permission to suck

also known as "freedom to fail."

I so need to grant myself that right now. I'm having a week of what feels like running through a maze underwater, as I gear up for Migritude's Kenya tour, prepare to leave the US for Kenya for 6 months, flounder through contracts and budgets for touring the show in the US in 2008 . In addition to the drowning sensation, there's the constant running into dead ends, the encroaching panic of not getting things done, the escapes into distractions that only generate self-recrimination at more time wasted........

The bedrock beneath it all, of course, is the terror of Getting It Wrong. Making the wrong choice. Missing a piece of information. Losing money. Falling flat on my face. And the irony of it is, that if I just gave myself permission to fail, I'd get more done, failing at high speed, than I am right now, locked in a paralysis of doing nothing at all.

my new favourite definition of a poet

By the famous Sufi poet Hafiz:

“someone who can pour light into a spoon, then raise it to nourish our beautiful parched mouths.”

Dec 21st, 2012

The day the world as we know it will come to an end.

Sez who?

The Mayan calendar, for one.

And various mathematicians, who have plotted the asymptotic graphs of all of humanity's technological developments and projected them out to the point where they all, relatively simultaneously, hit infinity. The day that they arrived at is December 21st, 2012.

I dunno. Sounds a little like the whole Y2K scare to me. But as someone who doesn't get ANYTHING done until I have a deadline, and the deadline's looming, it's an interesting possibility to contemplate:

"OK, suppose I decided to live as if it was true? I would have five and a half years to work, love, think, create, contribute, to the absolute limits of my human potential. Without any hand-wringing or uncertainty about the future. What would that draw out of me?"

murderous rage

as I read about the silencing of Kathy Sierra, leading tech blogger, through blatantly sexist and graphically violent threats and intimidation.

From The Washington Post:

"The sad thing is, I've had thousands of messages from women saying, 'You
were a role model for me,' " Sierra said in an interview, describing
communications she received after suspending her blog. Sierra was the first
woman to deliver a keynote speech at a conference on the Linux operating
system. Her blog was No. 23 in the Technorati.com Top 100 list of blogs,
measured by the number of blogs that linked to her site.

Her Web site, Creating Passionate Users, was about "the most fluffy and nice
things," she said. Sierra occasionally got the random "comment troll," she
said, but a little over a month ago, the posts became more threatening.
Someone typed a comment on her blog about slitting her throat and
ejaculating. The noose photo appeared next, on a site that sprang up to
harass her. On the site, someone contributed this comment: "the only thing
Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size."

On yet another Web site came the muzzle photo, which struck her as if she
were being smothered. "I dream of Kathy Sierra," read the caption.

"That's when I got pushed over the edge," she said.

In what she intended to be her final blog post last month, she wrote:

"I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

"I am afraid to leave my yard.

"I will never feel the same. I will never be the same."

* * * *

If someone posted on the internet threatening similar action against Bush, Cheney, any man in public office, it would be a terrorist threat. There's no question that the police - if not a SWAT team - would be on their doorstep, charging them with intent to commit a violent crime.

When it happens to a woman - a writer - it's a joke.

Go Chavez

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, has just announced Venezuela's withdrawal from the World Bank and the IMF - two global institutions responsible for more collective suffering and desperation in the global South than all the tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes of the last century combined.

He plans to create an alternative lending bank, run by South American nations and funded in part with his OPEC nation's high oil revenue.

You GO, Chavez.