Case-Notes from the Artsy Asylum

Randy Pausch's Death and Our Own Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor whose "last lecture" made him famous died today, almost a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,

When he gave this Carnegie Mellon commencement address in May, he had lived three months longer than the three to six months doctors had predicted, leading a friend to say he was “beating the Reaper.”

“We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer,” Pausch said. “We beat the Reaper by living well.”

It's difficult - at least for me - to see people with cancer deteriorate and die - even those I do not know. Randy looked good in the video above, in contrast with Tony Snow's last appearance before he died earlier this month of colon cancer that had spread to first his liver and then elsewhere. Tony was gaunt and had aged twenty years in my eyes. Even NPR's always insightful and frank Leroy Seivers now considers the pros and cons of hospice, and has a home health aide four times a week.

But Randy was upbeat and seemed unfazed by what the rest of us are overwhelmed by. And that gives us all something to consider.

My message in reflection: Please love others and live well while you can. Give generously of yourself and your spirit. Adopt a cause or two. Be present to what's happening around you and not distracted by the latest shiny thing of the blogosphere.

It's easy to be engaged by internet popularity, blog stats, being included in lists and invited to functions. Things are nice to own. But will that really matter when you face the end of the road?

Like Randy Paush who was only 47, or others we know who were suddenly stricken and died much earlier, we never know when an unexpected diagnosis - or a bus - will mark the end of our time here.

Let's make today even - simply this day - one that we'd be proud to call our last.

And then tomorrow.

Just Do It: Letting Goodness Show

Recently Seth Goodin sent an order to customink for some shirts and within days had a note from them asking if the shirts were for a charity event.

Lori, from Customink wrote

"If that’s the case, CustomInk would love to make a small donation to your team or to the charity itself on your behalf.

Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page."

As Seth explained in his blog customink just does this as a matter of policy. It looks like they are straightforward about it, not making a big deal out of it or making one jump through hoops in order to "qualify."

"regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don't do it as an inducement, they just do it.

"That's it. No policy, no standard operating procedure, no promise in advance. Just plain generosity."

Sometimes when we least expect it, gestures large and small touch our hearts.

And the good will that ensue can't be measured - unless my friend Katie Paine has figured out a way to do it - which wouldn't actually surprise me because she's a genius. But she says that some things are immeasurable, and if I read her right the measurement doesn't matter if we could manage it.

Still, Seth writes that "the value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk'"

In other words goodness for goodness sake, kindness for kindness sake is it's own best reward?

I was thinking that the values taught to me in parochial school should serve me well if that's the case. And that maybe the best lessons in life really are those we should have learned in kindergarten.

It's more than holding hands when we walk across the street. It's about seeing an instance where we CAN do something, even if not asked - and just plain doing it,

What good can we do today without being asked?

 

Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page."

As Seth explained in his blog customink just does this as a matter of policy. It looks like they are straightforward about it, not making a big deal out of it or making one jump through hoops in order to "qualify."

"regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don't do it as an inducement, they just do it.

"That's it. No policy, no standard operating procedure, no promise in advance. Just plain generosity."

Sometimes when we least expect it, gestures large and small touch our hearts.

And the good will that ensue can't be measured - unless my friend Katie Paine has figured out a way to do it - which wouldn't actually surprise me because she's a genius. But she says that some things are immeasurable, and if I read her right the measurement doesn't matter if we could manage it.

Still, Seth writes that "the value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk'"

In other words goodness for goodness sake, kindness for kindness sake is it's own best reward?

I was thinking that the values taught to me in parochial school should serve me well if that's the case. And that maybe the best lessons in life really are those we should have learned in kindergarten.

It's more than holding hands when we walk across the street. It's about seeing an instance where we CAN do something, even if not asked - and just plain doing it,

What good can we do today without being asked?

 

Who's More Egotistic Than A Blogger?

It's the political season and I'll try to stay mainly quiet this time around but one thing you should know about are my issues with media.

Oh I'm not talking about bloggers. We already know that we of the bloggosphere are legends in our own minds.

But somebody has to explain the popularity of people like Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Grace and Keith Olberman who thousands - OK millions - tune in to watch spout off in exchange for million dollar salaries.

I don't get why we don't all turn off the TV en masse. So in The Political Scene: One Angry Man: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker Peter Boyer tries to explain it to me.

"Olbermann’s success, like O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views."

“People want to identify,” Peter Griffin who sees himself as Olberman's handler says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”

My problem with that no matter how much I want to identify, I don't need to do it with a talking head with an ego problem.

These people are blowhards. No matter how right or wrong they are I'll still run screaming from a broadcaster - or anyone else for that matter - who is rude, sees things black and white, interrupts, talks down, throws out pithy one liners for shock effect and is generally condescending in their nicest moments.

I'm Not Amused

I may not be the average viewer who Griffin is talking about because I think a lot of the rest of us see Olberman like a Joe Buck run amok and given the keys to primetime; continually patted on the back for tirades.

To me Olberman will always be an annoying "sports guy" who is himself annoyed at the world because of a brain out of sync with the rest of the kiddies in his childhood or who is just too self-absorbed to know he shoult stuff a sock in it.  I see him as a guy who used to be mildly amusing when he stuck to sports. But it's clear that he thinks he knows more than the rest of us about everything else as well. That he has taken his schtick to MSNBC to cover alleged news- and done WELL there - just reinforces my view that the mainstream media is misguided at best and has an agenda at worst.

Is this news? Not many of us would argue that it is. Is he educating us? Encouraging us to think? Making us a better informed populace? Let's call a spade a spade.

Who Cares Who's Right

Like your kid who throws a temper tantrum in the middle of the Piggly Wiggly, it's not about what O'Reilly or Grace or Olberman are railing about or whether they have a point. It's that they've got a bully pulpit and we're rewarding them for not bringing us news but assailing us with condescending, harranguing point of view, over and over and over again.

Personality - even eccentricity is one thing. Class is another altogether. So as for me, I'll take reading a big-ego blogger any day over being lectured at by a big-headed alleged newsperson.

On the other hand, I'd love to see Olberman arm wrestle Robert Scoble.

Technology, Pop-Culture and the Examined Life

In The Conduct of Life, the cultural historian and critic Lewis Mumford speculates that, "ideally, each of us has two lives: our public life of daily activity—earning a living, raising a family—plus a private life created within our thoughts as we examine and evaluate our actions"

But in the article linked here the author Ken Isaacs of Popular Science talks about the idea of creating a place plastered with hundreds of images as that private place.

My argument would be that instead of a huge dungeons and dragons form covered in images, we'd do better to look for a beautiful calming structure in which to focus. Alternately, using a simple blog or microblogging platforms such as soup.io might serve that function as well.  In some, twitter for example, the public and inner lives cross. I wonder what  Mumford would have made of this phenomenon.

While in Isaacs example - click on image for large view - he uses photos torn from magazines showcasing popular culture the good news is that it's no longer the seventies and we can focus on our laptop if we need a plethora of pop images.

The world of twitter going by or the images in a fickriver or soup.io public page can easily serve up content if we want more stimulation.

In essence, the idea of bombarding our brain with pictures as a way to consider our lives seems counterintuitive to the goal of immersing ourselves in our own thoughts and inner reactions to our own actions.

The thing is - some people are now so used to 24 hour stimulation they can't stand to be alone. And I'm not sure we'd really feel much solitude in Isaacs decahydron of photo stimulation in any case.

And in the end a scrapbook filled with photos chronicling our lives and a pop up dome like a children's play house could serve the purpose if we truly, as Greta Garbo, "want to be alone."

Codgers and Computers

Shel Israel wrote today about where we "connected seniors" came from - I think some people think we retire and our kids buy us a computer as a way to keep us occupied - or to keep us from visiting them and the grandkids.

The observers may have been watching too much TV instead of interacting with connected people of all generations. That picture couldn't be further from the truth.

Not Pulled or Pushed by Offspring

Although I think that every house should have a computer sitting prominently in a public part of the house so a passing family member can sit down and do a quick google, my computer usage didn't start because of kids - either grown or in their shorter state.

No, I didn't start using them to share photos of my babies with my family, nor because I want to see photos of their babies now (although I do). And I didn't start using a computer because my kids were using them in school.

From the first time we as a young family could afford a computer I saw it as a tool we all - including me - could DO stuff with.

I remember the first house where the much maligned Commodore-64 sat in my kitchen. It must have been 1981 or 1982 and I was in my 30s with three children.

Apple was not in our price range, so the Commodore did the job of bringing computers to the masses - and me. Within no time a computer was part of my life and I've never looked back.

As computers evolved I was evolving too, thankfully.The decreasingly ugly box always had a prominent place in a well-used public room of the house. It got used more often and became more a part of what we did.

Jump ahead thirty years

If you'd told me that one day I'd be using a laptop computer to opine about the role of virtual worlds in business communication I'd have probably rolled my eyes. Researching and writing about my next step in the cancer wars I might have accepted a little better.

I'm not crazy about the term "seniors" but I don't like "silver surfers" either. Don't pigeon-hole me - just listen to me brag that at age 60 I'm ahead of three out of four of my offspring as far as being connected.

Those three born between 1971 and 1979 lag behind their sister born in 1985 and although I wonder about why that is I don't spend enough time pondering it to keep me from interacting with twitter, exploring plurk, or adding images to flickr.

PS - Dropping in on my Soup.io page will get you a collection of all my web content except twitter. Have you checked out Soup yourself?

ChipIn To Help Cancer, Fire, Robbery Victim and His Family

I'll let Dr Michelle Calabretta tell this story because she's on the scene at the hospital in Houston and tells of the family and the situation so well.

"One of our patients, a resident here in Houston with Stage 4 cancer, arrived for treatment last week and mentioned that he lost everything in a house fire.

To make matters worse what he and his family did salvage from the fire they left in their car, which was broken into while staying at a hotel.

He is a lovely man whom we all adore and my coworkers are trying to raise some money to help him rebuild.

You can imagine how hard it is to deal with cancer when you have all of your comforts, but now this man truly needs our help.

I am creating a ChipIn widget page until Friday May 23. If you are moved to help this man and his family please consider donating whatever you can manage.

We will pool all the funds and get a Visa gift card that they can spend on whatever they need."
                                    May 16 3:24pm

 

I hope you will toss in a as much as you can to help the staff at M.D.Anderson Cancer Center do what we can to help this family rebuild their lives.

They will see him this Friday for his regular appointment and I along with the staff there hope to be able to provide the family with the basis for some renewed hope.

Show You Love Your Mother and Other Mothers

Not much more for me to say except making sure mom does this is your number one priority. If you don't know my story check out Boobs On Ice, I was in a nearly zero risk category and was diagnosed in December with a 5 cm tentacled mass of invasive form of breast cancer.

Meaning that anything can happen to any of us and even I can have a tumor speed through tissue then rank borderline between stages 2 and 3.of a 4 level disease..

Showing one or more of these images on your blog and encouraging others to do so it as well costs you nothing and could - and will - mean much to many.

Walled Communications: Who Am I Here?

After writing here and on twitter about my granddaughter who was in the hospital in Pediatric Intensive Care. I got wonderful feedback and very supportive comments.

Following up, the diagnosis is that Emma has Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome which causes her heart to beat erratically from time to time. She has been stabilized on beta blockers and will be closely monitored. Thanks for asking and for caring.

There's a lot in life that's not easily classifiable

The reason I touch on this again is that we're people after all, and we - not to mention life - do not fit easily into nice little cubbyholes. At least my life never has.

In the late fifties I was asking neighborhood kids to find out whose mom would pay a quarter a week for me to teach them some basic baton lessons in my side yard. Was I having neighborhood conversations, kid conversations, business conversations?

I didn't pay any attention. I was helping someone else, helping myself, learning abut life, having fun, getting to know someone better and exploring, Communicating. Creating. Dreaming.

It was all about people and interacting and life.

Later I sold art to and created logos for people I knew. Then they would tell other people and I'd often meet and network with or do work for them. Or I'd meet someone at my date's golf tournament, my son's soccer game, on a PTA Board, and make a new contact.

Were these business connections? Friendships? Mom-connections? Consulting connections? Art connections?

I didn't know and I still don't.

In my world the topics of people and interaction and connecting and community do not have barriers between then. It seems artificial to act as if there are.

Yes, I hear the grumbling. "she tweets about her cancer treatments, not information we need," "there are thousands of babies sick right now."

Fact is though that not talking about new baby issues in a blog that is after all about life and the connections and relationships we make - and whatever else this blog is about - seems as artificial as only interacting with Second Life people in Second Life, or not mentioning my cat or my artwork or whatever else affects mine - or someone else's life.

And I think we learn something about business through learning about living, and learn something about community by caring about our neighbors' babies. And the list could go on.

The aspects of many of our lives are as permeable as those membranes we did experiments on in biology class.

Hard wiring, life-view, whatever you want to call it, that's how it works for me to function effectively in the world. I can't dissect myself into multiple little pieces.

Starting Boobs on Ice was an attempt to deal with my cancer experience but even that spills over in spite of my efforts. Magpie Genes is specifically as an outlet for my art pieces but there's some osmosis there too.

So it's OK for other people to have different guidelines for themselves and their blogs? Are they better compartmentalizers?

Totally! But I'm just too all over the place interest and life-wise to manage it myself. Let's face it. I couldn't if I wanted to.

I'm glad you're willing to put up with it.

Baby Emma Needs Your Prayers

 My friends who have tuned into my twitter stream tonight have heard that my granddaughter. little Emma born April21, has been admitted to the hospital tonight and is in the PICU being treated for a heart rhythm problem.

First signs in Emma's case were: fussiness and not nursing well. Not too worrisome, this progressed to panting and lips turning blue. An emergency run to he hospital was in order.

Initial indications from pediatricians and an echocardiogram are that there is a problem with SVT, but no indication as to the cause. Emma is on IVs, oxygen and is still nursing (thank you God and Kerry, my daughter and Emma's mom)

Speaking of God 

God knows I don't want to become an expert in one more disease! But one takes what's served and my approach is to deal with it.My initial tendency to research is probably stronger than my need for sleep.

Interesting note:

• I was also diagnosed with SVT in my forties and take beta blockers to keep it reasonably controlled
• My 28 year old son was told last week that he was suffering from SVT, perhaps caused by suspected pericarditis. 
• And not to be left out, my husband has an implanted device because during diagnostic surgery a few years ago his SVT was determined to be life threatening.
• Nobody has once mentioned the possibility of anything genetic in all these visits with medical professionals

St Jude Medical has a section on treatment that's somewhat informative I may be doing a lot of reading tonight..I'll tweet updates as I know them

            
       

                  Click here to download this factsheet in PDF form

"Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT). SVT is a broad term that includes many forms of arrhythmia originating above the ventricles (supraventricular). SVTs usually cause a burst of rapid heartbeats that begin and end suddenly and can last from seconds to hours. These often start when the electrical impulse from a premature heartbeat begins to circle repeatedly through an extra pathway. SVT may cause your heart to beat 160 to 200 times a minute."  http://www.mayoclinic.com

Video as Bonding Tool

Not every online communication and community building moment is about connecting with potential networking buddies who will lead to clients and customers and commercial success.

Some of the most poignant times for me lately, and ones that use new media in a way I didn't expect it to be useful to me, involve the videos my elder granddaughter and I made when she and her mom were staying at the parental abode a few weeks ago.

It turned out that Kelsey liked to make videos, and the flipcam was right up her alley. The image here is from a video we jokingly call "the spoon"

She talked off camera about potential things we could discuss in future videos, including how kids feel about their families; about how cancer is scary for people of all ages; how moms having babies change things for grandmothers and children but make us worry and think about our relationships and where we'll fit in the picture after the baby comes too.

In short she had many good ideas.

There is a real potential for youtube, Viddler and flickr to develop into tools that are not simply places for showing photos and videos. They're serving - for me at least - as a tool for encouraging dialogue.

Part of my current dialogue is a video of my new granddaughter and Kelsey's baby sister, Emma. It's just another way of sharing who I am with my community. This teeny baby and her very big sister are a big part of my life, and connecting with them from the start - and then leaving something behind to document that and for them to have always is a tremendous priority.

Nana loves you, girls. . .