Creativity is Being Yourself

I identified with much of what Professor Nichols wrote in her lectures, especially in the last post when she said, “I felt like a hippie at a business meeting.” I, too, often feel I am in a place I don’t belong – I’m sure we all do at times. But the lecture helped me to remember that fitting in and going with the flow is not always the most positive way to go.  Her personality often came out in her writing and that is the biggest thing I took from this course, that what I write not only needs to be good, it needs to sound like me.

This course was a lot of work, but not in the normal “got a paper to do for school” sort of work. It strained my brain to not only open up, but to make the words that trickle out more concise and to the point. The text book, as well as the lectures by Prof Nichols, was enlightening. Both concentrated not on grammar, but on finding your own voice.

Creativity is a big part of my life in a visual sense. I have a number of creative “hobbies,” but I have to admit that my writing has gotten stale. My job requires me to write about technical topics for a military audience. Writing has become drudgery for me instead of the creative outlet it used to be. The writing I read and critiqued this term helped me to break out of those boundaries. “The quiet kid with the Mohawk, the pecker waving contest,” and other bits of REAL speech helped me to strive to rid my writing of  some of the formality and just be me.

Prof Nichols is right. Writing is hard and I am tired. But it’s a good tired – like you feel when you just completed a nice long hike and are looking forward to the next one. Thanks for that. 

At the end, a new beginning

I’ve been struggling for months trying to figure out what my focus should be. What am I passionate about? I love my kids, but no one would want to read about them all the time … and since they are grownups, would they still talk to me if I blogged about their lives in a public forum? I considered writing about some of the serving ministries I participate in as one of my classmates suggested, but the interesting stories are confidential and I haven’t pinned myself down to just one anyway. What about the missionary family we support in Ecuador?  I designed a mock web site for them last term—old news and communication is not reliable enough to give them the coverage they need.

I finally decided to talk about myself and my life experiences. Although therapeutic for me, I’m still not convinced it would be an interesting and popular blog and I’m certain if I didn’t soon run out of things to say, I’d quickly tire of what I consider my whining. Many of my classmates have found topics they not only want to blog about, but are already considering for their final Capstone project.  What’s with me?

It’s finals week and I intended to spend the entire weekend on my final projects. Unfortunately, the commitments I’ve made to family, friends, church, and work don’t wait for finals to be over. My church was planning a missions fair and fundraiser today so I had committed to putting together two baskets for the silent auction, making fliers and price lists, and manning a booth. This morning as I was fighting with the clear acetate that keeps the stuff in the basket … ten minutes before it was supposed to be delivered, it struck me. I’ve encouraged friends to serve and held leadership positions in several programs. I ignored the call to write about it because, unlike fellow volunteers, I’ve not committed to one cause. Herein lies the answer to my quest.

Executive Summary:  Many people who are interested in serving the local community are not affiliated with a church or may be new to the area or are temporary residents. They need a place where they can find information on serving opportunities and meet other like-minded people.

Problem Statement:  People need details. They want to know exactly what is needed and what they will be doing. They often don't want to hand over money blindly, but want to supply a specific item that they shop for themselves. And they run in packs. Few people want to enter a homeless shelter or a Habitat build by themselves. They want to meet the people they will encounter there before they begin.

There is no one place in Dayton, OH area where those willing to serve can find out what needs to be done and where. Many people have never served before and are not sure what they are comfortable doing. They want to try out various missions and find out for themselves where their passions lead them.

A notice in a newsletter might be enough for some, but I’ve found from trial and error that people respond better to a personal touch. Send an email out at the office asking for help doing something and see what response you get. Stop by someone’s desk or call them on the phone and ask the same question and see how many more followers you’ll get.  It’s hard to turn down a personal request for help. I should know. I’m the expert at saying yes when my brain is screaming no!

Product Description:  The site will feature a moderated wiki where various groups can post their needs.  A vacation Bible school that expected 50 children and attracted 200? They need more supplies, volunteers, and childcare for volunteers with young children. A fundraiser festival? They need volunteers to run children’s booths, prizes, and a clean-up crew.  A church organizing a mission trip to Japan?  They need more participants, donations of sky miles and supplies. Needs will be posted real-time and an RSS feed will distribute the posts.

One section will be dedicated to a blog where volunteers can comment on their experiences and encourage others to join them. Message boards will allow people to meet, talk, and get to know each other before they participate and prospective volunteers can post their interests and skills so they can be match with organizations. Posters will be required to supply a valid telephone number or email where the website staff can contact them for more information. Much like CraigsList, the posters can remain anonymous if they desire.

To avoid being inundated with school and sports fundraisers, those activities will be placed in a separate area so that boosters from different school districts can see what is happening in their specific schools.

About Us:  I am an active community member. Although I have held leadership positions, I have not committed to one mission. My passion is variety and encouragement of others to serve. Although the blog will be based on Christian mission, it will be open to any type of community need and serving opportunity. 

Ugh. I don't like the sound of my own voice so I've recorded this script over and over. Still some blips and I STILL sound like Mini Mouse, but here it is.   

Script:

Is it possible to observe and not judge? Is it possible to express yourself without drawing on your own encounters and your own history? I don’t think so.

I’ve learned a lot by studying myself. I’m not a therapist and have no desire to become one, but I can see from my own journaling that the people and experiences of my past often explain my reactions in my present life. Like most people, certain names, landmarks, and even smells, trigger associations still today.

Many studies have been done on observation and experience. Jury selection, for example, has become an art form. Sometimes controversial, the selection process can employ background checks as well as intensive interviewing techniques to uncover potential biases. Building the optimum jury pool brings benefits to both sides. Jurors are often meticulously chosen to give the defense a better chance of winning sympathy for their client. At the same time, advocates contend that jury selection methods give both sides more confidence in the verdict. Think about that in the real world and what would happen if we could choose our observers and how they react to us.

Psychologists have examined the unreliability of eye witness accounts and how peoples’ past experiences influence what they see or think they saw. The term “mind’s eye” describes how humans are able to visualize what they WANT to see which does not always mirror reality. That can explain how your big sister’s memories from childhood differ from yours though you lived in the same house at about the same time.

This blog is meant to capture that very human practice of comparing our lives to others. You’ll read character studies of individuals and cultures I encounter as well as those who choose to be in the public eye. I’ll attempt to map my response to them by drawing from my past experiences.

I’ve found that first impressions are often wrong. Many of my closest friends now are people I had deemed too loud, too humorless, or too arrogant. Because of my naturally vigilant behavior, I still form bonds slowly. My self-study has made me more thorough in my reasoning and yet less judgmental -- a revelation that could be positive for others as well.

The blogs I enjoy most are those which attract comment. A blog is not complete without reaction; the varied responses are of greatest significance to me. There are many people who will not commit to journaling or logging on their own, but are happy to reveal themselves in other’s work. My intent is to invite commentary on my self-study and encourage scrutiny of my readers’ own lives. In examining others, we’ll learn more about ourselves.

My commitment was to write about myself, but my relationships with others are a big part of who I am.  Hopefully these introspections, by me and my readers, will have positive effects on us all. 

Thoughts on Module 9

I love my cell phone and I hate it too. When I go for a run or to the grocery store, I feel obliged to bring the phone with me. I'm rarely without it and that again is good and bad. It's good to have a phone if you fall and sprain your ankle on a trail, but how can you really enjoy the beauty of nature and get the most of a workout if you are texting or responding to phone calls? It's convenient to have the phone to call home to check "do I need to buy bread?"  But then again, it seems so rude to be talking on the phone in a public place instead of interacting with the people around you. It's so easy to miss what's going on when you are preoccupied with a phone.

Often the cell phone feels like a leash -- one that I often want to be rid of. I think this my "introvert thing" coming out again. Sometimes I just want to be ALONE and when I'm constantly in reach with a cell phone how can I be?  I can ignore the calls, but that just makes my family and friends call more because they were worried when I didn't respond. Yes, I think I media is too often intrusive.

Relay for Life Enters the Social Media World

This is a critique of the social media campaign of Relay for Life, an organization I have been involved with in varying degrees for about 15 years. When I participated in my first relay, the great majority of their efforts were via printed media – mailings, billboards, and mass distribution of flyers.  They have come a long way in their online presence, but have a ways to go in making that presence truly interactive and successful.

The site is nicely done, but needs to be crawled more often as some of the links did not work. That’s a major turn-off for me. The site is simple and colorful with easy-to-follow navigation and lots of photos of smiling people and cute kids. It has tabs for different audiences:  committee members, team captains, survivors and community, as well as links to cancer prevention info, toolkits and guidebooks, advice podcasts, and tips for fundraising.  There are also links for local organizations and an offshoot site for college-based relay events. From what I could see there was not a lot of participation in either of those areas. Local organizations have sites, but they don’t seem to be updated very regularly and seem to be more like bulletin boards of event times and locations. The site seems a bit clinical, but since it is affiliated with the American Cancer Society and based on fundraising for a medical need, that is to be expected. The blog link is mostly a collection of businesses offering products  for teams to buy for fundraising.  There was not much there worth reading unless you want to find a source for cheap junk to sell.  

The link to the Cancer Survivor Network, however, was excellent. Here there are chat rooms for most every type of cancer and every subject you might think of from where to buy wigs to the much needed venting forum. The chat rooms are very popular and I was happy to see that although there were lots of posts, there were very few without more than 3 or 4 replies – that tells me that readers are there for each other and are looking for ways to interact with others in like situations. 

There’s a link to their new mobile app which helps calculate fundraising totals, but the app is only for the iPhone and the reviews are pretty poor. I think they need to take it down and provide the needed patches to keep it from crashing before they market it. It will only tick people off.

The Relay for Life Facebook page looks much like the web site.  I like some of the posts which reiterate “comments overheard at relays” and then readers’ replies to them.  I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of Facebook and their page was like many others --people having private conversations with two or three people in a very public way.

Their foray into the world of Twitter is better. Their posts are actually interesting. They tweet event times and locations, cancer prevention tips, thanks to corporate sponsors, and fundraising achievements. The odd thing is that there is only a total of 454 tweets although the first one was posted in August of 08. With the popularity of the Relay for Life program, they could do much more with their Twitter page. They have 9470 followers – they need to promote submission of ideas and more involvement.

The RFL YouTube channel is in sore need of interactivity. There are over 60 uploads, but I didn’t see any that looked like they had been done by relay participants. I think the draw of YouTube is seeing what real people are doing, not just TV commercials over and over. It would be a big improvement if they would allow teams to upload videos of their events and even encourage funny amateur commercials for their fundraisers.

   

My blog was to be about myself with cultural and individual character studies and my reaction to them. Yikes!  Although I’ve enjoyed working on the assignments so far, I need to work on finding a more interesting topic for future courses if I want to pursue gaining popularity on a blog. Since at this point, blogging for me would be for class projects and fun, I‘d more enjoy writing about something entertaining – both for me and for the readers  I hope to attract.

But, since this is the topic I committed to, I’ll offer my thoughts on how I would incorporate social media. I can’t think of any reason for any type of app and I’m not interested in pursuing Facebook “friends,” so my interactivity would be mostly limited to tweeting when I post something new and relying on comments to my blog. I think that it might be interesting to pose questions to readers or provide a scenario where it might be easy to judge others and ask them how they would respond to the situation or people involved.  

Mimi Plays Devil's Advocate -- Take 2

What was she thinking when she decided to write about herself in a blog?

She’s an introvert. Now if you ever took the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you know that the word introversion doesn’t necessarily imply shyness. As based on the theories of Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, introversion simply means you are inward-turning. Interacting with people and being around noise and activity draw on an introvert’s energy so that they need to retreat to a quiet place to reflect and regroup, while extraverts get energy FROM the commotions of everyday life and crave that outward stimulation. Life is all about interactions with other people. How could the life of someone who would rather be alone in a room be interesting? It would be tedious for the writer and mind-numbing for the reader.

Mimi spends her work day in a cube on a floor with more than 100 cubes and teams rooms in a building with nearly 600 people who work on the same monotonous IT program. She wears headphones to block out the world, but they don’t keep out the noise, the ringing phones, the flashing instant messages, or the inbox full of emails waiting to be read and acted upon. At the end of the day chained in a cube, she still has to get into her car alone instead of finding someplace where she can laugh and talk and let it all out.

She says she thinks people see her as bashful, but she doesn’t prove that she is not afraid to speak. She doesn’t join in the debates about how the latest reality show will end the season or harangue her coworkers with complaints about the boss. How does anyone know where she stands? Often it seems like she is tuning people out. She is obviously a listener and an observer, not a storyteller.

The unedited bank of photos from her recent trip to Italy was just plain weird. Most people take photos of themselves in front of the Learning Tower or the Vatican, but her photos were mainly of marble floors and rock gardens, of people she didn’t even know sipping wine in cafes, or of drawings or mosaics –- but she cuts the heads off most of the statues and gets so close to the mosaics that you can only see a small portion. A note pad of some sort is her constant companion, but it’s full of weird doodles and lists. The pages may mean something to her, but not to an audience. There’s hardly a line that could be considered revolutionary or newsworthy. 

According to a 2010 article in the US News and World Report, more than 50% of Internet users are under the age of 45. Since she is firmly planted at the very top of that demographic, it’s doubtful that the mostly much younger Internet user would be interested in the musings of an old woman. She is definitely no longer young and cool.

Writing a blog is about readership and a blog about an aging Midwestern introvert is unlikely to attract an eager audience. If I were her, I would reconsider and find a topic that she can research and learn from while providing some entertainment to her readers.

Thoughts on Module 7

This was an informative module. I had no idea that Wikipedia had so many restrictions in place to try and keep the site pure. If they actually enforce their processes, they have come a long way from how they started – with the “anything goes” mentality. Even so, I think they have some rebranding to do in order to reinforce their reputation as a credible source.

Unfortunately, I have not hit upon a topic for my Capstone project yet, but I’m really enjoying seeing how everyone else is honing their presence on the web. Everyone is so different – cooking, MS, politics, pregnancy, martial arts – it’s amazing the diversity in our class. I'm hoping that my project will become as clear as some of my classmates ... soon!