Conversation Starters

This morning I was listening to an episode of   You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes  where Pete recounted a recent conversation he'd had with someone about memory.  To be specific, he was talking about memories his daughter, who's maybe preschool/kindergarten-aged, was forming.  Pete's friend said something to the effect of his daughter only really remembering big things, like a family vacation, and not the everyday things like her dad coming to pick her up from school.  Pete guffawed like this person was missing the entire point of life, doubling down that he was certain his daughter would   only  remember things like him coming to pick her up from school.    That  was the core memory, not a random vacation. It made me chuckle as I went about the business of doing a very mundane task -- changing the sheets on my bed -- as I thought about how much Pete  wanted  to be right about this.  That his daughter would be so evolved ...

 "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear." - Tao Te Ching For over 11 years, I had an almost daily yoga practice. It started in February 2008 when a housemate and dear friend of mine all but forced me to join her for a class.  She'd selected the studio and told me what time to be ready and because I'm a good wingman, I went along with it -- just for her.  I am  certain  I told the desk staff that I would never return. Famous last words. Not only did I return a week later, I returned the week after that and the week after that until I found a teacher or two I really enjoyed and the next thing you know, I was hooked. Before long, I was enrolled in a monthly membership and prioritizing time on my mat over afterwork drinks. Sometimes I'd compromise and go to class  and then  show up to drinks, normalizing the "wear your yoga gear in public" long before it became the now-standar...

Those of us who have taken on leadership positions should receive consistent feedback from our peers, our supervisors, and clients/students/consumers that our organization serves.  Recently, I had the opportunity to collect such feedback and it truly stopped me in my tracks -- in an anonymous-response ESCI (emotional social competency inventory) assessment, I got an insight into how my past and present colleagues view me as a leader.   After what has been a difficult year-plus professionally -- seeing 100% turnover twice in two years in our small nonprofit staff, including an abrupt departure by our Executive Director, going through an over 10-month span without permanent organizational leadership, and now adapting to new permanent leadership -- reading what these colleagues of mine think about me brought me to tears.  Genuine, happy tears.  I am so thankful for these incredible mentors, coworkers, volunteers, and community leaders who see so much value in me....

I am a social worker but not the kind that you think.  Raise your hand if what you think a social worker does is take kids out of homes.  Keep 'em up if you think that's   all  a social worker does.  Yeah, that's what I thought.  Just today, my new boss at the community nonprofit where I work asked me why I went and got a Master's in Social Work and then chose not to become a social worker. Boy oh boy, we all have a lot to learn. I am a community-based social worker.  I work in advocacy, connection, policy, strategy, and more.  I am a teacher -- and I am a student.  I collaborate with residents, with elected officials, with city officials, with other organizations.   I am a listener. I pull this one out of the lineup and spotlight it because what I'm also is a  talker .  I'm a Gemini, so that means I have the gift of gab.  I can write it or I can speak it and I am quite comfortable in the art of verbal expression....

As you may know, I'm a fan of the podcast   Ghost of a Podcast .  This weekly show is hosted by the psychic/medium/astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo where she answers a listener question and then gets into the astrological forecast for the week ahead.  Sometimes I skip over the listener questions because her answers are so specific to this one person's chart and while that can be interesting, it's not always the sort of voyeurism I'm into on any given day. This week, though, the listener wrote about her own psychic abilities and how she'd followed them in pursuit of finding her own life partner.  Now, I'm not super-expert on this, but what I know about psychics and mediums is they often can't "read" themselves -- so I'm going to chock this up to the listener's own intense gut-instinct and intuition, which is what most psychic ability derives from.  Anyway, this listener said she asked the Universe to bring her a soulmate and it did -- but what sh...

Take a moment to listen to Cleveland baseball radio announcer Tom Hamilton ( here ). I had to miss yesterday's game because I was working, but I'd asked my baseball twitter friends to loop me into any great #HammyShade (as we call it), which a few of them did.  One of them encouraged me to find this final speech of the broadcast.  You can hear it in Hammy's voice when he talks about bringing kiddos to the ballpark -- and when he talks about Rajai Davis' soul-reviving game-tying home run in the bottom of the 8th in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series against the Chicago Cubs.  I will never, ever forget that moment.  Even thinking about it makes me tear up.  Even though Chicago ultimately won that game, that Rajai Davis moment proved what all Cleveland fans know: Goonies Never Say Die.  Down but not out, fighting for, earning , every single moment. You can see it in the faces of the fans how much this meant to them.  I remember pacing  in my Ball Squa...

I want to share a moment of my life from yesterday afternoon.  I was out walking through Lakeview Cemetery (per usual) when I noticed an old man with a long white beard and an orange bandana tied around his head puttering by me very slowly on a found-it-in-the- way -back-of-the-garage motorcycle.  He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, making him stand out as a possible ex-Hell's Angel, someone who valued life on the road and nonconformity in a way someone from the 60's or 70's would.  If he'd been listening to music, it would have absolutely been The Grateful Dead or CCR or the Rolling Stones.  But all that I heard as he motored past me was the strain of his motorcycle to stay upright at the slow speed he was traveling.  I watched him putter up the hill by the Haserot Angel and disappear around the bend where he was temporarily erased from my mind.  After all, I see colorful characters in the cemetery all the time -- there was no real reason for him to stand ...