I went to my favorite museum in the entire world this past weekend: the Hirshhorn Museum, one of the glorious Smithsonian museums on the Mall in downtown DC.

I love, love, love, love, love this museum. The art, the architecture, the sculpture gardens, all of it.

(I don’t know the name of the piece shown in the photograph. I apologize to you, to the artist, and to Mr. Hirshhorn. I’ll do better about recording artists next time I go.)

In the basement, a group of serious adults were standing just outside a room showing Ali Kazma’s Black Box. You can read all about it on the Hirshhorn website. It’s a video installation with several screens showing the hands of a man who’s rapidly stamping documents. The syncopation of the many simultaneous stamp-stamp-stamp-stamp-stamps is quite a sound to hear.

Anyway, I step inside the room to watch. There’s a bench in the middle of the room, but the adults are all standing far back: watching, analyzing, keeping their distance. As though getting too close might trigger an art critic to drop from the ceiling and mock their lack of insight. And of course I don’t want to be rude and block anyone’s view, so I lean against a side wall and watch.

After a minute, a family walks in with a little boy, maybe five years old. He watches the screens for a moment and laughs. Watches a little longer, laughs again, longer this time. Sheer delight. His attention shifts quickly among the screens and you can tell he’s really taking this in. Not thinking about it, not analyzing it. He’s completely present. Pretty soon he was laughing uproariously.

And I thought: he gets it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the layers of meaning in this piece, the commentary on work and art and reality. But at core, it’s just plain cool. It’s funny. So the best commentary I got in the museum that day came from a blithe five-year-old.

And yet the business analysts of the world have developed some stuff that’s pretty damn interesting, if not full-on sexy. That’s because business analysts are essentially the shrinks of the business world. Except instead of understanding and solving problems of the human mind, they have to understand and solve problems of businesses around the world — and that fundamental process is applicable to all areas of human endeavor.

One of my favorite tools — and here we’re back in a world where the animal brain can grasp what’s going on — is de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats.” Let’s say you’ve got a problem, and you’re brainstorming. It might be a software development team trying to figure out how to give the customer the features they want without breaking the budget; or it might be a few college suitemates deciding where to go for spring break. Whatever you’re brainstorming, you can put on a different hat (not necessarily literally, although that’s definitely more fun); each hat lets you see the problem through a different lens. Think of a prism, breaking white light out into different individual colors so you can better analyze the elements that comprise the whole.

You can find a breakdown of the six hats on the de Bono Group website, among other places, but here’s a quick summary. The order the hats are presented in varies — I’m modeling after the color spectrum so I’m going in rainbow color, ending with Blue because that’s the hat that manages the whole brainstorming process:

• White Hat – A purely factual perspective. With this one you channel Mr. Spock and isolate the logical relationship among elements.
• Black Hat – The devil’s advocate. With this one you’re the skeptic who sees everything that could go wrong.
• Red Hat – An intuitive perspective. With this one you’re the insightful detective who follows a hunch and gets emotionally invested in the case.
• Yellow Hat – A cheerful perspective. With this one you’re the encouraging grandmother who highlights all the good qualities and isn’t bothered by the flaws.
• Green Hat – A creative perspective. With this one you’re the kid genius who throws out wild ideas faster than you can write them down.
• Blue Hat – The big-picture perspective that manages the whole process. With this one you’re the ground control of the mission, monitoring the brainstorming process and making corrections when things get unbalanced.

What I love about this is that it’s a simple breakdown of the fundamental process of dealing with problems. You can dress it up for a board meeting or dress it down for helping a kid decide what to do for her science project. In any case, the six hats help you think about how you think, and therefore, to think better.

How’s this for simple? Tweet the name of a book you’ve read to @ivread and the site automatically looks up the title and creates an entry for that book. No sign-up necessary; your Twitter handle is your I’vRead username.

Here’s what I love about this:

• No account registration needed. I don’t have to remember yet another login.
• It leverages existing technology that’s already part of my life. Tiniest learning curve ever.
• It has inherent redundancy. My information is available in my Twitter history as well as on I’vRead, so if I’vRead ever goes away, I still have all my data on Twitter.
• I get to choose whether to share book posts with my Twitter followers or not, depending on the format of my tweet.

I have a GoodReads account (I think — it’s been a while, so I’d have to remember what my username, which email account I used to sign up, what my password is…), but I’m giving I’vRead a whirl before going back to GoodReads. Its sheer elegance deserves a good trial run.

So here’s how it happened:

I was at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which at that time took place in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I’d just won the Asimov Award, given out by Asimov’s SF Magazine and Dell Magazines for stories written by undergraduates. Whatever. Anyway, here I am surrounded by many of science fiction and fantasy’s most glorious luminaries, and I’ll tell you, I’d done my homework. I’d looked up every writer who was scheduled to be at the conference and if I wasn’t already familiar with them, I tried to read one of their books. I was never a Boy Scout, for obvious reasons, but still I knew enough to Be Prepared.

I was standing in the hotel lobby early in the conference and the award’s administrator, a wonderful man named Rick Wilber who every  year shepherds the young award winners around the conference, was introducing us to a couple of writers. One was Neil Gaiman, and the rest of the award finalists were in a state of ecstatic shock to be talking to Neil Gaiman. Because he’s, you know, Neil Gaiman. Except that for some reason at that time, I did not know Neil Gaiman, or anything about him, and anyway the other writer we were being introduced to was Sean Stewart, whom I did know about because I’d read his book Clouds End as part of my pre-conference research and it had peeled me like a grape. I remember reading this book and not knowing exactly what was happening to me but knowing that I’d never, ever read anything even remotely like this and had never been transformed by a book in this particular way.

So I made a beeline past Neil Gaiman and button-holed Sean and started right in on questions about Clouds End, which it turns out was one of his personal favorites and also one of his most underappreciated novels.

This was the beginning of a long and fruitful correspondence. Sean lives and works in California, and I’ve lived in various locales along the East Coast, from Maryland to Florida, so we haven’t seen each other much in the decade since we first met. But in those early years, Sean took a lot of time to correspond with me by email. We discussed the mechanics of writing, yes, but more than that, Sean mentored me in the soul of art: he taught me, by example in his novels and by long, patient emails, that in real art you strip your soul bare. Any success I’ve achieved as a writer, any capacity to Tell the Truth, to speak openly and honestly and authentically, is due in large part to those conversations.

And since then, I’ve worked for Sean in various capacities, usually working on Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, transmedia, or whatever sexy word-of-the-day is being applied to that new art form. He’s a cofounder of Fourth Wall Studios, which is creating the tech platform that will shape ARGs in decades to come. It’s Pixar’s RenderMan, but for transmedia.

Most recently, I helped him and Marc Taro Holmes publish a Kindle version of Sean’s novel Resurrection Man. Marc a fab artist who did a boatload of illustrations for the book, including the ones featured on this page.

Working on this project meant that I got to read and reread Resurrection Man, which I hadn’t revisited in several years. And it was a strange pleasure to read it again, not only because I found the book more compelling now than when I first read it as a green 20-something, but also because I understood how much Sean’s vision of the world came to permeate my own. Both in its own right, and as a channel of deeper, darker forces that he and I both have a particular interest in tapping into.

So. If you’ve got three bucks lying around and you want a profound reading experience, get thee over to Amazon and download Resurrection Man. It will haunt you, and these days I think we could all benefit from a good haunting.

I am to loneliness as a frog is to hot water. Slip me in and slowly turn up the heat, and I don’t notice until things are pretty darn hot.

My dad left town, then my mom left town, and my sister had kitty woes to attend to at home, and my brother had school and family obligations, and so I went for several days with minimal human contact and damn. Did not enjoy that feeling.

My brother came by today for a while and the moment he walked in the door I perked up. Happy frog instead of boiling frog. Plus I got to cook for him, which delights me.

It makes me wonder if trees get lonely. I tend to think not. They’re intimately connected to the earth; they have birds and spiders and ants; they have breezes and sun and rain. I don’t know, maybe that’s not enough. Maybe, like people, it depends on the tree. I’ve met unhappy trees, but I don’t know about lonely.

(Great, you think. She’s gone loopy from the solitude. But go ahead, I challenge you: put your hand on a tree and tell me it doesn’t have a mood.)

So now I know have to strategize for loneliness so that the temperature doesn’t rise too high without my noticing. Schedule interaction. (Chatting with the clerk at the grocery store does not count.) And I know not to make grand pronouncements about how content I am to be alone. Be careful what you wish for…

I seriously love food.

It’s a passion I inherit from my parents, which is a little unexpected because they both come from solid midwestern families where food was appreciated and enjoyed, but was not such a passionate affair as it is in my family.

My sister and her family feast on Sundays, a Sabbath celebration. They plan the menus with care and attention. Wines and beers match the menu; desserts tend towards the exorbitant. I’ve not yet had the joy of participating in one of these extravaganzas, but I intend to do so before much longer. I adore this tradition; it’s the kind of divine intoxication that is missing from so much of Protestant religious life. Although my theology diverges from my sister’s at key junctures, we certainly share a dedication to cultivating Divine pleasure.

Last week I made a delicious lunch, pictured above: the gorgeous green is steamed kale, and the orange stuff is sweet potato, tempeh, raisins, and almonds lightly sauteed in olive oil and garlic, seasoned with cinnamon, cardamom, and sea salt. The juxtaposition of salty and spicy and sweet in the sweet potato dish was delicious and most satisfying. It took a few minutes longer to make this dish than heating up a microwave lunch, but the rewards were incalculably greater.

Of course, whipping up a homemade meal is a luxury afforded to those of us who work at home, but eating well is a decision you make, not a convenience. After the invention of Tupperware, there’s no valid excuse for not carrying a delicious and nourishing meal to the office.

* * *

Last year I bartered a pair of sunglasses for a Martha Stewart cookbook from my other sister. She still wears the sunglasses and I still use the cookbook. Recently I made a recipe from that cookbook: red cabbage with Granny Smith apples (pictured in its partially cooked glory at right). Thinly sliced onions sauteed in butter, followed by red cabbage, followed by sliced apples and some salt and pepper. Simple, elegant, delectable.

Food preparation is a sensual, sensuous experience for me. The colors and smells and textures, the absolute physicality of it. It takes me out of my head and into my body. Food is all about relationship: the relationship of each flavor to the other, the relationship of me to the people I’m feeding. I love to feed those I love. Cooking is art, and magic: more goes into a loaf of bread than flour, yeast, water. Cooking is a vehicle for emotion. When a meal is made with love, your mind analyzes the flavors but your body knows there’s more to it.

When I go to France (someday, yes, I am going to live in France for at least three months, just you wait and see) one of the things I want to do is learn authentic French cooking. I daydream about it sometimes: standing in my little European kitchen, surrounded by fresh ingredients and Mediterranean light, fretting joyfully over a sauce and wishing I spoke better French and sipping a glass of local wine until success with the recipe becomes irrelevant, and I relax into the simple, raw lust for delicious food.

Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action.

—Bhagavad Gita

I love fog. It’s so intimate. The horizon moves in, the world becomes room-sized.

I love not being able to see very far.

I’ve been in Maryland for a couple of months now, and people are starting to ask me: when are you coming back to Florida? Where are you going next? What are your plans?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I’m not always at peace with not knowing; I want to see into the fog, to know what’s out there. But of course we never do really know, even when we think we do. My current limitations aren’t so different from anyone else’s. It’s just that I don’t have the luxury (handicap?) of pretending those limitations aren’t there.

I tell myself that something will shift around the holidays. That I’ll have some clear indication of what comes next. What to do, where to go. That would be nice, but of course there’s not guarantee that a glorious sign will appear. Maybe on New Year’s Eve I’ll be sipping my champagne and wondering where the hell my sign is and what’s taking it so long to arrive.

Another time in my life I would have said that “we make our own signs,” but that’s a little too hyper-American individualistic for me now. I’m responsible for my own actions, yes, but there’s a larger world to listen to. It does have things to say. And the direction of my own life is interdependent on the lives of the humans, and trees, and stones around me.

So I watch for signs. In the meantime, I sit in the fog and sip my tea, and take pleasure in not being able to see very far.

Abandon hope. It takes you out of the present. The only reason to hope is that reality does not meet with your approval. And reality is a massive wall to throw yourself against.

Abandon despair. It’s just impatient hope with an inflated sense of self-importance.

Abandon resistance. The only reason to resist is a belief that some previous state (which was, most likely, imaginary anyway) is preferable to the alternatives. Everything changes, so you may as well flow with it.

Abandon striving. It’s just impatient resistance with an inflated sense of self-importance.

Curiosity is a double-edged sword. There’s an anxious curiosity that collects information like stones and uses them to build a solid ground to stand on, a wall against confusion and uncertainty. There’s also a wild curiosity that flings itself into the world and encounters everything, fresh and willing.

Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.

-E.M. Forster, A Room With a View

When in doubt:

• Go for a walk beneath the trees and listen to the wind.
• Cook a meal from scratch and listen to the sizzling, popping, steaming.
• Sit in a quiet room and listen.
• Treat a friend to coffee/tea/liquid alternative for no reason but to listen.
• Listen.
• Listen.
• Listen.

Until last Saturday, I only knew about Ikea from Fight Club and the rapturous expressions of devotion from family and friends who like to shop there. I finally went with my mom and sisters on Saturday morning and got the full experience, including lunch at the Ikea cafe. Just in time for me to be more appreciative of last week’s New Yorker article by Lauren Collins.

I get it now. I’m not an Ikea fanatic, but I understand why people are. It’s a unique experience, and well tailored to the modern consumer. As a web developer/designer, I was fascinated by the interaction design. The layout of the entire store, from the main aisle to the sneaky little cut-through’s to the prepared rooms, guides the visitor with astonishing ease. (We did not re-enact 500 Days of Summer, although the suggestion was made.) The winding aisle has large arrows pointing you in the right direction, and pretty much everyone flows obediently with the arrows. At one point I wondered, aloud, what would happen if you went against the flow. I found out later in the day when we had to backtrack from checkout all the way to the elevator so that we could eat lunch before purchasing our wares. Judicious use of the cut-through’s expedited the trip (“Oh! Wow! Potted plants are this close to kitchen wares?”), but we still had to walk against the arrows on the main aisle for some distance. I felt a little rebellious, but no Swedish SWAT team jumped out of back rooms to stop us, so all ended well.

My sister pointed out that one of the drawbacks to living near an Ikea is that all your friends’ homes begin to resemble each other. This would horrify me, since uniqueness is one of my most cherished values, but I suppose for many person there’s an unspoken comfort in that. “We are alike, we share tastes and stores, this is a safe place to be.”

I suppose that was the most striking thing about Ikea for me. It feels extraordinarily safe. The art is bold and colorful, or understated and tasteful; the modernist lighting fixtures might be a little edgy but also practical and comfortable. And the entire experience is so well organized that I never felt anxiety about where to go next or how to find my way back.

I did see an amazing little wooden table that folds out to a full-size dining table and then back down to a slender storage compartment. I mentally situated this in my fantasy studio apartment. But the very safety of the place switched off my lust for objects. I like used items, storied and proven, unlikely to be matched in the next apartment. But that’s my taste, and someone has to buy an original item if there are to be used items, and I now understand why so many people select Ikea as their point of origin for home goods.

Most importantly, the smoked salmon with dill sauce was delicious!

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s seminal album, Nevermind. I’m listening to it on Spotify.

Smells Like Teen Spirit reminds me of lying in the operating room, drugged to the gills with happy juice, waiting for my surgeon to install my port for chemo. The nurse leaned over me. “I hope you don’t mind the music, the doctor likes to listen to 98 Rock.”

Hello, hello, hello.

I was in high school when Nirvana hit the radio waves; that music is inscribed deep in my brain. I found the driving guitars soothing. “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I like Nirvana.”

Hello, hello, hello.

“Okay, I’m going to administer the anesthesia now. I want you to count backwards from ten.” I got to eight before disappearing into a swarm of grunge oblivion.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous.

#

When I woke up, my hair was matted with blood. My post-op nurse gently washed it out for me. I guess sticking a tube into the jugular is a bloody proposition. I was so loopy from drugs at that point that I really wasn’t disturbed.

#

It’s been raining this past week. Today is the first bright day in a while. The mushrooms are thriving; I have no idea if any of them are edible, but they’re all fascinating to look at.

Amazing to think that something as simple as taking a bite of the wrong fungus could snuff out a human’s entire life force. That something as insistent and resilient as the will to live could be sliced clean through by a mistake.

Never give in; never, never give in.
- Winston Churchill