Dancing Upside Down

Where do I jump in?

Nothing like starting a blog post when I have an article that is due tomorrow and I have not even started it. But that is also why I am writing right now.  Maybe writing in here will get me started.  Plus, I dearly want to start contributing to this blog again.  I have missed it.

Yes, it all the sudden occured to me that the two are quite similar so the title above just jumped up and named itself.  Now I wish the words would answer the question!

I am living in Florida for the winter, in a very wonderful community called The Village of Holiday Lakes.  I offered to write two articles for the upcoming issue of the community newsletter.  One article on Senior Fraud, and one related to computers.  The problem is threefold.  First, I do not know what people want and need to hear regarding computers.  Secondly, and probably most key, is that I have not written since August.  I have gotten "rusty" however the actual feeling is more like stopped up.  The words won't flow.

The problem with this blog is similar; the flow, the conversation, the feeling were interrupted.  It is hard to get everything going again.  

When I began the blog - over a year ago - there were many false starts.  And I also blogged about blogging quite a bit just to find my footing.  I do not want to have to blog about blogging again!  A lot of those entries were about boundaries and what I felt comfortable writing about.  I am past that stage.

The shift with the blog has to do with, as the title says, "Where do I jump in?" 

When I started this blog I was very much in the throes of dealing with the brain injury.  Now, I am in a whole new chapter.  I received great help from the CORP-TBI team at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.  Now I am in the section of my life where I just live with the remaining vestiges of the TBI.  It is old news.  Yes, I will probably post about things related to the brain injury from time to time, but it is (thankfully) no longer the main focus of my life.  I am not knocking that it was the main focus for the last year - it was very important that it was and it accomplished a lot.  But I have completed that chapter and moved on.

What is interesting about the comparison between these two writing conundrums is that this next chapter is about reinventing myself professionally and I am trying to do it as a computer wizard.  So, here I am feeling stuck about what to write about being a computer wizard on two different levels: what to write for an article in the community newsletter and to also what to write in here about my thoughts, feelings, and experiences with stepping out into this new profession.

It just occurred to me that how I usually write is that I immerse myself in a subject.  I research and read . . . a whole lot.  Finally it is as if I reach a saturation point and then and only then does the writing begin.  I have not given myself that time.  I have not made the time to give myself. 

Time is one of the challenges I face due to the brain injury.  Things do take longer, plus I still have to rest twice a day - its sort of like a reboot.  So, setting aside the time to do all the research and reading, and the time to write is challenging.  But it is important!

Well, I don't know if I have unblocked the writing muse but it sure feels good to be writing here.  I'm back!  And I am going to try to write a lot more.

Reach Out & Touch Someone

I am fascinated by how the internet is changing our communication and our relationships to one another!  I have heard people make disparaging remarks that soon we will all just sit in rooms with computers in front of us and never truly connect with anyone; that we will become machine-like ourselves.  I couldn't disagree more!!  

The internet is connecting us in ways most of us never imagined possible.  I don't mean "imagined the technology", I mean imagined how we would connect Heart to Heart via the web. 

This is hitting home to me on a personal level over and over. 

• I can share this blog with people working their way through recovery from a TBI. 
• I am reconnecting to people from K - 12 grades via Facebook.  As I write this I am having an ongoing conversation with two classmates from days of yore.  We are trying to identify people in a kindegarten class picture taken in 1961. 
• Yesterday I set up a Facebook account for my 84 year old mother.  Facebook will be a good way for my Mom to keep up with her eldest granddaughter who just left to spend a year in Belgium. 
• Just now, my sister sent me a link to a YouTube video of a TV interview with my niece's Belgium host family about their experience of choosing to be a host family and choosing my niece.  It makes the world a little smaller!

Instead of writing a lot more, I want to let two short videos do the talking.

This first one is one done by Becky Roth, a Senior student at the University of Kansas under Professor Michael Wesch.  (If you have not yet seen Michael Wesch's Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us click on the linked name and spend 4 minutes to watch it.  It is phenomenal.)

Becky Roth's piece is titled: The Internet has a Face   Becky says of this:

Before, we were reliant upon what the user has expressed through words, however, when one can read beyond words through visuals, the communication seems to become more “human and personal.” If there was a fear that the internet was making society antisocial, vlogging would seek to prove otherwise.

Another amazing and fairly brief video is a TED talk by Jonathan Harris, an artist who uses programming as his art form. He has developed programs/websites scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.

His projects are both intensely personal (the "We Feel Fine" project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world's blogs to collect snapshots of the writers' feelings) and entirely global (the new "Universe," which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same -- to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.

Dancing Upside Down

The name of this website/blog, as you know, is Dancing Upside Down.  The title actually did not come about because of the brain injury.  I appropriated it to this blog because it seems to fit my trajectory of recovery as well as the name's original intent. 

The name came about shortly after I had watched the video of a talk called The Last Lecture given by Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon.  (If you have not seen The Last Lecture, carve out an hour in your day to watch it.  Click on the title to get to the unabridged version which is by far the best.) 

The Last Lecture's subtitle was "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams".  Randy did this talk as a way to impart wisdom he wanted to give his children, knowing that he would not be around to do it himself as that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.  The talk was and is incredibly inspiring. 

Randy's lecture instructs young people on how to set goals and achieve them, how to ask for and accept help, how to recognize the opportunities in your vicinity and use them.  It is guiding them in the steps needed to succeed and be happy in life; its showing them the dance steps. 

But what if you are someone who did not receive that guidance when young?  What if you are in your 50's.  How do you regroup and try it again?  I watched The Last Lecture at a time in my life when I was looking back over my last 50 years and preparing to reinvent myself for the next 50.  When you learn to Dance later in life you are: 

Dancing Upside Down

I feel I am someone who must learn to Dance Upside Down.  I am reinventing myself because of the brain injury.  I am reinventing myself because I would not want to continue doing my old work anyway because I was so tired of the traveling. 

(I was a large scale project manager - which meant I had to go to the projects and be on site for at least part of the time.  We were supposed to have travel be only 30% of our job description.  We decided the 30% was just describing the time we spent in airports and airplanes!)

I want to explore the questions of why some people are "late bloomers" or are unhappy for whatever reason and want to reinvent themselves.  I especially want to explore how people go about it.  How do people reinvent themselves?  How do people make the second half of their life "count"?  (With respect to the fact that what "counts" will be different for different people.) That leads to other questions.  How do people decide what "counts" and what doesn't?  I would love to explore and understand enough to write a handbook of ideas and useful techniques for non-bloomers who want to bloom into late bloomers.

A Peeling 3-CPO

Yesterday I wrote some about what I want to do in this blog and how I feel very "done" with the PR of worrying to the extreme about how people will receive the blog and what they will think of me from reading it. 

Well, the other thing that was feeding into that post was that I had just received an "update email" that a friend sent out to his "helpers" and other friends and family who care about his ongoing recovery from a serious accident.  He sounded extremely upbeat as he described his physical therapy and other progress.  He has often sounded that way.

I found myself comparing my writing in this blog to his extremely upbeat email and finding myself lacking . . . but as I let it sink in more I had a wonderful BFO that put me at ease.  

Doug's work is different from mine.  We have both been given an opportunity to work on our weak areas - in how we interact with the world as well as the actual healing.  And we are both rising to the challenge offered to us.

Doug closed with noting the positive tone to his email himself:  Dear helpers, when I write these updates I see I tend to express the positive. It's not that I don't get bummed out, and often. And went on to explain, On a karmic level, because of so much you all invested into my life, I find I have a commitment to give back a life that is well-lived, with as much integrity and awakeness as I can muster. You see, I can no longer just space-out and bum-out into sleepy negativity. That would be throwing away gifts that are not mine to throw away.  

As Doug says he can no longer just space-out and bum-out into sleepy negativity. That is Doug's work. My sister and I used to referred to Doug as an "Eyore" because he did have a tendency to whine and complain at times.  This accident has given him a new way of looking at and relating to the preciousness of life.  

My work is in what I wrote about in the post from yesterday.  I was not an Eyore.  I was more of a 3CPO!  My work is about peeling off some layers of protection and exposing my soft, human, and vulnerable interior.

I am, as Doug says above, [committed] to give back a life that is well-lived, with as much integrity and awakeness as I can muster.

A long while ago when I was dealing with what I will call "blog-fear" I put some new words to William W. Purkey's quote:

You gotta write like nobody's reading,
Love, like you'll never be hurt;
Sing like nobody's listening;
It's gotta come from the heart ,
If you want to be heard.

Okay,so ends the third post on the topic of blogging!  Now I am going to get back to doing it instead of writing about it!

Secrets, PR, or . . . ?

I am having a conundrum about this blog.  It has to do with what I "should" share here and also who I "should" share the blog with.  But it is part of a much bigger conundrum in general, in fact it is probably part of a cultural conundrum. Who makes those rules anyway!?  

On the level of the culture as a whole, I think there is a huge push for us to present ourselves always as upbeat and positive regardless of what is going on.  There seems to be a great deal of discomfort when someone shares honestly.  So many people seem to feel they need to fix things for others; again it is trying to get the person back into the upbeat and positive position.  People are uncomfortable with just listening and doing nothing to change the situation. 

On the level of me, it may be that the pendulum of vulnerability is swinging from one extreme over to the other.  Maybe that is what it needs to do before I can find some happy medium.  I have upheld and hidden what is going on for me for most of my life.  But that did not serve me well and it also got me into the pickle I am in now.  So now I am trying to be more vulnerable and exposed.  But it feels rocky and tender.  I don't know the landscape or the proper behavior.  I feel very exposed and unprotected.

I want to be able to write about this new territory I am having to traverse due to this head injury.  I want to be able to write honestly as I explore this new me as I figure this all out.  The injury brings silver linings with it as well as a great deal of change.  It also strips away a lot of old junk.

Yes!  That is part of what I am trying to say here.  I do feel that I am shedding a lot of old crap that I used to cloak myself, to protect myself or to morph myself into someone I thought was more acceptable to "them"; to anyone outside myself.  I want that to be gone. 

I recently put a link to this site on an email I sent out to a bunch of friends.  It was in an email where I also announced that I was looking for house sitting jobs.  One friend had a very negative response to the blog. She felt the blog made me sound unrelaible and would turn potential house sitting customers off.  (If you are a potential house sitting client let me assure you here and now that I am extremely reliable.  You can check my references!)

Her negative response affected me.  It made me take another look and assess why I am blogging and what I want to say here.  It also made me look at how much I care or don't care what other people think of this blog.  It made me evaluate what I am willing to risk. 

What I want to do with this blog is to share honestly and openly who I am in the here and now.  I do not want to wrap myself up in some package hoping it is palatable to some unknown person out there.

I find that I both do and don't care what people think of this blog.  I care that people like it because I want to do a good job writing.  One of the purposes of this blog is to improve my writing. 

But I find that I don't care what people think about it when it comes to judging me as a person.  I am so done with trying to be different than I am!  The friend who had the negative feedback for me about this blog worked in PR for most of her life. 

This blog is not about PR.  This blog is not about selling myself as a house sitter or as anything else.  This blog is about me.  If a potential house sitting client does not like the me that they see in these pages then that is fine.  They probably would not like the me they would meet in person either.  We simply are not a good match for each other.

I am going to close this post here for the night becasue it is very late.  I may add more within the next couple of days because I do not feel the conversation is complete yet (with myself or with my readers).

Blog Thoughts

I am sitting out on a sunny deck on Vashon Island overlooking the sound.  This place that I am currently house & pet sitting has a wonderful view looking north.  I can watch the ferries traversing between Vashon and West Seattle, see the city of skyline in the distance and the day is so clear I can see Mt. Baker which is about 160 miles away.

                Photo courtesy of suespetcastle.com

I have a 2 year old dachsund and an 8 year old quaker parrot keeping me company here at this home.  They are both a hoot! 

The parrot has a vocabulary of over 150 words and phrases.  She even sings some! The funniest one is that she picked up "Obama" just from the owners leaving the radio on for her during the day during the campaign.  I am trying to teach her to say "Obama's the President".  I hope that will be good for about 8 years.  Maybe Michelle will follow Barak.  Parrots live for about 25 years so if I succeed in teaching her to say it there needs to be an Obama in the White House for about 4 terms.

The dachsund, Oscar, started out acting like any willful 2 year old - testing my authority.  The first two days were bouts of testing interspersed with bouts of sweetness.  Now we are on a better keel.  He really is a cutie when he is not barking.  Unfortunately, that is not as often as I would like! 

Writing on this blog is a process.  Like right now, there are about three directions I could go with this post . . . including scrapping what I have written above and starting over. 

The issue at hand for me is a mixture of why I am writing this in the first place (the blog as a whole and also this specific post) along with who I am writing this for.  The audience varies.  But all of those questions deserve an answer and I guess this is as good of a time as any.

I started this Dancing Upside Down blog largely because I said "I could write a book about ..." so many times that I finally decided  to start writing and see what comes of it.  The words that follow the "..." are "about How to do Everything Wrong with a Brain Injury".

However the blog has grown to be a lot more than that. Yes, I am staying true to the initial plan which is why there are so many posts about the brain and recovery.  But in addition this blog has been a way to let friends and family know what I am up to and what has been going on in my life in recent months. 

The thing is, I am suddenly reconnecting with many old friends from high school and college.  Facebook, LinkedIn and a new alumni site for our high school is mainly what has initiated this flury of reconnecting with old friends.  I want this blog to also be a place they can catch up with me and who I am now, at 54 years of age. (Hello there! This is me!)  But the problem is that this blog is very much about the present. 

Friends, shoot me a call to find out more of the whole picture.  Or you can email me via this blog:Email Me

Quotes, Questions, & Quandries

One of the things that I am enjoying about blogging is the responses I receive as I try to make sure that I have permission to publish artwork and that I am crediting and quoting people correctly.  Most artists and writers are very gracious in giving me permission to use their artwork here on my blog as long as I link back to their websites. Only very occasionally will I come across an artist who is more constricted about the use of their work.

Researching permissions and attributions, and blogging in general have lead me to learn more about copyright law. In researching the quote on the previous post the two trails crossed in an unexpected way.

When I began researching the quote used in the previous post I found it attributed to many people.  I posted a query on the forums at Quoteland.com to try and find the original author.  (Quoteland is a great site for anyone who uses quotes frequently or for occasional help in finding a quote to fit a purpose or identify the author of a quote.)

One answer to my Quoteland query attributed the quote to Patrick Overton.  Another response attributed the quote to two other people; one of whom is a friend of mine.  In addition to emailing Patrick Overton I also emailed my friend to find out what she knew about the quote.  The story got more interesting and involved than I had expected.  And it continues to get even more interesting! Read the update below.

Patrick Overton responded with the following nice reply:

Hi Jane

Yes, I am the author.  It was first published in my collection of poetry called "The Leaning Tree" published in 1976.

No, it is not the correct version.  You can find the correct version (and correct lineage) at my website patrickoverton.com.

The poem is entitled "Faith."  The correct version is:

When you come to the edge of all the light you have
And take the first step into the darkness of the unknown
You must believe one of two things will happen:

There will be something solid for you to stand upon
or, you will be taught how to fly.

Thanks for asking - I always appreciate someone taking the time to find out the truth and find out the actual words/lineage of the poem. 

Patrick Overton

I sent Patrick's response on to my friend and received the following surprise back:

Hi Jane,

Nice reply.

That quote, unfortunately, got attributed to me and resulted in a lawsuit, despite my never claiming to have said it. 

Ironically, that poem also appears, unattributed to him, in at least two other books.  I once heard that a power company, I believe, had sent it out in their bills with no author credited and it just started spreading.

Both of the people here, Patrick Overton and my friend, are excellent authors.  I was sad to see that there had been a lawsuit, especially given the circumstances.  But on the other hand I can see where Overton would be rightfully frustrated with his words being attributed to other people. 

I feel attribution to artists of all types is extremely important.  It honors the art and it honors the person.  I am one of the only bloggers I know who actually footnotes posts.  I do this to acknowledge, attribute, link, and thank my sources.  

This problem regarding the "Faith" quote's accidental attribution and the resulting lawsuit have brought up some questions for me.  Now granted, I do not have all the facts straight at this point and have sent a request for some clarifying information. 

UPDATE 2/15/2010:

Patrick Overton  contacted me because he found this post recently; a year after it was written. 

According to Patrick, there was never any lawsuit.  In fact, he was fairly distressed to think that my friend recalled a lawsuit.  He said he did have his lawyers write her a letter.  Patrick said that his lawyers drew up a contract for the use of the poem and that she paid about $250 for the use, which includes the use of it in her new edition of her book - where it is attributed correctly.  Patrick said $250 was about a quarter of what he spent in lawyer fees.

To maintain a copyright an artist, writer, or a business must be able to prove that they have taken action to correct the attribution each and every time it is discovered that the copyright has been broken. 

In this day and age with the ubiquity of the Internet and the information and misinformation it contains it seems ever more easy to be quoted as well as to be misquoted.  Equally, it seems that it could be easy to have quotes misattributed to a person and have the misattribution spread on and on through the viral nature of the web.  If people can be sued for a misattribution how can a person protect themselves from that?  Lawsuits are expensive even when the defendant is in the right!

There is another question at hand too.  When is a quote altered enough that it is someone else's or at least no longer the original owner's?  In the post below I used a quote that is clearly derived from Patrick Overton's "Faith".  I prefer it over the "correct" quote above.  Of course, I attributed it to Patrick because they are essentially the same but if I just attributed it without noting that it is a variation I would be misquoting him. 

In seeking to understand copyright law a little better I recently took two great workshops from John Grant, an attorney in Seattle who specializes in "copyright law for creative people and businesses".  He has also written some good articles on the subject. 

However we did not cover the legality of misquoting or misattributions!  For the moment, I am left to wonder.