Ho Ho Ho! Nizhonigo Keshmish Baahózhó Doo Nínanahí

Dear Giselle, Happy Christmas! 

“What a total pleasure G+ is…which is due completely, totally, and utterly to your good company, humor, wit, intelligence and willingness to so often join me in conversation about, well, pretty much everything.  Here’s to another year of the same…”  Yes Please!

Merry Christmas to you too my dear Giselle!

Clay is not mud… Brian Altman.  Mamie Deschillie is insulted…

Merry Elephant Everyone!

Jodi Kaplan you are awesome. Yes, I agree with Paul Stickland.  *MERRY ELEPHANT TO ONE AND ALL*

* giggling *

Merry end of the year to one of my favorites.

One that is always willing to be surprised and delighted, willing to intelligently challenge and lead discourse, willing to dance and throw her head back, willing to nurture and care for her community.

Giselle Minoli I am so pleased to have met you and learned from you this year. May you and Brian and Grumpy and the kids have the the kind of year in 2013 that you look back on and smile knowing it was one of the good ones.

And to you, as well, Eve A and Denis Labelle and Marie Hélène Visconti and Anita Law.  

Paul Stickland Navajo mud toys are very, how shall we say, anthropomorphic.  As an artist and children’s tale-teller, I think you would like them a lot!

Ah, Sheri ONeill I so appreciate those words.  The feeling is mutual.  I shall listen to Christmas Creche!

Happy Holidays to you and yours Giselle Minoli , and your mud menagerie as well 🙂

Merry Christmas, Giselle Minoli. And don’t fret, you still have eleven days of Christmas left to celebrate.

Still giggling….you guys are a mechiah (blessing and a pleasure).

This is true M Sinclair Stevens…although in my mind it is mostly confined to this day.  But I have the next 11 days off, so I plan to continue celebrating, as you suggest.  And I look forward to bumping into you often in 2013, which officially for me begins on January 13th…which ends my beginning of the year vacation.  Merry Elephant to you MSS!

Giselle Minoli I like how if I mistype “G+” you pop up on my screen. 

🙂

I also like how if I say something nice to you, you usually say something nice to me. But with just a little more, a little demonstration that you have been paying attention and remember things about people that make them feel like they are part of your life.

This is the kind of thing that I learn from you. Graciousness.

That’s hilarious Cindy Brown.  I get nothing when I slap it in.  I have it written down on an article my mother gave me about Mamie Deschillie.  What if it’s completely wrong????

I’m not white! 😛

Well, strictly speaking, neither am I.  (Latina and dine, both.)  But I’m perceived white and raised white, so there you go.

I would have to pretty much agree with that.  I get the privilege whether or not I want it.

But given that many of my fairly immediate family /can’t/, I’m acutely aware of my position,  unlike a lot of white folks.

Yeah, that post was a very good one — saw that back then.

Cindy Brown I’ve come to think that being “white” has absolutely nothing to do with skin color, race or religion.  Rather its meaning now has to do with a “belief system.”  In the traditional sense, I haven’t known any “white” people since childhood!

Merry Christmas Giselle Minoli and everyone else.

Wish, that every day was that feeling of Christmas , peaceful and friendly 🙂

Actually as far as I can see, “being white” is a function of how everyone else treats you as much as some of the assumptions you make.

For example, I don’t typically wonder if the storekeeper is watching me like a hawk in case I’ll shop lift something.  I don’t wonder if I was turned down on a rental because of my color.  These things are as much about how I get treated as they are about how I think about them.

Cindy Brown that’s why I rather think that “being white” is an attitude more than anything else.  Attitudes = assumptions….

Lisa Borel I know exactly what you mean.  I grew up in New Mexico, which has deep American Indian and hispanic traditions that pre-exist “white” traditions.  My parents moved there after the war because there was very much a sense of freedom from preconceptions at the time, as described to me by my mother.  My parents had Arab friends, Jewish friends, Indian friends, friends of every color and religion but it was never discussed, because to them none of it mattered.  Their conversation with their friends was based on art and music and work and talking about everything under the sun.  Everyone was included.  No one was excluded.  And then the State changed and weirdly became very conservative as years went by.

Cindy Brown Yes…and there are many people who get their total identity from the group, religion, race…whatever…that they belong to.  Whenever I encounter one of my own isms (and I do have them…) it usually sneaks up on me and I have to figure out where it came from.  Because we’re not born with them.  They’re like spiderwebs.  When our house was being restored, spiders took over one of the cabinets in the kitchen.  It was the weirdest thing…opening up a door that had been closed for 6 months and there were hundreds of egg sacks.  Spooky…and interesting at the same time.

Ha!  It is indeed M Sinclair Stevens.  I was born there.  In Albuquerque.  We had hay rides.  And I had horses.  And goats.  And a cow named Michelangelo.  It is very, very beautiful…the landscape…and I miss the skies.  Virginia is the closest I have come to the feeling of that vast horizon, the landscape, the sky filled with shooting stars, a place where the history of it hasn’t been completely wiped out by wall-to-wall city.  It’s the desert after all.  Is your mother’s family still there??  I love to drive around New Mexico.  To just…get in a car and drive…somewhere, anywhere.  It’s gorgeous.

M Sinclair Stevens what a fabulous post of yours (that I missed) and what a great sepia photograph.  I’m obsessed with ancestry stuff.  I so related to this:  

“Is this what my ancestors felt when they said goodbye to the old country? The irresistible promise of a fresh start. 

I realized in writing this that my antipathy toward Facebook has nothing to do with the toolset. That is, there is no improvement Facebook could make, no technical change that it could implement that would make me want to be there. Why? Because I view it as already settled territory. It’s already built out, the result of someone else’s vision. I have nothing to contribute. Why be there?

On Google+ there is a sense (even if it’s only imagined) that we are building this place together. Explorers and pioneers and settlers. Isn’t that why we talk about it endlessly?”

It speaks exactly to why my own parents moved to New Mexico, and why I have packed up and moved to the various places I have wanted to explore.  I have not read every comment on your Post, which was a response to Peter Strempel’s, but I think often (like every day) of the “group thing,” versus the rogue male/female thing, versus the marginalization thing, versus the staying put thing.  

I do believe it is the push/pull of artistic people.  The absolute need to stand outside in order to see things as objectively as possible (although it may never be possible), countered with the absolute need to share one’s discovery.  I don’t think it’s a solvable conundrum.  Isn’t this everywhere in life?  

Thank you so much for sharing that with me…I love it.

Thank you. You’re so sweet. You remind me that I need to try a little harder than I’ve been doing. I think I’ve let my creative muscles get a little lazy.

long showers is my muse.  Standing in the stream of water just clears the mind…

Howling at the moon needs a few shots of tequila, according to my coach… 🙂 🙂  [I’ve never acquired the taste for alcohol :)]

And my husband in Virginia soaks in the tub fan tai.  I’m a shower girl myself.  It’s that waterfall feeling that I like.  It’s very sensual, a shower.  However, a good howl doesn’t require the spirits.  Rather a good howl starts in the belly, rises up through the throat and before long you’re out the door and standing in the middle of the cornfield or wheat field or tall grasses for no reason other than to commune with the night.

There are coyotes in the field outside our townhouse in Louisville.  The howl when they kill something.  It’s very eerie…

Hi dear Mara Rose.  Husband sleeps.  Wife stays up and reads and tries to catch up on emails.  Merry Christmas to you, too.  I hope your day was lovely and I send you every conceivable best wish for 2013.  Are you staying put between now and New Year’s?  I am staying within these walls and plan not to go out with the exception of going the movies and Pilates (and one flight next Saturday if the weather holds…).

Ha Ha Ha! dawn ahukanna!  You are too much.  Kindly let me know what that meal will consist of.  Elephant…or human food?  If the former, I will have to do some research…  Merry Post-Christmas to you, too!

And to you and yours sweet Eddie K!  Did you have/are you having a good holiday??? I am taking this week off and am a veritable slug this morning.  I haven’t moved from where I sat having coffee with Brian Altman at 6:00am before he drove off to Ft. Knox…

You are a better person than I am Eddie K.  I never got into Downtown Abbey though I know many people who did.  I try to stay off TV, much as I love some of it, elsewise I wouldn’t write a word!  As for getting a start to the day, I vote for not doing that at all!

No no no, M Sinclair Stevens.  It’s not at all that I didn’t like Downtown Abbey, it’s that I never watched it at all.  Nor Mad Men. I have such limited time I really have to pick what I want to watch.  It’s such a time suck.  So…It’s 60 minutes, which I still love, and Homeland, and an occasional game or show with my husband, and the news.  Really that’s it.  When I’m by myself the television is never on.  I just don’t think about it.  But when I do get into a show…I get really into a show…thus my decision to just not even go there in the first place…

Greetings Mara Rose.  So sorry…I almost missed your comment.  Glad to hear your mare is on the mend.  Could there be a better way to end the year.  Hot Springs…I used to love visiting the outdoor ones sprinkled over the New Mexico desert in the Winter time.  Esalen sounds right nice.  I have never been and can’t imagine I will get there at this point.  Just go on and plan the trip! 

Giselle Minoli My new high retina display Mac looks better to me than a TV. I understand completely about being immersed in the larger experience. I still love to go to the cinema. However, I find that with headphones on that I’m just as immersed especially as I’m so close to the screen.

My parents always used to tell me not to sit so close to the TV when I was a child. Now I can snuggle with it on my lap.

count me in as another person who loves his Retina display.  Though, unlike most people, I run it in 2880 x 1800 mode…  with 6 point fonts…

Yes, I have pretty good eyes…  20/10 despite all the reading and other abuses I’ve heaped on my eyes.

Good genes 😛

Giselle Minoli And here I always wanted to live your delicious life. How we romanticize the unknown.

my eyes definitely is my best part.  When I was younger, about 16-17, I was reading James Clavell’s Shogun.  Loved it.  Thick book with small letters.  Read so much (and didn’t want to go too fast as I wanted to savor it) that by the end of the book a couple of days later, my nose was literally touching the book.

I looked across the street, about 80′ away, and saw that my neighbor had 4 palm trees.  He had 2 palm trees previously…

Yup, I gave myself myopia.  I was so unhappy with myself – for a whole week my sight was blurry and I thought I was going to have to wear glasses for wrecking my sight.

A week later – back to normal!

Back in high school I also looked at the noon day tropical sun… it wasn’t for too long, you really can’t hold your eyes open and stare at the noon day sun.  The pain is awful.

On that little adventure, I had this bright spot in my eyes for about a month…

Good genes… 😛 😛

I think elephant rides should be a new Christmas tradition.

Giselle Minoli I’ll spend 2013 losing a few pounds then so as not to be cruel to the elephants.

A very warm seasons greetings to you Giselle Minoli  you have made the world a bit less lonely of a place, as you share  thoughts about life, so enlightening and at times as though we were kin.<3

Greetings george glavas  and Miguel Rodriguez.  It has been an equal pleasure for me.  My very best to both of you for 2013.  P.S.  George…we are all interconnected!  😉

Anita Law as long as I don’t have to be anyone else’s Mistress (or Master of) than Brian Altman’s I accept!  (Somehow that sounds questionable too, doesn’t it?  Oh, well…)  “Lurkers,” voyeurs, observers, those who chime in all of a sudden…everyone is welcome.  Wine’s on me…but you gotta come to KY to get it!  Greetings Anita Law!

Bonus points for those getting the Granny reference. 

Right reference, one state over. Tennessee mountain folk. It’s all the same….. ducking.

James Barraford I have to say the Bourbon thing is really delicious.  They take it very seriously, but they are also generous.  They want you to love it so the better restaurants will give you tastings of delicious things like Pistachio Bourbon.  I swooned over it.  Very expensive.  Very yummy.  I said, ” Brian Altman, will you buy us a bottle for home,” and he said (without looking at me), “No.”

James Barraford But that was because you started out saying yes to her first, wasn’t it?

I am roaring at that M Sinclair Stevens.  It’s true.  It’s all absolutely true.  Men start out saying Yes to everything and then once they’ve gotten the girl Yes morphs into No in the snap of one’s fingers.  It’s an amazing fact of life.  😉

Ah….but you see, James Barraford, it’s the little things like having the garbage taken out and a sip of Bourbon and a foot rub at the end of the day that make a woman’s life so much easier there is no way to measure it.  Those little things are not inconsequential.  But I am curious to what women’s NOs consist of.  You mean, like “And exactly why is it that you’re not the President of the United States?”   Like that?

Roaring.  Roaring.  Roaring.  Pull up a seat at the bar and have some Bourbon James Barraford.

I’m a good little Buddhist, bourbon-less coke for me. I have as much chance winning here as Wayne LaPierre has of passing a roadside sanity test. 

M Sinclair Stevens I only saw this thread less than two hours ago… and Giselle Minoli and I have been in other threads since this one started. Very problematic. 

P.S. M Sinclair Stevens there is a JetBlue direct to Albuquerque from JFK now (incredible!) so the invitation stands once I get myself there, as you say, if the stars and planets line up properly, which they will, sooner or later.

Giselle Minoli I have been in some chat discussions lately with just one other person who is high in my Google+ circles relevancy…and not gotten critical notifications of new messages. In fact, in one case, I only saw an update because it was in Gmail…an update that I saw about 14 hours too late. 

I’m wondering if there is a need for a private community or if that just defeats the overall purpose.

James Barraford and I’m struggling with the private community/group thing to.  I feel they “take me away” from seeing the bigger picture in which I personally am so interested and I feel locked in a room.  There is a reason that I am a pilot and it’s because I like to see everything.  I still believe as strongly in publicly posting as I ever did.  It’s all just so haphazard now…

Giselle Minoli All kidding aside… My main stream gets almost no love from me now. I look at communities 75 percent of the time, because even with the chaos surrounding communities, people are posting in them. I’ve been shocked at how much quieter my main stream has gotten in less than three weeks.

I know many are going to disagree with this but I’m saying it anyway… the reason is clear to me. Unlike Facebook, very few on Google+ have real life people in their circles. Therefore, there is no real attachment ( even though you may like the folks in your circles) and so its not that hard emotionally to move on to areas like communities where one can try to interact with others of similar interests.

That sounds cold, I know. And your mileage may vary. But think of some of the really cool folks that used to be in your stream and now are gone without a word. A year from now more cool folks may be gone, replaced by new cool folks. I think we as humans need some sort of familiar base of people to interact with on a steady basis and a flying stream doesn’t cut it for many people. Hence communities.

Or I’m completely full of shit and in need of pistachio bourbon.

I would prefer to be able to control which aspects of a community appear in my stream, frankly.  That was the whole point.  Not segregated into enclaves I have to hop skip and jump over to. 

Ah well.  It will likely continue to evolve.  I’ve seen good circles and bad; and good communities and bad.  Not overly worried about it.

Speaking to your physical spaces and geography metaphor/analogy M Sinclair Stevens, I have a small apartment in the big bustling city of New York, which I need, and a sleek small house in the country in Virginia in the middle of the cornfields and the apple orchards, which I need, and a townhouse in Kentucky, which we have out of necessity because of my husband’s job.  In my life I need many things.  It is neither one nor the other.  Except I have to say I never felt comfortable on Facebook and still don’t.  I cannot describe that…it is just what is so for me, but I don’t discount it’s value to other people.

As for groups, at this moment in my life I am interested in exploring other things.  I’ve been a member of the actor group, the fine designer group, the fine art group, the dancers and performers group and want to explore life outside the group.  Perhaps it’s just where I’m at in my life at the moment.

I like being free of peer pressure, having to please people or a sense of climbing up the ladder or wondering whom I am sitting next to.  I don’t feel any of that on the public stream (and Yes, in my view there still is one). If you post to Public jumping onto someone else’s stream or they onto yours is a choice.  And one that I am very grateful for.  I have learned so much about myself from “the public” in this last year and a half.  And many notions that I had been told about “the public” have been completely dashed.  I find almost nothing that I have been told to be true.

For instance, while there may be a lot more men, I don’t find it unwelcoming to women.  There are just more men.

While there may be trolls, I don’t find that any different than the business world or walking down the street in New York or any other city for that matter.  There are trolls everywhere.

As for shared values and interests I come upon both of those things much more by happenstance than planning.  A young woman who has become a cherished friend was a complete accident; the chair next to her at a restaurant in NY was empty and I took it because I was hungry.

I met my dance instructors by accident.  They were not part of any group I knew, nor was I in one they were familiar with.

I will allow that I might well be the odd duck, but almost all of the people to whom I am close in life I met by accident…not because they or I belonged to a particular group.

I think G+ should have and promote both.  If the world is now about inclusivity, and we are encouraging communication between ethnicities, countries, races, religions, creeds, genders and political orientations, shouldn’t we be encouraging that here, too?

I don’t censor myself when I post public.  I just think about what I want to say and what is meaningful to me.  Whoever shows up up to join me in that conversation, I am always delighted and honored and thrilled and flabberghasted.

This is how I met James Barraford.  And you M Sinclair Stevens.  And I couldn’t be happier about that reality if you put a snifter of Pistachio Bourbon in front of me at this moment.

It’s just true for me M Sinclair Stevens.  I really love this community. There is another post I just saw and it is one of those who is the best of G+ in 2012 post and I so understand them and get it.  But I cringe because there are scores of people I admire and am awed by and I do not have time in my day to visit everyone’s pages and read every word and who is best is like comparing Kate Blanchette in Elizabeth and Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love.  Two different movies.  Two different actresses.  Two different scripts.  It’s just very hard for me to do.

You see, M Sinclair Stevens?  Ms. dawn ahukanna another charming and exceedingly bright and insightful person I met “by accident!”  And Thank God for that!  She’s fabulous.

Giselle Minoli Nope we can’t visit everyone every day any more than we can in corporeal life. We must sip from the stream as we do our bourbon.

Yep dawn ahukanna and I go way back on Google+. She is fabulous. Because Dawn used the term flaneur I must call nomad dimitri into the discussion…my favorite flaneur. It’s seems like forever ago since our conversations on serendipity and travelling without a map—he a nomad and me a cartographer.

Flaneur is a great word M Sinclair Stevens.  I was an actor for such a long time, and then a designer for such a long time I suppose that I am used to starting everything up from scratch once again – a new play, a new cast and voila! New friends.  As a designer, there is nothing, then there is something that has form and shape…and then you do it all over again.  The same thing is true for me as a writer.  The page is blank and you fill it up.

The notion of returning to what is familiar and known and comfortable is something that I understand emotionally, but not something that works creatively.  So I look for ways to challenge myself here.  The public stream is harder in that sense.  I suppose it is more comfortable to fish in known waters.  But then…there would be no discovery for me.

Hello, nomad dimitri.

James Barraford I’ve been in a few dinner party threads. One of the first was a public thread that went on for four days where (some of the people in this thread) and I discussed personality types and introversion, specifically…especially the Myers-Briggs INTJ type, which several of us identified as.

I’ve also been in a couple of private threads that meandered for weeks.

Initially, I tried a dinner party where I invited half a dozen people and introduced them and tried to get them in conversation. That wasn’t very successful. Either because I didn’t have enough people, or not the right mix of people, or because Google+ was very new then and people weren’t used to chatting up strangers.

But I’ve always liked the cocktail party analogy for Google+. Mingle everyone. And have another.

James Barraford you are very naughty.  Are we opening up that can of caviar again?  You started Media Tapper, I was travelling every month to and from Timbuktu, the year went by and everything went haywire.  It’s a great idea.  We should put it back on the table.

Denmark dawn ahukanna?  You get around girl….

I feel that way, too James Barraford.  And I remember not feeling that way about 2012, which didn’t mean that some things were possible, just that not everything was…if you know what I mean.  This year feels cleaner…more buoyant. 2012.  What tough year.

I don’t subscribe to it in the slightest James Barraford. Nor did Christopher Hitchens by the way, and he was sort of the God of kicking everyone else’s ass…  I don’t know about coming out the other side… yet ….but I sure do like another chance and starting over! 

There is a show on Showtime I started watching tonight.  Brian Altman is reading the book…it’s Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States.  Do you know it?

M Sinclair Stevens It was tough, but I had it made compared to many in the world. I have a job, roof, food, amazing wife. I have nothing to complain about when I see what so many have to go through.

Giselle Minoli i miss that pain in the ass Hitchens. My contrary side owes a debt to him.

I’ve been watching the series. I’m a reader and student of history so I already knew most of what Stone is showing, but for my wife its been an eye opener.

They both drew/draw a visceral reaction. I tend to see Hitch in a more clear and less paranoid manner.

Well, I missed all this delightful back and forth between a few of my favorite G+ people. So I will just add a late “Merry Christmas” to you Giselle Minoli and everyone else on the thread.

M Sinclair Stevens love that forget the year party idea!

2012 had some very bad moments. However, it seems to be ending well. Fingers, toes, and eyes crossed.

Giselle Minoli Perfect comparison using Spielberg.

 With Moore, I feel like I’m learning something. And yes, Moore uses a jackhammer that preaches to the choir as well. Perhaps its the subject matter and the fact Moore’s a documentarian as opposed to a “filmmaker” as Stone is, so I don’t have the same feelings towards Moore that I have towards Stone.  

Yay! Brian Titus joins the party. Hope you and yours had a lovely Christmas. Those cards your daughter painted were beautiful.

Sigh, Brian Titus I missed them.  I am putting on my hair shirt and will make amends!