Dicky Lives

The Robcast Episode 100 with Rob and Elizabeth Gilbert is rather interesting and insightful on so many levels. 

One topic that they had a bit of a riff on was the idea of creating something, just because. Rob created a character with his kids called Dicky … 

He went all out, got some stories together, a bunch of illustrations and a pitch for publishers and was flat out rejected. So Dickie ended up in a file in the garage. 

Elizibeth had just been playing with poetry, which turned into lyrics, which turned into recording a song. For what? The fun of it basically.

Guess what, nobody died in the process. 

It is so liberating that these people who have quote made it quote, still have the freedom to play and experiment with ideas, and better yet, they don’t always turn out to be mega successful works, like their previous work.

I was recently at a meeting and a mother had to bring her daughters to it and they say in the corner on a small table made at children height and just created with pens and pencils and things for the hour. Why? Because it’s fun! Arrr to learn to get back to the point of doing stuff for the fun of it.

That reminds me, I really should get that new box of LEGO out and built it. 

What is Seattle like?

CreativeLive hasn’t just taught me about photography & creativity, it’s also made me curious about what Seattle is like, turns out in terms of population, it’s not that big 600,000 odd, compared with Melbourne 4 million, it seems like a drop in the ocean. Turns out Pampered House Wife packed her and her partners things and moved there and kindly blogged about it. 

https://pamperedhousewife.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/differences-between-melbourne-and-seattle-that-nobody-warned-us-about/

6 weeks down!!!

Look at that, 6 weeks has rolled around since I started this blog.

A quick recap on my top posts. These all have an important element for me, whether it was the content or the story, a growth felt in my writing style, or a growth in my thinking.

This might not work….
A confession 

Painting, piano & sailing

Let’s have a conversation around digital minimalism 

Grieving with Hope

I feel more at ease in a room full of pole dancers, than a church

Tiredness 

Awesome Jar

Hope to catch a glimpse of how loved you are brother
Thanks for being on the journey. I plan to keep the journey going.

How has blogging every day changed my thinking process?

A daily blog has forced me to stop at the end of the day and reflect on all that has happened, to take count of what new things I’ve learnt, or noticed & then forced me to try and turn those thoughts into words on a page. This is something that I hadn’t practiced for years (& some would argue if I really wanted to practice them, I should attend a university).

It’s also interesting to see how a thought changes as I process it through the writing. Sometimes the place I start from, is a very different place to where I end up after having to think and process the idea in detail. 

Bed time alarm

Way back when I was younger I had alarm set on my phone for 9:30pm.

It was my bed time alarm.

It turns out Apple decided that more people would like a similar feature.

Unfortunately I’m not always good at following it.

But I do find if I stick to a rhythm of a similar (early-ish) bedtime and a similar wake up time that life is generally better. If I hit the sack after midnight, the next day I am Mr Grumpy pants.

A “better do a few things” fun Friday 

Unfortunately fun Friday was a little dull today. Nothing awesome to put in the awesome jar unfortunately.

Instead I spent the day fixing up loose ends on various projects. 

The problem with being a thinker and someone who comes up with a small stream of ideas, is sometimes the last idea isn’t ipfinished before the new one is started, it’s even worse when that creeps over from personal projects, into professional projects.

I discovered that I’m not the only one who thinks this way. 

But that will have to be a post for another day.

Creating something and putting it out there

So I created my first end to end vlog (filmed, edited, uploaded). 

The response has been mixed, a couple of “that’s goods”, a couple of “well, it’s a bit boring”.

Truth be told it is boring. It’s 5 minutes of me talking about doing stuff, travelling, and a bit of show and tell. It only stars me. And if I never saw it again in my life, I wouldn’t be fussed.

But what it represents is so much greater than what the content is. It’s a new beginning, a starting point. Are there technical issues? Yep. Are there story issues? Yep. But did I actually complete something and put it out there? Yes, and to me that is the biggest achievement. It’s not going to go viral. It’s drop dead boring, that stuff doesn’t go viral. But it’s there and done, wrinkles, pimples and all.

That not to say that if someone left a comment saying “your video is shit man” that I wouldn’t be a little bit hurt, but it would inspire me to make a better one, and a better one. And if I follow the philosophy instilled in me by my year 7 English teacher

“Each new work, should be your best work. ”

– My Year 7 English Teacher, Greg C

If each thing is 1% better than the last, then with time and practice, it should grow into something amazing.

Case in point, I was asked to photograph a couple this evening. I’ve never had to photograph a couple in love. I’ve only ever photographed friends and couples acting like friends, not all lovely and kissy. I felt we came away with an OK result. But next time it will be better. I’ve learnt a few things that worked, and a bunch of things that didn’t. That’s ok. 🙂

First vlog

It’s done. I created a 5 1/2 min vlog video in under 48hrs. While I’ve been toying with the idea and filming things since February, today was the first time I actually pulled the trigger and sat down & forced myself to edit something together.

I know that this isn’t sustainable to do a daily vlog of the likes of Casey Neistat, but I can probably start with one a week. Although something has to give, unfortunately it will probably be the daily blog post 🙁 

Strangely enough, it wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought to post a vlog. Maybe I just wanted to get it over with, I’m not sure.

I’ll just have to see where this creative path takes me.

Hope you catch a glimpse of how loved you are brother

Hurray for birthdays. For some reason this birthday felt different than the past couple of years. I didn’t shout it out to everyone, reminding them that this event was coming, nor did I try and hide it from view, I just had it on Facebook like most people, & let it be.

But this odd thing happened, and I’m not sure if it’s part of a culture that I’ve been trying to build, or what exactly it was, but I got a bunch of personal “private” messages (either via SMS or bookface) from a random assortment of fokes. It was really quite nice.

I’m all for the public wall Facebook thing, but after an accidential social experiment amoung friends a few years back, I lost faith in the bookface system. What was the experiment? Person A was changing person B’s birthday to a different random date. No biggie, but the date rolled around and a bunch of people wished Person B Happy Birthday (since Facebook never lies). Then for fun, they moved the date forward another month. A month later a bunch more comments for Happy Birthday pile in, the worst part, a bunch of people had double posted, not realising that Person B surposily had a birthday a month prior. 

Anyway I had a number of birthday wishes away from the public wall. Which means someone had to go to the effort to write and then send that message. Since practically ditching the Facebook timeline 18 months ago, I’ve been trying to actively follow up birthdays using my phones calendar. Unfortunately sometimes I miss. But where possible on the day I send a message. I’m not trying to be different, or anything. Just trying to be genuine in the digital world.

One such friend wrote the following (which is probably why they are the published author, and I’m a hack at the English language with a blog):

[I] Hope you catch a glimpse of how loved you are brother

And you know what, I reckon I did. It wasn’t about amazing presents & big parties. Instead it was about connecting with others, some for the first time in months, others we only spoke yesterday.

From time to time, may we all feel how loved we are by those around us.

Friends

Friends are great. I doubt too many people would argue with that statement. 

Tomorrow is my birthday, and so tonight I organised a gathering of random people from all walks of life, with one common thread, I count them as friends. 

At least for the past 10 years I’ve felt that I’ve had a bunch of semi isolated groups of friends. Some people seem to have a group of friends that they share across lots of avenues, I’ve never really had that. Instead they seem to be seemingly unrelated groups, that I meet individually and I enjoy seeing them interact with one another at events I hold.

My girl friend was asking me to organise some form of celebration, and I struggled for weeks as to how the format of this celebration would happen. The typical thing would be to go to dinner. But my issue there is once you exceed 6 people on the table, it’s starts to get awkward with some on the end feeling left out, etc. plus I’m sick of the local food scene in town (within the dietary requirements I was trying to juggle. I had gluten free, fodmap, vegetarian, lactose free, paleo & normal human). If it was summer I would throw a BBQ in the entertaining area out the back. Unfortunately it’s about 2 oC tonight, so outdoor entertaining is out of the question. So I bit the bullet, and cooked up a storm of Australia Mexican (I’m sure real Mexican is completely different). Basically finger food that can be eaten as a group in the lounge room around the fireplace. No need for tables, or even cutlery, plus it can provide a space of no barriers to communicate with one another.

It’s fun catching up with people and introducing across these silos, so that different people can put a face to each other. The funny observation, a lot of my friends (myself included) are dream big, dream often, start the next project, before the last one is fully finished sort of people, at least half of the room was creative people like that. I hadn’t even connected the dot until tonight.

I want to be able to facilitate building spaces where people can come together and share ideas and dive deep into concepts and dreams. I feel that food and a warm lounge is the perfect space for that to happen.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten old, the ability to create friends and meet new people becomes harder, especially if you just carry on doing the same activities and job year after year. I think that makes the current friends all the more valuable.

To my friends who were able to make it tonight, thank you. To those who couldn’t, I hope to see you next time, at the next gathering.

Thanks for thinking big & dreaming up the future with me.

Judgement day

Today I listened to a sermon, 30 minutes long, 27.5 minutes of hell fire and brimstone, 2.5 minutes about love and grace. I think the speaker used more bible verses than I’ve ever heard in 30 minutes (apart from when someone reads a big slab of the bible).
I sat there somewhat confused, somewhat dumb founded. I expected this from a 80 year old tranditional old school preacher from the 50ths. But in 2016, haven’t we moved on and expanded our vision of God, Jesus & the bible? 

I saw two encounters after the message with people coming up and saying to the speaker “what a brilliant message” (or words to that effect). This is actually an interesting contrast to another setting when the pastor spoke each week about the love of Jesus, the common comment he got was “it would have been better if you were wearing a tie”. Do older foke like to be reminded more about hell & judgement day, than love and grace?

Is there something that resonates well with some church people about hearing how they are in and part of the “Jesus club” and the rest of the world is going to a place full of fire and torment? I guess it’s just like mass media, bad news sells, and the church can sometimes be a place where as much as the lingo is “deny the world” (or whatever the Christian ease is these days), sometimes it’s just a carbon copy, just selling didn’t things.

I love this short clip from Jay Bakker’s latest tour: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvgoGvjJXrg
Side note: I shared this clip with a gay friend the other day (who is neither here nor there when it comes to faith, at least from what he has told me), and he pointed it out it’s more Americans that take this stuff literally as opposed to other parts of the world. I have no hard data to back this up one way or the other. 

Now I have no idea what today’s speakers motives around sharing his message for the day was. Whether he was being deadly serious, or just pushing the boundaries of how far he can take a message. If he was being serious, good on him for knowing what he believes and not being afraid to share it. If it was a bit of an experiment, I’d like to hear how he thought it went. I personally tired an experiment when granted 360 seconds to speak in front of 110 once, I told them (a church) that I denied the resurrection of Jesus, then simply sat down (and after a couple of seconds, played a clip to explain what I meant. It was more a shock thing than anything else. Strangely I’ve never been asked to speak or share since).

I would like to be involved in a side project of looking at “what does faith look like in a modern world?” I’d like this to follow the work along the lines of Peter Rollins or Michael Frost (Who spoke in Melbourne earlier this year and I missed out). I have a venue in mind, a local jazz / music venue. To start the ball rolling I need to have a conversation with the owner of the venue to see if we can do a monthly gathering once a month on whatever her slowest night is. Who knows, she might say no, but at the same time, she might say yes. I’m probably working on too many projects at the moment anyway.

Standard disclaimer applies: Most of these blog posts reflexes Andrew’s thoughts at the end of a long day. In hindsight, he only ever agrees with about 90% of what he has written/said. If any material offends you, sorry, but that’s too bad, but in retrospect and growth, some of it will offend the author, and that is ok.”