little number making everyone in the gym miserable.

You’d think that when you are cranking up the incline on your treadmill and sweating out the balsamic vinegarette you ate for lunch, that waffles would be the last thing you’d desire. Not so. The smell is so delicate and yet so unavoidable, no matter how focused you are on running in place and winning a race against Paula Ratcliffe in your head, you still cannot shake the image of yourself sitting on your couch eating waffles, fluffy and warm from the wafflemaker. Goddamnit!

Glancing around I see I am not the only one fighting off the effects of the smell – there are looks of grave despair on nearly all of the faces around me. A cruel and pathetic scene this one, and one of pure determination. Like a massive army of warriors collectively warring our physical impulses with societal expectations, we run on...in place. But, you know, gloriously in place, like Mel Gibson in armour against a blue screen. The smell suddenly gets stronger as the outside door is helped open for a woman without adequate transitional umbrella skills, whatever it is outside that is so delicious is now practically sitting in front of us you can smell it so precicely and its right about now that we start dropping ranks like flies. With every man down, every ponytailed director of finance who jumps off the treadmill before the track even stops rolling, the rest of us look back at the casualty longingly. I grapple with the smell for 10 minutes more, mentally seesawing from self flagellation to uncontrolled indulgence, until finally, dripping sweat and quite possibly at my ugliest and hungriest ever, I stumble off my human hamster wheel, scoop up my gym bag and race next door to the bakery for whatever they are baking that most closely resembles a waffle. What kind of bakery is open this late anyway? And of course, when I arrive there is a line. I get behind two other gym-deserters I recognize from the janitorial closet.

If you look into this matter, you’ll realize that the majority of New York gyms are strategically placed in a similar fashion – right next door to aromatic “The Best Pizza in Manhattan” joints, delightfully well-lit liquor stores stocked with frosty bottles of Blue Moon, quaint kitchenettes and hearty delis. Many may attribute this phenomenon to New York’s famous variety of shops, food, pleasures and vices all compacted into a very small space that of course ends up being right next door to every local gym...making regularly eating things you shouldn’t just plain convenient and leaving we well-intended Manhattan-ites perpetually pursuing this constantly transforming version of hyper-hedonism while our metabolisms and wallets try desparately to keep up. You can tell I feel strongly about this matter based on the length of that run-on sentence. This is indeed a city where you can have everything you want (from shoes to midnight waffles) as long as you can pay it off…later. Now this mass consolidation and constant availability of all the things you should and should not do onto one island could be the reason that all gyms are next to bakeries, yes. But actually I think its really just a big conspiracy instigated by New York Sports Club to make sure that I never cancel my gym membership as I run off the cinnamon roll I have not yet eaten.

"No Place to Stand": Manhattan on the Move

It was another day in my shiny office, 7 World Trade. Another overcast morning, another sticky subway ride, another jet fuel cup of black tea, another wade upstream through the crowd pumping from the PATH train entrance. For all those who came back to World Trade this morning, it was also "another day" - one that, unlike mine, looked completely and irreparably different. For me, an office building. For them a memorial. For me, a groggy thursday morning. For them a mark on the calendar when everything they knew changed.

When I finally made it through the thickened security and up to my office, I went straight to the window and watched as the sun rose mustard yellow over downtown, sweeping the thick crust of people around theGround Zero fence. I had a perfect bird's eye view of the private ceremony starting below amidst the haggard steel spine and mean-looking cranes of the ground zero construction. Lofted in glass above the scene, it felt almost like I was a nosy neighbor peeping in through the window's at a stranger's funeral. What did I know of this place's memories?

There were huge crowds gathered to hear the city leaders' speeches, family members returning to the site to remember and read their relatives names and relive the pain of that day, all among the buzz of another Manhattan morning, the roar of a anti-government protest outside my building and all of us just creaking in to another day of work. It seems like an uncomfortable, totally unfair and yet appropriate juxtaposition. Pockets of sacred moments never allowed to lie still among the constant movement and muscle of life that continually moves forward, even when we want to stop and grieve for what is lost.

When I sat down to my desk during the quiet of the early morning (anyone who has worked for a digital group knows the office stays uncannily quiet until around 10 or 10:30...) I looked up all the pictures of September 11th on the internet just to try and imagine what this place must have looked like back then. I never saw the world trade centers in person. I only know the look of this place without them and I try to imagine what it must be like now for those who remember. And it's a funny feeling because, although sometimes, late at night especially, you can still feel what happened here, for the most part this place for me has an entirely different meaning and feeling from those returning here this morning. And I got to thinking - its funny how places, no matter what happened there or what they mean to us, unforgivably and inevitably change. That the heart is the best place to keep things…the spirit the best place to let them go. Can New York, can my family, can I…do both?

It seems like a good day to both remember whats gone from these places of ours and also to celebrate re-growth and the perserverence of the human spirit. Most things never remain the same among us - change is the only thing you can count on. But I couldn't be more glad to be changing alongside people that I consider this courageous. People I know in my life, just like those who came here this morning on the anniversary of this day, who 'keep on keeping on'. Showing us, together, just what takes to hold up an entire city ...or an entire family... from the ground up.
Yesterday when I left my building late, Ground Zero was dark in front of the two beams of blue light shooting up from downtown to commemorate 9/11. Looking up at them from way down here where they began, those light beams seemed to be symbols not of the twin towers themselves, steel and glass and magnificent height, but instead of the people who hold up cities, nations, families, marriages, hospital wards...and anything else that needs holding up or prodding on. In that dark instant when I first saw them they made me think of my two parents. Two perfectly parallel beams of light in the lives around them, each one on their own path, never crossing or blending but always next to one another on their way up to where they burst into blue flame of light on contact with an overcast sky. I couldn't see where these spotlights began – and if I could, the site would no doubt look just like regular spotlights, not divine orbs or shooting stars – regular old cheap casino spotlights shooting up inspiration among the construction rubble of human struggle, triumph, cigarette butts, coffee cups and all the rest. But out of this they still create these brilliant lights that are visible to everyone in the city. Near and far, New Yorkers see those lights and they remember that this is their city – our city. Everything from the filthy sidewalks to the gorgeously lit peak of the empire state. Its theirs and they help it to keep on changing, keep on moving, keep on keeping on. The currents of our lives carrying us through these places we wish so hard would hold the water weight of our memories. If they could hold our memories for us, then we could swim back to the way it was, to remember past happinesses, because things were so different then. But rivers leave no marks, no trails, no footsteps in the sand or blood stains on their ripples. You can tread water against the current and look back for them forever or you can keep your feet out in front of you to brace the rapids, the way they tell you to do in river rafting if you ever fall out of a raft in white water. And so I watch the PATH train rumbling rudely and thoughtlessly behind those holding silent vigil amidst the mounds of dirt and construction. In some mean, toothy way, it is just New York's way of giving them what they came back for... "Another" morning that refuses to sit still.

Growing Pains: America's Got Guts

Ok get ready. Here comes # 3,809,899th blog post on the DNC acceptance speech hitting blogosphere – you know I can’t resist!’

It’s ironic that I had written my past blog post about great speakers before I watched Obama’s speech. Quite obviously, he hits all the high notes when it comes to a talented speaker – and I don’t need to paraphrase once more what everyone else is saying about the impact of the speech (that was more than self-evident) nor the terrific tactics of his delivery. But I felt as I watched that I owed this man a blog post. After all: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

It was perfect how I watched it. On cnn.com streaming video the morning after in a high rise above ground zero. Yep. I didn’t even make it home in time to catch the live speech last night. At first I felt like Id committed some kind of treason to the crown punishable by disenfranchisement, guillotined from my own Gen Y, excommunication from my Obama facebook group, or hell, even social media altogether. ME? Miss THE DNC acceptance speech? Or, in the words of a friend of mine when he found out I missed the live broadcast, am I really “slipping”?? But I did watch it. And it seemed appropriate that I’d watch this man deliver this speech of the future under my wide-open, dusky Colorado evening sky at our very own Invesco stadium, while I ate instant oatmeal over ground zero in glassy 7 World Trade and picked up a voicemail from my sister and cousin who had called me from the crowd at Invesco the night before to tell me I was there in spirit.

The man’s got guts. And that really means something. Because life takes guts. Things like families, economies, day jobs, politics, break ups, deficits, careers, international diplomacy and Biphenotypic Leukemia – they take balls. Big ones. But not necessarily ones of steel. Just (at the risk of being graphic) regular, everyday ones. Obama did rise to the occasion – he didn’t leave McCain with any excess praise or unneccessary competitive compliments. Nor did he leave him with too much mud on the old mug – slinging one or two small handfuls of mud is probably healthy for the pure scale of a pending presidential election. He showed that he’s got ‘em. And I like that. Be brave America. GOP republicans like to talk to Americans like theyr are babies. Don’t you wowy, lil guys, big president gonna take care of dem big bad terrorists for you. You just sit back and suckle, hushed sweetly by downloaded videos of Monica Lewinsky and rocked gently to sleep with inactive phrases like moral fiber. No, there was none of that. Which will probably thin the ranks a little by those who, lets face it, just want to have a presidential sugar daddy. Obama even talked about individual and mutual responsibility. This isn’t about me, he said, its about you. Hey guys, this isn’t just my problem. And its not yours either. It’s ours. Now there’s a moral dilemma for you. Government wobbling on the psychological divide between you and I, us and them. The ever-present political pickle – how do we make a thing work for US, both united and divided (depending on the issue). But I thought he dealt with it well – ok, then you do your job. So I can do mine. And We can do ours. Whatever that looks like. Isn’t that just the real kicker anyway. Think about the moral ambiguity of having cancer – well your own cells are turning on you, so we are giving you a medicine that is supposed to kill a part of you but not all and hopefully the part of you that lives is the part you want to keep. When I was sitting with my brother in the hospital while he finally slept through a tremouring fever that visibly shook his shoulders, I told him one thing in his sleep because it was the only thing I could think of to say. And it was similar, in my opinion, to what Obama could think of to say to America yesterday under the sky of my homestate. I said “Be Brave, Alec. Be brave.” What would you have said?

And Obama did say some other great things. It was a magnificent middle class message, aimed tactfully at the hard workers of this country. He said things I liked about education (and would like even more if I saw them in actualization), led an interesting counter-attack on outsourcing strategies, paid simple homage to the Divided We Fall bumper stickers and rhetorically marched steadfastly among middle Americans, never straying too far to the coasts in vernacular or subject matter. He didn’t pay a fleeting compliment to the Nouveau riche, not even a tip of the hat to the Main Line. It was a squared shouldered handshake with the middle managers and the working class. Risky, yes it was. Brave? It was that too. He would have wasted a lot of time trying to make oratory eye contact with all socio-economic segments of America. The results of this election should be more than interesting. Above all the other things Obama said (many of which were both powerful and moving), I liked that he told us to get our s*#t together. Buck up. Face the morning. Because there is no going back now. This is where the rubber hits the road. You can do it at top speed hanging halfway out the window of the passenger seat or you can buckle up and drive. Reverse doesn't work on the freeways of international politics or the 6 lanes of life.

It seems that at this point in my life, I am surrounded by the pain of growing up. As if my number has at last come up and its time to turn in my term paper and freakin graduate. Most adults (who are adults) remember this painful phase of their own, when IT happened and they had to take responsibility for their own lives and not the life they had been “given”. Moving far away, building a life on your own, paying bills, finding that that laws of logic also govern the laws of relationships (and that the Beatles were 100% wrong when they said “all you need is love” - what is that statistic, is it financial discord that causes 70% of all divorces?), watching your parents struggle or someone you love fight hand to hand combat with mortality. It’s like watching Cinderella die an unclimactic (and a very adult) death. Many adults remember the day Cinderella died for them. What’s different is just how she met her untimely end. Was it the wicked stepmother in the kitchen with the frying pan, the prince himself with the knife in the ballroom, or a freak middle aged liposuction accident in the conservatory? However it happens, her fate is inevitably sealed and the screenwriters have really got it out for her, one way or another. She’s like Kenny in South Park. She and her awesome (free) dress, perfect life and flawless relationship. But its not all bad. Once she is dead you can forget about being perfect. And start focusing on being brave. Thats where the real change, the real growth and the real good stuff happens. So maybe that is what Obama was asking of America last night. Maybe he’s asking us to just grow up at last.

Mathematics and Metaphors: What Makes People Listen?

My job here in New York is all about listening. And those of you who know me well know that listening, being the antithesis of talking, is not my strongest suite. As my work now requires that I do so more frequently, I’ve been doing a little more listening than usual. Now, as someone who works out life’s issues verbally instead of cognitively, I found to my surprise that listening occasionally leads to thinking. And thinking hard. This is all just to say, “so I’ve been thinking”…

about what makes people listen-worthy. They say in presentations, the audience will remember some miniscule percent of what is said – some 5 or 10 minutes of a 1 hour presentation. What material gets listened to and, better yet, what delivery can make plain material worth listening to?

I’ve met people in life who are great speakers. And most of those great speakers are also great people. Which makes sense simply because being a great person, thrown in with a little sing-songy syntax and a subject the speaker really cares about, is just plain compelling to other great people, as well as people who are good people looking to be great…you get the point. So I’ve been thinking through these people I’ve met – my parents both more than qualify, a political leader here and there (I like the way Obama has turned “Hope” into more of a verb than a noun), as well as this New York City spiritual leader I’ve been following named August Gold, my friend the master of mutual inspiration Simon Sinek, and a few others I’ve met along the road. Another one of these people came to our offices this morning and as I found myself yet again mysteriously, well, actually listening, I started asking myself why. I was sure it didn’t have everything to do with just how white his teeth were or the way he referenced his eight-year-old son in a conversation about business communication. No, there was surely something that all these people whom I enjoyed listening to had in common. A common trait, trick, knack or know-how that made me pay attention. I’ve decided the answer lies in two things:

1) Gravity. Good speakers have gravity. When they come into a room and sit in front of you they really sit there. And you can feel Newton’s second law at work on you. This seems frivolous and, well simple, and it is. But to get a commitment from a listener to listen the speaker must first commit to, literally and figuratively, sit with the listener. The good ones can sit with large groups of people even. When someone approaches you with a weight and a presence, being with only you for that whole half an hour instead of with their horrible mother-in-law, their cross-dressing Austrian burlesque dancer/ lover or their breakfast….People worth listening to can somehow sink to a sublevel below that frequency at which most people operate hovering above the ground, buzzing from apartment to office, lover to coworker, project to project, struggle to bliss, all just a foot’s length from the ground but never quite touching down.

Most of the successful people in the world learn quickly that life isn’t that condusive to growing “roots” – the minute you root yourself somewhere and say “this is forever”, your life goals change, your dog runs away, your career path takes a mean right turn into the trees, your supposed life partner leaves you for a (much prettier) Minnesotan, or someone steals your doormat. That’s life -you can sign in blood but there will always be a plasma-proof legal loophole. Great speakers, though, these really great speakers Im talking about who are usually at the same time really great teachers and leaders, they manage to grow roots everywhere for whatever temporary period of time. Every relationship, every conversation, every project, every moment, they grow roots. It takes lots of extra effort, risk, vulnerability, time, loss and an extraordinary amount of trust in strangers. But for those who can do this, those who can touch down to the ground and bring a gravity, a realness to their conversations, they are always listened to. Because others know that when those with gravity talk, they talk from the bottom up. Not just from themselves as a business executive, an entrepreneur, a mother or an underpaid divorcee from Kentucky, but as all these people, as themselves. You see how I try to explain it and can’t with any words other than one? Gravity. You’ve met these people too. You know what I mean.

2) Metaphors. Good speakers and teachers make all subjects into familiar, tangible metaphors. This includes things like unusual and interesting phrases of speech (such as “kick him out of bed for eating crackers” or “5’2” soaking wet and hanging from a pole”) to break up boorish business babble. Every day metaphors that simplify and domesticate complex, intimidating subjects. Personal anecdotes that reminds the listener, you and I are just the same, just people trying to be successful at both life and business. This is where speakers break what I call the B2B barrier – a business to business suit and tie conversation turns into two very real (last time I checked) people who happen to be in business and are having a conversation. The web is conveniently mimicking this move – businesspeople are now connecting via facebook, high-brow executives are making themselves vulnerable to the masses with informal, stream-of-conciousness and (gasp!) open-for-commentary blogs, Gen Yers are pouring into the business world with new expectations around work-life balance and it all converges in one crashing, match.com-meets-linked-in virtual reality online called web 2.0. However comfortable or uncomfortable this may make the aristocrats of an old-world school of business, its happening. So that even the most traditional executives might want to have a snazzy headshot and favorite movie quote ready for their next product release or webcast. Not sure if you got the memo – but if you’re the CEO of a company, part of your business’ brand is your brand. If not your blog then your management style, if not your own social community then your vision and your visible purpose for being in business at all. What you are all about defines what your business is - and its getting easier for the world at large to see both you and your company. If you don’t believe me ask Google.

And this is what makes good executives like my mom, great. Not only are they sharp, strategic, efficient, managerial and articulate, they are personable. You can relate to them. And they speak in a language you understand, they can storybook a business plan better than Hans Christian Anderson could cannonize socio-economic dynamics. How? Its all about the metaphors. Stories. A way of approaching things that harken back to our childhood days. Stories that carry real meaning for us, about life and love and death and families and money and sunday baseball games and all that riffraff. (What is life anyway if not a series of different stories, all of our stories, told and retold in all different forms?) Suddenly "Return on Investment" turns into "Would you rather spend eight years doing something you hate for the title that you want or spend eight years holding titles you hate doing all the things you love." Get it?

You’ll notice also that these metaphors are never boring – they touch on something that the producers of Gossip Girl have down pat –namely that if you are writing a speech and trying to think of a metaphor, if at all possible, choose one with the most amount of blood, sex and scandal. It has a better chance of making it into that 5 minutes of material that the audience retains.

Overall, I am in utter admiration of these people who have this skill. The business world, and (case and point) the world at large that so informs the business world, needs more of them. My dad always says “life is all about showing up.” This is true on so many different levels –showing up at all, showing up authentically, showing up for others when you are needed, etc etc. And so to all those who are aspiring great speakers, teachers, leaders...a brief public service message from a recent listening convert – if you want people to listen, you’ve first got to “show up”. And when you do, make sure you show up as yourself.

Putting the "Heal" in "Health": Life Lessons Learned in Whole Foods

I take vitamins now. Yep, I am now one of those people. Those vitmin takers, those, worker-outers, those I-Can't-Believe-Its-Not-Butter-ers. I am that 16th girl in line in my work-out clothes at a crowded Whole Foods in New York City, waiting to buy a salad, a tub of yogurt, all-natural cookies that taste a bit like the lipstick I ate out of my mom's makeup drawer when I was 5, and a multi-vitamin that costs more than all the rest of it added up, not to mention the last DVD I bought. But all that does not matter because as I get closer to the cashier, I am feeling oh so trendy and healthy. All I need now is a good self-tanner (real sun would scramble my DNA and comprimise my current temple of health)... I look around at all the other aspiring healthy people in line around me, eating salad instead of ribs, buying all natural deoderant instead of lady speed stick, flipping through gluten-free cookbooks, tapping their feet impatiently so they can return to their Grammercy apartments and pop in their favorite yoga DVD, and I can almost hear their collective thoughts ringing down the line "Less trans fat, more crunches, gym tonight, bar tomorrow, no you canNOT have that, chapstick with antioxidants, thank God they finally thought of that." I turn my multivitamin over in my hand and remember why I ended up here in the first place looking for a superwoman multi-vitamin.

“Hi” said my brother.
“Hi, how are you, how are you feeling? Chemo today? More tests? Are you walking much, whats up whats up?” bumbling idiot. Stuffing his head with questions wont help him forget that he has cancer, Kate…
“I’ve been better.”
“Oh. Right. Yep.”

A girl next to me is talking loudly to her friend while trying on a too small, cosmopolitan-red Theory dress in Bloomingdales. “Why does this make me look so fat? My shoulders are huge? What shoes should I wear, they have to be the right color” Her face looks so pained that the desire to to shake her and say “yes but do you have leukemia??” passes and I go back to simply recognizing that familiar feeling I see in her face as she surveys herself in the mirror. A girl in a pink dress passes behind me toward the BCBG section, dragging her tortured boyfriend behind her. The mimes of everyday trifles, troubles and insecurities pass by me in the form of all different colors, materials and lipstick colors. Bloomingdales. A watering hole for the unfulfilled. And here I am in my usual spot among all the usual suspects under all the magnifying mirrors desparately inspecting my external imperfections in order to neglect the internal ones, buzzing from dress to dress...while my family watches the hospital parking lot empty car by car as they wait for my brother's bloodcounts drop into neutropenia (which is supposed to be a good sign).

“So the bad news is this second chemo treatment isn’t working they way it needs to. They are starting me on a new regimen.”

Heart hitting the floor and I am pounding on God’s (whoever that is) door and screaming profanities before slipping back to earth and sliding down the wall of Bloomingdales, taking a $500 dollar silk dress with me. I consider tearing it to pieces with my teeth and tying it around my forehead while the sky falls in sharp little pieces around me. Grief is 100 times sharper when you're not the one whose loosing something. You're just here to watch. Nothing. Makes. Any damn sense.

“Ok.”
“The good news is – you are a bone marrow donor. A 10 for 10 genetic match.”

Merry Christmas, Kate. You’ve been a very good girl. Well, most of the time anyway. I know you asked for a Barbie mansion. Then a pair of rollerskates. Then a red iPod. I know you really wanted that red iPod. But this year, I thought you might like the chance to save your brother’s life. We don’t give many people this kind of gift here at the North Pole, as you can imagine. But I guess you earned it. Well, he did anyway.

They say the scar over his heart where they pulled a blood clot the size of a baseball out of his stretched atrium in a record 17 minutes (the biggest one they’d ever seen) is healing nicely. He hasn’t lost his hair yet, despite the battery of chemo drugs charging over his immune system, scything through his cells like pirates through a victim crew (except these are supposed to be the good guys). Its hard, they say, to look at him, at his current life sealed inside a hospital room without white blood cells, locked in an epic battle for but against his own body, without, well, crying. Or hating God. Or...something. He doesn’t wimper, my brother. He never really did that, not even when we were young. His is an ever-so adult struggle with an oh-so-adult life challenge. But oh do I want to whimper for him. Throw a fit against the unfairness of life and beat my fists on the table of whatever celestial monarch pointed to him and said "You. Leukemia. One year. Take him away." Those fits turn out to be for my benefit only. He just doesn't need my kicking and crying. No hero ever needs to be cried over. Only your sincere belief in their victory. This I can also give him. Along with a couple of stem cells.

Maybe someday that heart scar, along with the four other angry scars on his chest from various drains, chest tubes and biopsies, will barely be visible. Someday he’ll be able to distantly retrace his steps through hell, high water and late-night, perpetually well-lit hospital wards only via those scars as they happily fade. But I hope they never completely disappear. Because that’s what they are. Heart scars. People keep saying “things will never ever be the same”. Cancer or not, when do things ever stay the same anyway? I had a brother that I knew once. But this weekend, I’m taking my multi-vitamin and I’m going home to Colorado to meet the new one. I hope he likes me. Because I love the hell out of him.

So about this Whole Foods line. "Thinner, happier, prettier, cleaner, higher, firmer, purer, fresher, better, faster!!” Webster’s definition of healthy-“enjoying health and vigor of body, mind, or spirit”. Where is the whole foods aisle for mind and spirit? Is there an all-natural mineral oil for that? We health nuts, (from Boulder, Colorado or not) spend so much time saying No to ourselves. Maybe we just need to say Yes to the right things. And if we stopped saying No so often…that might be easier. Saying Yes often enough to remember how good Santa was to us this year, - these great legs (ok maybe with a little cellulite here and there) to stand in this endless line with. And the appetite to want that delicious, humongous chocolate bar at the checkout. I think I’ll skip the gym tonight, maybe walk home instead.
I put down the Lipstick-cookies and back away slowly. Then slip the chocolate bar in my basket next to the bank-breaking multi-vitamin. Viva la Revolución.