Am I really a blogger?

Soooooo.... it appears that even though I've only posted a few entries, I'm already getting recognized as a blogger. I have to admit... I'm super excited about it! Not since I was rapping (haha check out my old tracks: City Town), have I had a channel to really express myself. I encourage all of you to start your own blogs and hang your storage compartments in the wind - liberate your thoughts! Share! It's incredibly cleansing.

I used to experience mental/emotional/spiritual constipation if I did not write in my diary every night. I'm not sure why I stopped writing in a diary, but it probably has something to do with how much emailing started to take over my communicative energies. I type like a pianist, and don't miss a beat of the thought process, so it's a much better way to capture the tides. I'm looking forward to creating goals for myself for how often, and how profoundly I blog.

Helping me to reach both of these personal goals is an awesome opportunity that has presented itself– Next week I will be blogging from the Sustainable Brands Conference in Monterey, CA on June 3rd for Link TV's CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) site. I'll be sure to link in this crowd to that crowd, and vice versa - though I'm not really sure my professional colleagues are interested in hearing about how I don't like to go to pee inside.

Hopefully I'll have the chance to connect with some of the big characters that day including Tom Szaky from TerraCycle, Steve Glenn from LivingHomes, Gil Friend from NatLogic, Kellie McElhaney, Exec. Director, Center for Responsible Business at Berkeley, and many others!

If there's something you would like me to ask any of these crusaders, just let me know! I'm so excited! This will be my first actual blogging gig! Word to my mom!

Primitive, Creative & Repressed

Not a good combination. Gonna write this one with "Weird Fishes" (Radiohead) on repeat.

I want to work with my hands. I want to feed babies. I want to feel the grass under my feet all day and pee outside. I'm sick of toilets.

I want others to describe me as visceral, instead of me describing myself as visceral.

If my dreams could be my life, I'd have squashed berries on my lips instead of designer gloss - what a farce! I should take my Chanel mascara tube and use it to grind up pieces of corn on a rock! I should've never cut my hair. It should be snarly and gold from the salt and the sun. Sea salt bath scrub, $38 from Sephora. Who am I? Why are we paying more for the things we can make ourselves, and less for the things that kill us?

There's a reason I was mesmerized by my favorite movie, The Blue Lagoon, and my favorite book, Island of the Blue Dolphins when I was little. Life counted by many moons. Nothing to exhaust you other than the toils of simplicity. Meeting basic needs with your own body and mind. Imagine what that would do for the soul.

I want to sink my fingers into some pottery on a wheel right now. I want it more badly than my teeth wanted the food I had on my passenger seat on my way home from grabbing lunch to-go today.

I want a house made out of palm, and some damn stars in the sky. What the hell have we done?
What have I done with myself? I'm ready to pack a bag and head for the equator....

The more things change, the more they stay the same

My friend told me the other day that she had heard that aborigines just can't survive in our modern world. Between the visual and sonic pollution, the cell phone rays, the obesity of the electromagnetic field... she said they just cant take it, and it can cause their bodies to just shut down.

I've heard other weird anecdotes, like: Children these days aren't getting obese from eating fast food because DNA has now evolved to be able to process all of the unnatural toxins and chemicals my generation grew up shoving into our bodies.

So if one generation at a time our genes are learning how to cope with the chaos that makes up modern life, I guess it makes sense that people who haven't gone through these stages of "evolution" (not sure you could call it that) can't survive in this carnival we call life in America.

Although I love the smells and bells that come with city life, I couldn't take living in the heart of the city anymore. After years of being sure it's what I wanted, I found myself moving westward to the outskirts of LA and settling more deeply into life in Venice. Although it's still considered part of a city, it feels more like a suburb. Back in Hollywood, I couldn't even find a bush to let my dog pee on.

Here in Venice, I have a backyard with a tiny garden, and perhaps the best part of my day is when I go outside and check in with it. It's a space where I'll have one of those moments where I'm just staring at my hand reveling in the fact that I exist. I'll realize it so profoundly that it freaks me out. Something about the smell of tomato leaves really grounds me into being.

I imagine that if any aborigines actually died while visiting a modern civilization it is because they were completely unable to stay connected to their sense of self. Are those of us who live what we consider to be "regular" lives "evolving" in ways that protect us from our loss of self despite our ADD and overwhelming surroundings? If the aborigine had been protected with an ipod that was playing his/her favorite drum beat, would he/she have managed to make it through another day?

My uncle thinks that we are all turning into numb drones. He is disgusted by the way kids walk around hooked up to cell phones and ipods. He says it looks like we are wireless walking machines with USB inputs as opposed to bodily orifices. I believe these bubbles that we create for ourselves with all of our mobile devices are actually our way of taking our identities with us as we crusade into the shmorgasborg of othernesses.

In addition, our mp3 players and iphones (or if you're like me you made a political statement and bought the android google phone) are our ways of staying connected to those who we love and cherish. At first it seemed like Twitter was a retarded concept - but now we are starting to use it because it's actually a really good way of keeping track of your favorite people as they float around the veins of the matrix that are obstructed from your present position. Years ago the words "online community" sounded so bleak and lifeless. Today, we tap into our various online communities to feel recognized, understood, validated. It is sometimes the only place we can go to feel like we have a voice...

A day later, you might find out that someone you didn't even know was listening. You might make a friend you will never meet in "real life". You might fall in love in 2D. You might talk to your Dad and manage to engage with him more profoundly than you ever did in person. I'll be the first to admit there's been a countless number of times when I've experienced tear-filled breakthrus while sitting in front of a silly computer screen.

And you might look like a lifeless drone while you are having one of these moments... and you might have to remind yourself to get out and deal with the bar scene before the weekend ends. Perhaps it would be more socially acceptable to get wasted and cry on a street corner while you friend prepares for you to puke all over her new shoes. When you're far away from home, and your friends are moving pieces, this world we've created online becomes a major lifeline.

I enjoy when I know everyone I love is safely tucked into bed and I can turn off my cell phone. I like the quiet of Venice (save your every-other-month shooting) compared to the non-stop chaos of Hollywood. But when I wake up in the morning and I've got a virtual pile of notes from my friends, family, and what I'll call "cyberkin", I feel proud to have found a balance between old and new that really keeps my life full and filled. Tomorrow if we get invaded by aliens, or if we get blasted back into the stone age, I believe I'll find a way to be happy with either side of the equation. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Reason My Black Background Is Blue

For those of you who read my last post, The Reason My Background Is Black, I'm hoping you had a chance to watch the video about PSPs on Saatchi & Saatchi S's facebook page. If you did, you might've made yourself squirm a little by thinking, "Maybe she should've named that post "The Reason My Black Background Is Blue". Well, for this post, I absolutely had to. And to be sure you all understand why, I recommend watching The Birth of Blue. This is a video of a speech that Adam Werbach, Global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco as a fulfillment to his promise that he would return with some solutions for his speech given four years prior entitled, "The Death of Environmentalism".

This "eulogy" as Adam referred to it, addressed why he had decided to move out of the non-profit world and into the belly of corporate America, or should I say, Earth. When Adam was 23 years old, he graduated from Brown, and was handpicked to become the president of the Sierra Club by David Brower. This made him the youngest president of the largest and oldest non-profit in America. Adam became every activist's golden child, and the same people who had revered him would come to revile him when he made the decision to go and work for Walmart.

After watching, The Birth of Blue, the way I understand his justification for "selling out" is that Adam began to see that the world was not coming up with good enough solutions to face the huge crisis we face. He said, "When you want to steal some money, you go where the money is and rob a bank. When you want to create change, you go to where the people are. You go to the corporations". One out of every 100 people in America work for Walmart. He likens it to the story of David & Goliath - and in this scenario, he is David, crawling into the belly of the beast.

Change, needs to come from the inside out. I was discussing this with my friends Libby Patterson & Paul Kardash of the Eco-Alliance as Paul clobbered around in Libby's glittery pink stilettos. Paul jokingly exclaimed, "We should call Adam and tell him that he should've called it the Birth of Pink." I was thinking, hmmm... I guess part of the speech does focus on how women make the majority of household purchase decisions. We are absolute animals when it comes to finding a deal, and caring about what goes into our bodies, and the bodies of our loved ones. But Libby had a better take on the idea and delivered it in perfect Libby-empress-style, "That's good Paul," she said, "Because change needs to come from the inside out." I didn't realize that this is why Paul had suggested pink. Isn't it great when two intelligent people fall in love, and even better when you get to hang out with them?

I diverge...
The point of this post was to explain why my black background is actually blue. "Blue", in case you didn't watch the video(s) yet, is Adam's definition of what happens when you find a way to make green personal - which is really the only way we can affect change as individual regular people. What are your passions, what do you care about... how can you relate to the problem and engage in making the world a better place by shifting one tiny action that you repeat in your everyday life? I know, I know, you're all saying, well, "If I turn off the faucet while I brush my teeth, is that really going to save the world in any way!?" - and I hear you on that, but what I hear more loudly is the echo of a beautiful story I stumbled upon somewhere in my cyber-surfing recently. Maybe it was in The Birth of Blue - you tell me... it goes something like this ( I found this similar version of the story on Google taken from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul):

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset. As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew closer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up, and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean. As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time, he was throwing them back into the water. Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said "Good evening, Friend. I was wondering what you are doing."

"I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."

"I understand," our friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize it is probably happening on hundreds of other beaches all up and down the coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

The local native smiled, bent down, and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"

So this cheesey soup is being fed to millions of Walmart employees, and they are all picking their own PSPs (Personal Sustainability Promises). The reason my black background is blue is because it saves watt hours, which is also green, but what makes it blue is that it's not huge. It's small. It's probably insignificant. But knowing that and choosing to do it anyways is the shift that needs to happen in all of our hearts. That means we need to reach down deep and sense how we are all connected, how if we all turn our cheek, this blue planet will dry up and make a Mars out of itself.

If we each picked a starfish to throw back into the water, I'm sure we could save all of the starfish.

If we don't find ways to help, we'll be wishing we were starfish because we'll be drowning in seawater! That's not really the blue we want. Let's make blue what we want it to be. Deeper than green. Deeper than pink. Deep deep down into the source of what connects us all, the fact that we matter, the fact that unless we believe we count, we won't.

The Reason My Background Is Black

Ha! Well that could be taken a few different ways...
Genetically, you can get white out of black, but you can't get black out of white. I do have some pretty big sicilian (which could be african) lips– usually the source of inbound ethnicity inquiries.

But that is not the type of background I was referring to for this blogpost. Instead, I was referring to the anti-traditional black color I chose for this blog itself. And the reason I chose it is because it is better for the environment!

If you don't believe me, believe Google! A while ago, they came out with a more soulful version of themselves called Blackle, and to-date it has saved one million, two hundred and thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and eight point one hundred and seventy-ninths of watt hours (1,237,408.179)! I typed out that number because I'm so happy about it.

I would love to start calculating how many watt hours I am saving by choosing this black background, so if any of you cats out there know how I might be able to have the same sort of ticker on my site, please let a sister know ; ) (I'm all in-theme) haha. Hmm... maybe I should've named this post "The Reason My Background Is Black Is Green" - kind of makes me feel squirmy though.

And as my new PSP, Personal Sustainability Promise, I've decided to homepage www.blackle.com instead of www.google.com. Gotta walk the walk! So come with me– Go black and never go back!

"Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".