Elucidate

Do you listen to podcasts?

Podcasts are a rich media that brilliant producers create. Shows are beautifully crafted and are super engaging. I subscribe to a dozen podcasts and listen to them daily.

Think DVR for your best radio shows downloaded to your phone seamlessly...we live in wonderful times!

My good friend and musical genius, Goliath Flores started a podcast. He is combining his love for story telling along with his love for sound-design and soundtrack creation.

I have been listening to his first episode this afternoon and it is simply brilliant. He tells a familiar story but with details that have gripped me into the narrative. The soundtrack helps build emotion but largely stays out of the way, like any good soundtrack should.

Subscribe to his podcast, Elucidate on iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast or where ever you get your podcasts.
Download, listen, tip on his website.

You will thank me.

Hustle

Good artists hustle. They stretch their limits of imagination. They welcome discomfort. The others are busy drawing more sea-shells and palm trees.

Good musicians work two jobs so they can play their own music at gigs. Gigs are tough. Gigs need you to hustle. The others are pretty happy with their status quo in their coffee-house style playing covers.

A monk hustles. Zen is tough. "Don't-know mind" does not come easy. Meditation is really hard. They put in the time and the effort where others give up and quit.

Hugh MacLeod hustled when everyone told him it was worthless to do so.

"If your plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain." -- Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody

Hustle is a good marker of people I want to be around. These people say "What if" when they can say, "Will do." They are not happy with good. They seek better. Not more, but better. And they want to find better themselves.

Casey Neistat says this in his own way in the video below.

Committee

Chilli's puts a touch screen device on every table.

• You can pay for your meal with it, saving the server a valuable 5 minutes per table
• It shows you ads continuously that you can not turn off. Billboard on your table anyone?
• It also plays video, typicaly cartoons, in full volume no less just in case a phone or tablet is unavailable to be stuffed in your childs face
• This is in addition to the two TVs playing something or the other in constant view from any table
• And the pop music that is being piped in through the dining room speakers

A committee came up with this dining experience. I am sure of it.

When a committee works well, you get a Toyota Camry that lasts thirty years, five hundred thousand miles, all on the strength of timely oil changes. No personality, but the damned thing refuses to die.

When a committee works poorly, you find yourself with an attrocity of a touch screen device on your dinner table. With sound. And ads. Ditto on the personality. All with below-average food conjured up by the same committee.

In a world full of pocket internet devices, the best gift you can give someone is your attention.

Unless you are at a Chilli's.

Pride

In the backgrop of the Orlando Tragedy, our little community 30 minutes west of Orlando is witnessing something beautiful.

We are all mourning the tragedy that struck so close to home. While political candidates are using this as an opportunity to further their agenda, be it vanilla or rancid, the helpers are working their collective butts off in support of the LGBTQ community.

My wife has set up free support groups twice a month till there is need for anyone recoiling from the attack at Pulse. Gay bars are a safe place for gay people where they can spend time without judgement. This idea of a safe place was shattered and gay people need to heal.

To promote the free support group to the community that needs it the most, we set up a photo booth at the local Pride event this morning. We set up props and people came in by the hundreds. Couples, teenagers, proud mothers, fathers, and grand parents, babies, puppies... everyone was out with a message of love.

Moreover, my wife and I were embraced fully by the LGBTQ community as allies.

There was no discrimination on our more traditional man-woman union: "Oh, you are not gay... we will find some other booth at the vendor to visit"

There was no judgement: "sexuality is fluid, so how can you two be sure that you want a man-woman relationship?"

There was no conditional acceptance: "we love you even though we don't understand your straight lifestyle"

There was only love.

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The illustration is free to use if you like. You may rightclick on the image and save to your computer. You could also get it on imgur. No copyright on this one.

Home

I stumbled upon a homeless person's camp today.

A small brown puppy with a green collar was sitting on a sidewalk. I noticed it during my drive to the office from lunch. I pulled over immediately and walked over to where the puppy was. I fully intended to rescue it. The puppy ran into the woods barking as I approached it. I noticed that the path into the woods was well worn, so I walked in.

There were a couple of tents in a clearing a few feet into the woods. The puppy was next to the far tent. The puppy was not agressive. It stayed next to the tent. Barking.

I heard no person there. The camp did not look like much, just a few old tents and some assorted things. It looked shabby.

Home is typically a feeling that transcends the traditional four-wall house. Sometimest the idea of home is associated with a neighborhood, sometimes with a person, sometimes with particular pieces of furniture.

Sometimes home is a shabby tent in a clearing in the woods with a brown puppy protecting it.

Tuna

My first time eating tuna was in the form of a boiled mess scopped from a sandwich assembly line and plopped into my 6 inch roll. This was back in 2004. It was my first year in the US. I never had tuna before that meal. And I never had tuna since.

That boiled scoopable tuna spoiled tuna for me for many years. I have opted for a meatball sub since then for the next twelve years and counting.

I will at times dig up a poor impression that I have been hiding away for a while and see if I can change my mind about it. Life is too short to dismiss something or someone forever. Forever is a long time. I turned my nose at tuna when I passed by it at the grocery store for twelve long years. Clearly I don't dig up those poor impressions often enough!

I cooked myself a tuna steak tonight with my dinner. I opted to cook the tuna blackened with copius amounts of cajun seasoning. The flavor in my memory had to go.

And it did!! Tuna steak was fantastic! I am glad I picked it up at the grocery store.

Small victories like this one make me want to revisit and reevaluate some of the other ideas that I have dismissed in the past. This is the kind of positive reinforcement that can be an effective life-hack of sorts.

Go ahead, try the tuna!

Walking in the Rain

When you grow up in a country where it only rains a few months of the year, you typically learn to love the rain. Florida is a bit more generous with the rain than my home country. Unlike Seattle where it drizzles constantly, Florida will produce afternoon showers almost every other day. Rain can get old and boring fast. And it does quite reliably among most Floridians.

I went walking in the rain this morning. It was drizzling when I woke up, so the morning ritual of walking Olive around the block was out of question. I changed into my swimming shorts and an old cotton t-shirt, put on my hiking hat to keep the water out of my eyes and took off in the rain.

I walked a block to the lake which was quite full. The lake looks completely different in the rain. Quite different. As I was watching the otherwise calm surface riddled with rain, the droplets started sweeping across the surface in gentle arcs. The wind had picked up. My t-shirt was almost completely drenched. The rain started pouring strongly, shifting slightly in angle and intensity. A lightning flashed and it thundered just as I turned around to head back home. I was walking into the rain this time and it was cold. The water was cold and the t-shirt against my skin was cold.

I came home refreshed. Like one does jumping into a cold swimming pool first thing in the morning, a-la Tony Robbins.

You should try it.