The Motherlode

PS. I had the wrong link before, fixed now! Here.

Entire This American Life archives + DownloadThemAll (for Firefox) + uni broadband = never, ever being bored again. If you download that program, a shortcut is

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/[1:374].mp3

which brings you all the way to the latest episode. Yes, I am an audio glutton.

PS. For the guilt: support the show. I will do so when I locate my credit card.

Pax by PBJ + Stoppard rules the universe

A little bit of inter-cultural-peace rhetoric on the "reverse domino effect" and peanut butter and hummus and I get all squishy. Via the Queen of Jordan. Where has HuffPost been all my life? And is there some even better international-oriented version?

Other procrastinatory finds:

• 52 tips for happiness. Not quite - oh who am I kidding - EXACTLY as new-agey as it sounds, but makes good points. Also, the key to dying happy.
  
• A blog by a med student who dares to say he hates it. I likes my humour like I likes my chocolate: dark, bitter and Jewish. (what?)
  
• PostSecrets, an oldie but a goodie. People baring their souls on postcards.
• Another medblog, The Underwear Drawer by an anaesthetics resident, the third Asian female doctor type on my blogroll. She's a caustically hilario writer and comic-artist and by the sounds of it a brilliant doctor (an Ivy grad iirc) and also the mother of a kills-me-with-the-cute 2yo bubba and the wife of a dashing opthalmologist. Doesn't that sentence alone give you an inferiority complex? Curse these overachieving supermoms (somehow supermum doesn't sound right).
  

I find I've been hesitating to post cos I'm worried that I'll come off as self-centred or pretentious or lame or maudlin or dumbarsed. Hence the vacillating between banal and high-falutin' posts. BUT the very concept of a persoblog is pretty much self-centred and pretentious anyway so why not just suck it up and deal. My excuse was that a dead tree journal makes me write shitely (/shitelier) and the echo-chamber nature of it drives me round the bend and I get lazy, so an audience would help...yeah whatever, it's totally narcissism baby!

Nuffa that meta crap. The phrase that's been rolling around my cranium for a while is this: "nudge the world". I thought that was my own, by the way, til I Googled it and found that in fact that it had been implanted in my brain by Tom Stoppard. I always suspected he ruled the universe. It's from Henry's cricket bat speech in The Real Thing, where he's talking about the power and beauty of language, how words strung in the right order can change minds and even the world. Which I believe is true, but also a teensy tiny bit snobbish because in the play he's talking about how the other dude can't write to save his life. What I believe is that even words strung in the wrong order can be Archimedes' lever or his place to stand on or however that probably apocryphal quote goes, cos it's the concept that matters. Nowadays the power of the your average Joe Blow to nudge the world is unprecedented. The internet for one. If you make a YouTube video that strikes exactly in that sweet spot of popular interest, you can move, inspire, entertain (or more often, disgust) an audience of tens, hundreds of thousands by mere word of mouth. And it doesn't have to be a complicated idea either, as the Free Hugs guy shows. The world is nudgeable in so many ways. Sure, one person influencing geopolitics and climate change is a tad tough (though not impossible), but even a concept like PostSecrets...I can't put my finger on why I think it's so powerful, something to do with empathy and common vulnerabilities and connecting strangers. And look at Wikipedia, wow. What a batshit and revolutionary idea that was.

Beyond the internets, I have fewer examples but I still believe in the force of an idea, no matter who it comes from. Say you're struck by inspiration and tell your step-cousin-in-law who tells a friend who knows a parliamentary aide who tells the Prime Minister about it in his lunch break...who knows, nations could shift. Actually, my own papa has nudged the world, though not by dint of a single blinding idea, but by sheer dogged determination. He's probably one of the most effective agitators in the entire diaspora for democracy in VN and for the welfare of Viet refugees (yes there were still Viet refugees in limbo even in the naughties - how many decades after the war?). He's gotten people out of detention centres and that's not even his day job. So from creating a blog with a premise that touches people, to lobbying ministers and media, there are endless possibilities for anyone with a shiny idea and/or passion and balls.

The next obvious question is if anyone to nudge the world, what can I do? It's frustrating and tantalising. I think....dammit, I know that I'm not a half bad pot-banger. The problemo is finding The Idea and The Cause. Operation Fanatic and Operation Dr Quinn didn't quite fit the bill. The former taught me a shitload and gave me confidence that I could take an idea and run with it and I had a ball, but its scope was severely limited. It was ultimately a passive exercise. The format still has potential though: a newsblog is a powerful thing, distilling and filtering information at a time when attention is a scarce resource. As for the latter, it's an idea I can get behind because of its sheer obviousness, but honestly, the issue is hardly the closest to my heart. So...what? That is the 64 million dollar question. I'm sleepy now so will ruminate on this later no doubt, but for now let me turn the question to the audience. You there. Screw the Queen of Jordan: how can you - or we - nudge the world?

No brainer

Spinning clockwise = right brain dominant
Anti-clockwise = left brain

At least according to the sages at the Herald Sun.

Strangely enough, I see her spinning clockwise even though I am a wordy right-hander with the visuospatial skills of Helen Keller. Ask the guy from my year whose car I backed into yesterday. hehe. His $45 000 2-month-old pride and joy Subaru WRX (which apparently means something impressive to boys) no less. No damage I think (/hope)!

Anyway, what side brain are you peoples?

If you're wondering,

Herr Metamorphosism or Mamzelle Intueri, you are blogrolled cos I have fangirled you from age 17 off and on and now I'm 21, hot damn, and I still want to be a doctor like one and a parent like the other and a writer like both, if wishing made it so.

And Chris, update yours fer once!

Actually no, gave up Being A Writer cos that is way too intimidating and makes me backspace backspace backspace every second word. That's for people with stories. But not being a writer is no reason not to write, right? (say that 5 times fast)