There is a big problem in my life that I have been ignoring for years. Or, just papering over and pretending to deal with. It’s one of those things that is private and if I chose to never mention it then noone would ever have any clue about it. It is easily hidden and even easy to ignore. Sure, there are a couple of times a day when I am confronted by this issue and am forced to deal with it. But the soon evidence of it is shoved back in a drawer, or hidden under other things. I’ve spent money to try to fix it. I’ve thrown things out, I’ve tried to just live with it, but it never fails to come back and bother me again. I know for certain that I am not alone in dealing with this problem. But I wonder, for those who’ve dealt with this issue successfully, how do they do it? Is it will power, is there some magical solution?

Some of you may have already guessed what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, read on…

Yes, I am talking about mismatched socks. It seems every year I spend a small fortune buying new tube socks, new gym socks, new dress socks, new hiking socks. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Soon enough, the perfectly matched and specially purchased fall into the same old rut – only one sock remains. Who knows where the other one went? I don’t.

There are, of course, those rare pairs that somehow manifest a mystical ability to stay intact for many years, no matter how often they’re worn. For these gifts from the universe, I am greatful, and from them I am given hope.

But for the vast majority of socks, it is inevitable that sooner or later they end up orphaned. A single sock, trying so hard to fit in with other similar but not quite identical socks. Black socks with different patters. White socks with different toe details – yellow, grey, logo’d, blank. Brownish/greenish socks, all desperately searching for their sole-mate, but condemned. Their fates sealed: perhaps they’ll eek out a few bottom-of-the-drawer-no-other-choice mismatched wearings, or they’ll sit their, sometimes for years, unworn, in a desperate but ultimately futile longing for their match. And I, their equally forlorn conspirator. Deluded, pretending, that perhaps, maybe, one day the long-disappeared pair will crawl out from some corner, emerge from hiding, and re-appear through the eternal black hole of sockdom.

But nay. Mismatched socks to not spontaneously re-combobulate.

And as for me, the human manifestation of the orphaned pair — on the one hand I cannot find the internal strength to accept the reality of a lost sock, and on the other hand I abhor the thought of donning two that do not mimic each other in each detail: color, material, thickness, pattern, and logo. And thus I’ve doomed myself to a drawer, and a life, full of unmatched socks.There they sit, unusable. Unwearable. Unbearable.  Yet I’ve not the heart to dispose of them, clinging ever to the stupid, foolish idea that one day I’ll find a pair for at least one of them and for that — a faint and futile hope — I keep them all.

Teas of the Week

Well into the fourth week of ’09 and the tea hits just keep on coming!

First of all, the Year Without Coffee is progressing brilliantly. My affection for tea, which was more a hope than a certainty a few weeks ago, has been cemented for all eternity. I have quickly come to love the ritual of preparing, seeping, and consuming my cup (or sometimes pot) of tea.

One critical factor in this journey has been the kind and quality of tea that I’ve been drinking. As I mentioned in my last TWiT post, Zhena had been a constant companion in the first weeks of The Year. This week, I faced my first empty tea tin, which was both sad – no tea! – and fantastic – buy new tea! I’m no expert and neither did I consult one, so my choices of new varie-teas was based on a) experience and b) package design.

I strolled into Whole Foods and headed for the tea section. I saw Zhena’s area and wanted to sample more of her delights, but decided that before I head further down that path, it’d be best to dip into some other alleys first. So, I got:

• Rishi White Peony organic loose leaf tea. I actually have some other Rishi black tea at work. But this white tea is absolutely wonderful. It is gentle and aromatic. If over-seeped, it does become pretty bitter. But properly done, it is delectable. The only issue I have is measuring two tablespoons accurately. Suggestions?
• Republic of Tea Holiday Chai comes in packets, like the Zhena’s chai. Oddly, the container says it’s caffeine free. Really? Regardless, because of my love of Chai in the morning, this has been my morning tea for the past week. It is gentler than Zhena’s, but just as flavorful and sweet. A real treat.

I’m totally sold on the tea thing. One aspect of drinking tea that I have quickly come to appreciate is that, totally unlike coffee, I feel free to make a cup of tea whenever I feel like it. There is no sense of mounting guilt through the day, or of concern that it might be too late to make some (bedtime tea!). And I really like having different teas during different parts of the day. To top it off, I feel good about having left behind some of the less desireable side affects my coffee habit induced.

Yay Tea.

Yet here I stand, at the dawn of a new year, declaring my abstinence from this old friend. An entire year without a single cup of joe.  Whether it will be a battle between time and force of will, a wonderful and memorable experiment, or possibly a well-intentioned but ultimately doomed enterprise – well, only time will tell.

Why am I doing this?

Coffee is not evil. It is not debilitating. On the contrary, it is warm and filling, and with a little bit of cream or milk, it tastes most excellent. But… coffee also is not a health food. In fact, it has a bunch of pretty negative qualities. It leaches calcium from your body. It dehydrates you. It’s a diuretic. These things are not good for you; they speed the aging process.  And, most important to me, over the past year coffee has become an unbreakable habit and, thus, a crutch.

To wake, each and every day, with the idea that my morning cannot truly be OK until I’ve had that first drink of café, well, it just doesn’t sit right with me. So at some point last fall, I started to ponder the possibility of quitting ol’ Joe. At first I thought I’d try a month without it. But then I started to realize that wasn’t going to do the trick. What I needed was a total break from the bean. I’d go whole year sans java. And as 2008 drew to a conclusion, the idea just kept germinating, until it sprouted green and true.

What is the upside?

the health benefits of tea, according to wikipedia.org

In the other corner, we have tea. Tea, tea, the magical elixir. Full of anti-oxidants, battler of free radicals. And tea, unlike coffee, is available in a mind boggling array of flavors and qualities. True, coffee also can be had in a vast array of formulations. And, yes, different beans have different tastes.

But tea itself is among the most varied and versatile foods there are. From black to white, green to herbal, hot to cold, spicy to sweet, for breakfast or dinner, to stimulate or to relax, to fulfill or to cleanse, there is a tea for that! Tea, it seems, is a wonderfood. And I aim to taste them all!

soy chai latte in a cup

So I plan on this: during my 365 days of coffee-free living, I will use the opportunity to explore and share as many new teas as I can! Just five days in on my trek, and each day has brought it’s own version. New Year’s Day, I took the easy way out, slurping a Chai latte from Starbucks. Then, a couple of green teas at home. And a pot of black China tea shared with my mom at the Kensington Cafe. Yesterday I downed a couple servings of home made Zhena’s chai tea. And today, it is Zhena’s Breakfast Bliss black tea. Yum.

morning tea. yumm.

I’ll be posting weekly updates and reviews of my teasplorations. Until the first one, just know that so far I am very encouraged that, rather than the fear and skepticism I felt just a couple of days ago, I am totally encouraged and confident that I really will make it through the whole year without a single drop of coffee! Yes, the old stimulant is being replaced with a new one, but it’s like going from eating a fast food burger to a organic vegetable. They are both food, but one is practically poisonous and the other is nutritious and delicious!

For the 1.7 regular readers of this periodically forsaken blog, you may still have a vague recollection of an earlier era (may even have been when we still went by The Duologue!) when a significant portion of my blog entries (there were more then) mentioned national political issues. Lots of stuff about little Georgie boy, Darth Cheney, and the rest of the Bush clowns.

Eventually I came to feel that OM was not really the best place for me to “ventilate those” grievances. So for the most part I ceased and desisted when it came to high political punditry.  It wasn’t because that part of my voice, brain and heart had atrophied, though, but rather because I knew I needed a proper home for them. Though I dropped politics as a topic here, those needs were sated elsewhere, via leading progressive blogs, where I’d  occasionally participate, and more recently, via my new best friend Twitter, and even real-world campaign activism!

That activist fire, which is what led to my once-frequent political snarking, was far from extinguished and despite my efforts to pipe down, still showed up here every once in a while. But I felt deeply that this is not the right venue to wax political about issues, media, and electoral issues. Nay.

The Actual Story

Today I arrived in Austin, Texas, where I am attending the Netroots Nation first annual convention. Or the third, but until this year it was known as Yearly Kos.

Why am I here?

I love politics, period. I care deeply about the policies and impacts of government upon the populace (citizens & not). And when I care about something, I usually get a strong itch to be involved in it. Politics is no exception. And one of the great things about politics is that it is a participatory sport. Now, since I have no desire to be a candidate myself, the next best thing is get involved in the grassroots.

That is what I am doing here. I am looking for my niche, my space, my voice. I desperately want to find a way that I can make some unique contribution to the throbbing ecosystem of ideas, movements, and actions that are politics in this country. Is there a particular issue, tribe, or format that calls to me? That I have the chops for? I really can’t say yet.

But I do know that I am invigorated, energized, and very thankful to be here, among people who give a serious damn about the world we all live in together. These people aren’t sitting idly by, yelling at their TVs and then drowning their sorrows in a pitcher of spud lite. Nope. Here we have union organizers, NGO communications directors, political operatives, and, yes of course, tons of bloggers. (I’m a big fan of bloggers, btw).

What am I doing?

I’ve been to a bunch of conferences, in a number of roles. At some, I’ve sat in the audience, maybe asked a question or two, tried to spark up a conversation here or there, and then gone home. With some new ideas in my head (or, less pleasantly, things I wanted to forget), yes, but not necessarily new connections with other human entities are certainly not feeling empowered to lead a better life.

But here, after a single day of attendance, interaction, speech-listening, and then drinking with my Netroots Nation cohorts, I am feeling just that: excitement, connection, and a very tangible sense of possibities that lay before me. That is just why I came and that is just what I’m doing.

For some this would be torture. For me it is a joy. One of the things that has reformed my thinking about what is necessary for gracious living is the Apartment Therapy website. I have been reading the website for years and over time my notion of what constitutes a home has changed. I think we all have an idea in our minds about what we think our home should look like, a certain number of bedrooms and bathrooms, a square footage that will allow us to pursue dreams and hobbies, a Platonic ideal against which all things are measured. In addition we have ideas of ‘safety’ and neighbors and if we have kids we think of school districts. Probably many of our preferences are shaped by our childhoods and formative experiences. In fact with over half of the world existing on less than $1 a day, many of these concerns are just learned notions of what exactly a ‘home‘ is. Apartment Therapy questions our notions — our American, developed world notions — of what one needs to create a home. I have let go of some of my biases and embraced our current situation.

Another factor in my release of the notion ‘bigger is better’ is the long running column, Shelter by Toni Schlesinger, in the Village Voice. In one of her earlier columns she documents a family who share 500 square-foot apartment. At the time Wade & I were living in a 425 square-foot duplex near the beach. I remember looking around the space, which I had only gotten to work comfortably after many iterations of furniture moving and stuff organizing, and thinking, ‘ZOMG, could Wade & I raise a child here?’ I never found out the answer to that particular question, but here in CasaWeX, I am pursuing the factual actual question ‘can 2 adults and 2 kids share less than 1,000 square-feet and enjoy it’. One of the reasons that Wade & I have always embraced this house is that everything is very close together. One can be cooking in the kitchen and the other geeking on the computer and a conversation can be held at reasonable volume. We like being close to one another. But when two kids (and all their stuff) are added to the mix can it be made to work? The answer to that question remains to be seen, but suffice it to say so far, so good.

About 4 weeks ago, a writer named Theresa Duncan reportedly killed herself in New York. She had a blog of some acclaim that until her death she updated daily. Her death was not widely reported even by by NY and LA papers and blogs — she’d recently moved from Venice Beach to the East Village — until after the disappearance of her longtime companion and collaborator, the artist Jeremy Blake. He walked into the ocean a week or so after finding her body in their apartment and was at that time presumed dead. Reports assert that a body was eventually recovered and identified as his through dental records. An ongoing investigation is presumedly underway, but as of this time no further information has been released nor have the texts of either of their last notes been released.

I read of Duncan’s demise most randomly on Valleywag, a website I rarely visit, on the morning of my 35th birthday. I felt some shock because her website had become a staple of my blog diet and I felt certain I had just read an update, but no her last obscure post dated July 10th, the date of her passing, was the last instance of my remote interaction with her web presence. Some personal websites or blogs offer a portrait, often a self-portrait, of a narrow portion of life focused on crafting, geekery, or parenting while other websites offer vistas or wide landscapes that showcase a certain portion of society. The ‘Wit of the Staircase’ offered a different kind of view that in my opinion made it stand out from the crowd and made it a memorable experience that took one out of the mundane. I reveled in the juxtaposition of the unusual images she used to illustrate her nebulous links and abstruse interests, but in the two years she blogged she revealed very little personal drama. Occasionally she asserted perplexing accusations and one could deduce she had more than a passing interest in what is demeaningly referred to as ‘conspiracy theory‘. One could not say they ‘knew‘ Theresa Duncan from her blog, but still her passing was very shocking.

There is something to this ‘story‘ that captures the imagination. There are so many questions left…Were they really harassed? (Probably.) Were they ‘mentally ill’? (Who isn’t as it all depends on who is giving the diagnosis.) And the answers will not be given by either of the two doomed lovers. Many are trying to put the pieces together, some are going for easy and cheap analysis while others are looking into the depths of the internet for meaning. I grieve for their families. There are no answers. My feeling is perhaps the meaning lies somewhere in the middle.

Something has been lost. Two lives are over and their deaths will resonate for the family and friends left behind. I will miss her sharp wit, her endless links that took me on an adventure far from the quotidian, and her superbly curated images that opened worlds before me.

May the elements of the rainbow colors not rise up as enemies;
May it come that all the Realms of the Buddhas will be seen.
May it come that all Sounds will be known as one’s own sounds;
May it come that all the Radiances will be known as one’s own radiances…

I used to make lists of goals on a regular basis, but it has been a while since the last time I\’ve made one. Also, I have a long history studying Covey\’s 7 Habits. Goal setting is part of the 7 Habits; but making goals without some larger framework – that has been on my mind a little bit. In other words, I started asking myself \’do I have to keep setting the same goal over and over?\’

If my whole basis of growth were simply goal-setting, the answer would be \’Yes\’. But thanks to my Covey-oriented framework, I will be working within the concept of Habits, fundamentally different from goal-setting alone. The key is to develop habitual behaviors (being proactive, putting first things first, thinking win-win, etc – each are behaviors that are rooted in essential values, not ephemeral lists).

So while I am momentarily focused on my list of goals, I am doing so within a larger context of developing the habits essential to the advancement of my values and long-term goals. No more wheel-spinning.

This business of setting goals, and focusing on the big rocks is not something to be taken lightly. It takes focus. Currently, there are two categories of goals that are occupying synapses on my cerebral cortex:

1. Household Necessities
2. Higher Callings

Which ones do you think are in the ‘Big Rock’ group? Yes, the Higher Callings. But thus far I have not been able to focus on them, as the Household Necessities are in the damn way: a stack of framed photos in the foyer; an unused turntable I need to flip on craigslist; the unplugged teevee that must be donated asap; a pile of dirty laundry; and a bunch of other similar, petty distractions.

As long as these chores little pebbles remain unfinished scattered about – and quite visible in my apartment – I am having a helluva time navigating to the hall of Big Rocks. Can’t seem to do it. But rather than complain, I’ve decided I’ll just start small (how counter-7 habits of me, I know).

So there we have Goal No. 1: The next 48 hours (work hours excepted) are dedicated to clearing my immediate environment of clutter. Immediately thereafter I will move on to developing my set of Quarterly Goals, followed by an action plan. Also, at some point I might acquire the bible of GTD.

So I kicked it to the curb, got it out of my life. But that is not the end of the story. It is the beginning.

(more after the jump) Here is where I really earn my stripes: what else will change in my life, now that I have removed the lazy box? Of course, there are lots of great ideas as to what one might do after he is released from the cursed teevee life. I have high aspirations for doing lots of things.

But getting things done is not an automatic consequence of teevee removal. Now I begin to work on developing good habits, focusing energies on some key goals, and – toughest of all – being disciplined. With all things, it is not the starting but the finishing that defines our accomplishments. It is the difference between going to the gym for, say, two weeks, rather than making exercise part of your lifestyle.

Step one: select some achievable goals. Okay, this post is more meta, as I don’t have the goals laid out yet, but be assured such a post will follow. Actually, there is one goal that I have already set, and thus far have lived up to it: blogging daily. What I like most about it is that moment when, after posting, I can sit there and enjoy (briefly!) another success (as in, meeting one of my self-determined goals.)

Such positive reenforcement is a huge key to finding the motivation to attack the bigger and harder goals that I have or will set for myself. Financial, fitness, and professional goals are at the top of the agenda, but all of those require commitments an order of magnitude higher than does blogging. Still, meeting my blogging goals has given me both a forum to focus on my self reflection, and a small taste of the rewards of self discipline. But ahead is where the true joy and satisfaction lay, and that is where I am headed: on a journey to the land of the Big Rocks.