those who were seen dancing

I’ve been getting more and more excited over the past several months about all these un-jobbing ideas that seem to be all over the place. It’s a fun trend!

Way back in the Zen Habits archive, I found the Short but Powerful Guide to Finding Your Passion [He also has a companion guide about making a living from that passion.]; it’s a lot like my job search from the heart post awhile back. It’s so practical! And handy if what you really want most is to get out of the cycle of jobs and careers.

So! What else is out there for people who want to make that jump? Or, if you’re like me, maybe a slow, steady slide…

• Escape from Cubicle Nation is all about the slow, steady slide – and practical advice to start it.
• I’ve mentioned Tama Kieves before. She is my favorite! Making it to one of her workshops is still on my list, but her book, her email list & her smiling face are all profoundly encouraging.
• Project Mojave is also worth looking at when you have a business or idea you want to start up. It’s very internet-marketing-oriented, which, well… I’m not entirely comfortable with.
• Art of Nonconformity is an elegantly designed site (one of my recent faves) that tells more of a personal story. It’s often as lovely in sentiment as it is to look at.
• If your passion turns out to be long-term travel, there are loads of people getting up to that these days, too. I first spotted this advice via Professional Hobo, and have started keeping up with Meet Plan Go, and Married with Luggage.

Cross-posted from i'd like four tacos, please.

Gosh, I don't know why I feel disconnected from my people (especially my local people, but really all of y'all). It's not like I ever tell anyone what's going on with me or anything. Aside from 255 character summaries of what city I'm in and where I'm eating, that is.

Things happened!

For instance, I was in Chicago on a project for a few months. I used to hate Chicago, but I don't after finding dance classes and various forms of art and entertainment I couldn't find anywhere else. It's unlikely I'd move there, but it's a pretty decent town outside of the winters. It does have spectacular condiments. And fireworks every Wednesday night.

That ended abruptly and with some rejoicing on my part.

In the meantime, a certain someone moved first from Hawai'i to southwest VA and shortly after that in with Willie, My Roommate the Cheese Lady & me. I've been told recently that having your boyfriend move in is a reasonably big deal, and might have merited some sort of announcement. It didn't seem like that huge an event. One weekend he left town when I did, and the next he didn't.

I'm currently working in Creve Coeur (which, while French for "broken heart" or "heartbroken", is pronounced Creev Cor), a suburb outside St Louis. This means I spend probably 16 hours a week in planes and airports (mind, I still bill 40). I noticed this past weekend that I spend the majority of my life in two of the situations in which people feel the most entitled, powerless, tired and pouty: namely, organizational change and air travel. It's a problem; I can feel my faith in the basic goodness of people slowly eroding. People - self included - can go through terrible things with great dignity, but so often endure little hardships like exhausted children.

So, travel is wearing on me some - it's the mix of being gone, dealing with people in airports and on planes, and not successfully changing the entire world in the past 6 months. Mostly I'm lonely. It turns out almost everyone I hung out with is quite busy without me, so rather than the problem I expected to have (not having enough time on weekends to do what I want) I have the exact opposite (not having anyone who wants or is able to go play). And, like, all the dance in Richmond happens during the workweek. Harrumph!

I don't mean that I am miserably sad! The part of travel where I am in new places all the time is pretty great. Thanks to the care of My Roommate the Cheese Lady and the aforementioned fantastically useful [not to mention just fantastic, period] boyfriend, the house is constantly getting cozier and happier. My current work is usually more interesting than my old work (sorry, former colleagues - it's just true), and it changes enough that I'm always learning. I've forgotten how to wear high heels. I still see my parents once a month. I get to find and explore new dance stuff most places I go. That sort of thing.

Still. My predominant feeling is a sortof wistful loneliness and disconnection.

I have a bath thing here in Chicago that smells like oranges.

Except! It's supposed to smell like oranges and patchouli. It probably does, but my wholesome package-less deodorant also smells of patchouli, and I believe I can no longer smell patchouli as a result.

No. Longer. Smell. PATCHOULI.

I strongly suspect that thinking patchouli is just what clean armpits smell like qualifies a person as a pretty serious hippie.

There's a mediterranean restaurant inside a jewelry store around the corner from the office. They make, among other things, the finest falafel I recall eating. They also introduced me to a Greek thing I'm terribly pleased to meet: lemon rice soup.

I stole this recipe from the internets and made my own tonight.

onion or scallions
kale or cabbage, shredded (yay, bok choy)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped or minced
a quantity of pepper, turmeric & ginger that sounds good to you
some amount of vegetable oil and soy sauce
a cup or two of precooked rice
4 cups vegetable broth
1/3 to 1/2 cup lemon juice, freshly squeezed

Sautee everything but the rice, lemon juice and broth, until appropriately yummy (depending on how soft you like your green stuff). Add the liquid and simmer for about 10 minutes. Consume happily.

If you, or anyone you love, ever need to quit smoking... may I suggest a month in Chicago?

People smoke and litter their butts all over downtown. At first, it makes an ex-smoker think man, I really want a cigarette, but this gradually turns into a general feeling of disgust. The air in Chicago is fairly urban (that is, clogged a bit with dust and dirt and exhaust and stuff), anyhow, and the addition of secondhand smoke to that mix is straight-up foul. It makes Richmond smell positively tropical in comparison.

When I smoked regularly, I had no idea how unpleasant it was for passersby... and, well, one person smoking isn't that bad. But one person smoking every 5 feet is a bit like walking through a bar. Only the bar is like, 2 miles long.

I saw this photo yesterday that made me wonder if there's a sex- or gender-based trend in the postures people assume while having orgasms.

My purely anecdotal conjecture is that women tend to squinch while men sprawl, and women become convex while men become concave (though upon reflection, I'm not so sure about the latter). So tell me: where do you fall on this totally scientific spectrum?

[Poll #1545057]

Thank you for supporting my adventures in bad science.

I finished my first project last week and don't yet have a new assignment, which (leaving aside my worries about being bored tomorrow) means something awesome: this morning I slept in on daylight savings time and am now cozied up with some cats and Google Reader.

Reader is pretty great. I played with other readers a couple of years ago without really enjoying them, and ended up just creating categories of "friends" on Livejournal for my various blogs and such. That's handy: I can read everything, actual friends and blogs and fandom stuff, but LJ's RSS feature breaks. Like, a lot. And it's not designed to be export/import friendly, so it took an hour or so of manual work to convert to the new tool.

Anyhow. I came here not to bury LJ, but to praise Reader. Reader is a reasonable compromise, available as one stream or several like LJ, except consistently working. It's also easy to share random stuff I like (although this is also easy to do on Facebook, where I already have a network of friends, so...).

These tools, for me, say a lot about how I interact with the world. This got me curious. What social stuff are you using on the internets?

This is a pretty cool thing Twitter can do: Kevin Smith (yes, that Kevin Smith) can embarrass Southwest Airlines much more publicly than the average person. They apparently kicked him off a plane for being inconveniently fat. Maybe.

There's a longer post on Shapely Prose about both Smith's experience and the longstanding asshattery of a couple of airlines (at least one other airline, United, does the same) when it comes to fat folk. Nevermind the right or wrongness of the occasional two-seat purchase policy: it's the occasional that really sucks. It's an inconsistently and unfairly applied policy.

Look, I don't know why airlines have such a hard time achieving profitability. I don't know what's reasonable to expect so that they can continue to fly and pay people who make that happen. But it does seem like air travel has become more and more uncomfortable over time - not for me, or even for just fat people, but for people as a whole. The discussion around this particular issue always seems to include so much blame for other humans, rather than the compassion and empathy that is arguably our natural state. It's the system. It's a system we're actively participating in when we defend our space, occupy as much of it as possible with our bags, and complain at the noises made by the smiling baby sitting in a lap next to us.

Air travel doesn't always make people assholes. It often makes us kin. A couple of weeks ago when everyone headed south got rebooked onto the same 5 early morning flights, we got an entire group going to figure out how the airline's process was meant to work, and to inform other passengers (yeah, I got picked for recon; that was pretty fun) so no one got stuck in the wrong line.

Both, though, are part of the same thing: it's a lousy system built on crappy processes. No one ought to have to struggle to find the right line. No one ought to wonder whether some policy will be applied to them or not [Er, not to mention that fatness ought not be a thing one can be shamed for, period. It should be a difference we all just accommodate because we're people, and people are good.].

I started this post in the Denver airport, which I recommend. The overall experience is just average, but they recycle and have free wifi and lots of places to charge things. Everything I need. Except maybe a shower.

Where I have been, though, is Kaua'i. Kaua'i is pretty amazing when you get into it (the last trip there was very short, so I just saw the surface of things, which is lovely the way a postcard or travel magazine is lovely). This time we got to climb around on things. Alas, I never made time for serious snorkeling, just a little paddle out from the beach on my first day, but that left more time for land-based stuff.

I'd like to get more practice hiking - it's been awhile, and like anything it gets more comfortable & therefore more daring each time I do it.

( Oops, this turned out longer than I'd planned )

Good trip! The company was also lovely & I had a lot of fish tacos, though my appetite for them has not diminished. [Yeah, yeah. Go ahead and make your crass jokes. I'll wait over here.]

I have to write this story down. It's not only adorable, but emblematic of my family.

Last Friday, when you may or may not have been celebrating Christmas, my mother got up and read the paper. As people often do. She came upon an article about a family with several dogs who'd ended up in a lousy financial situation through a combination of injury and the generally lousy-ness of the economy. The article mentions that the dogs eat a lot - seems all of them do! - and the family is worried about providing for them.

Mom decides we need to take them our "spare" dog food - that is, several large bags and some cans. And, because she is herself, we have to a) do it immediately, that morning, before we go to the annual xmas movie... in an hour, and b) she's not coming with us. People tend not to believe this, but my mother is shy. Introverted, too. She's great at organizing people and making them feel comfortable, but if you look really closely, you can see that it takes effort.

I should mention here that we only know what neighborhood they live in and vaguely what their vehicle looks like. Also, I'm not sure I've yet put on pants when she issues this decision.

So. Dad and I get dressed, by which point mom has a fully developed plan and is already executing it. We all load up the van, and we locate the neighborhood. I read the newspaper article in the car, so we'll at least know the name of the family when we show up at their doorstep. We then drive around until I spot the family's vehicle, and dad goes and tells them we have dog stuff for them (also a small offering for the people), which the dude, dad & I all drop off at their place in about 5 minutes.

Total elapsed time on this entire project? About 40 minutes. Half of which is driving. No big production, no hand-wringing, no pushiness in the direction of the dogs and people we - I hope - helped. And then we went to the movies.