Tony Does LA

Told you he wouldn't last long enough unemployed to make the public doll--our BusBlog Hero, Shakespierce, has become editor of LAist. w00t! Congrats, Tony.

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Okay, BMO...

OK.

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myspace birthday to me

when spam hits at home, there's always MySpace comments for some snazzy bday wishes. Thanks also to all of my buds who called, skyped, and emailed. I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!

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I was getting spammed every five seconds..... micro cleanup crew wanted?

....in comments last night and this morning. As a result, I have a mountain of shit to clear away from the mountainside here. And it seems if you leave a little litter, they find you by the smell of it.

I don't have time at all. I wish there were micro-services we could purchase as bloggers, like in New York when you hire someone to shovel your driveway, or if you really get busy and don't have the time or energy to shovel at all, you hire a plowing service.

Just as so many Web 2.0 product offerings are more feature than application, I wouldn't at all mind paying for micro-services, like spam cleaning, at a rate of say 5 cents a cleansed post.

I was thinking of another micro-service related to my blog and internet client life last night, but it was one of those great ideas I took to sleep with me.

Of course you'd need to be bonded if I hired you to spam shovel for me, because I want to know that I can at least sort of trust you not to blow away my blog while you're in there with admin rights. "Bonded" in the age of the social web means that we trust the same people, and so we trust one another.

MySpace has tons of micro-service opportunities. I'm too tired. And George drank the saki at the Japanese steakhouse, not me!

What micro-services could you use that you don't have time to do yourself, and what kind of micro-payment value would you attach to them?

Tags: social software, social marketing, web2.0, comment spam, blogger = Powered by Qumana

I'm Glad He Found the Picture Before ValleyWag!

Tom has some surprising information about my past. Well, maybe not so surprising. See, you have ordinary crime, organized crime, and the authorities. Like cogs in a wheel, these elements work together to keep law and order rolling. But sometimes, lines blur. People crossover. Convergence happens. Don't tell the family. Shhh. It's not that easy. Less shit more wind. That kind of thing... What can I say?

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sorry--i have to shut down comments for now--under spam invasion.

Shit. a girl shouldn't have to turn off comments on her birthday.

:-(

email still works. ;-)

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oh blogger

Whenever you do maintenance, I suffer. What work did you do the last two days while Blogger was down? Whatever it is, I'm being creamed by comment spam - like it's never happened in five years. Like hundreds. WTF? Happy birthday to me?

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On the eve of my 45th year

And so i begin my 45th year. Six years longer than my father lived. That's the old mile marker, you know. I don't use it as much as I used to. But it's the metronome of loss, marking time by the absence of, the sting of without.

When I used to think of being 40... who am i kidding, i never thought i'd live to see 40. that's a common thing for kids whose parents disappear dead out of the blue -- at least to the clueless kid -- one day when they arrive home from school.

That does something to your sense of balance, warps your perspective, reminds you there is no safe. You want terrorism? I'll give you some terrorism. What is terrorized doesn't grow right. The loss of a parent at an early age distorts the whole order of nature -- what the child thinks he observes he never trusts again.

So then, what do you do?

Well, first, you expect everyone you hold dear, including yourself, to make an early departure from the world. And you live with that stark reality knocking on the right side of your skull 24x7x356. Award-winning service for the dearly dissociated.

it can get complicated.

especially when you never thought it really bothered you much.

Rambling here.

Papa George says I'm the youngest looking 44 he's ever seen. It's the genes. You get the good with the bad.

Jenna has all sorts of things planned for tomorrow. I love her up and down my spine you know. GOD I love her.

And i'm on steroids, so let's see if i can enjoy the day without slipping into mania every fifteen minutes or so.

rapid cycling. wait until I come off of them.

i can breathe.

it's alright to be okay.

Everything changed when I hit 40. Everything. Every. Thing. Did I already tell you?

family, job, love, kid, marriage, health, self -- no one escaped the hit.

Category 5 heading straight for the heart of my city, my soul, no way out.

covert to overt--watch the show, the best view is on the hill to the left, bring a blanket to sit on, the nights can get chilly.

I don't want to scare anyone who hasn't hopped over yet, and maybe you've had a great life, and maybe you have nothing to grieve, or you've cloaked yourself in a new age narcissistic blanket of impenetrable white light (good on you!), but if you're real, I can tell you this from my neck of the woods: everything I knew with certainty from birth to my 40th year, turns out, was wrong.

Pretty much reverse order in fact. Pretty much a perspective flip. PRETTY MUCH HAD TO HAVE MY LIFE TWISTED INSIDE OUT. PRETTY MUCH ALMOST KILLED ME.

40 was so very tough. 41 was so hard. And i have worked every inch of the way since to make it less hard, safer, find the safety, seek it, divining rod to water-->let me find what i never had, i can't be on high alert another second, there must be a safe corner somewhere, dark and quiet, shhhh.

But that was then. Before. When I hit 40 and the shit hit the fan.

Now I'm 44. Less shit, more wind.

But what has stopped--what has stopped is the searing, slicing pain, phantom limbs of loss exposed and re-amputated before my eyes.

It felt something like that.

I didn't bring all of it here, but I brought all of me. Every single moaning second of me. And every single second I was making sense of it.

The functioning and the not-so came here. This is where I came. And when I didn't write about it, I wrote FROM those places of despair, terror, disbelief, agony, and relief. Always from.

I said it back then, when I first started blogging: "This is where we heal. This is how we heal."

I can say that. At least I can say that.

Today I want to say something out loud here too:

I'm going to be okay.

I am okay.

Permission. permission to be okay, to begin to become, to become who I am. the permission I gave myself four years ago.

no one can give it to you. it's permission you take. shhhh. take it.

happy birthday you crazy shit; you're okay. It's okay.

Even when it's not, it's not always fatal.

it's not always fatal.

i didn't understand, didn't get it. everything was fatal. always.

fatal--my default.

best friend said: "Sometimes you get better, you know."

I said, "Huh?"

A row of doors flew open, knobs twisting on their own, open open open open open, reverse slamming.

wooooooosh.

like that.

And even with the tremendous relief that accompanies survival, there's a rip, a gash, a more powerful ache beneath, below. Cixous would say step down, step down into it, and so I do, and there I face the cruelest joke of all: my being okay means that she can't be. She's not because I am. I am not disabled; she cannot care for me if I am well--she can't find her way to me, around me, without her role..

The masks don't fit, they fall, and I want to help rearrange them, to make sense, to reshape them, to comfort and fix. I already know the answer. Oh. How I love her, the honest beauty she would show only to me, and only in the earliest hours of the day, before waking completely, the morning stirring her own trauma into terror.

So much more, so many more hearts, broken, so long; it's been so long. I have lost and let go until my palms ache from the unfolding.

To make it to this place, a place I trust enough to say it out loud.

I'm okay.

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make up a word 2.0 day

what's a word for what happens when you've been pronouncing a web 2.0 company name in your head one way for like four months and then you hear a podcast or someone talks to you on the phone from that company and you realize you've been pronouncing it wrong in your head the whole time.

ready...go.

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Fighting the War on Terror

RSS compatible!
OPML approved!
WIKI enabled!
ATOMized!
kaboooom!


somebody set my lyrics to music. whatarush!

note to self

Repeat after me:

"If I should decide to take a vacation or a break from blogging, I will not ask anyone to guest blog for me. I am not that important. The Internet has and will survive without me, my brilliant wit, and my stunning prose -- indefinitely."

Tags: reality check, blogging, tech, social media, guest blogger = Powered by Qumana

pervasive cluetraining

it's nice to see people continue to discover and apply the highly relevant Cluetrain Manifesto, even as others race to be the first to unveil "what's next."

I argue that what comes after cluetrain is cluetrain.

Because cluetrain is not linear, it's hyperlinked. With hyperlinks--surprise--there is no beginning and no end. Cluetrain is a way of relating, not a marketing program or campaign. Cluetrain is the journey -- toot toot -- not the boarding pass. It's the "along the way," not the "here we are."

And in keeping with it's purpose, Cluetrain is as personal. as personal to me and him and her as it is to chris, doc, and david.

That's why those red flags start-a wavin' when I hear anyone proclaim this or that as "the next cluetrain"

My god, we just got here. We lugged a goddam big huge boulder uphill at great personal risk (independence means under-insured) over the last seven years, and we're three steps from the summit.

Except that it's a web, not a hill. We traverse across, not up.

HA!

This is the cluetrainian era, not the post-cluetrainian era.

Fry up some baloney, layer on some mayo, and enjoy it.

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ragged and wormy

It's sinus infection time--oh that lovely time of the year when my face is filled with staples and my brain is pushing up marshmallows, and I can't unearth a single cogent thought from the mucus sea inside of me.

cripe. i'm sick and i am not good at being sick. not now not ever.

I have three deadlines waiting for me, they have come to life, staring at their melting Daliesque watches wondering when I might deliver. One cogent thought. Just ONE, and I might be able to rescue whatever phlegm-encrusted bits of self-belief I had going into this rapid-onset sinusitis.

aaaahrgh. my face. my teeth. o.

I looked up photos of hookworms today because that's what Sophie has (or had now that i've dosed her with five syringes of wormer) and there were 17 other things I should have been doing, but the vet telling me how hookworms have teeth and how humans can catch them (I guess by dancing on dog shit), left me too curious for my own good.

You see them, right? Let me just say that if they were the size of my pinky finger, I'd stick one between my eyes right now so it could suck the crap out of my sinuses--teeth and all.

they had it right with leeches.

now, imagine that hookworm face singing opera.

Funny, eh?

k. good night.

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future by design and Jaque Fresco

I always click through the blogads that I accept (sometimes even before I accept them!) to make sure they're sending folks where they're supposed to, to see what's at the other end of the tunnel, etc.

The most recent ad about the Atlanta Film Festival and Future by Design caught my attention as I explored inward.

I'd never heard of the work of Jacque Fresco until I accepted the ad for my blog. I found the site fascinating. Whether or not the future cooperates with Fresco's design, I have to say I wouldn't mind seeing the movie OR living inside a world like this virtually--3rd life, the underwater version.

Look at these designs. They're amazing. Maybe we can engage Mr. Fresco to re-design Atlanta.

"there are no civilized people yet. it's a process constantly going on. As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you're in the early stages of what they call civilization. All of the marvels and wonders of technology amount to nothing unless it elevates humans to their highest potential." -- Jacque Fresco

Perhaps that's a bit new-agey, but when you've lived a long time and designed entire future worlds, I can suspend my disbelief long enough to pay the proper respect.

Here's Fresco's Inventions and Designs- many of which have been patented and have had wide commercial acceptance.

• 
  
  
  
  • Systems for noiseless and pollution free aircraft
  
  
  • A new aircraft wing structural system, patented by the US Air Force
  
  
  • An electrostatic system for the elimination of sonic boom
  
  
  • Boundary layer control and electrodynamic methods for aircraft control that dispenses with ailerons, elevators, rudders, and flaps
  
  
  • A three-wheel automobile consisting of only 32 parts
  
  
  • “The Aluminum Trend House,” a prefabricated house designed and developed for Mike Shore and Earl Muntz, 1945
  
  
  • Designed and developed another prefabricated aluminum house for Major Realty Corporation in collaboration with Aluminum Company of America
  
  
  • Developed numerous components and systems for architectural construction
  
  
  • Developed equipment ranging from 3-dimensional x-ray units to electronic surgical instruments for the medical field
  
  
  • Developed a technique for viewing 3-dimensional motion pictures without the use of glasses
  
  
  • Designed and built a wide variety of reinforced concrete structures
  
  
  
  

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ess-doe-tea

SDOTI -The Lemur says stuff about my new job and about coffee and the telephone and conferences and power balls which you should not miss.

practicing my new signature...

Jeneane Sessum
Social Director, The Internet(TM)

Jeneane D. Sessum, SDOTI, OBGYN, PC

jeneane sessum
soc-dir, internet

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when a man loves a (single) woman

when a man loves a woman
can't even find his own nose
cause it's stuck deep
inside her ear

If she's a nose thief
he can't see it
doesn't think it's gross that
she's givin' herself a tracheotomy
with her own index finger

when a man loves a woman
he don't see her two sets of teeth
waiting to bite out
his adam's apple

Tracheotomy biting white eyed woman
single and wicked for stealing noses
no place for her to get a single man
unless he has some spare parts...

When a man loves a woman
Deep down in his inbox
She can bring him such misery
If she extracts her own duodenum
He's the last one to know
Cause she took his eyeballs too.

mmmmm mmm mmm

catchy though, isn't it?