In Over Your Head

Month: September 2010

  • Running on Empty

    When you are building up an asset, you’re either spending time or cash. Renovating a house requires either your handiwork or someone else’s. Getting a charity off the ground requires legwork or funding. Often a combination of both is required. Sometimes you have more of one than the other, or you have no choice which…

  • The Privatization of Culture and the Illusion of Depth

    An MP3 used to be a concert. A Kindle used to be a bookstore. Is this you? You listen to music personally on your MP3 player. You read books by yourself and watch your TV on your laptop or iPad. You eat alone at least 50% of the time, rarely go to concerts, and watch more…

  • 30 Days of Home Cookin’

    You may not have had the pleasure yet, but trust me: Cooking for friends is actually pretty great. I did it yesterday while I had some friends over to roll some dice and, man, was it different than ordering pizza. I also put down some charcuteries out on the table and we devoured that stuff.…

  • Your happiness is not your own

    So I took the advice of this book last week and made a To-Stop-Doing list. The idea is to notice what activities are sucking your energy, wasting your time, and making you feel horrible– the opposite of a to-do list. Anyway, social media activities, in their various forms, made the top 5. Interesting right? Blogging I…

  • Where the Poor Go

    I was checking out some graffiti in my neighbourhood the other day and thinking about gentrification. It seems natural that those that are poor would be able to see opportunity in places (neighbourhoods) where the rich are not looking yet. This is how startups get profitable and why artists move into sketchy areas of a…

  • Choose Your Web Wisely

    Voting, food, career, spending, success– all of these and more are political acts. We don’t realize it while we’re doing them, but all are meaningful in terms of who they help– ourselves, our families and communities, or the world at large. The mere act of paying rent to the stranger who owns your apartment building,…

  • Balls

    Your fashion choices, your words, your decisions–all need more BALLS. You worry what people think about you because they won’t like you, or they’ll talk behind your back. But really, they’ll admire your courage and adjust just fine. You’ll question yourself at the last minute, maybe think you’re crazy, but sometimes, you need to be…

  • What Fear Means

    One of the best books I read while in Paris was The Gift of Fear. It was recommended to me by Chris Penn a long time ago, and basically talks about how women can deal with creepy guys and/or stalkers. Chris said I couldn’t understand trust until I understood how people abuse and manipulate trust.…

  • A story about prisoners and a guard

    Imagine a prison with a hundred inmates and one guard. All the inmates want to escape. Of course the guard does not. He stands up on a wall with a rifle and fires at anyone trying to climb it to take him down. If one prisoner tries it, he fails and dies. If they all do,…