Happy Thanksgiving 2009

I am an ingrate most of the time. As much as I want to blame it on my culture, the truth is it’s just easier to be ungrateful than it is to find ways to be happy with your life.

But if I’m honest and forthcoming about my life, I should be shouting out how amazing my life is. If I come out of the bubble of being a sheltered American who is always lusting after MORE MORE MORE, I am beyond blessed.

I am grateful foremost for my family, my amazing family who love me beyond reason…who love me despite my inability to properly show them how much I love them back. I sometimes don’t know how they continue to be unconditional in their love for me but it’s something I strive to reciprocate.

This year I am particularly grateful for the ability to connect with people I have found to be my kindred. I realize most of these connections would not be possible without the medium of technology we have available today. Imagine that. How many people never found their intellectual soul mates back in the day? Now it’s far more possible to truly connect to people you would never have had the opportunity to otherwise.

Anyhow, I hate sappy posts. Happy Thanksgiving!

Baggy Pants

NoBS 1:

Sometimes I just want people to shock me with being honest. I’d love to see the non perfected side of a person. I’m sure there are plenty of selfish and flawed people out there. I’m not saying that I don’t see that. I do. But even those people have a hard time just showing their baggy pants side.

Don’t brush your hair back, don’t sweep the strands back. Sometimes I just want to see someone in their raw state with simple little flaws and mundane boring streaks.

All around me, people are telling me they are honest but what they are really being is shocking or bold or an asshole. It’s all show and it’s incredibly hard to peel back layers when people present themselves in perfect little blurbs.

We were just talking about the state of presentation in Bindpoint the other day. We’re now a society of 15 second attention spans and our insatiable desire for instant gratification limits how we value content these days.

We don’t care if we get someone or understand something. All we care about is are we entertained? Am I still bored? If yes, then skip to the pictures or move onto the next video. Most of us can’t even finish a single article or a thirty second Youtube video because we get bored so fast. Is it the content? Or is it us? or both?

I’m guilty guilty guilty of not reading articles anymore. I just skip around to the bullet points and glaze over the pictures. I find most blogs uninteresting and the few that I keep bookmarked have nothing to do with the best tips or tricks or news on the latest gadget. The blogs I value the most are from people who will write a post on how they almost forgot to buy stamps at the store or how they noticed a weird tree formation on the way home. It’s not for show, it’s just for sharing and logging thoughts down.

After our reflections on this meta cultural shift, Jaminbee from Bindpoint came up with a proposal/experiment for us all to counter our growing need to only do things for entertainment and show. We’re to journal/blog three times out of the week with a few guidelines. We can’t edit our post (to avoid tweaking for “readers”), we can’t post pics (so that our content is free flowing thought rather than illustrated by bullets or pics), and we must post three times a week (so we are forced to start writing about every day things). This is to go on until the start of 2010. I’m going to do my best to keep it up with probably a few extra blogs where I can post pics. 🙂

So yaya! Now I have a great carass of bloggers to appreciate the non perfect acts of our lives with… Cheers to Jaminbee for this exciting new experiment. I think I’m mostly just excited to be collaborating with the group and hopefully getting to see their baggy pants side soon.