Last night was the tenth edition in what is unarguably the best geek event in Seattle, the Ignite! series.  Hey – don’t believe me?  The Ignite! crew just won some sort of award.  To summarize the format for those of you too new or too forgetful to the scene – bring about 15 speakers up on stage in front of about 700 raucous geeks, have them talk for exactly 5 minutes in front of their slideshow, which is exactly 20 sliides long and which advances every 15 seconds.

You get nerves.  You get laughter.  You get those squirmy uncomfortable silences as the slide show gets borked or the speaker goes all doe-eyed in front of the headlights.  Mostly you get entertained and informed.

Maybe it was just me, but the crowd last night seemed more restrained compared to previous Ignite events.  My hunch is that there were a lot of people attending Ignite for the first time – call them late adopters, to use a geek’s parlance.  The cover charge may have had something to do with it.  It may also just be a busy time of year and the normal attendee patterns are thrown off a bit.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s very nice to see new faces and meet some new people.  But the normal drunken naked debauchery was in short supply.  (ed: Drunken?  Naked? – OK, not naked, and maybe just buzzed).

There were some headline names that everyone in the Seattle geek scene probably knows, or knows of: Marcelo Calbucci, founder of Seattle 2.0; Andy Sack, founder of Founder’s Co-op; and Matt Harding, better known as Dancing Matt, and who is truly Internet Famous.  In keeping with the egalitarian theme of the event, however, the speakers that stole the show were:

• Mark Selander, presenting on the Commutapult, a utopian commuting scheme with a sure-thing 100% safety record.  Biggest LOLs of the night.
• Bradley Vickers, who gave a talk on his real-world experience rowing across the North Atlantic with four guys and not enough food.  Not quite the Shackleton experience, but very captivating.
• Dan Shapiro, former CEO of Seattle mobile tech company Ontela (which merged with PhotoBucket last year), who gave a funny and informative presentation called “Hacking Birth”.
• Vanessa Fox, one of the handful of people who might legitimately vie for the title of “Best Search Expert in the World” (ed: didn’t she just write a book? Yes!  Yes she did), gave a fast-paced and very diverting talk about search and Those Crazy People On the Internet.  I must, in good conscience, ding Vanessa several points for showing photos of a guy on ChatRoulette dressed in a very meowy cat costume.

Last night was one of those nights I learned a lot.  For example:

• You can put rose petals in ice cubes. (via Kim Prohaska)
• You can hail a taxi using the same dispatch system the cab companies use. (via Aimee Cardwell)
• There is a restaurant in Seattle called Nettletown, which coincidentally is located not 100 yards from where I sit as I write this, that serves foraged food. (via Michelle Broderick)
• A donation of one pint of blood can save three lives. (via Jeff Shuey)

Overall: Even a slightly subdued crowd can’t diminish the pure genius of the format or the enthusiasm that the speakers bring to the stage.  If you haven’t yet attended an Ignite event, plan on making the next one – they’re not going away soon.

p.s. What happened to the exclamation point?  I think it used to be Ignite! Seattle, but now it’s just Ignite Seattle.  As a result, my synapses fire slightly less frequently when I read the name.

p.p.s. PSA: do not – EVER – use your cell phone when you are standing at the urinal.  Just sayin’.

p.p.p.s. If you’re in even the slightest funk, go to an Ignite event.  It will expand your consciousness, connect you with the community, and make you laugh.  Guaranteed.

Blogging and online-ness has a certain ruthless temporality to it.  If you write about current events, there’s a strong – norm? – to write about things as close to when they happened as possible.  It’s the Twitterfication of the blogosphere, I suppose.  If you aren’t curating your life’s experience AS IT HAPPENS, then your content is suspect.

However, sometimes it can’t be helped.  Case in point: my (current) review of (last week’s) Cheap Wine and Poetry event at the Richard Hugo House here in Seattle.  It was the 5th year anniversary of CW&P, and, judging by the applause when asked, I was one of a sizable contingent who were attending CW&P for the first time.

Where to start?

Although I didn’t do a precise count, there were probably 120 people, very definitely standing room only.  I came in just as things were getting underway and found a spot along the back wall, near the restroom, the cross traffic, and, occasionally, near the drunk guy mumbling into his cell phone; he was of a peripatetic inclination, however, and made the rounds of the various rooms throughout the night.

The Hugo House Commons, for I assume that this area *must* be the Commons, is very much laid out in an old-house sort of way – a few rooms adjacent to each other, each opening towards a small stage.  But the layout has a charm to it, and I’d like to take another look at the place in the daylight.

Next: wine.  You can’t talk about Cheap Wine and Poetry without mentioning the wine, can you?  I enjoyed a decent Syrah, and, at only $1 per glass, I find nothing to complain about.  It’s a bargain at twice the price!  The only downer: to get wine, you had to sort of stand in front of people who were trying to see the show.  In a transparent attempt to live up to the Seattle ideal of passive, smug kindness, I limited myself to one glass, obtained at the start of the show.

However – however!  This was not the sort of show were one has to be drunk to enjoy it.  The readers, chosen in a “best of” selection process, were, on average, spectacular.  There were a couple misses – it WAS a poetry reading – but the hits were great.  Of note: Nicole Hardy, who read selections from her book about the Mudflap Girl.  She’s charismatic and witty and charming and has an undeniable physical stage presence.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her.  Also: Keri Healey, who read a short story that just blew my Smart Wools right off – funny and somber and disarmingly real.  Best pure prose of the evening, in my opinion.  John Burgess, who I don’t know and have never met but am sure I would like, did a series of readings accompanied by a background bassist.

There was another reading I liked, by a young woman whose name I didn’t catch and am too lazy to Google, but it was fresh and direct and slightly ribald and refreshingly long.  If you’re going to use the list as a structural device, make it a long list.  At one point – maybe about item 15 or so – the aforementioned drunkie asked “How many more” and this young woman deftly replied, “A lot – I’ve been dating a long time!” *zing*.

There were more readings, but none which particularly stood out.  Oh, and a very strange, Twilight-zone-ish set of intermission pieces where images of Hugo House writer and marketing guy Brian McGuigan were photoshopped into various scenes of gay domesticity.  Inventive, kooky, and, by the end, as the images moved from the living room to the bedroom, slightly discomforting. ROFL.

The evening ended, as all good evenings should, with a public spanking.

Thanks to all the Hugo House staff and volunteers for a great event.

This review scares me.  The writing of it.  The thinking through my innumerable complex reactions to an amazing evening this past Friday, when I joined with a few hundred others at Kane Hall to hear readings from selected writers at the concluding event of the 2009-2010 Hugo House Literary Series.

The theme: Laws of Attraction.

The writers: Leslie Fried, Emily Warn, Phillip Lopate, and Marya Sea Kaminski.

My reaction: fucking bloody priceless.

I can’t tell you precisely, not yet, why I was so moved by this event.  I feel stripped clean, naked, exposed, all my sentences already cliché, all my rhetorical gestures previously caught on camera, acted out by other people.  I feel traumatized – my own life reflected back at me with all the ugly details outlined in red wax pencil.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Let’s start with the readings themselves, and break my generally-held principle of first diving into the meta-explanations.  Sometimes the importance of the thing is the thing itself, no?

The writers were lovely, talented, artists and craftspeople all.  I was immediately taken by Leslie Fried’s poems; unflinchingly real, driven, purposeful, bringing life from the page, out of the microphone, and into our collective conscious. She is, and I was glad to be able to tell her in person at the reception, a worthy winner of the recent New Works Competition. Emily Warn’s poems affected me less deeply; perhaps the subject matter – rural tasks, Jewish mysticism, lesbian marginalia – was less familiar to me.  Phillip Lopate, recognizable from his accent as hailing from some distant New England province, was warm, funny, sincere, successfully mixing historical reflection with swift wit in two essays on affectation and obsession.  I tweeted one of his priceless lines at the time, and am still smiling two days later.

But I reserve – as is my right, being the Sole Blogger Around These Parts – my highest praise for the concluding work, by Marya Sea Kaminski, an actor, writer, and performer, who gave a superb presentation, a pastiche of sorts in three segments: part one, a tongue-in-cheek, slightly cynical recap of the “laws” of attraction; part two, a heartfelt, nakedly honest review of her own struggles with attraction (yes, it can be a struggle, both the seeking AND the finding); and part three, a sepia-toned memoir of her great-aunt and –uncle in 1950’s Philadelphia  and beyond.  Marya (pronounced, as I came to find out, ma-RYE-ah, like Mariah Carey, although I’m guessing that an actor as apparently authentic as Ms. Kaminski would be somewhat offended to be compared, even tangentially, to a Hollywoodized puffery like Ms. Carey) spoke of love, lust, and awkwardness; heartbreak; decisions, mostly bad; danger, self-destruction and damage.  That one can be damaged by attraction is a notion that takes some age and hard-won experience to appreciate fully; the audience, composed equally of young idealists and aged rubricists, were probably split in their interpretation.  Striking the middle ground in age and outlook, and appreciating in real time some of the damage about which Ms. Kaminski spoke so forcefully, I feel like I was perhaps best positioned to appreciate the nuance and subtlety hiding in the background of her lively vocal performance.

I am a fan. Of these excellent writers, of course; of Hugo House, of which I will soon become a subscribing member; of Seattle, which has an energetic artistic community that can support such events, and of myself, for finally taking the plunge and going to a Hugo House event after more than a year of useless dithering.

So I went into The Big Climb this morning with VERY limited expectations.

To wit: I’d spent most of the last week or two with a sore hamstring and knee.  Further: my head is a fucking mess; a tangle of bullshit, cobwebs, and hyped-up adrenaline.  Yet further: some sort of super-allergy hit me on Wednesday, causing full-body hives and a hacking cough and god knows what else amongst my internal organs.

But I got to the Columbia Center and entered a sort of super-madhouse of energized, directed fun.  These people were here to climb.  The feeling of dedication to the cause, to those who have been affected by leukemia, lymphoma, or other blood cancers, was palpable.  I immediately thought of my friend Tom, persistent and unfailingly positive with his own battle with lymphoma, and my resolve strengthened.  I thought of my friend Trevor, whose generous donation allowed by to race, and of the team from work, all of whom probably struggle with their own daily battles.  My resolve strengthened further.

So – chin up, chest out; register, check my jacket, stretch, jump up and down a bit, and remind myself not to blow my wad on the first twenty; save yourself for the last twenty and you’ll feel much better.  Prepare yourself mentally to feel like vomiting and you’ll be less likely to actually vomit.  Act like you’re twenty-five, even though I haven’t seen the sunny side of thirty in many a year.

And you know what?  I had fun.  I did well.  I don’t know how well, because the results aren’t in yet, but I passed a couple of the fit young bucks from the work team on the way up, and I’m guessing that I’ll see the top half of my age group.  I trod steadily, consistently, and purposefully; passing enough to feel energized, yet passed in turn by enough to feel like I was keeping the right pace.

All the while remembering that I’m fairly fucking lucky to have my health and be in a situation where I can actually climb 69 flights of stairs with thousands of others.  Which I, naturally, forget sometimes with all the goddamned navel-gazing.

I want to end this post with a huge THANK YOU to all the sponsors and volunteers who came out in support of the event; you, ladies and gentlemen, are true heroes and worthy of the highest praise.

UPDATE: Individual results are in, and I placed in the top quarter of all finishers, which probably means I’m in the top quarter for my age group as well.  Yay! Age group results will be posted in the next day or two.

This morning I received the most recent “What’s Happening In Seattle This Week?” newsletter from Seattle Spin.  Their editors typically choose a topic for an abridged summary of what’s out there, and this week it was “self help books.”  They boiled all the essentials down to three themes: Get Over It, Knock It Off, and Make A Plan.  Call it sound-bite psychology.

Here’s the blurb for “Knock It Off”:

I have some recent direct experience with this. About six weeks ago I came to the conclusion that there were some habits I wanted to stop, and merely willing myself to stop them was proving fruitless.  So I put together a little template and put green dots when I did the thing I wanted to do, and a red dot (well, orange – Bartell’s didn’t have red) each time I screwed up.

Here’s my progress after almost four weeks:

(These things are things I mostly do at work, hence the blank spots on the weekends.)

You can see that I hit orange every now and then, but it’s amazing that the first day was almost all orange and then IMMEDIATELY started to go green.  By weeks three and four I felt really great about my progress and in fact as of this writing I’ve stopped tracking my daily progress on those sets of habits.

My conclusion: Three things about this type of system work well.  First is the visibility: this was 18 inches from my nose Monday through Friday.  Second was the tactile process: putting the little dots on the paper gave me a sense of accomplishment that I wouldn’t have gotten by clicking a checkbox in a website or on my iPhone.  Third: you can code the things you want to track so that you can have the sheets out in public (in your cubicle, for example) – nobody needs to know exactly what “NVD” means, for example.

I’m not normally a Type A super-organized person – in fact I laugh just writing those words, I’m so far on the opposite end of the spectrum – but this Type A tactic worked really well for me.  Hope it can work for someone out there on the innertubes.

I wonder how many of the following items apply to you?  What would be on your own list?

TEN THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY
(no particular order)

1. Stimulating conversation
2. A good book
3. Fog
4. My babies’ sleeping faces
5. Playing soccer
6. Affection & intimacy
7. Challenging myself to go outside my comfort zone
8. Anticipation
9. This song
10. The sound of rain

Found this great article over at samhowat.com: The Five Habits of Moderately Effective People.  It’s a good, common-sense set of principles for those of us who have too much to do, but still want to do much.

An excerpt from habit #5: Stop living in your comfort zones!:

People go through their life, insecure about their looks, personality, and capabilities, missing out on opportunities both professionally and in their personal life. The lucky few figure it out early, but the majority, waste 20-30 years of their life, passing up on things because they don’t respect themselves enough to get over their insecurities and step outside their comfort zones.

The next time you feel uncomfortable at the prospect of trying something new, don’t look at the situation with fear, but with excitement; it’s just your brain’s way of telling you that you get to experience something new and exciting!

This brings to mind one of my favorite quotes, from Marianne Williamson:

Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

Check out the full article here: http://samhowat.com/five-habits-of-moderately-effective-people/, and/or follow Sam on Twitter at @samhowat.

From Conan O’Brien’s farewell speech as host of the Tonight Show:

All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism-it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Great thoughts to live by!

Saw this great quote on the bio page of Amanda Koster, a local internationally-acclaimed photographer with some GREAT work up at amandakoster.com.  I was particularly drawn to her 2005 photos from the award-winning photo/video essay “AIDS is Knocking”.

Here’s the quote I liked:

“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field
I will meet you there.”

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

I will meet you there.

Last night our company soccer team got drilled 7-1.  This follows last weeks’ debacle, where we got beat 10-1.   We played better, but mistakes cost us and we still have a long way to go to gel as a team.

Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun and got some much-needed exercise.  And you know what?  Sometimes it’s OK to lose.  It helps build character and/or reveal character.  We stayed together, supported and encouraged each other, while at the same time using our heads to note where we need to improve for upcoming games.  Don’t get me wrong – I think we’re all in it to win it, but if you’re going to lose, lose well, lose graciously, and learn from your mistakes.

Sort of like anything in life – work, relationships, contests, competitions – keep your chin up, keep the moping to a minimum.  Failure has valuable lessons to teach.  This is the point in today’s blog post where I relate the famous anecdote about how Thomas Edison failed 10 trillion times at making a viable light bulb before he finally hit on the right formula.  Or how French band Phoenix became an “overnight success” after four albums and a decade of touring.  Or how PayPal shifted gears and became a huge success in online payment processing after getting a mediocre reception for their mobile cryptography offering.

Failure isn’t a bad thing.  Not learning from it is bad.  Not getting back on your feet is even worse.  So get up, dust yourself off, and think positively – tomorrow is a new day!