Bird By Bird

I was dreamin' when I wrote this
Forgive me if it goes astray

Like a light breeze breaking through midsummer's oppressive heat wave, little topics to blog about keep appearing in my mind's eye and then flutter away. I'm overcome with the vapors and cannot put the proverbial pen to paper.

It's this way at work too. Headhunting. Writing website copy. Conducting secondary research for a host of wide ranging topics including the ever-so-compelling adhesives industry. Creating a sales decisioning process. Generating proposals. Writing a keynote speech, a module on Board governance for a succession planning seminar and training workshops on leadership and change management. Every day starts with a gaze at my overflowing desk and the immediate question: where to begin? (With Facebook, of course.)

The title of Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird is the perfect example of my current frame of mind. In the author's story, her kid brother was overwhelmed an enormous homework assignment at hand: to write a report on birds.  His dad gently sat him down and gave him the best advice ever. "Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Amen to that.

Here are some of my birds in random order:

• I got my first VW Jetta in 1986. Since then, I've owned three. I love them. I purchased our last in Connecticut in 1999 with the sole purpose of moving from NYC to VA with Stinky the cat on the seat beside me. This week I bought a forest green/black RAV4. I sobbed at the dealership when leaving my car behind. Leaving Stinky behind. Leaving a piece of myself behind. (Speaking of the vapors, apparently I was overcome with female hysteria. No smelling salts nearby.) And then I drove off in my giant hulking machine like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome smashing through roadblocks, sparing no one. The new me will survive -- nay thrive. 
• Itinerant artist, and all around great guy, Jim Mott came and stayed with us for a few days recently. I felt a little bad for him because he probably usually stays in areas that are more picturesque than our suburban tract. But it was fun to host him, spend time chatting with him and, most importantly to me, see the world from his eyes for a brief moment in time. He's very much in tune with color and light (as one might expect). I, on the other hand, am not. One evening, he and I headed out to a nearby field to watch the moon rise. Literally. Staring into the horizon to catch a glimpse the split second it came into sight and then watching as it swiftly rose to its full splendor. I hate to wax poetic given that I'm an MBA nerd and not prone to such things naturally, but it was a gorgeous, mesmerizing, radiant full moon. Next time, I'm bringing bug spray. 
• My brother sent me two blogworthy items of interest. First: research proves that more intelligent people (i.e., those who scored high on a vocabulary test), drink more than the "dumb." Given that my writing style has clearly devolved over time, I think there's a call-to-action in these findings. (In a corollary sense, it also may explain why I was an English major in undergrad. Somehow it just came more naturally to me back then.) Bring on the pink elephants. 
• Second: A recent WSJ article about nationwide fashion trends contains a great line that my brother picked up on about the indie movement in Brooklyn (e.g., home-sewn clothes, handmade jewelry, homemade pickles, butchering their own meat). "It's what I call 'party like it's 1899.' " Classic.
• Lastly, the neighbors hosted a red wine tasting at the fire pit last weekend. Everyone brought a bottle and we sipped, rated and ranked them. The clear winners, in my opinion, were the wines our neighbors custom made at Casa Vin'Arte in Fairport. Absolutely delicious. So, in addition to spending a really nice evening with a select set of neighbors (i.e., the non-crazy ones) ranging in age from 4 to 80, we were also partying like it was 1899.

Yeah, they say one thousand nine hundred zero zero party over
Oops out of time