Raindrops on Roses

In New York, and in life in general, when it rains, it pours. In the city where anything is possible, everything suddenly becomes impossible (getting a cab, getting delivery, getting your groceries home, getting a life). Thus, its the perfect opportunity to stay up late alone in the dark, let the central heating out through an open window, listen to the cabs slosh down first avenue and feel the minutes of your life go slowly by.

I've been in New York for two years now (and like a true New York patriot, I was far too busy to realize or celebrate our anniversary together). Each day here has been blended like a Kandinsky painting, circular in the patterns of living out loud and then working overtime to quiet down, or at least until the morning sheen of self awareness wears off once more. This morning -- suddenly and unexpectedly -- I became aware of the passing of time.

The hair that I had cut short and sharp well over a year ago and has miraculously seemed to stay that way, suddenly looks like it has grown an inch. My bedroom smells like my T-shirts and residual chamomile tea instead of the peeling paint and borrowed furniture of my early twenties. My apartment, or at least the part of it I preside over, looks a lot like my mother's kitchen and I get the itchy and strangely electric feeling that I imagine she must get also when I clean it maniacally-- allowing a momentary, secretly profound grasp on my own tangible existence and impact on the empirical world perhaps? Words, like marriage and career and income, that have been for most of my life distant orbs of cosmic mass barelling toward me through space that wont reach me until after the sun runs out of nuclear fuel, becomes a red giant and swallows the universe...have overnight become more like very real words that can be found next to my alarm clock at 7am that demand to be both respected and feared.

But most of all this morning I realized that I was afraid to live my life forever as it is now and equally as afraid to make any change at all to it. The very distinct welling of fear that collected in my esophagus when I thought of the countries I would like to trek through, the writing I'd like to do more of, the new city I would like to live in, the inspiring companies I'd like to work, for was enough to make me stop and notice myself, there running on a treadmill called New York City, which was itself rattling in the bed of a pick-up truck on the Interstate which was...my life. And that was the moment when I caught time red-handed walking quietly through my life while I was busy burning dinner in the kitchen. And when it saw me looking back at it, it stopped dead in its tracks. Until I closed the window against the rain and went back to loudly sorting silverware.

Do Unto Others....

At sunrise in New York on a Sunday, they own the city. Quietly of course, they move with their faces toward the dawn. They, who seem invisible among the late afternoon brunchers and the rabid weekend shoppers who hoof through union square, now step out in the wee hours of the morning to show all their colors and walk the pale yellow streets. Very old men walking very small dogs and even older women walking their walkers and baskets on wheels. Young bright-eyed Latin American immigrants disappearing into the back doors of bakery kitchens. Sleepless artists who read folded newspapers as they walk. And of course, the hooded, plodding weather-torn homeless who are on the move at the first smell of the sun.

Its a hard life being homeless. Even in the nicer shelters, you are getting up before six every day. Carrying what little you own and making your way around your life as an eyesore to the rest of the world, unless you can manage, as many homeless do, to make yourself look somewhat presentable with what you have. There is no sleeping in. No speaking out too loudly. No morning television, no private urination. And, if you want to keep your temporary place to sleep at the shelter, no wine on a Saturday night. No one to really talk to about the memories that make you just as much of a real person as any of the rest of us. And while you are at it, please, try to refrain from talking to yourself...because not even you are listening to you anymore. If any of these requirements seem too inconvenient, you're more than welcome to pitch a tent against the icy winds of the east river with the rest.

Its 7:15am on the morning of SuperBowl Sunday. I'm on the M15 bus heading home from the shelter, with a small array of the otherwise invisibles I described earlier. As I pass 41st street going south, I see a lumbering figure with a small briefcase bag. A sight that, like the rest of the invisibles, would rarely catch my eye, even if it wasn't the only moving thing on this deserted Avenue in midtown. This morning though, I turn to catch a glimpse of the face to see if its one of our guys. I try to wave from the bus window, but John doesn't see me with his head down against the wind.

His name is Michael. "You pronounce it Mikah-el." he says. "My sister named me and thats how she used to say it." He's a stout, wide black man with a very well shaped head and closely cropped hair. His eyes are liquid and his skin shows only a few craggy marks of homelessness. A finely-shaped nose and a clean blue collared shirt. The most marked underbite I think Ive ever seen, with thin narrow teeth that are at least one whole tooth's length away from one another. But however Barracuda-esque that whole rig might sound, there's something rather pleasant about him. His eyes arent angry like many are. His mannerisms are far more open in nature than the rest. Strangely, homelessness hasnt seemed to turn him in on himself...yet. And he genuinely seems to like simple conversation. I guess you cant talk like that about usual stuff with some of the guys at the shelter. Because homeless life, well, isnt that usual.

Seeing three of us drinking orange juice at the table --two of us volunteers and one of the other guys who was feeling remotely social--he sidles over and slides in to the cafeteria bench. He's open-faced at the prospect of conversation, even with some spoiled rotten overnight volunteers here to work off some unspoken catholic guilt and then go back to their beds in the morning to sleep it off. He smiles with his his barracuda teeth and says nothing. I try to sip my orange juice but scoot it away when I notice the smell of feet that is filling the room from the already sleeping men around us. We are talking about South Florida. One of the guys, a small, thin guy with scarred skin, a bald spot and a big black handebar mustache, is talking excitedly about his time in the everglades and all the reptiles they would pull out of hte boat's engine when they docked after a boat ride. I am making a face and expressing my distaste for the creatures. I start to tell a story about the rattlesnakes in Colorado but realize before I get too far that the handebar mustache guy (I never caught his name) wants desparately to tell another story. I fall silent and go back to showing the utmost interest. He has long, thin, pale hands that shake violently as he holds his juice and they shake even more now as he waves them in the air in the midst of the next story.

Mikah-el listens pleasantly with his bottom teeth out and his head to the side. Then he opens his mouth and says in a barrio-thick, Southern accent "When I was a boy in North Carolina, grow'n' up near the border," his pleasant expression deepens as his mind revisits the memory, "Y' ever heard of a mulberry tree?" We all nod our heads, picturing this man as a young kid in the hot, wet woods and fields of the Carolinas, running under the big furry canopy of the swaying mulberry trees. "Big ole trees they are. My Daddy used to take our hunting rifle and..."as he says this he points an arm out as if to aim and closes one eye "and shoot snakes right out of the trees. One, two, three just like that." We are all quiet as he continues, "When I got old enough he took me out and showed me how to use the rifle, how to hold it. It was too big for me 'course and I couldnt never go huntin' with him or nothin. He was dead before I was big enough and my older brother never wanted to teach me to hunt any big game. So I just used to bird hunt with this ole bbgun we had, you know, but there aint enough meet on those things to feed nobody. Anyways, I still tried to practice with that rifle, tryin to shoot them snakes out of the tree branches like Daddy usedta. One, two, three just like that. Never got too many of 'em."

Pause and he's back from his memory to look around that we were all listening. "One day I was out in the field with a sickle, you know cuttin the weeds back, back and forth" he makes a sweeping motion accross his body, turning his wrist at each turn of direction, "And I suddenly saw this big ole rattlesnake coiled up in the weeds. I didn't even think, I just hacked at its head with my sickle, you know how they say to be sure to get the head off first, just cuttin at it like crazy. Maybe it was a'ready to strike, you know, but it made me think o'it when you said" (nodding to handlebar and referring to a little known fact that he had asserted earlier) "that rattlers could strike the length o their body. That sucker was, you know, like right there gettin' ready to strike.I woulda been, well..." With that, he takes a bite and munches on a piece of bread with a slice of American cheese from his styrafoam plate, his eyes still bright and lilting around at us.

After finishing a discussion on hunting, through which I keep my tummy turning disapproval to myself, we move on to gun and carrying laws in different states. My fellow volunteer, Dave, from upstate new york metions that new york just passed a law that you had to conceal your weapon if you wanted to carry it - that its illegal to have it in a visible holster. "Now whys that?" asks Mikah-el. "Im guessing that they judged it too provoking to have it showing" I say matter of factly as I tend to do when Im bullshitting about a subject of great interest. "Oh, yes yes, of course." He responds thoughtfully. Dave and handebar are now off on a heated discussion of gun laws and rights and the like, and, feeling that the conversation was getting too close to gun-toting self reichiousness for my taste, I feel it time to interject a small point of likely disonance. Mikah-el encourages me on without knowing it through his wholly-interested, genuine look of non-judgement. "Well I know that in Colorado, where I'm from, there was a big fuss about concealed weapons and liscence laws after Colombine." Mikah-el looks concerned in a childlike way at the mention of the massacre. "They blame the guns but they dont blame the parents" retorts Dave without looking at me. "Well I think you can probably blame both, dont you think? I mean with nearly 20 kids dead, I dont think anyone in our state would have been satisfied to blame upbringing alone and leave accesibility to guns as it stood before the shooting." Handlebar looks mystified and Mikah-el nods open-eyed. Dave ruffles, "well when your kids walk around looking like goths and dress

I know Im becoming heated when my nose starts to tingle from the rush of blood (I always blush when Im angry). But, given that I am sleeping here tonight on a cot with 16 of these guys, I verbally withold the hot reprimand I was giving him in my head and from announcing that I too dressed like a goth at some point in high school out of the pure pain of not being accepted. More precisely, it would have come out like "Well I used to dress like that, and you are definately right, because I personally have shot a lot of people as well." Instead, I say "More than that, no one factor could be an isolated incident, especially considering how alone those kids must have felt. I think the moral of the story is just be nice to everyone." I force a laugh and look around for the judgement I feel sure is already in their faces. I see it in Dave's but mere thoughtfulness in those of the other two, which, as two men of the street, suprises me. "It was a cry for help" murmurs Mikah-el, almost inaudibly with his eyes on his sanwhich plate. "Just havin' some'ne list'n, I guess." There is a momentary silence among us. Looking at these two guys holding their styrafoam cups and staring down in thought at a cafeteria table in the basement of a church turned into an overnight shelter in the cold winter months who are now silently thinking about those two guys at Colombine and everyone they hurt, my anger at Dave disappates and looks stupid next to a subject of this importance. Loneliness. Isolation. Underestimation. Neglect. I know they get it like a slamming door.

Dave takes his plate and starts in on clearing the table. I lean forward "You know what I think? I think that everyone that does something horrible to others, every act of violence or mean or terrible thing someone does, I think that if you look back you will always find that someone has been mean to them. Its like a chain, you know? Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. Sometimes it might just be hard to look back far enough into someone's history...you know?" They both nod. Mikah-el sits back in his chair with a heartfelt, gentle look on his face and looks at me forlornly. Handlebar's hands go on trembling as he weaves his fingers together in front of him on the table.

I continue. "Most people that do bad things are, well, really..." I pause. "Hurting." says Handlebar.

Clocking in.

It’s a slow sunrise over New York. A very dirty, acidic sunrise backlit by early morning winter clouds. I’m one of the first few to make it to the office. There is work to be done today. Meetings to attend this morning. Deliverables to be attended to this afternoon. Action items on a notepad next to handdrawn checkboxes. My sleeves smell of hand-me-down clothes and canned fruit from the shelter that I couldn’t hand out quite fast enough at 6am this morning. I fold my powdered sweatshirt and twist up my hair so that you’d really think I belong here in my office. At my job. ‘I have a job’ I tell myself in the mirror and immediately feel grateful. For a moment I feel a wave of strangeness, something near guilt, first kind of like I’m cheating on my job by helping to feel those who don’t have one and then as if I’m cheating on them by having one. Either way, I take these first few minutes of the morning to run my cold hands under the cold water. Wake up and move to the next chapter. Next chapter of your day. Next chapter of your life. Next chapter of you, when no two are ever the same and someone keeps putting twists in the plot. Here in my cubicle slowly applying hand lotion and watching the manhattan skyline open its blinds for eyes, I feel as though I’m reading it in third person. Just for a moment. And I…love…everything about the silence. Here where I can hear my heart make jokes on the corner of my 20’s as it waits for the next “walk” signal. There’s only a few minutes to dilly dally. A few minutes to fill my teacup, wash my hands. A few minutes of clear, uninterrupted writing up here where the air is clear and behind glass to reflect and get settled in my own life. I dream of someday finding true independence…which might actually be the realization that I am completely dependent on the entire world at large. On a grueling New York city Tuesday morning in winter right around rush hour with less than a few hours sleep for any of us on the subway cars, you can be sure that this heart ain’t tired yet. The lights are coming on in offices. I can hear the printers warming up on the morning’s first expense reports. Nobody has asked me any questions yet but I’m waiting in peace until the first one comes. I’m finished with my tea and feel soothed by the light of my screen and the unopened documents. Just two more seconds more and I’ll be ready to start.

A little bita loan, a whole lotta love

Spent a fantastic Saturday night, frigid and blowing as only new york (well, ok maybe Canada too) can make 'em, in good company at a fundraiser with Kiva.org's new New York chapter. If you haven't checked out Kiva yet, do so...they are the most interesting thing going this side of the Atlantic...and the other side...too....

Person to person, intention to impact, concept to community, these guys actually know the world well enough to change it. Microfinance is as popular as faux leather leggings these days - but for good reason. The smallest loans are making the biggest of impacts on the lives of entrepreneurs everywhere - and their communities follow in their wake. Anyway, I felt they deserved recognition on these pages for attempting the impossible - putting third world development in the hands of...the third world. After all, compared to most charities and international causes, a microloan is imply gift with high expectations. Anyway, worth checking out.

Peace out (and I mean that)

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Marketing: Are you Feelin' It?

I started in marketing because I needed some way to fund who I was, or who I thought I was. Back then it was something to bide my time until I ended up on Oprah. Something that made you dress up for work, write on whiteboards and watch your language. Something that meant charts and graphs and my address next to a customer ID along with all the different kinds of hair products I'd ever bought. Something that meant a lot of bad coffee, conference calls where you never said anything after announcing yourself, and words like 'investment' and "return" written all over your soul, and on the backs of peeled off soft drink labels. This is what I pictured when I first got my own direct line and I was determined to resist the slide shows of death. Of course I was partly right, but most of the way wrong.
Because marketing is all about little post-college, secretly-insecure, intellectually-impetuous brats like I was. Its also about working mothers with kids they love more than their jobs. And bridge-playing retirees from Arizona. You get the idea…
What I finally got after a little time doing it was that I wasnt to be warping myself to please marketing. Marketing should be warping itself to be me. To know me, to meet me in the middle, wake me up at night with new ideas and give me the products that helped me act myself out. Me and everyone else in the world working a 9 to 5 who really wanted more – from themselves, from their lives, from their spouses, from their time.

Now. Marketing has done a great job. I own jeans that cut off the circulation to my thighs that I fit into by eating food without MSG precisely when my blackberry tells me to eat it. Honey, Im a walking loyalty indicator. A living, breathing consumer behavior statistic that matches up perfectly with my value set, as well as the spending trends in my target demographic (x axis) cross referenced with my metro area(y axis). So if Im so predictable (and in general, I am) along with a large majority of the rest of the country, then why haven't marketers found a better way to influence my behavior around a what most of us humans actually do care about (which is more than you can say about hair color)…each other.
We've heard of corporate social responsibility and most of us own a red product- but what I'm missing here is the feeling of knowing and being connected directly to another person whose day or entire life is a little bit better because I decided to do business with this company. Take that GAP. For those of us who dont get out to volunteer much, this (and the spiced eggnog) is the familiar feeling that makes the christmas season so great. Once again, you can thank holiday season marketers for helping to encourage us to look at each other a differently during the month of December. With just a little more compassion. A little more benefit of the doubt. A little more, oh I dont know, just general good will. But it’s hard to have good will toward an improper noun. Where are the people here? And if you have so much of yours and my money to give them, why can’t I talk to them?

Excuse me Apple, but when I bought my red ipod I did not hear any songs written by AIDs survivors in Botswana. When I get my coffee I dont get a postcard from the free trade coffee farmers - I dont see them on my coffee cup -- nor do I see the animals in the rainforests who would be saved per year if Starbucks would make its cups recyclable! If marketers want to influence my decisions, start with me ("check”, says Apple), then someone who I might want to help. And if you really want my repeat business, brand loyalty and twitter references, then somehow make feel actually connected to them in a more tangible way. In the world of Web 2.10 and beyond, we must be able to connect people better than we used to. Even in countries with limited web access and completely different lives. Surely there must be something to put a face to the names of all the millions of people I’ve supposedly helped with my product and non-profit investments.
People care about people. And to care about people you have to know about them, and a little more than their statistics. I cant wait for the day when you can give a $30 microloan online (thank you Kiva.org), have the whole of it go directly and traceably to a microentrepreneur who updates me on her progress via facebook. Impossible you say? What if the operational costs were covered by a big brand’s marketing department in exchange for my loyalty and the internet access was hosted by a Microsoft CSR social media site. Naïve? Probably. But oh the possibilities!
I will say this (and get back to work). If there was a brand or product out there that allowed me to do just that, I would buy it, tell me friends about it, and wear it’s T-shirt under a sport coat with pearls. I realize Im not everyone. But almost everyone can relate to that good feeling of having meaning in someone else's life. A product can help you do that through its own basic function (think Johnson & Johnson), but a brand can help you do that beyond what their selling and more toward what you're buying. Now that the internet has stripped advertisers of their mass marketing monarchies by educating the consumer like never before on just products themselves, what exactly are you buying these days? Products or promises? I choose promises and I expect you, big brands of the world, to keep them. If you want to know how, just give me a call or a job. I reckon that we, the consumers of the world are willing. And the world is waiting.

Boston Cream Dream

A brisque, blustery Monday morning commute and New York seems too sleepy to notice itself. I’m on the very edge of myself, eyes open and making every street mine. For the first time in weeks, I notice my own breathing and I feel ready for the day, for the week, for the everyday task, for the…moment. I skipped my pre-planned, pre-packaged breakfast in favor of the donut cart. A donut cart that sits right outside my office – I normally walk by it every day with my head down, having consumed a very calculated, cost-efficient and healthy breakfast with the occasional exception of those really painful, come-to-soon mornings that happen sometimes. Always, when I do default to the cart, even when I order, I keep one earbud in to block out the noise of the world. The guys inside are always nice and smiling – and they always give me 25 cents off. But when I stop there it’s almost like some kind of mini failure representing my entire life and career- failure to plan, to watch what I eat, to resist un-meticulous impulses, to spend a limited amount on breakfast. Today, the wind is out on the town, kicking up skirts and driving up hair like a kid on a sugar high, and I feel right there with it… moving alongside instead of towards the long months of winter and work ahead represented by my sleek black office building. It, by the way, looks rather shiny and nice today. (If it were a person, I think I would tell it so.) I’m not waiting for my future today. Not today. I’m living in it. When people ask what I want to do, I say I want to help people. Its not really that simple…but then again it is. Today I don’t ask myself any questions, like other days. And I refuse to give answers. What are you doing with your life? What are you doing for the world? Why are you doing X, Y and not Z? Your hardest does not change the world, why are you not trying harder? No comment. Cuz I’m still writing the press release. Today, I take both my earbuds out. I say “how are you doing” and I mean it. I order a Boston Cream. They say smiling “we havent seen you in a while. Good to see you” (and I believe they mean it). $1 instead of $1.25 today. Big smile. “Have a great day”. Oh I will. Its no Mahatma Ghandi. Its no sustainability in Africa. Not today. Just one, small, happy exchange and a Boston Cream. But maybe on some microscopic, low-frequency wavelength – the world felt it. Maybe not. But I will say, this one hell of a Boston Cream.

If you've never seriously considered therapy, then you just need more of it than the average person

Sometimes, you dont know that you're good at. Sometimes you dont think you can do what you know you can. Sometimes you think if everyone is lying to you, then you're the biggest liar of all. Sometimes you decide on exactly what you will say to every single person who supported you in the case that you might let them all down. Sometimes you feel confident that you might very well ruin everything you touch. Sometimes you get to work early and you actually care that absolutely no one will notice. Sometimes any lives you may have touched, any path you may have altered, don’t matter enough to stand judgment when you call them up one by one to the stand in the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes you realize you may be singing a whole octave lower than the song you wrote yourself requires. Sometimes you notice you’ve let your parents problems right on in to your own life, welcoming them at the door with a plate of fruit and cheese and those little non-recyclable appetizer plates that could be single-handedly responsible for global warming. Could you be responsible for global warming? Or maybe just global boring. Is it you, your parents, society or your health insurance provider that expect you to be such a healthy, well-balanced yet wildly successful and shiny-bright human being? Some days, when you go to lock your apartment door behind you, making a mental note to buy Drano, and dig for your keys in a bag full of crumply receipts you haven’t yet logged in your checkbook, you definately know its not all about you. No one has to tell you that. If it was all about you, they would leave the subway doors open the extra 3 seconds so you could safely slip on the train, as opposed to jamming your right shoulder in the doors with unfettered determination not to let life leave you behind. And some mornings, a lot like this one, you get tired of shoving your way into your future in favor of standing alone on the platform, watching the overcrowded train pull away toward success, faces smushed up against the glass. And then its “This train is delayed because of train traffic ahead. Please…be patient.”

Sometimes you spend all your time waiting for always – which will be, well, never. So you’ll just have to leave a voicemail on your own machine and plan to pick it up tomorrow when you’ve had a better nights sleep.