One Red Hot Country Mama!

I had some things stolen, and have been filling out police reports for the past few hours. It was just a "wrong place, wrong time" thing for me… but it is too bad since before that it was a great day otherwise. Seems like things like this happen right when everything is coming together… as a reminder of the impermanent nature of everything.

Pema Chodron on impermanence (follow link for full article, sorry about the formatting):

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.  To seek for some lasting security is futile.  To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions.  Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone "out there" is to blame for our pain – one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking.  One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction.  Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there ís anywhere to hide.

More:

We’re all addicted to hope – hope that the doubt and mystery will go away.  This addiction has a painful effect on society:   a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.

Thanks Pema… So – I was reminded of this with my little brush with crime tonight. Goodnight.

Finally, after years of reading the opposite, the Boston Globe published a piece by Stephanie Coontz on how successful, educated women can also be happy in their sexual and romantic relationships. Here is some of the traditional view (don’t you want to just yawn?)

Or as a forbes.com writer put it in an August 22, 2006, column directed at men: "Don’t marry a woman with a career." She won’t look up to you, warned author Michael Noer; she won’t be happy in marriage; and she might even cheat on you.

Note to self – take all Forbes advice with a giant grain of salt… what kind of advice is that? More:

Columnist Noer writes on forbes.com that if a wife outearns her husband, both will be unhappy. And pundits have seized on the work by sociologists Wilcox and Nock to suggest that wearing rose-colored lenses and maintaining a "family myth" of fairness will help women bolster their marriages more than trying to get husbands to share housework and child care. Today’s advice to educated women seems to be, have a job if you want, but don’t earn too much money or expect too much help at home.

Here is some of the shiny new research on the matter:

One reason educated women are more likely to marry today than in the past is that modern men are less threatened by equality and more interested in finding a mate who can share the burdens of breadwinning. Many studies show that men now want a wife who is at a similar educational or occupational level. The 2001 Journal of Marriage and Family paper found that in mate-preference surveys taken in 1985 and 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to number 5 on men’s list of desirable qualities in a mate in both surveys, ahead of good looks. Meanwhile, the desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place in both surveys, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. And in choosing a spouse, males with a college degree rate good looks much lower in importance than do high school graduates. "In a high-achieving man’s definition of an A-list woman, the A increasingly stands for ‘accomplished.’ "

Finally, an article that recognizes strength and potential in women, and the strength in the men who appreciate them . Thank you Boston Globe! Hopefully the likes of forbes.com will eventually catch up to the rest of us. 

I joined an American Marketing Association Webcast yesterday about how companies, big and small (ie. my clients) can use blogs to forsee trends and improve products. I’ve been to a number of these webcasts, and often they devolve into a sales pitch… but this one was probably the best one that I have been too.

They had speakers from both Forrester Research and from Umbria, a company that specializes in getting marketing intelligence from the blogosphere. The Umbria speaker definitely stole the show with some of her insights and case studies. The idea is that companies can use blogs to listen into conversations about their products and services in a way that they never could before… since it is all public.

"As people blog about the new iPhone, what they thought of Borat and how they take their cookie dough, they provide a wealth of unsolicited opinions that can be mined for valuable information about how a target audience thinks — and consumes."

Basically, Umbria does a search on blogs for a product or trend using the standard tools (Technorati and Google) or something similar except they remove all of the spam – this represents a huge amount of blog posts (creating fake blog posts is a way to improve search engine rankings). They are then able to approximate the age and gender and location of the blogger based on a number of criteria, such as language, paragraph length and timing of posting. Some of the measures seem arbitrary and I don’t agree with them (ie. they said that it takes women two paragraphs to say the same thing that men say in one). However, they do pull some interesting information.

You can see here, a press release on their recent study on Organic and Health Trends. An interesting finding that she mentioned is that a lot of people love going to Organic Foods stores because they enjoy the samples . I think companies like Umbria and the Attention Company have it right – listening is important.  I am looking forward to see how this idea fits into the dusty world of traditional market research.   

I hate, I mean hate parking in Toronto. It is expensive and there is little choice other than play by the Toronto Parking Authority rules.

Right now, most parking lots have little machines, where you buy a ticket and put it on your dashboard. Immediately, once it goes overtime, a parking attendant springs out of nowhere and gives you a yellow ticket. I have gone running towards my car at least half-a-dozen times after the parking attendant after they started writing the ticket and only once have they ever let it go (this was in the suburb of Oakville, where the parking people are a bit more laid back.)

Tonight I cheated the system in the only way that I know how… I was getting into my car after having a great dinner with my friend on Bloor Street, when I saw a bunch of stylish looking 20-year-olds in the parking lot, getting ready for a night on the town. The driver was just putting his credit-card into the machine when I interrupted him to give him the ticket that I bought but didn’t need anymore, since it went until 7:00 am anyway. He smiled and said thanks, then wished me a great night. But I didn’t need thanks… I felt happy that the annoying City of Toronto Parking Authority would not get any more fees or fines from either of us. 

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.

"Which road do I take?" she asked.

His response was a question: "Where do you want to go?"

"I don’t know," Alice answered.

"Then," said the cat, "it doesn’t matter."*

I like Alice. Having direction makes the thousands of choices that shape life easier to manage. After that it is a matter of self-control (an Achilles heel for me too ) and focusing on what is most important. Tall orders, both of them. Since many aspirations have some element of chance it is hard to put a time-limit on fulfilling them. You leave yourself open to the possibility of getting what you want rather than counting on a specific outcome. For years, I had a quote taped onto the side of my cubicle from actor Harrison Ford, which I now know by heart:

"Hard work and a proper frame of mind prepare you for the big break that finally comes along… or doesn’t".

*Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland