That's it. Screw this, I'm giving you my money.

There's free money in this for you.

I'm not being cute.  I will send you cash.

And I'm not being creative either (got this post idea straight from Seth's Blog).  Here's the most relevant excerpt:

"When we set ourselves a deadline, we're incredibly lax about sticking to it. So don't (set it for yourself, in your head, informally). Write it down instead. Hand it to someone else. Publicize it. Associate it with an external reward or punishment. If you don't make the deadline, your friend gives the $20 you loaned her to a cause you disagree with..."

I think this point is right on.  In my life, I've missed a lot of deadlines.  But for the situations in which peers expected/needed/wanted me to deliver, I've much more often (drastically more) shown up on time and with quality.  This has been true for my group projects, competitive teams, childhood plays, lab partners, jobs, everything.  If it matters even a little bit, I'm much less likely to come up short in front of my peers.  I care what you think.

That I care about that has frustrated me for a long time.  We hear from different places that we shouldn't care about what other people think because being influenced by other people's perceptions is a weakness - a sign of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, something to overcome.  More recently, however, someone told me that growing up is not about cultivating indifference towards external opinions of you and your work but about being able to discern which people's opinions actually should matter to you.

I know I still have work to do in this discerning process - I still do care too much about random people's criticisms when I shouldn't.  But I also know that my life has been INSANELY blessed with peers who think deeply, who live intentionally, and who have consistently done amazing, inspiring, life-giving, stand-up, straight baller things so far in their time on earth.  Micro loans to Nepalis.  Med school after earthquakes.  Surfing couches to move your life forward through the worst economy we've seen.  Holding up your own family, quietly.  Seeing them through.  So many examples and so many I don't even know about, I'm sure.  You guys -- I care what you think of me and my work.

The big project I'm working on and am extremely invested in is this website and resource we've started to teach Haitian Creole: HaitiHub.  We have well over 100 people signed up just waiting to take classes through Skype.  The problem is that I'm already teaching as many classes as I can.  We're bottlenecked until we organize and orient more teachers - either native speakers or former volunteers.  Until this happens, the project is stuck and a ton of people aren't benefiting from online conversation classes and even more people than that in Haiti aren't benefiting from more Creole-fluent and culturally-fluent volunteers.

And yet, somehow, it's been months with "get more teachers" at the top of my HaitiHub to-do list and we don't have a single one (despite interest from many potential teachers).

So here's the deal: The first two people to like or message or comment about this post, for you two, I'm on the hook for $20 each.


On July 7, if HaitiHub doesn't have at least one new teacher, be in touch with me however you want and I'll send what I owe you in whatever way you'd prefer.  That's it.

I care a lot about you and I care enough about the money for this to actually work.  All I can do is thank all of you guys for your friendship and everything you do and for helping me make some progress with HaitiHub.


(Here at the end, I almost don't want to post because there's something very performative about all this...but I do know that it really will increase the chances of us getting another teacher on board, so onward!)


www.rafacarlo.blogspot.com

A favorite poet

Gary Young is so great.  He reminds me that I want to write poems again some day.

He reminds me also of a quote from Christian Wiman of Poetry Magazine: "Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both."

I'm off to bed but here is one of Gary Young's sparse, untitled prose poems from his book titled "If He Had." It's best to read it aloud to yourself, slowly. (unfortunately, blogspot is messing with the original line breaks...)

I thought I could save the boy. The world could be remade, and the boy would survive.  Penance, prayer, the smallest gesture can change the world. So can I. But so can the birds yammering in the trees, and the trees, and the wind that moves them all around. The world is every promise and possibility. Am I still a father, he asks, now that I have no son? Oh, yes, I tell him. Now more than ever.


www.rafacarlo.blogspot.com

"We put on our stories before our clothes."

A fantastic quote from William Wenthe.

And here are 19 others all about the writing life.  These constitute the Top 20 Quick Quote Contest results (out of several hundred) as judged by the folks at a really good, small literary journal called Crazyhorse  which is attached to the College of Charleston (keep writing, everyone!):

The Top-20 Quotes 

“What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.”
—Logan Pearsall Smith

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” 
—Ernest Hemingway

“The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.” 
—Theodore Roethke

“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.” 
—John Dos Passos

“I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.” 
—William Faulkner

“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.” 
—Hunter S. Thompson

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” 
—Flannery O’Connor

“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.” 
—Isak Dinesen

“Write, damn you! What else are you good for?” 
—James Joyce

“If I don’t write to empty my mind I go mad.” 
—Lord Byron

“I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.” 
—Amy Hempel

“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” 
—Red Smith

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.” 
—Winston Churchill

“Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God.” 
—Jack Kerouac

“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive when we started and know the place for the first time.” 
—T.S. Eliot

“If you’re a good writer, these days, you pay attention to the way that people don’t pay attention.” 
—Charles Baxter

"There are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are." 
—Wm. Somerset Maugham

"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag

“We put on our stories before our clothes….” 
—William Wenthe

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath." 
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All I am is the trick of words writing themselves." 
—Anne Sexton

www.rafacarlo.blogspot.com

Bottom of my to-do list: follow up

So a number of weeks ago I decided to take up carving woodblock.  I wrote about it being important because it's precisely the "least important" thing I could spend time on.  That post here.

Just wanted to share the first creation.  It's a carved relief kind of thing in basswood with ink - maybe 3" x 4".  I stole the design completely from a surf website (linked to in that earlier blog post).  It's pretty crude and took a long time for such a tiny piece but I had a ton of fun making it and hopefully more creations are coming soon.

Here's to the bottom of all our to-do lists!

Oooh...Lulu!

So I've decided to write a book - a concise Creole learning textbook.

As the first 8-week session of HaitiHub classes comes to a close, we've built up a good amount of supplementary exercises, new vocabulary sets, clarifications/expansions of certain topics, etc in addition to what's already in the Wally Turnbull book around which classes have been structured (Creole Made Easy: A simple introduction to Haitian Creole for English speaking people).

As I've been thinking about how to incorporate all of the new material with the existing stuff, I came to the conclusion that a whole new text could be more straightforward, applicable, and comprehensive than could a mashup of my material with the Turnbull. So hopefully in the not too distant future (within 2010?) HaitiHub will have it's own book!

And how will this happen? Well, I'm not sure exactly. But I've read on a few different blogs that Lulu is the place to start for self-publishing. I've only now started exploring their website more closely, but it's pretty amazing stuff. Check it out:

www.lulu.com

And if you're at work on a book of your own, I'd love to hear about it. Let's all of us keep writing!


www.rafacarlo.blogspot.com

I went for a panel on Haiti and found Heaven!

This past weekend was the 15th Annual LA Times Festival of Books held on the UCLA campus. Shame on me but as a native Angelino, not only had I never been to this festival, I don't remember ever even hearing about it! I'm trying to see LA with a tourist's eyes for a change and, ironically, that's helping me get to know the city in a deeper way.

When I started poking around the Festival website, the thing that sealed the deal for me was a panel called "Haiti and Recovery From Disaster." The panel was made up of UC Irvine professor Amy Wilentz, author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier," journalist and current Berkeley professor Mark Danner who is author of "Stripping Bare the Body," and author Rebecca Solnit whose latest is "A Paradise Built in Hell" which is an interesting book about how people self-organize in the aftermath of catastrophic natural disasters that turn society on its head. The panel was moderated by Davan Maharaj who is the managing editor of the LA Times. A great lineup, to be sure. And the cost of entry to attend this panel? One dollar on ticketmaster.

I was really blown away by the entire Festival. It was just SO deeply encouraging to see so many people voluntarily attending panels and presentations given by world class thinkers on consequential topics. Nobody had to be there, but even the large convocation halls on the UCLA campus were filled with hundreds of people throughout the day for different talks. The day itself could not have been more beautiful - sunny, warm, everywhere you looked people were holding books, or hands, or food, or dog leashes, or babies, or bags of free recipes, music, poetry. The crowd was so diverse in that amazing way you only find in big cities. Everyone was sharing public spaces either on the stairs of the large campus buildings or the installed event tables, or the soft grass. Aromas from the cooking stage, mariachi from the music stage, readings by elementary school poets, free samples, laughter everywhere, handicap access, I mean you name it and it was there making the day awesome.

I left with a free Qur'an, free CD of Buddhist chant, free poster on US involvement in Haiti, free bookmarks, and the Wilentz book on Haiti since Duvalier (which I did pay for). Not to mention great notes from several really awesome sessions. A panel called "Rebooting Culture: Narrative and Information in the New Age" was particularly good. The panel pointed out in the course of the debate that today, in some ways, we are more in love with the narrative than ever before (we turn everything into a story - just look at reality tv which is doing a great bit of business turning kids' stupid, random lives in beach cities into narratives or look at politics - most recently the Obama vs. Palin matchup which was largely a contest of competing narratives/personal histories). And yet, at the same time that we're eating up more and more narrative all the time, our attention spans our shrinking and the way we live and consume information is becoming less linear.

Anyway, check out David Shields and Nicholas Carr for more on all of that.

My big conclusion is that yes, so many things everywhere are screwed up and horrific. But when a city can offer something like the LA Times Festival of Books, make it accessible to everyone, and fill the place over one weekend with tens of thousands of people who are engaged, challenged, and joyful, God it just makes me stand in awe of what goodness people are capable of and it forces, thankfully, a rush of hope into me.

www.rafacarlo.blogspot.com

No. Way. Skateistan?

Maybe this organization is old news to you (as it looks like their story broke internationally in 2008) but I just heard about it thanks to my great buddy Jake.

I almost can't believe it. Talk about sharing your gifts. Talk about outside the box. Talk about courage on the part of the local communities as well as the founders.

I'm headed to bed here, but what a fantastic thing to learn about before calling it a day:

Skateistan.


www.rafacarlo.blogspot.com