Photo Series: Portland & Oregon's Coast

Portland + coast (04-2013), a set on Flickr.

I was in Portland last week for work, but that never stops me from spending every spare moment I have in search of beauty and beautiful food. I spent the weekend at the coast with my friend who lives in Portland. It's moody and raw and stunning.

I still have over a hundred photos on my phone that I'll play with for days to come, but for now...enjoy!

Guest Post: Crafting a DIY Community

Hello Readers, 

How are you? I have exciting news to share with you. You've ready my individual blog posts about various Craft Lake City workshops, but they recently invited me to do a guest post for their blog...sort of a meta post about my experience with the whole series. First of all, I was totally flattered and happy to do it. Beyond that, it was a great reflective exercise for me to summarize the energy of the workshops and try and explain why I love them so much. 

An excerpt: 

There was something electric, almost subversive, in the act of gathering around a tablewith complete strangers and creating something unique, together. I say “subversive” because the paradox of our hyper connected culture is that we aren’t really connecting with each other at all. With a flick of my finger on an iPhone screen I’m connected to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Yelp, Blogger, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I run this exact cycle of connectivity every day, multiple times a day, but when was the last time I started a conversation with a complete stranger?

In a collaborative effort to drive traffic to each other's sites, click the link below to read the full post. 

Crafting a DIY Community


Love, 
me

Every water bottle needs its own tote.

We're all long past the one-use plastic water bottle phase, right? Please. The next step in our eco-evolution is totes for our favorite re-usable bottles. Behold...

Neighbors on Pierpont Avenue, Tissu Fine Fabrics hosted the latest Craft Lake City workshop.

BYOB: Bring Your Own Bottle. All other necessities provided. 

Tissu is a gorgeous store. Made me wish I knew the first thing about sewing. 

#putabirdonit

Step One: A foam core, held around your bottle with a "frankenstein stitch"

Step Two: Stitch the fabric to the foam core.

Step Three: Ask the Cricut workshop sponsor guy to cut out a gold glitter bird for you.

Step Five-ish: Rethink the color selection of your ironic bird.
Then, once your gold blob is ironed on (Step Four), stitch a bottom on your tote. 

Step seven or so that I never got around to because I'm slow and new to this whole needle and fabric thing: Sew on a handle / strap. You're ready to hit the crowded farmer's market walkways, hydrated and handmade.

My water bottle is on a date with the water bottle belonging to @heathengoddess.

Meanwhile, can we take just a moment to freak out over the beauty of this store. I mean, seriously.

Handmade chandelier so girly and fabulous I can barely stand it. #covet

Again, if only I knew how to sew and what to do with all this. Other than touch it and photograph it.

Ibid.

HELP! Crowdsourcing a bit of inspiration...

Hello Internet, 

I'm working on an exciting creative project right now. And I need your help. Yes, you. 

This might seem vain and silly, but I would really appreciate it if you answered the questions posted below. 

You see, I need a bit of crowdsourcing wisdom right now in order to move forward. 

Trust me, this is a bit awkward for me. I know. But...this project is important, so I'm putting all that awkwardness aside. 

Can you help a blogger out?

QUESTION(s): 

What words or phrases would you use to describe my photography? 

What about my travel photography? 

QUESTION: 

What words or phrases would you use to describe my writing? 

OR, another way to phrase the question: 

How has anything I've posted inspired you to...[fill in the blank]?

The comments section is all yours...

Thank you so much!

Happiness Project brunch, no. 3

As far the Happiness Project is concerned, if you'd rather see delicately filtered photos of friends eating brunch awash in sunlight, ignore my previous post and keep scrolling...

The topic for March: Work. Our collective tangent: Manifesting our destinies. No big deal. 

Never under estimate a good scrambled egg. Or two dozen of them. 

I was just getting back into town right before this brunch (which was true in February and will be true in April as well...because "just coming or going" seems to be most all the time for me), so the menu was simple. Scrambled eggs may be quick, but they don't have to be boring. The night before I cooked a lot of extra crispy bacon and crumbled it in preparation for the morning. I also cut up a lot bell peppers and set them in the fridge on a paper towel to dry, otherwise they give the eggs a troublesome consistency. Beyond the peppers and bacon, add to two dozen eggs a few splashes of Half and Half, generous heaps of course sea salt and ground pepper, and you're set. Oh, and lots of shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese. Lots. Again, always remember, dieting is not allowed at brunch. 

@heathengoddess handling the fruit and cheese course, as it were. 

@psychopetals is responsible for this deliciousness. 

I already spun off into a monologue about this month's chapter, but here are a few points highlighted by the group as a whole. These were moments in the chapter that inspired people for one reason or another. I'd love to hear what you think about all this, whether you're reading the book or not. Feel free to comment below. 

Rubin writes: "My research had revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. the brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction. If you do new things - visit a museum for the first time, learn a new game, travel to a new place, meet new people - you're more apt to feel happy than people who stick to more familiar activities. Because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer." 

"We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day."  

"One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self-definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish. Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened." 

"To counteract fear, I told myself, 'I enjoy the fun of failure.' It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." Side note: I always tell my staff that if you don't fail at one thing every day, you're probably not working hard enough. 

Our favorite paradox of the day was the arrival fallacy, the belief that once you get *there* you'll be happy. I say "paradox" because we've all set happiness-related goals, which certainly imply some sense of destination. This tension was something we discussed at length. When you overlay that tension on the topic of work and career, it was a rich discussion.

Rubin quotes Nietzsche: "The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable." Creating goals and moving forward with intention must be balanced with an ideal of living in The Now. I'm not sure anyone can ever really master that, but our little troupe of happiness project-ers is trying.

My tangential, self-absorbed post about Happiness Project brunch, no. 3

This one was a doozy for me. I'd been anticipating this chapter since the first spark of an idea to host a brunch group around Rubin's book. The chapter is about work, a topic that's pestered me for a while now.

I feel some sort of (likely unnecessary) obligation to provide two caveats before I launch into this:

1. I'm grateful to be employed full-time, to have a legitimate career and steady salary and benefits and health care and the whole bit. I recognize that critiquing my situation may come off as solipsistic when our country's economy is still sluggish and a lot of people are hurting. At the end of the day, my experience is still my experience, though. 
2. I love my field. I love higher education. I love the intellectual rigor. I love my radical niche in higher ed, being able to tackle social justice issues and partner with nonprofits to organize our communities. I love all of that. I've been at it for over a decade now and it's been good to me. 
3. I used to be a program coordinator, in the trenches of the work, as it were. I've since moved on to administration. I'm still in my niche, but I'm removed from the immediacy of it all. 

In our brunch conversation, someone shared a saying they'd heard growing up: "Don't get good at something you don't want to do. People will give you more of it." Or something along those lines. It makes perfect sense for me to be where I am in the institution. I'm still doing work that is meaningful and progressive - and creative, to a degree. But four years into this specific role, something is shifting. It's not minor. It's tectonic. I haven't been able to name it quite yet, but something is in motion. I'm not sure how to stabilize and carry on as usual, or if I even could / should.

Partially this can be attributed to the all-to-common early 30's professional having a quarter life crisis. There's more to it, though. Rubin writes: "Career experts argue you're better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that's where you'll be eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage." Here's the stupid thing about all of this, it does come easy to me. I do love it. I've built a resume and a network and a reputation that gives me plenty of competitive advantage, she says humbly. There's no terribly outstanding reason for me to leave my position or my field. I just feel like there's something...

In very general terms, it's creativity. It seems so petty and bourgeois to blog about my inner artiste, but I'm quite serious about it. Furthermore - meta commentary - why do I immediately discount it as petty and bourgeois? I have legitimate talent when it comes to writing and photography...and I live to travel...and I'm a tech savvy community organizer who knows how to rally people from really different walks of life. Can you see where I'm going with this?

I need to spend some time with this moving forward: "I wanted to develop in my natural direction. W.H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: "Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow, and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity."

Accidental limitations. Necessary limitations of our nature. I can see the bi-sected legal pad now. It's like the proverbial pro/con list, but on steroids. This is, not coincidentally, entirely related to scarcity thinking versus abundant thinking. This is why I say it's tectonic. It's not a minor shift in perspective or habit, I'm actively uprooting entire paradigms. I'm engaged right now in an exciting and challenging conversation around these very issues. I feel like I'm building the plane while flying it, in terms of corporate training videos. For the creative souls out there, a more romantic metaphor: I'm making the path by walking.

Inspirational-ish graffiti, as seen on the Instagram account of @urban_forager.

Happiness Project brunch, no. 2

So. Here's the deal. Two Happiness Project brunches have gone by with not a blog post in sight. Why? Because February was weird. Every single person at the brunch collectively agreed. Weird. Most, because they're all my friends and sensitive hippies like me, attributed a degree of the weirdness to Mercury's retrograde. It's a thing. Look it up. We also realized that February is a generally cruel month in the great state of Utah, full of horrible inversions and illness and blah. Not to mention the chapter in Rubin's book: Remember Love. 

Before your mind spins off into cliche visions of bitter suburban book clubs and cat ladies, let me clarify that we are a solid mix of urban singles, marrieds, gays, partners, co-habitators, lesbians, and dating abstainers. We love love. This was not a bitter book bashing. We just didn't love Rubin's chapter. Sure, we found useful nuggets:

Pierre Reverdy wrote: "There is no love; there are only proofs of love." Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.  

The business school truism: "You manage what you measure."  

Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. "Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure not this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."

But overall, we were universally bothered by how she patronizes her husband and, in a roundabout ironic way, infantilizes him as she writes about building healthy relationships. There are lessons to be learned from her writing in chapter two, we simply learned more from workshopping with each other and ignoring her. Mostly. 

Brunchers gonna brunch.

So, before I post the obligatory Instagram photos of the brunch food, let me disclose a modicum of personal insight along the relationship theme. This is a blog, after all. Here's where I landed after reading the love chapter:

I'm intentionally not dating right now. I'm okay with that, see: intentional. I'm working through some stuff that, for whatever reason, I've determined I don't want to work through while also balancing another person in the mix. I go back and forth as to the wisdom of this decision. On one hand, I look back through my dating years and recognize a pattern of thinking I need to have it all pulled together before being with someone. On the other hand, I know that's a false dichotomy. I know I will eventually, as I've done many times over the years, start dating again regardless of my trajectory on whatever imaginary path I've created for myself. Also, I have moments of honest clarity when I realize there's some of that aforementioned stuff that I'd actually like to work through with someone. 

In related news, I really dislike dating. I more or less hate it, actually. It bores me. I don't like the drama and the butterflies and the wondering and the dance of it all. I'm all about the good stuff once that tedium is out of the way. I'm a girlfriend girl. I thrive in partnerships. It's the same reason I suck at small talk. I like to commit and focus and work it out and move on if it's not right. The best romantic relationships of my life have spent significant time in that sweet spot of the hard work of relationships. I'm to a point in my life where I'm pretty solid in who I am and what makes me tick. I would love to find someone that compliments all of that as an equal partner, and clearly I'd do the same for them and compliment whatever makes them tick. I realize you have to, ugh, date, to get there, but whatever. 

Is that enough bloggery disclosure? This could go on for days. No one wants that. Let's look at photos of french toast. 

Not Pictured: Half and Half. Brunch is no place for a diet. 

Teach me, Alton. Teach me. 

I added quite a lot of cinnamon to my version.

Use crusty country bread that dried overnight. Trust me. And Alton. 

Mi madre helping me soak and set the bread.

Griddle, then oven, then mouth. Insanely good. 

You're welcome:

Alton's gourmet french toast recipe.