Not So Grounded

Goodbye - Hello

Started a new blog, Goodbye - Hello, all about Maddy's last year at home.  Not sure where it will go (or where she will go, for that matter) but thought I'd be more structured than inundating my poor friends with rambling emails on the subject.

Home Again Home Again ...

Just returned from 3 weeks away, from home in the Blue Ridge Appalachians several thousand miles north west to western Washington.  Our family of four crashed with close (and very kind & accommodating) friends in Bellingham. We did tons of cool stuff (photos on FB):  watched 3 pods of frolicking Orcas, kayaked past bald eagles and their nests, skylight train to Vancouver, very fast dips in glacial water ... wild flowers, volcanoes, big ol' juicy oysters, nightly Mallards ice cream (Maddy always got basil), and camping camping & more camping.  (Okay, a little too much camping for the rest of my family ...)

Three weeks is a great amount of time to be away.  Cleared my head, my perspectives, my priorities, my schedule, my stress.  For three weeks I did as I pleased.

Interestingly, I worked a lot.  And loved every minute of it.  This trip, more than any other, allowed me to enjoy my professional life seamlessly.  I worked whenever & wherever I dang well felt like it, played just the same. Completely unencumbered by physical location - just my laptop, wireless, blackberry and iPod (free Kindle app, favorite reading tucked into my pocket).  Calls got made, work got submitted, bills got paid, I yakked with friends, I kept up with our dog-sitter ... all while walking new streets enough that they grew familiar.

I suspect I sound delusional.  That vacations are supposed to Unplug, not ramp up the Plugging.  But I felt exhilarating freedom, permanently released from an office, a house, four walls and a land line.  Untethered from a permanent address that defines where I technically belong.  From the static practice that I am a local Here and an interloper There.  That one place is home and all others are not.  

To be sure, I am delighted to be back in my own bed, watching the summer rain dance on the poplars by my windows.  But it's also nice to know that in only a few weeks the arid western vistas grew just as sweet.  Imagine how different the world would be if everyone felt Home no matter where we were?

You Go, Oprah!

I can't decide if Newsweek's grotesque photo of Oprah demonstrates that she has finally hit a mainstream nerve or that Newsweek is far more frightened about its future than I suspected.  

Either way, this week's cover story confirms for me the magnitude of the intellectual and cultural shift sweeping this country.  And the sad irrelevance of traditional publications.

I could certainly offer contrary facts, statistics, and stories to counter Newsweek's indictments against Oprah and her messages.  But I'll leave that to others who, I'm sure, will flood Newsweek's mailboxes.

Instead let me just say that despite the fact that I'm the magazine's primary market (48, advanced degreed, entrepreneur with substantial disposable income, an educated and prolific reader), this issue shows the desperation of an elite losing things far more fundamental than the value of their 401(k)s.

Here are some different truths:  vast swaths of the world believe that our thoughts and intentions shape our reality, for example, and we no longer feel compelled to wait for the physics industry to catch up.  In 2005 the Centers for Disease Control reported that 65% of us routinely access "alternative" healthcare; the Institute of Medicine then revealed that we spend more out-of-pocket on those alternatives than on visits to our primary physician.  We recognize bioidentical hormones do not benefit from double-blind studies because they are unpatenable (ie unprofitable, ie unable to generate the revenue necessary to fund those studies), not because they are ineffective.  So we're using them and experiencing life-changing improvements.  

We're moving forward without Newsweek and its peers.  In droves.  And this issue suggests their fearful sense of abandonment is palpable. 

Newsweek may gloat sardonically in its intellectual superiority, dutifully reporting facts, all perfectly checked, that demonstrate collapsing securities markets, melting polar ice caps, and clashing political enemies.  But they miss the real story.  They miss the fundamental demise of the paradigms and epistemologies that cause all those horrors.

That is the story Oprah bravely explores.

I do not always agree with her.  I, too, bristle sometimes at what I believe is her misplaced enthusiasms.  And I certainly regret that she must weave evocative material between banal celebrity interviews.

But the real secret is Oprah remains steadfastly relevant, and Newsweek does not.  Unfortunately at a time when we most benefit from national dialog, Newsweek chooses to be a gasping periodical in a dying industry, regurgitating the same empty story week-after-week, with writers and editors -- no matter how skilled and well-intentioned -- increasingly talking only to the shrinking pool of people just like themselves.

There's a whole new world out here, far larger than Newsweek's antiquated universe.  Maybe if they took some bioidentical hormones they'd finally feel well enough to find it, join it, and share that story.

Change in the Air

It's a lazy day, this post-Thanksgiving Sunday.  Cold, rainy, all my family curled up in the living room, still in our pj's.  Darling Daughter just returned from Santa Barbara, visiting friends and doing the full college tour at UC-Santa Barbara, and she's telling tales.  My niece is laying on the couch.  Sweet Boy's watching a movie.  The dogs are asleep. The girls are begging John to make them breakfast, and suddenly I smell bacon.

I'm trying really hard not to feel poignant about all this, not remember Lindsey's only here another six weeks and Maddy's old enough to look at colleges and choosing nothing closer than 3,000 miles from home.  (She has two college criteria, in addition to a good dance program ... no trudging to class in cold, snowy, rainy weather and, she argues, since college is the best chance to explore somewhere brand new, completely unencumbered, & on her parents' dime, she might as well go someplace as different from home as possible.  She's always been scarily rational & fearless about these kinds of things.)

So taking her lead, I won't get melancholy about all this impending Change, especially since melancholy never actually wards off the inevitable.  (And I remember Lindsey and my friend Liz are weathering their first holiday season without their mothers so I don't have much cause for sadness in comparison.)  I'll enjoy their company & this exquisitely lazy day instead.

And I think I've got 'em convinced to go with me to the gym.