Categories
Monthly Goal Meet-Up

November Monthly Goal Meet-Up

Notebook Portfolio

First things first. I know, I know. I said I would do a special mid-month reminder for the meet-up and then I neglected it entirely. I just got caught up in other blog stuff, so I’ll save the special reminder for another month. Let’s jump into what I did do:

October Goals

1. Run! Yoga! Elliptical! Twice a week = happy life. (Um…)
2. Stick to completely realistic budget. (… not so much)
3. Develop and implement 3-month Alice PR plan. Yes!
4. Write twice weekly on Modite. Woot!
5. Throw an appetizer and wine party. Go me!

We can start with the bad news. I most certainly did not exercise this month, and might have even done less than the previous month. Ugh. But! I did lose a couple pounds, so I’m not feeling too guilty about it. And I did stick to my completely realistic budget… until the end of the month when I went on a shopping spree. Since I go on a spree every Fall and Spring, I should have planned for it, so I’ll live and learn for next time.

I’m excited that I delved right into my new responsiblities at Alice, and I’ve been updating Modite religiously. Speaking of, I’ve been reorganizing and redesigning the blog a lot, as you may have noticed, and that’s actually been a huge stress reliever for me. More on that next week. Finally, I threw a rocking party for the Brazen guys and some of my girlfriends. It was a pumpkin potluck, where everyone brought a dish that was pumpkin or Fall related, and it was delicious! The company wasn’t too shabby either. I highly recommend the idea.

So! What am I’m going to tackle for November? Here we go:

November Goals

1. Exercise as if my life depended on it. Because it does.
2. Stick to budget. Don’t overspend for the holidays!
3. Spend quality time with Ryan, friends and family. Be thankful.
4. Continue writing twice weekly for Modite.
5. Secure two to three pieces of “big” coverage for Alice.

Since I’ll be traveling a lot in November, I wanted to mostly maintain what I’ve been doing right and focus on things that matter. I’m really looking forward to the holiday season in fact. And while I didn’t accomplish all of my October goals, I’m starting to feel a lot happier lately and near the end of my “dip.”

Alrighty then. What’d you all get done in October? What will you be cranking on in November?

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To participate in the meet-up:

1. Post a list of your career/life related goals for November, along with your checked off October goals if you’d like, on your own blog.
2. Come back here and leave a link to your post in the comments (*If you don’t have your own blog, feel free to share your list here in the comments to join in!)
3. Then, check out everyone else’s lists as they leave comments – click their links, visit their blogs, say hello, meet, greet and support each other because that’s what it’s all about!

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The next meet-up will be Monday,  November 30th so that we can set goals for December. I’ve already marked my calendar for it and am wishing you lots of success for the month!

Categories
Character Finds

Go Forth

This is the other video I wanted to share today. It’s a Levi’s commercial that features as the soundtrack a poem written by Walt Whitman, and is supposedly a recording of Walt Whitman himself. A columnist over at Slate brings up the obvious question on whether or not Levi is desecrating Whitman by using his poetry to sell jeans, but any company that uses their marketing dollars to spread poetry to the masses is fine by me.

The same columnist also praises the commercial for it’s genius aesthetics and sound editing. The article is worth the read. And when you’re finished watching this and reading that, go watch the second of Levi’s commercials, this one featuring O Pioneers (I actually like the audio editing on this one even more).

Categories
Character Finds

Stop Motion Story

I’m going to break from my normal picks today with two videos, both of which are advertisements, and both of which are marvelous. The first is this incredible stop motion video for Olympus Pen. My favorite part is when the guy parachutes down the staircase… you’ll see.

Many thanks to Junk Drawer Media for knowing about my stop motion obsession and sending this my way.

Second video coming up…

Categories
Links

More on Anxiety…

I was frankly surprised at the response on my anxiety post. I didn’t expect so many people to understand where I was coming from… so thank you. Here’s some great follow-up posts to mine:

When did I become incapable of spontaneity? I used to be capable of it, pretty sure about that. In fact, I used to be really darn good at it! But recently, anything “off plan”, whether it’s a food item on a menu, a trip somewhere, or even a drink with the girls, has become a chore, another thing on the list, something that requires its own mini plan of how to get there and enjoy it. And that can be fraught with anxiety…

I find myself ‘nesting’ my way out of anxiety, staying home or ducking out to avoid the stress related with erm, having fun… I’m a highly productive member of the workforce, can be counted on to do the right things by my friends (remember, I always have a plan!), and I’m sure I’m enriching my life by ticking off things on the big, fat to do list. Only, it would be nice if sometimes I could switch off the list making freak in my brain, and just chill out.

– Via Life Beyond List.

With anxiety, you really do feel like you’re being threatened, but anxiety is a threat in and of itself. So many times I would tell my dad I was going for a walk and would make it to the end of my driveway before I turned back around. So many times I passed on going somewhere with friends, afraid that those same emotions would blindside me and I wouldn’t be able to get home, get back to my comfort zone. I was afraid that I couldn’t control life, couldn’t stop change from happening.

Anxiety is a change itself, though. It changes your life, turns it upside down, turns you inside out, threatens to keep you a prisoner in your own house, your own skin.

Until one day you push through it.

– Via twenty(or)something.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Food With Thought

A World War I poster from the U.S. Food Administration by F.G. Cooper.

I would like to hang it in my kitchen.

Via Wall Blank, $24.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Red Balloon

Please tell me you’ve seen The Red Balloon? It’s a charming short film that follows a little boy across Paris who is following a red balloon. This print is a charming nod to the spirit of the film. And yes, I’m on a balloon kick.

Monsieur III via The Shiny Squirrel, $30.

Categories
Happiness Knowing yourself Self-management

Understanding the Anxious Mind

For the past eight or nine months, I’ve created a bubble around me of people I trust, making sweeping efforts to withdraw from drama. Through this process, I learned; the bubble always pops.

Here’s what that’s like for me: Imagine, you’re a crumb and you fall onto the sidewalk and an ant discovers you. His tiny ant friends are soon alerted and before you know it, you’re swarmed! A disgusting black blanket moves furtively and anxiously to completely and methodically chew through your every last morsel. The very thought makes me sick.

And more than anything, this is what it’s like when things are outside my locus of control. And I love control, especially in all of its anxiety-ridden devastation.

“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger,” reports the New York Times. “It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”

For me, the what-ifs appear with even the simplest of situations. Ryan will inquire, for instance, if I would like to attend a concert last-minute, and my chest will immediately be gripped with all of the possible unknowns, and how all of these unknowns make it impossible for me to go.

Where is it? What time does it start? Are we going to get there late? Do we have to pay a cover? Will I have to walk in heels? I don’t have a cute outfit without heels. It’s going to be cold outside. Will I have to stand at the concert and carry my coat? Will it be hot? Will there be a lot of people? Are the people going be younger than me? Will they be boring? Will the band be good? Who’s going with? Are we going to get drinks after? Will the restrooms be clean? I can’t stand public restrooms.

No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. Rationality urges me to do my make-up and try on clothes while anxiety grips my heart so tightly that I’m dripping with angst. By the time Ryan arrives, I’m paralyzed into doing everything I can not to burst into tears.

I distinctly remember my first such outburst in a sixth-grade hallway. After an elementary school of calm, I peeled back the doors on middle school to discover inequalities, insecurities and the bulging wart of worry – a reoccurring blemish in my otherwise untarnished path towards happiness.

Taken together, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorder, make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, reports the Times. That’s not even counting the garden-variety worriers like mothers who fret when their daughter doesn’t call, or husbands that believe a phone call in the middle of the night signals a terrible occurrence.

My coping mechanism is to nest as methodically as anxiety chews. Withdrawing further perpetuates the vicious cycle of shrinking into comfort, into habits, into a place that is safe and away from criticism or mistakes or hurt or anger. I crave the days that are built around everything going according to plan.

Research shows that I’m good for the human race. Without those who are hyperviligant, we wouldn’t be able to leap into action so quickly. High-reactive kids are “less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.”

The Times also reports we’re “generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.”

But for me, the mental anguish of wearing myself ragged “with a brain that’s always on high alert” is suffocating. I long to be laidback. To be the kind of person who doesn’t wring their hands under the table. The kind of person who “gives up any notion of being guarded or protected” in order to be intimately known. A person that can arrive effortlessly to a concert.

Categories
Links

How do you measure up?

We’ve all heard that how tall you are at work can help and being overweight can hinder you. But did you also know that being short is a big part of the mix as well? The New York Times reports:

The shorter you are in America, the more likely your chances to develop coronary heart disease, diabetes or stroke... A decrease in a man’s height to the 25th percentile from the 75th — roughly to 5 feet 8 inches from 6 feet— is associated with, on average, a dip in earnings of 6 to 10 percent…

And like obese people, short people are less likely to finish college than those of average weight. A paper from the July issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology used survey data from more than 450,000 adults to conclude that male college graduates are, on average, more than an inch taller than men who never finished high school…

The economist John Komlos has shown that the United States is losing height relative to other developed nations, and some American demographic groups are even shrinking in absolute terms. Yet we tend to discount shortness as a mere byproduct of genetics and early-life experience, while treating the obesity epidemic as if it were a grave danger to public health. Why can’t our campaign to reshape the American body have two fronts? If we really want to make our country healthier, let’s have a war on shortness too.

The Fat and Short of It via The New York Times.

Categories
Character Style Wishlist

Blither Ring

This ring is one of the more unique and cute versions of the large flower ring I’ve seen and comes from the same designer as the Plaid Pintuck Dress.

Via Spool No. 72, $24.

Categories
Character Things to Do

Weekend Ride

If I could do anything this weekend, it would be to go on a hot-air balloon ride. And I’m not sure there is anything as iconic as the hot air balloon to represent pure, fanciful imagination… ah. Happy Weekend, everyone!

More photos from Celine via A Cup of Joe.

Categories
Inspiration Links

Your passion is lost on others

 

13-year old Tavi posted this excerpt from a Washington Post piece on her blog:

It’s always a bit discombobulating when people raise their voices in anger because they’ve gotten wind that designers are making and selling $25,000 dresses. After all, it’s not as if the existence of a dress that costs as much as a car negates the availability of cute $25 frocks at Target. And it isn’t as though edicts have been issued that all women must now dress like one of the superheroes on Balenciaga’s runway.

For personal and sometimes tortured reasons — I can’t have it so no one else can! — observers declare that they just don’t understand the attraction of these strange and expensive clothes. That would be a fair argument if those same complainers lashed out at people who spend thousands of dollars on Redskins season tickets, vintage wines, first-edition books or midlife-crisis cars. But those industries don’t stir nearly as much ire from people who are uninterested in them.

Everyone has a passion that is lost on others.

From The Washington Post via Style Rookie.

Categories
Accountability Links Politics

Ignore Fox News?

Journalism is taking hits in more places than one. Not only has its validity and usefulness been questioned by the entire blogosphere, but increasingly, its integrity has taken a beating as well. Nowhere do the shiners show up more than upon the face of Fox News, whose incredibly biased coverage on President Obama has raised red flags, all the way up to the White House.

Slate Magazine shared their take this past weekend:

Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity and take pains not to load the dice in its own favor. At any other network, accusation of bias might even lead to some soul-searching and behavioral adjustment. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for “evidence” and “proof,” which when presented is brushed off and ignored.

And while I agree with Slate and detest Fox more than I can say,  I can’t help but remember another opinion piece by Frank Rich at the New York Times, where he argued that during the first 100 days of the presidency, Obama’s mere presence cottoned such unprecedented praise and agreement that the press couldn’t help but gush. And sometimes positive bias is as worrisome as negative.

Ignore Fox via Slate.