playing at work.

I get the joy of working with creative and fun people. Together we have conversations that provoke thought and weirdness that induces laughter. In the last few months we started the friday ritual of going out for lunch and Friday Funnies before end of day. Friday Funnies is pretty simple: someone pulls up a funny YouTube or Hulu video to share. Then we laugh.

Maybe laughter isn't the best medicine, but it certainly is good medicine. I didn't work today (three cheers for Thanksgiving!), but it is still Friday and I would like to share some of our recent funnies with you.

SNL Hidden Valley Ranch Taste Test:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/284927/saturday-night-live-taste-test

A little work place bonding: 

One more video for you from my mini-friday funny with my mom and sister, Sexy Sax Man:

 Cheers!

how much?

A few weeks ago I was trolling Google to answer a work query. I started typing: How much...before I could finish Google populated a list for me. This is what Google thought I (and the general public) would likely be looking for. Some of it is minor, some major. 

But this is it. This is what a lot of people are counting the cost for. 

What about you? When you ask how much, what comes next?

baby love.

Babies are the sweetest, softest, most helpless things there are. They amaze me - they are so little but will someday become full grown adults (how does this work!). As babies, they are wholly dependent on people outside themselves - a beautify vulnerability. 

My college roommate, Lauren, asked me to take pictures of her little girl Grace, I couldn't say no. She pretty much slept the whole night, and let me just say it, she is cute as a button! As sweet as it was to meet miss grace, seeing my friends as parents for the first time was even more amazing. They are still the same people, but something is a bit different. The joy and struggle of parenthood has been placed upon them, and will be with them for the rest of their lives. I saw a different love coming out of them that wasn't there before. They displayed the sweetness of parenthood with grace...no pun intended :)

I also saw how much work goes into caring for a baby. My friends honestly shared the struggles that come with having a child for the first time. I was so grateful that they let me into their lives and allowed me to see the full spectrum of their experience, especially the hard parts. But nonetheless, of this I'm sure, they will be great parents to little miss gracie. 

hugs please.

I love Shel Silverstein (author of above poem), but I love hugs even more. At my kindergarten graduation we sang a song called "Four hugs a day". The gist of it goes: "Four hugs a day, that's the minimum. Four hugs a day, not the maximum". What profound advice for such little people. My teacher was preparing us for life. The lesson probably could have gone something like this: "Okay kids listen up. I know you are only 6, but life is going to get really hard some day. Harder then you know now. So you guys need to give lots and lots of hugs, and not just on special occasions but everyday. Got that kids. Don't settle for a life filled with tug o' wars, those are never hard to find. I want you to be different, I want you to love and hug and care for others." I honestly don't remember a ton of things from kindergarten. But this song stuck with me, and probably for good reason.

 I'm sure I could quote you statistics about the benefits of physical touch between humans or what happens if a baby is not held enough, but I think we all know that sometimes we just need a hug. Hugs are great for all occasions: when we are happy, sad, excited or disheartened. Hugs let us show our love for each other, share in the excitement of life, and know we aren't alone. 

Most of the time we get the normal, "hey" hugs. But sometimes we get those great, all encompassing, wrapped up in the other person kind of hugs. Those are the best. 

We can all find reasons to have tug o' wars with the people in our lives, I know I find them on a daily basis. Frustrations and shortcomings never seem to be short on hand. But I like this other kind of war better, it is a war I can get behind. So more hugs are in order. 

Hug someone today. Because you need it, I need it, we all need it. 

Collaborations.

What happens when a few musical geniuses get in a recording studio to make music? A thing of beauty.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions, a collaborative work between Yo-yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, is a mingling of classical, folk, and bluegrass styles. It is lovely and great reading music - as  most of it is instrumental. Two of the songs do have vocals, which brings me to the reason for today's post.

The whole CD is terrific, but I've been a wee bit manic about one song in particular: Here & Heaven. Beautiful harmonies set to a cello, fiddle, and banjo — need I say more?

Not all those who wander are lost.

Okay, so I wasn't lost in the Tolkien sort of way, I was actually following my GPS. But hear me out.

This past weekend I did myself a favor and headed north. Just some time to get lost in the woods, or something like that. I was traveling to a familiar part of Minnesota, but still needed help getting there. I punched the address into the GPS and off I went. I thought I knew which roads would take me to my destination. I'm happy to report there was a better way.

The usual route, well it's a bit boring. This new path, oh it was beautiful. There were twists and turns, roads lined with forest, quiet country ways with only one lane in each direction. The newness of it was charming.

It was like I was a modern-day cowboy - driving off into the sunset, with the city behind me and no schedule before. Except I was driving a Pontiac and am clearly not a boy. Well, maybe if John Wayne was 24 and a woman and living in 2011...let's be honest here, it really wasn't that epic or romantic. In fact it was just, pleasant. It was a pleasant three hour drive north, but with a few hidden gems waiting to be found along the way. I didn't need to know my route, my only job: enjoy the ride.

The other side of the coin: hope.

This week it is the other side of the coin of last week's post. On this subject matter I am merely an observer, so I'm going to let someone else say it better: Read this article (from the Wall Street Journal) on the life and death of Steve Jobs. Thought provoking stuff. (I found it through this blog)

Your technology doesn't just change the method that you communicate, it changes what you talk about and how you do it. Not only that, but technology also shapes our society and culture. So, whoever is shaping our culture and technology is shaping your world in someway, whether you know it or not. Steve Jobs wasn't the master of the universe - clearly - but he was one of the idea leaders of our day, so understanding his ideas (and the many other thought leaders that are vying for space in our lives) actually matters. 

I'm not an expert on Steve Jobs, the author of this article likely isn't either, but it will get your thoughts turning at a minimum. One of the more powerful sections was a comparison of Jobs's Stanford commencement speech (see last week's post) and a Martin Luther King Jr. speech:

"Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness.""