Perpetually Curious

My problem has always been wanting to immediately jump to the end result without mucking about with the messy hard tasks needed to get there. Apparently this is quite normal. I'm finally getting around to listening to Daniel Kahneman's 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow . I'm not very far into yet (only listening in the car and driving has been on hold with the snow recently), but early on Kahneman points out that our brains are wired for the path of least resistance. Thinking requires effort and those tasks which require more thinking are less desirable because of the effort required.  That hit me rather hard. I had typed that first sentence two or three days before  listening to the piece in the book, as a place holder on a blog idea. When I listened to Kahneman's research and theories, I realized that what I had been doing all along was human nature and not a specific Devra defect. (I have lots of those, but another time.) I decided to write about ...

Parenting is tough. I'll put that out right up front. Parenting when you work a job that is not necessarily during traditional "work" hours is even tougher.  Parenting when you are doing this as either a single parent or in a relationship with someone who also juggles a non-traditional work schedule is even tougher than that.  I'm not writing this to get into a spitting contest. It's not a pity party either: a career in arts administration was my choice, much like my husband chose a career in retail management. We both knew what those choices meant as far as schedules and child-rearing before we had children.  I'm writing this to shine a light on what it is like to be an active parent working in theater management. Mass Media gives us a disjointed view, if any at all, of a career which resembles a luxurious soap opera. Much of what is written about our field in either scholarly or journalistic blog posts is written about the million-dollar comp...

As I've done for a couple years now, I take an hour or so and do a review of the prior year's work and think about what I'd like next year to be like. Many thanks to Rosetta Thurman for this practice and the  thought - provoking questions. 2013 was a tough year, but looking back I still made a lot of progress and started putting things in place. I did a great job developing the brand of Devra, so much that it netted me a new job. Although, one of my goals for next year is for said job to pay me a living wage (insert ongoing discussion about artists/startups/small Org mgrs here). I loved being asked and serving on grant panels. There is a tremendous amount of art and artists in my community. It's difficult to parse who gets funding when sitting around the table. One of my goals for 2014 is to be more visible in the community as a funder. Most of these artists or smaller organizations are flying by the seat of their pants, and a caring face may go a long way. At least, ...

I both love and loathe this time of year. As a hardcore ESTJ, I do adore all the planning and possibility inherent in the this beginning (also, like many, in the late summer/early fall of the academic calendar). However, as someone who has NO patience, all the planning bums me out because I want those projects to be completed immediately! My daily planning sheet This past fall was difficult for me: with all the transitioning going on I lost a lot of my daily and weekly routines and constantly felt behind on everything. I was stressed a lot more than usual, snapped at my family, and basically quit exercising. So the big thing I'm working on right now is getting my 50,000'-20,000'-descent views (otherwise known as monthly-weekly-daily) in good working order and INTO THE DAYPLANNER.  One of the "Getting Things Done" info posts I ran across said: "If it's on your mind, it's not in the right place." I chuckled because it's true. You ca...

Two years ago I challenged my husband to a reading contest: at least two books a month, one fiction, one nonfiction, and my school reading didn't count. 2012 proved tough for both of us, but 2013 has been better. Together, we've read twenty-seven books over the course of the year. We've read more than that, mind you, what with magazines, blogs, our kid's books, newspapers, etc etc, but twenty-seven made it to The List. I thought I'd share the ones I read, and some selected thoughts or notes. January : (F) Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness. This is Book 2 of the All Souls Trilogy and, yes, a very guilty pleasure. (NF) Tribes by Seth Godin. There are several authors whose total works I am trying to read and/or collect. Godin is one of them. I also have The Dip and The Icarus Deception sitting on my nightstand. February : (F) Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke. Some of my fiction is of the Young Adult or Juvenile variety. Not going to apologize: my brai...

It's Thanksgiving, and I'm in the middle of thesis paper research, so naturally I'm thinking a lot about who has been helpful and needs thanking. Almost everyone I've contacted about varying topics has been both intrigued by my thesis and generous with their time and energy. I'm especially thankful to: Robert Wildman, my faculty adviser, who has the extremely difficult job of both keeping my passion in check but encouraging my quest when I'm tired of it. He's playing the Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote.  Robert Long, who I emailed out of the blue, but has given me several puzzle pieces and introductions and continues to check in on my work. All of the people who have agreed to be my "sounding board", reading drafts and commenting on what works or doesn't (Byron, Liz, and Bob). All of the folks I've worked with at Americans for the Arts: Clayton Lord, Hannah Jacobson, and, by extension, Professor Roland Kushner. They care about our fi...

Is laughing with people about yourself the same as being laughed at? On Nov 22, I was the special guest for Mr. Diplomat, an improv show held every Friday night at DSI Comedy Theater . The show's set-up is a special guest comes on, tells stories from his or her life, and then the crack improv team makes up scenes based on those stories. "And yes I said yes" by It's Greg, licensed under Creative Commons I was asked to be the guest in a rather informal way: the guy who took my old job is also on the Diplomat team and they'd had a guest back out, so he asked if I was interested. While I may not have any desire to be an actress, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy my time on stage, so I said, "Yeah, sure, I'm down with that." Kit promised I didn't have to be funny, I just had to get up on stage and tell some stories. They would take care of the rest. Having recently listened to Daniel Pink's To Sell Is Human , two of the primary rul...