Ok, so I have been talking about this for months

My tattoo.  It was done by the most awesome Dawn Grace who designed and tattooed this on my right leg.  The whole process took a bit over 2 hours -- about 45 minutes for design and the rest was her tattooing me.  I'm not gonna lie -- it hurt in places.  But for the majority of the time it was fine and I was relaxed.  I won't say I could have been asleep but I was very very chill for the most part. Endorphins -- nature's drug!

And yeah, I am planning my second tattoo already.

I LOVE Chicago

 I am in Chicago for the weekend and having a fantastic time.  I am a New Yorker at heart but I could be convinced to live here. What a great city!  I have taken about a zillion photos but for now here are two images from my phone.

Yeah. Tomorrow is tattoo day.  I am nervous.  I am sure there will be pictures of the process and the outcome.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge"

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Albert Einstein

(please click to a larger image)

The best love song of all time

This morning when I woke up I had This Must be the Place by the Talking Heads playing on a loop in my brain.  I honestly think  David Byrne is a genius and this is one of the best love songs I have ever heard.  Then I went to Youtube and listened to the many ways people have covered the song.  Why am I blogging these videos?  Mostly so I can find them later but I hope you like them as much as I did.  I am pretty sure I have posted at least one of these before but you can't really expect brilliant new content all the time, can you?

First, the master himself who uses strings on this version rather than the traditional floor lamp.



More versions of the song after the break.

New House on Harbour

 The other day Zha logged off to RL for a while and by the time she came back less than an hour later I had taken our greenhouse down, terraformed, put down a new greenhouse, decorated it and moved around some landscaping to accomodate the new house.  Ooppps.  Oh hai.  I guess I changed things a little.  Maybe I should have told you?

More about how much fun it is to share land with me after the break.

As a matter of fact, you are not the center of the universe

Years ago I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and it might not be an exaggeration to say the book changed my life.  I have the Four Agreements on the wall of my office and refer to them often.  I just learned that last year Ruiz wrote a new book called The Fifth Agreement, which I have to get my hands on and read.

I won't lie - I have a long way to go before I can claim to be true to the Agreements.  In fact, I sometimes forget about them and when I find myself upset about this or that I refer back to them and it helps me to stay focused.  I especially need to remind myself not to take anything personally.  Because really, who doesn't need to be reminded that the world does not revolve around them?

I just had a clear childhood memory I want to share.  In my mom's kitchen she had this huge bulletin board covered with kid art and shopping lists and bit of paper that she needed to keep track of for one reason or another.  In the top right corner of the bulletin board was a cartoon from the New Yorker Magazine that showed a little girl looking up at her mom who was saying "As a matter of fact you are not the center of the universe."  My dear sweet mom cut that out of the magazine when I was about 5 and it stayed on the kitchen bulletin board for most of my life.

I beg to differ though, I am the center of *my* universe.  I am just not the center of anyone else's universe.  Anyway, here is a reminder to myself - The Five Agreements.

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word – Speak with integrity.  Say only what you mean.  Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.  Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally – Nothing others do is because of you.  What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream.  When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions – Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want.  Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama.  With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always Do Your Best – Your best is going to change from moment to moment.  It will be different when you are healthy as opposed to when you are sick.  Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
5. Be Skeptical, But Learn to Listen – Don’t believe yourself or anybody else.  Use the power of doubt to question everything you hear:  Is it really the truth? Listen to the intent behind the words, and you will understand the real message.

Ok now. Just Stop.

I read an interesting article this morning that got me thinking.  You can read it yourself here.  The article talked about three ways people create stress in their own minds.

Negative self-talk about ourselves
Negative self talk about others and/or situations
Negative future fantasizing (aka worry or fear about the future)

I read that list and it was a light bulb moment for me.  As I have written about as recently as yesterday, I am the master of negative self-talk.  All you haters can say whatever the fuck you like about me and I promise you, I have said worse things about myself to myself.  I am only too happy to believe all the negative truths about myself and while I am in that downward slide I will create a few untruths in my mind to bring to the party.  Its ridiculous really.

I would go so far as to say most of us fit in one of the three categories in the list.  If I think about my friends and loved ones it is pretty easy to figure out which category they fit into fairly consistently.  We all have our own way of adding to our daily stress burdens, don't we?  That isn't to say while we might be pro at one category we don't dip our toes in another.  For example, first I often work myself up into a state about all my mistakes and failings and then I begin to worry about how those flaws will impact my relationships in the future.  See what I did there?  I started with now and extrapolated to the future ways I will fail.  Its a special talent of mine.

So how do we break out of the bad habit of negative self talk?  I am no expert by any means, that is for damn sure but I can tell you about an interesting experience I had last night.  It was late and I was not physically feeling very well and honestly someone I love was disappointing me.  I was beating myself up with all the reasons why his bad behavior was my fault when I just said to myself, OK enough.  Really?  Stop.  And I did.  It seems really stupid now in the light of day but in the middle of the night alone in my bedroom it felt like a revelation.  Just stop.

What does any of this have to do with Second Life, social media and virtual worlds?  Nothing specifically really, although I would say in our virtual lives we often only have partial information about what is going on in any interaction. I remember Botgirl wrote a wonderful series of posts a while back about a couple.  One person stopped showing up online and the other created a whole lot of drama about the relationship in her own mind trying to understand why her partner was missing.  In the end the missing person was offline due to a power outage that lasted a few days.  Certainly, having partial information as we do online gives us ample opportunity to spin drama in our heads about ourselves, other people and the future of our relationships.

And when I do that, I am going to try to remember to tell myself "just stop."  The truth of the situation is often far more mundane and less upsetting than the creative stories I spin in my mind.

Deep in the crazy end of the pool

Lately my life has been so full of good things on many fronts.   I feel alive and accomplished and strong.  And then?  Someone says something or doesn't say what I had hoped they would say or I hear someone else say something and I forget.  I forget all the wonderful things about myself and the fear and self loathing grab on to my stream of consciousness and my inner dialog degenerates.  For the past 24 hours I have been in a pretty bad place as the one person I confided in can attest.  It has been the anti-fun.

Hopefully I will be kinder to myself today and the world will be a brighter place for me.  Hopefully.

Playing with old images

The more things change the more they stay the same

Do you ever go back to where you used to live in SL?  Sometimes I do.  My first land was in a sim called Jokung.  This picture is from 2007 and it was taken when I first bought the land and got my first house and omg how much did I love that place.  It was a really quiet sim with very few people around, which for mainland was a treat.  

Fast forward to today.  You can see the parcel has changed, but the bones and the basic feel of the land remains the same.  The quality of the picture is really interesting to me as well. What a difference windlight and sculpted prims make!

So, what is the lesson here?  Everything changes. Sometimes things change for the better and sometimes they change for the worse.  What is really important is to be flexible and roll with the changes as they happen around you. Be resilient and flexible and you will come through whatever the world throws at you happier than if you resist and hold your ground.

what a fantastic day

I think I slept about 3 hours last night. Insomia is for the damn birds. Not angry birds, because you know I love that game.  No, insomnia is for the birds that wake you up on a Sunday morning at 6am because they are so effing happy that its another day in paradise but you are just trying to make up for the late nights spent with friends, nursing a gin and tonic.  Insomnia is for those birds. The ones you want to throw a shoe at right out the open window.

But despite being tired and cranky I had a great time on Inside the Avatar's Studio. Yes Skype was messing with my audio and that was annoying. Paying attention to the conversation while trying to fix technical problems at the same time...not fun.  But all in all I had a great time.

I started the day like this

And after a great day and a super fun time in SL this evening I ended my day like this.

Someone in the audience today asked if I would ever consider doing a video blog and I said no.  But maybe, just maybe I might.  Let me think about it.

Now I must retreat into my introvert's cave and nurse my bordeaux.  Good night.

I love you all.  I do.

Come see me on Inside the Avatar's Studio

Tomorrow I am going to be a guest on Inside the Avatar's Studio at 4:30pm SLT.   Remember that new project I was so excited about a while back?  That project is Art Screamers and I will be talking about it for the first time on Inside the Avatar's Studio.  I would love it if you could be there!

 In case you are not familiar with the show here is some information from their website.

Inside The Avatar’s Studio brings together innovative leaders from the virtual technology frontier to discuss perceptions, perspectives, and predictions of what ‘being virtual’ means in today’s society.  Guest speakers discuss current issues and trends surrounding the implications virtual experiences based on their own areas of subject matter expertise.

Host: Kevin Feenan (SL: Phelan Corrimal), President of Rockcliffe University Consortium

Rockcliffe Rotunda (Second Life), Rockcliffe University Consortium

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/243/12/29
Filmed Live by Metaverse Television: www.metaversetv.com/live

Here is what the folks at Rockcliffe University are saying about the show tomorrow.

Virtual environments allow us to push the envelope of understanding who we are at multiple levels. Such self-examination can be an exercise of fear in action where we want to reach out with one hand while pushing away with another. Establishing a balance between the two is a mix of social artistry and grace.

This week Kevin and Chestnut Rau (http://slofdreams.blogspot.com/) discuss various social perspectives on social artistry and how the development of relationships push the boundaries of understanding ourselves and the world around us.

Chestnut rezzed into Second Life on June 16, 2007 and had little experience in virtual worlds or gaming at the time. Like many newcomers she was utterly amazed by what she saw and quickly developed interests in innovative virtual art, the vibrant live music scene, and photographing the wonders of the virtual world.

In 2009 and 2010, Chestnut was the events writer for the popular blog New World Notes. In that capacity she sought out and wrote about the most interesting and innovative events that were happening in Second Life every week. More recently, Chestnut has concentrated her creative efforts on her personal blog where she makes observations about living a virtual life, highlights fun places to visit and shares RL and SL photographs.

Chestnut recently joined musician and art patron Zachh Cale and Amase Levasseur, the curator of the amazing art sim Originalia, to work on a new project called Art Screamers. They will be inviting some of Second Life’s top artist to create innovative installations using the resources of a full sim. They are in the planning stages of the project and look forward to opening Art Screamers to the public at the end of July.

This is not a review blog but the Magic Couch is worth shouting about

I very, very rarely review things for sale in Second Life on this blog.  I am not interested in shopping as a hobby so what is "new" and "must have" often escapes me completely. In fact, when content creators do send me things to blog I find it sort of irritating. I end up feeling obligated and I really do not care to provide free marketing services just because someone gives me a copy of their work.  If I do blog a review copy I feel like I am not being true to my own reasons for writing and if I don't I feel like I have let a creator down. All in all, I stay far away from the whole game of review blogging.

However, once in a while I come across something so amazing that I really do want to give the designer kudos and point you in the direction of their store. Today is such a day. The name of the store is Blue Pearl Homes and Furniture and the creator I am writing about is Marian Lean. Mind you Marian did not ask me to blog this item and does not even know I am doing so. I am writing this because I am so very impressed.

The other day I was reading some feed or other and came across a link to a skybox that sounded interesting and since I am always on the hunt for the perfect place to change my clothes up in the sky, I followed the link. I picked up the freebie not really knowing what I was getting, went home and rezed the contents.

Oddly, what I got was a couch with some instructions to rez a box and load it next to the couch, which I did. The notecard said to sit on the couch, pick how high I wanted to rez the sky box and go. Which I did.   Read more about the amazing Magic Couch after the break.

Building Trust in Online Relationships

Sometimes I am on transmit and not on receive.  In other words, there are times when I am not a very good listener.  Oh, I hear the words people are saying but I can get really busy trying to figure out what they *really* mean.

Let's face it, none of us *really* know who we are talking to online.  The bit of distance between person and online persona can be fertile ground for bad behavior. We have all seen it a thousand times.  People troll and behave badly because they lose track of the human on the other side of the computer screen. We react to the words and our own interpretation of the words, which may have little relationship to the other person's intent.  We find ourselves angry or upset and then we begin to doubt ourselves and our friendships.  Things can get pretty ugly here on the Internet.

I know I personally have planted gardens of mistrust in the gap between friends and their words on my screen.  Even when a person has never given me any reason to believe they will act badly I have found myself withholding trust in them because of my own past negative experiences online.

The absence of physical closeness is a fact of online relationships that adds a layer of complexity I am still trying to figure out.  Daily I wish I could look my online friends in the eyes and give them a real hug instead of *hugs* and *kisses.* Somehow, I think it is easier for me to trust someone when they are sitting next to me over a cup of coffee than it is when we are hundreds or thousands of miles apart, typing away at each other over the Internet.

Having said all of that, there are moments in any friendship when I am able to quiet the voices in my head and really listen to what someone is saying to me, as opposed to what I think they are saying to me.  I do find I have to work a little bit harder to build relationships online because the challenges are real.  Still, the rewards of getting to know people I never in a million years would have met otherwise are so, so worth the extra bit of effort.