Riches beyond comprehension:



On an anniversary, I like to reflect on the past and try to re-tell the stories that we tell all the time.  Stories are like memories, being re-written with each telling, but they also hold lots of interesting and vital bits that we don't access very frequently.  How things began.  How the character of a relationship crystalized.  How, once, the future hadn't yet been written, but were merely hopes and expectations.  

Three years ago tonight I convinced a dude in camo that Kellianne was flirting with that there was no room in the cab back to their hotel.  And so he left and the rest of us got in and we took a lot of pictures in that cab (which Rick and Rachel were also in) and almost got thrown out of the cab because of the flash.

Then we had a crazy time in the hotel room, drinking little bottles from the mini bar, I took a lot of pictures of Kellianne and Rachel making out which somehow never made it to the internet, we spilled Pringles everywhere, and then Rick started playing all the "S" songs in his library and Kellianne and I made out and snugged in the couch bed.  At 8 in the morning I had to be at the Crocodile to host McLeod's "I Heart Crafts" table so I left early and sent Kellianne a Flickr message a couple days later titled "other things... etc..." that said,

Kellianne,

Wow, what a surprise and a delight this weekend was for me, because of you. You are my new favorite. Is it ridiculous of me to suggest that we invent a crazy distance-spanning crush extravaganza out of this? I know we both just need one more thing to keep our lives full and interesting, right? Whatever comes of it, I'm forever grateful for your beautiful visit. Times a thousand.

b.

She replied,

Crazy distance-spanning crush extravaganza? Ridiculous and Yes and Please.

I am blushing and short of words. Unusual on both ends. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

k

Also included were are phone numbers and email addresses, and I think we started with haiku emails, her first one being "Twelve degree shivers. / My local. Leads from Broadway. / Thinking: B McLeod" (which she wrote from her local bar in the cold of winter with the advise of her favorite bartender, James), then moved to haiku text messages, then longer life-story epic emails, one of hers from March 15th, 2007 ending "I challenge us to overcome 3000 miles of seperation and begin to learn the stories that led us here. I'm pretty sure it'll all be extra-special-awesome." and finally many long phone calls that started just a little before SXSW.  

We were both so conscious of the amazing connection we had, even in those first moments of contact.  It's not even weird to think about now, because the same energy and excitement continues to be in our relationship to this day.  We are always happy to see each other when we wake up.  Three years in, the relationship isn't a spectacle to anyone but ourselves, but it's quite a spectacle to us and our shared narrative of our lives that we tell each other in the mornings and after work and when we go on walks and eat food and do those kinds of things.  

Happy 3 year hooking-up-iversary, Kellianne!

In case Facebook and Twitter weren't poaching enough of our writing activity from Livejournal, now even Tumblr has passed Livejournal in traffic:



People are writing less, people are commenting less (at least, FINALLY, Tumblr has created a very limited, opt-in, version of commenting that they've decided to call the "replies" for some reason even though it is really the same thing.  I guess they're just really against the word comments and not the actual feature, who knew.  Not that I'm complaining, cause I love comments.

Anyway, so yeah it's the end of the world, all the long-form diary writing industries are going to collapse and there will be a decades-long media frenzy/debacle as all the execs try to swim against the stream and keep their high-paying jobs and private jets that long-form diary entries with threaded comments and flexible permissioning has allowed them to sort of get used to over the last however long.  I bet there will be at least a couple good movies about it.  It's going to be messy and it's going to be ugly.  The worst will be brought out of some. 

Please try to maintain dignity, though.  In the end, the future is an unstoppable fuzzy steamroller that will turn us all into chocolate pancakes and we may as well prepare the syrup.  Here I am.  Let's hold each other and pray.

 I'm in a good mood.  

I weight 166.8 lbs (down from 174.2 at on Jan 4th).

I'm warm.  

I'm going on a walk now, will get a coffee, and will think about what to do with my day.

Hi!

Self-promotion makes me feel uncomfortable, and to me that's a sign of a healthy relationship with self-promotion.  But then again I'm a sucker for experiments and metrics.  Hence, this morning, asking my Twitter followers to re-tweet a link to 750 Words, which I would like to see grow a little.  I got 8 or so RTs, which, if I add up all of the followers (not counting duplicates) ends up meaning (542+133+70+242+341+220+423+6,603+210=) 8,784 people have a chance to see the link.  It's only been 2 hours since I posted, so there may be more activity later, but I like the idea of seeing how links spread in my social network.  For example, who has more influence, someone with a lot of followers or someone with few followers?  On one hand, someone with a lot of followers will get the link out to a wider group of people, but they'll be more loosely connected.  Someone with fewer followers is probably closer friends with a larger percent of their followers.  Okay, I guess it's all pretty nerdy.

Now, not only is Facebook stealing people from Livejournal, but now Tumblr is too.  Except I don't really like to write posts there because only a fraction of my friends who I'd want to read stuff are on there.  Reposting and commenting on other peoples things, and blindly favoriting stuff, and browsing pretty pictures, all that it's pretty good for.

PS.  My unproductive spell that lasted pretty much since around Halloween is, I think, officially over.  I'm back to my happy productive self.  For a week now I've been stirring ideas and itching to work on the twin suns of my work and hobby projects.  I think it helps that both 750 Words and my work project have so much in common, despite being in entirely different markets.  The former is fun and meditative, the latter is a tool to help businesses become more efficient.  But they both deal with websites that visually simple, working with text, numbers, and data analysis, and are using my favorite new technology: jQuery (which, unless you're a nerd and happen to know, is a javascript library that makes it easy to do pretty much all of the really advanced javascript work that the newest and nicest websites of the day use).  It's getting to the point that even a creative writing monkey like myself and build complex, scalable, novel websites for a few bucks a month.  It's a strange world to be in.

I'm in a bad mood and am angry at Health Month already for taking away my coffee.

I weigh 174.2 lbs.

I'm cold.

I better go on a walk and drink something warm or something cause I can already tell where this day is going.  Downhill.

I've been lazy and haven't attempted rallying people this year yet. I figure, since it's Sunday, we should start Health Month officially at midnight tonight (Monday morning).

Here's what I'm gonna do:

1. No alcohol
2. No smoking
3. No coffee (tea is okay)
4. No illegal drugs
5. No refined sugars or artificial sweeteners
6. No refined flours
7. No white rice
8. No dairy
9. No fried or fast foods
10. Only lean meats and fish
11. Exercise 2-3 times a week
12. Monitor weight, mood, etc
13. 1 day of amnesty to break 1 or more rules 
14. Lots of healthy potlucks at friends' houses
15. Health Month ends at midnight on Feb 1st
16. Enjoy!

If you wanna do the same, or do something else in the spirit of Health Month, feel free!

That's it!  Join if you want.  Here's the Facebook Group for it if you wanna talk about it:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=7538394538

Right here.

I am not sure why I did this, but I went through every single 8:36pm post from the last year and noted where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. It took pretty much all day yesterday.

Now, today, I don't know what to do with this data. I guess I'll just post it all!

Top 10 places I found myself at 8:36pm:

1. Home (120 times)
2. Outside (17 times)
3. Vain Office (15 times)
4. Tavolata (13 times)
5. Kushibar (7 times)
6. Bathtub Gin (7 times)
7. La Carta De Oaxaca (6 times)
8. Black Bottle (6 times)
9. Kellianne's parents' house (5 times)
10. Oddfellows (5 times)

Top 10 things I was doing at 8:36pm

1. Eating out (85 times)
2. Drinking (30 times)
3. Working (29 times)
4. Hanging out (26 times)
5. Watching a movie (20 times)
6. On the computer (16 times)
7. Walking (14 times)
8. Eating in (13 times)
9. At a party (12 times)
10. Reading (12 times)

 20 people I was with the most often at 8:36pm

1. Kellianne (219 times)
2. Carinna (40 times)
3. Megan (31 times)
4. Chris Jones (23 times)
5. Ingo (18 times)
6. Andy (18 times)
7. Hannah (16 times)
8. Katie (12 times)
9. Josh Bis (10 times)
10. Rick Webb (9 times)
11. Samantha (9 times)
12. Asa (9 times)
13. Russell (9 times)
14. Charlotte (8 times)
15. Lia (8 times)
16. Matt Hodge (8 times)
17. Kindra (8 times)
18. Brandon (6 times)
19. Mike Prevette (6 times)
20. Kellianne's mom (5 times)

Some other interesting things that jump out.

I'm surprised that Katie and Rick Webb are both in the top 10 for people, considering that they both live on the East Coast.  Pretty awesome.

When I'm outside at 8:36pm, 14 times I was walking, 1 time I was BBQing, 1 time I was drinking, and 1 time I was waiting for a bus.

The most frequented places for eating out were Tavolata (13), La Carta De Oaxaca (6), Kushibar (6), and Black Bottle (6).  But the most frequented places for drinking were Bathtub Bin (7 times), Rendezvous (3 times), Del Rey (2 times) and Shorty's (2 times).

When I was just hanging out, I was at home most often (20), then at Bedlam (2 times), Vain (2 times), and at Rick Webb's SF apartment (1) or Misha NYC apartment (1).

All 12 times I was at a party I was at a different house or venue.

There were 3 dinner parties at Carinna's house, 2 at my house, and 1 each at Ingo's parents', the Madsens', Heath's, Kindra's, the Summerquists', the Dickers'.  Way to distribute the dinner parties, friends!

And it's really interesting to see where I happen to be most often with each of my friends.  With Kellianne, it's at home, with Carinna and Josh it's at Cafe Presse, with Chris Jones it's at Shorty's, with Megan, Ingo, Andy and Asa it's at my house, with Samantha and Brandon it's at Volunteer Park, with Russell and Lia it's at the Waterfront Grill, with Jana it's at the Egyptian etc.

To check out all of the data, click here:
http://busterbenson.com/eight_thirty_six/two_thousand_nine

I started thinking about how to best reflect on the year, and the decade, as I do every year. And every year I am dissatisfied with what's available. Reflection works best when it can build on reflections from the past, year over year, etc. We are changing, slowly, over time, in ways that none of us can really tell from up close.

I mentioned the idea a while ago, and have since started on this "Best of 2009" meme which has been making me feel pretty unsatisfied in the reflection department. I met with Carinna and Michael a couple weeks ago to start coming up with ideas on how to make yearly reflections more fun and more satisfying.

This is the first draft:

http://bigcheckin.com

I'm leaving for Delaware tomorrow morning for a week, so this is as far as I got. It has 15 questions, varying from checkbox selection to adjective listing to inner-circle creating to goal contemplation. The answers are stored in ways that I think will make it easy to create aggregates amongst people, and also in ways that will make it possible to chart your own changes over time.

It's not yet possible to publish your results, but it will save your answers and I promise that results will be made available as soon as possible when I get back.

This is another long-term project. I want to launch something in January that will include charts and graphs and statistics and ways to post your Big Checkin to places people can see it, ways to make some parts private, etc. But while I'm gone (and won't be near a computer) it would help if some people felt interested enough in the idea to post their own thoughts and reflections, it will help me better able to figure out what's interesting and what's not.

So, yeah, there's no report at the end yet. But I'm bringing my sketchbook with me to start thinking about it. Any ideas you have as well on better ways to ask the questions, ways to visualize the answers, etc, would be awesome.

Help?

Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What's yours?

I should have read all the prompts before agreeing to do this I think. What kind of person do these prompts lead us to try to be? Tea? I think it was that curiously strong tea that comes out of my French press. For sure.

Word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. "2009 was _____."

My word of the year, determined early on, was "frugality to the max!" I suppose that sort of sums it up for me... an attempt to reign in the unbalanced nature of my life from the previous year. Back to basics, build from the strongest part of the foundation, make a plan for a sustainable and balanced future while still thinking big and taking well-calculated risks.

Shop. Online or offline, where did you spend most of your mad money this year?

Lawyers, landlords, credit cards, and the IRS. I guess the offline shopping world wins again.

Car ride. What did you see? How did it smell? Did you eat anything as you drove there? Who were you with?

Another silly question. I don't have a car. But the scene from the window of a taxi is usually pretty exciting. I also enjoyed the bus ride to Vancouver this summer. My Zipcar errands were more about the destination, and our mini-roadtrip to Orcas was more about the people in the car.

New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

I'm very happy to report that my unsung hero of 2009 wasn't a customer service rep. That would be sad. I didn't so much get swept up by any new people this year as grow more solid relationships with the people I already know and love. Kellianne deserves special props for weathering our third year of higher highs and lower lows with me. I feel like I also got to know several of my friends a lot better this year too. You know who you are.

Project. What did you start this year that you're proud of?

Locavore, Enjoymentland, and project Baby Benson.