Category: make it work

In The Great Room

It is a mild and sunny Monday afternoon and I am happy and healthy here in New York City.

At the moment I’m working on my NaNoWriMo trying to increase a word count that currently sits at just past 45,000 words. I gotta get 5,000 more written by Friday to make it past the goal line.

I think I can I think I can.

In order to inspire myself, I’m sitting in the great room at the New York City Public library tapping away at the keys to my MacBook.

It really is a great room:




Copyright 2010, Karen Fayeth. Taken with an iPhone5 using the onboard app and the panorama function


Downstairs there is a free exhibition of some artifacts from Charles Dickens. Among these treasures is the late Mr. Dickens pen and inkwell. Now that really is inspiring.




Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth. Taken with an iPhone5 and the Camera+ app.


Here I lament tapping away at the keys, trying to make the words accumulate into something good while our man Charles scribbled them all out longhand, dipping pen into ink every so often.

I suppose one might be a bit more thoughtful about the words if one had to write them out one by one in pen and ink, eh?

For me, I can’t imagine going back to even writing on a typewriter. I remember having to type up papers for school on my mom’s old manual typewriter and being so head bangingly frustrated at having to type each page perfectly with no mistakes. Argh!

No, I’ll take my beat up old MacBook, words slopping out from the edges of my Word document like water in an overfilled and somewhat leaky bucket.

I can veritably shower in the words here as they fly free and easy from my fingertips.

Then again, he was Dickens. I have yet to fully be Karen Fayeth.

Back to tip tapping away in the great room.

Many words and many miles yet to go….



Happy Gobble Gobble Day

Now a holiday tradition. Doodle-y goodness!

_______________
First published November 25, 2010

To celebrate the holiday, I present to you a doodle from my marker board at work.

I was on a *really* long conference call. It was boring. I got distracted.

May you and yours have a fabulous, gluttonous day!

Photo and doodle Copyright 2010, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page. Photo taken with an iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic app.



What I Don’t Have

On Sunday, driving home from a late breakfast with a dear friend where we had talked at length about a lot of deep and powerful topics, I flicked on the radio in my car to find distraction. Something a little more cheery.

The last time I had been in the car was Friday night as I drove home from work, and I had listed to NPR. So when I turned on the radio on Sunday, what I found waiting for me was the unmistakable voice of Garrison Keillor and his show “A Prairie Home Companion“.

Oh lord, really? That show gives me the hives. To be honest, NPR kind of does too. I do like All Things Considered on an evening commute, though.

That said, the sonorous voice of Mr. Keillor managed to lure me in and I listened to him tell a long, drawn out story (can he tell any other kind?) the point of which is that a penny given by a poor man has more value than a dollar given by a rich man because the penny means so much more. The poor man is giving what he doesn’t have.

Which then lead to a life lesson of giving what you don’t have to the world.

A short Google search led me to discover this is all a riff on a Wayne Dyer speech, which lead me to break out in even more hives. Lots and lots of itchy hives.

So for as much as I wanted to forget this little parable, somehow I have not been able to.

This idea of digging deep and giving what you don’t have, not just in terms of money, but of yourself, has somehow found a home inside of me.

Today as I contemplated the blank page and watched the cursor blink at me, awaiting my command, I went inside my head and asked what I wanted to write about. What am I feeling? What’s on my mind?

What’s on my mind are very dark, angry thoughts. I thought of writing about these dark blotches on my psyche, spewing my venom out onto the page, which, truly, can be very uplifting and releasing.

But is that good fodder to publish to the world on a blog page?

Maybe not.

That’s when the phrase came to me again. Give what you don’t have.

What I don’t have right now is peace, joy, happiness, calm and ease within my own skin.

How possibly can I give what I really don’t have? What about the old phrase “you can’t feed someone from an empty vessel”?

Hmph. Determined to see this through, I set out to write a blog post giving cheer and optimism to the world because both are in rather short supply for me right now.

Um. Yeah.

Where to start?

Google, of course.

And so here’s what I found. I share it because it made me smile. Gave me a little hope. Brought the light back on in my eyes, if only for a moment.

Now I give that to you.

The gift of optimism:








Image from Babble.com



The Sound You Hear

Wait, what is that sound? Muted yet distinct. Gentle yet forceful. Repetitive percussion, steady like a metronome.

Oh, yes. Well then. That’s the sound of my forehead upon my work desk. The press board laminate feels so cool against my fevered face.

The rhythmic thumping hurts, only a little, just enough to help take my mind off the other pain. The other agony.

Maybe I’ll intersperse some groaning in there in syncopated time. Yes, that might be symphonic. Soothing. Calming.

This skull produced tintinnabulation* began just about five minutes ago. Yes, that was it. Just when my boss left my office.

Ah yes. The boss.

He’s acting a little wacky lately. Too long a story to type up here, but he’s very much trying to garner the favor of his own boss. He’s living in the US for six months and so I believe he’s decided that for the entirety of those six months he is going to tap dance upon my neck, which may delight the Big Boss and make him clap like a toddler child over a tambourine monkey.

“Do it again! hee hee!”

We’re one and a half months into this polka and I’m not having nearly as much fun as he is.

We got into a little spat earlier about a slide deck he wants my team to create for him to deliver to the Big Boss. My Boss started weaving this storyline of what he wants this deck to do, to say, to mean.

According to the line of reasoning of what he wants, my team is to deliver a PowerPoint deck that will cure hunger, give everyone in the room a mani-pedi, and make a sandwich.

It should be that magic.

That beautiful.

That perfect.

It will have pie charts more delectable than a whip cream festooned holiday pie made up of metrics we do not have.

It will show graphs with upward shooting trend lines representing successes we did not achieve.

It will have strong bullets saying profound things in only six words per line and six bullets per page.

Or better yet, tarted up with graphics like puzzle pieces forming an interlocking circle, or arrows that grow from small to big across the page. Oh! Be sure to add in lots of those fun little transitions like bullets flying in from the left side and spinning objects.

Yes, make me a deck that would take a professional slide deck maker a week working full time, do this while still doing all your other work and quit bitching about it.

Oh, and can you have it on my desk by December 1.

Yeah. *thump, thump, thump*







* Gotta love thesaurus.com

Image from Sara is Reading What blog