I’m a bit tired but still psyched after my first two days at the new job as social media manager at Doe Anderson.   I have seen the birds-eye view of the work I’m going to be taking on in the next few months, and it is pretty awesome.

Here is the slightly sad but probably inevitable news:  as soon as I get Internet Bard up and running, I’ll no longer be updating That Darn Kat.   First of all, in addition to IB, I’m going to be blogging at Social Media Explorer, and most likely the Doe blog as well.    I’ve realized that as things stand now, I can do two personal blogs poorly, or one personal blog well.  I’d rather do one well.

Another part of that decision is the realization that I need to focus some real world time and attention on my real world relationships–rather than leaning on the social media tools with which I’m more adept–to keep in touch and connected.  I’m already doing better about that.  I think.  I’m sure Jen or Jonna or Daryn will chime in on the comments if I’m deluded about that.

That Darn Kat was not my first blog, and clearly won’t be my last.   When I look back, each iteration of my blog has had a particular tone and has covered a distinct phase in my life.  Life in Pal was about adjusting to small town life after traveling the world with Chris’ during his Air Force career.  Oh, the Drama was about a period of my life that was full of both literal and metaphorical drama (I was the drama team leader at our former church at that time, and it was a particularly tumultuous time of personal drama.)

To a certain extent, That Darn Kat was about my “quarter life crisis” and figuring out who I am, what I believe, and what my purpose is.  It was about refusing to keep living out of my parents’ fears and expectations for me, and living out of my own dreams and strengths instead.  Because of that, I think it was hard to let it go.  But with all the changes going on lately, I think it became clear that TDK had run its course.

So anyway… Lost has had it’s season finale.  Grey’s has had it’s season finale, and in the words of Miranda Bailey, “I’ve seen the bigger picture.  And I can’t do everything and still have everything. So I have to, uh, let some pieces go. This piece.”  Which means that it’s time for the finale of this blog.

Thanks for coming with me so far.  If you’re still hanging in there to see what happens during the next part of the story, scoot on over to www.internet-bard.com in a few days.

See ya there.

I have to admit, I was a little cynical about the whole “5th Grade Graduation Ceremony” thing, but it was actually kind of moving.  I went to the same small town elementary school, and it was a very bittersweet, nostalgic thing to see how much the teachers and staff really care about these kids.  It was clear they were going to miss them next year.

There was some major career upheaval for both the grown ups in the family.

Chris’ workplace drama is possibly the more interesting (i.e. “tabloid-worthy gossipy”) story.  In the name of not getting him dooced for me disclosing too much private intel, I will just say that a longstanding stressor was removed, making his workplace a much more pleasant and healthy environment.

I spent most of May in the occupational limbo that results when you’re in the process of applying for a new job (and then the “last two weeks of school” feeling that results when you actually get the awesome new job and give your notice).

In May, it became crystal clear that we are a family in transition.  Maddie is solidly a preschooler (and apparently, a coaster freak).  Joshua is getting ready to start middle school.   All four of us are taking on new roles and responsibilities, and learning new things.  It’s definitely an exciting time.

Next week, I’ll be moving from LeapFrog Interactive, where I have been happily employed for the last two years, to Doe Anderson, as their new Social Media Manager, working with Jason Falls.

Pursuing the position is not a move I made lightly.  After all, I’ve been pretty vocal about how happy I’ve been at my current workplace.   Who could be unhappy while working with a group of people like these?  (And hey, no creative workplace is without some occasional constructive conflict.)  But it looks like I’m getting to move to a place with great people as well.

But in the end, it felt like it would be an amazing fit and a great opportunity.  (Not to mention it’s a half hour shorter commute–a not-minor consideration when you’re a parent who jealously guards time with her family, and when gas is at $4 a gallon.)

I consider myself privileged to have gotten this new opportunity, and equally privileged to have had the opportunity to work for my previous employer.

“I keep wondering, if I’d only done this instead…”

It seems like everyone around me is mentally rewriting the past and the present, trying different possible realities on for size, evaluating what is against what might have been.

I’ve spent a fair share of my time doing the same thing.  Trying to cipher out what I did wrong or right, or what someone else did wrong or right, that landed me in this particular unexpected bend of the road.

That’s the thing about life. It doesn’t really care about your plans. So you can chart all the courses you want, but it’s much better to just be prepared and flexible for the opportunities that come your way. - Rebecca Thorman, Modite

I’m at a bend in the road I didn’t really see coming, too.  And it’s good and scary and amazing and sad and potentially a little inspiring.

Between the “there” that was me “in the dark place” seven or eight years ago, and the “here” that is currently exhilarating the heck out of me, I had to spend a little time sitting on the riverbank, trying to figure out how I’d missed the fork I needed to get where I wanted to be.  That’s a part of the journey that I would never discount.

But at a certain point, you have to put your boat back in the stream, and see where the river takes you.

Often, that unintended destination is a much better one than you could have imagined when you started out.

So, yes, something is definitely UP with me.  It’s good stuff–not necessarily fun or easy stuff, but good stuff.

It’s a long story (is anything ever not, as far as I’m concerned?) but the short version is that I’ve been hiding from my friends, family, journals, etc.  All the people and things that notice or highlight it when there is a kink in your mojo, thus forcing you to face and deal with said kink.

The exact nature of the kink that’s been in my mojo is the long part of the story, as well as the part that is not particularly the business of anyone who knows me solely through reading my blog.

The thrust of the situation is this:  I have been struggling for a while now with the issues of vulnerability, transparency, authenticity, boundaries, and intimacy.  Yeah–heavy stuff, is it not?  What is appropriate to reveal, and what is not, in which context?

My life has given me some pretty big stories to tell.  Powerful stories.   But anything powerful enough to make a difference in this world is like Pandora’s Box.  Let loose without restraint, it can do powerfully wonderful and powerfully destructive stuff.   My response for a while was to put a lid on the box.  But that’s not really my nature.  To keep things bottled in and boxed up.

Plus, what ends up happening is that keeping that big thing stuffed inside you keeps you too busy to do anything else.

So the Stories are going to start coming out.  Hopefully, in ways that are predominantly healing and helpful.  I’m building some frameworks, some contexts, that will let me send those stories out into the world without unleashing Pandora’s Box.

Things will be changing in my life in upcoming weeks.   Potentially radically changing.  And because this blog, and Internet Bard to a lesser degree, are reflections of my life, they’ll be changing here too.  But hopefully, for the better.

-The Fray

“Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”

Jesus, Luke 9: 23-24

Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? To save your life, you have to lose it.

I have, I think, a deeper understanding of this passage in recent years. My life isn’t what I expected. It isn’t turning out at all the way I set out for it to go.

Many good things I couldn’t have anticipated have come to pass in the last few years. But many bad things I would have done nearly anything to avoid if I could have, have also happened.

This is not the life I asked for.

Which is where the Luke passage comes in. The harder I try to save that life, the harder I try to get my own way, reality be danged, the less engaged I am with the life I have. The more I focus on what’s been lost, the more I find myself “alone in the bitterness.”

The truth is, the life I have is better than the life I wanted. It’s a deeper and more challenging life than the one I wanted, to be sure. It’s a harder life. But it’s a much better one. And the closer I follow in Jesus footsteps, the less I wander off following my own agendas, the better it gets.

Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s the nature of life on this planet that some thing dies so that something else can live–from microorganisms up through plants to us.

More and more I’m learning that you’re always sacrificing something to obtain something else in life.

It’s been a crazy few months.   At work, I moved departments rather suddenly and found myself trying to learn a lot of new stuff really fast.  I also launched a new blog, and lost my old web host, and somewhere in the tussle, this blog got a little lost.  Part of the web host crazyness meant that I spent a few weeks tying up all the remaining loose ends for coffee cup studio, which officially is no more.  Oh, and a project I worked on last year won a Gold ADDY Award at the Louies, making me officially “an award-winning copywriter.”  Yeah, I totally rocked the long red formal at the awards ceremony, but fortunately there were no acceptance speeches.  Or cameras pointed my way. 

At home, things have been a little freaky for other reasons.  Mostly, it’s been freaky because it’s been so remarkably drama-free.  We’re managing to stay on top of the basics and are starting give Junior Cheeseburger some much-needed and too-long-put-off attention and focus.  (By the way, he completely ROCKED his last elementary school talent show.  He did Queen’s We Will Rock You, and had the whole gym stomping and clapping.) 

Oh my, the times they are a’changin’ aren’t they? I’ve been wrestling for almost a week now with a post for this blog about marriage.  I have SO much to say about that topic that it’s hard to tease out just enough for a blog post.  I’ve gotten back in the habit in the last week of reading Copyblogger, which helps me tighten up my writing when I find myself going all War and Peace, when what I really need is “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.” 

Anyway, I think I’m back.  I think.  The last couple of months have been really focused on taking action out there in the wide world of reality, and also privately working out some deeper stuff.  Some of the “stuff” I need to work out is the fact that I can’t seem to do anything privately.  And that’s not right.  Being a real and authentic person doesn’t mean I need to bare my soul to every passing stranger, just like being a passionate person doesn’t mean my life needs to be one long Festival of Personal Drama. 

I have a really hard time striking that balance, apparently, because people tell me that I come off “mysterious and secretive.”  My initial thought upon hearing that is, “I am the least mysterious person on EARTH.”  Here I thought I was the bare it and share it poster girl.  Maybe not.  Either that, or they think I’m the stereotypical Sunday school teaching soccer mom with nothing in her past worth keeping secret. 

Ok.  Not really that, either. 

So basically, I’m learning context.  What separates being honest and transparent from being inappropriate is the context.   The context of the situation, or the relationship, or the story itself, dictates what should and shouldn’t be shared or kept private. 

Part of the issue here is that I have seen “privacy” used as a shield for really hurtful dishonesty.  It makes me actually a little skeptical about the real need for some things to remain private. 

Then again, some truth is a burden that ought to be divided cautiously among people who can bear it in grace.  Or heck, there are some things that other people just flat. Don’t. Want. To. Hear. About.  For a wide variety of reasons.

Part of the problem is that I’ve simply endured lots of public humiliation, and the side benefit of that is that very little embarrasses you (and thus, you have very little motivation to keep embarrassing stuff private).   

I blame childbirth, partly.  Once you’ve gone through the whole “six people wearing scrubs staring at my vajayjay” thing once or twice, you’re a little more numb to the whole “exposed and vulnerable” feeling, I think.  Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, still out here.  Still working stuff out.  Probably still vastly oversharing.  In fact, that whole “vajayjay” comment above is probably a prime example of that. 

Ah well, spot me that one, will ya?  I’m still learning.

The first lie is that you can change someone else, and the second lie is that people don’t change. Like all the most effective lies, they’re not so much absolute lies as they are misdirection and half-truth.

The truth is, you can’t control someone else’s behavior. Not by yelling, not by reasoning, not by threatening, and not by whining (although almost everyone employs these and other methods in a vain attempt to get someone close to them who is driving them crazy to change).

The truth is also that while you can’t change someone else’s behavior directly, you have tremendous influence in your relationships, if you learn how to control and direct that influence. People do change. You can change, and through your change, other people you’re in relationship with can find hope, inspiration and nuts-and-bolts-details for changing their own behavior.

Is there more to it, deeper spiritual truths, and the application of the Gospel? Yupper. I’m a follower of Christ, it’s part of who I am and my worldview, and I don’t make apologies for it. My personal belief is that the transforming power of the Gospel is at the heart of real and lasting change. I know not everyone is on the same page on that, and that’s okay. I can believe that’s okay because I believe that the same One who pursued me and won me over, will pursue and win over anyone who is open-hearted and winnable. Anyway, back to our topic. The book, and what I personally discovered when I earnestly tried out Townsend’s suggestions for being an “agent of change” in a particularly trying relationship.

I am not going to attempt to condense an entire book into a blog post, but I will say that it presented an extremely do-able, clear and specific road map for changing difficult relationships. I can also say that when I followed the guidelines, change happened in a situation I had given up on. And lastly, if you get nothing else out of the book, please latch on to this one idea: “I’m for you.”

It’s a little ironic that just at the time I was being really challenged by this book, I first heard TobyMac’s song “I’m for you.” I like TobyMac, although I’m not as big a fan as Chris is. But there was a part of the book that talks about your “position” towards the other person. It’s talking about the position of your heart. If you give a person advice, and your position towards them is that they’re a screwed up mess who probably won’t listen to you, because God knows they’ve never listened in the past… you have no shot of reaching them. As much as you are able, you need to relate to that person from a position of love. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that. Did it mean that I was to be a doormat? That I was to act like their destructive and self-destructive behavior was okay? No. Because that’s not loving the person. Townsend described it as being “for” the person. The phrase “I’m for you” suddenly made it click. You have to be FOR that person, meaning you genuinely want the best FOR them. You are advocating FOR them, standing up FOR them, even against their own issues, biases, and bad habits.

“I’m for you.” means “I’m not fighting you. I’m fighting for you. Even if it means I’m sometimes fighting against stuff you want, but which isn’t good for you. Even if it means you don’t like me as much for a little while.  I’m for you.”

I’m not going to lie to you.  Being for someone you love is hard, hard stuff.  Standing firm and working through stuff instead of continuing the pointless verbal ping-pong match of blame and defend is a major commitment of energy and faith.  But it works. You have to stick with it, but it works.

Of course, what’s bringing this up is a recent realization that I need to start putting some energy into being an agent of change in a few relationships, for a few more people.  When you see someone you care about beating their head against the same wall of their own bad habits, you can either wag your finger at them, or you can get in there and help.  But if you elect to get in there and help, you have to actually help, not just be another source of guilt and condemnation for them.  You have to be for them.

Wish me luck. 

Yup, its time for another one of those “remedial GTD” posts. I signed up for Jott towards the end of last year with the intent to use it and Sandy to help me build my “trusted system.”

The “trusted system,” for those not familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done organizational system, is basically where you put your “stuff,” rather than trying to remember it all.

“Stuff” equates to all the random data that are hogging all your mental RAM: appointments, to-dos, plans, schemes, ideas and such like.

The idea is, you “download” your “stuff” into your trusted system regularly (daily or weekly, depending on your need), and as your brain learns that the trusted system actually can be trusted to keep track of all that stuff, it lets go and frees itself up to think about bigger stuff that requires your higher thinking skills, like creativity.

So anyway, I signed up for Sandy and Jott months ago, but as much as I liked them, I didn’t really adopt them because Sandy requires typing (and usually when I think of new stuff I need to remember, I’m somewhere that typing is awkward.  Like sitting in traffic.)

Jott doesn’t require typing, and its voice recognition is Da Bomb, but it does rely heavily on text messages, and when I originally signed up, I was getting charged a fee for every message.

Well, in the intervening months, we’ve added unlimited text messages to our phone plans, because we’ve found that it’s the best way to communicate during the workday.  It’s less disruptive than a voice call on the cell, but you know that as soon as your spouse gets a chance, he or she will respond.

Anyway, I revisited my Jott/Sandy combo today, and I must say, it’s pretty sweet and trust-able.   I also figured out how to post to Twitter and to both  blogs via Jott.  Um–yay.

So my blog posts here will hopefully start coming a little more frequently, although as a heads up, they may have a few more “typos” till Jott’s voice recognition gets fully up to speed on interpreting my Bluegrass-Hoosier accent.

If you are not a fan of gadgets and the interweb, GTD can work quite capably as a paper-based system.  A great resource site on paper-based GTD is DIYplanner.com.  In addition to tons of articles, it features great printable forms.  Another good source for templates is David Seah.

Complaints about the airlines aside, last week’s trip out of town was really beneficial to me.  Aside from the boost of confidence I got in presenting fairly well, the copious amounts of “down time” waiting for the travel glitches to work themselves out gave me a nice break in which to do some reflection, private journaling and just get nicely refocused and mentally refreshed.   Sans someone asking me a question or needing something urgently for a few days, it was much easier to look at my life from a longer view and get a little clarity.  Maybe even some perspective.

I’ve been paying attention to my dreams lately, as well as some of the recurring imagery around me.  Lots of earthy stuff: digging in dirt, sinking my toes in sand, mud coating everything.   Everything is very active, energetic, but it’s not a frenetic, airy, flighty kind of energy.  It’s the energy of a farmer steadily working the same small plot of ground over time.

I’ve been feeling an urge to start a garden, but I don’t know if that desire is literal or metaphorical or both.  I’m not sure if I want to actually put my time, attention and energy into a garden, or if it just means that I’m coming into a season of tending, nurturing, and growing things, rather than starting 100 new projects.

That’s weird for me, because in general I naturally tend to be a “starter of new things” and a “finisher of stuff left unfinished,” but being a “tender of things in-process” is a way of seeing myself I have a hard time with.