Everyone's Story

I’m looking around the airplane on a homeward-bound flight and wondering what stories each of my fellow passengers is living.

I’m heading home after helping my in-laws adjust to life after a major surgery. I know deep in my heart everything will be ok, but I’m wondering if I went home too soon. “Did I do the right thing?" I think. "Can they handle this on their own?” I’m conflicted. Yet I needed to go.

Passengers looked at me as I boarded earlier. One man stared at me as I buckled my safety belt and, later, as I teared up watching a movie I’d downloaded. What is he thinking about me? What story do other passengers think I’m living? Maybe they don’t think anything at all. They could just be passively watching. I look around at them too, and wonder to myself, “What are their stories?”

Is the bald guy in the white hat a few rows forward coming back from Disneyworld, or is he on his way to his father’s funeral? The woman in the red leather jacket seated on the aisle next to me – is she on a business trip, meeting a lover, going to her 40^th high school reunion?

I learn that the man in the middle seat next to me is traveling with his wife and son. Where to? Why aren’t they seated together? Are they celebrating, grieving, playing, leaving? I could ask, but I don’t. I’m content to be in my own world, thinking, worrying, about my own family.

Other passengers looking around just see me eating my sandwich, typing. They have no concept of the conversation in my head. The conversation that tells me, “It’s ok you’re going home today. We each have to find our own way in life.” We can share the road, but ultimately the journey is our own.

That woman in seat 14A – what’s her journey? Is today’s story a difficult one? A happy one? I will never know. So I will just hope the best for her. And for the man in the white hat, and the woman in the red leather jacket. And for all my fellow passengers on this journey of life.

Time is free. It’s the most important gift you can give.

Finding My Voice

There’s a lot I want to say, but I don’t. There’s a lot I want to write, but I don’t. Perhaps you can relate, especially if you work in PR and communications like I do. My professional life is about helping others craft and amplify impactful messages, speak well, tell their stories, promote a positive brand reputation. But I often wonder: In focusing on helping others share their voices, what happened to mine?

It’s not that I have suppressed my personality or that I never speak up. In fact, I have built my personal brand on being honest, communicating from a place of high integrity, and having the courage to thoughtfully say the things that need to be said. That is who I am. And yet, in putting my energy into a brand – an executive’s, a company’s, and even mine – I adopted this idea that I had to be careful about what I say all the time. Well yes, I do have to be careful. We all need to be careful about what we say to some extent. Being cruel or rude or hateful or just tactless is not the way to communicate. You may incite a lot of passion, but you probably won’t achieve anything positive.

If you are a company spokesperson, every word you say or post can reflect on that company, even if it’s on your own time and your own digital feed. Just as there is no such thing as ‘off the record’ with media, there is no such thing as a ‘private point of view’ in today’s social-media-driven society. My default has been to take the safe route. I have refrained from sharing certain comments in public forums because I don’t want to cause a problem with a friend or limit my career prospects. I’ve refrained from writing articles with personal observations and posting them online for similar reasons.

These decisions seem reasonable, but it’s possible to constrain yourself too much. What if those personal observations could enhance my career prospects? What if they start compelling conversations? And if they don’t, what's the big deal? I admire people who thoughtfully share their perspectives, even when I don’t agree with them. Why should it be any different when it comes to what I have to say?

It bugs me that in helping others work out how to express themselves eloquently and authentically, I have felt the need to suppress my own voice. I want to bring it back. In doing so, I may share ideas not everyone can relate to. I might say nothing at all. I might say something not quite right. Because it seems too controlled, less authentic, to try and perfect my own voice. My voice is most certainly imperfect, but it’s my voice. It’s time to use it more.

What's in a Name? Part Deux

Ever wanted to make up a 'Starbucks name?' If you have a name that just doesn't fit within the cultural lexicon where you live, you know why I'm asking. While on some level it's lovely that people helping you at the supermarket or local coffee house want to be friendly and call you by name, I find it a burden. Not because I don't want to be friendly, but because my name most distinctly is not part of the local cultural lexicon. Even in France, where the name Yvette originated, I'm told it's the name of grandmothers. Of course, that means it will be hugely popular in France about a year from now, but that's another story...

When people do recognize recognize my name, it's in the context of a different culture where they spell it with an "E" or an "I" or one "T" at the end. The other week when I asked for my grande non-fat gingerbread latte at Starbucks, the young woman taking my order couldn't get my name right no matter how many times I repeated the spelling. No worries. I knew I'd get my coffee. When I picked it up, I finally saw how she'd spelled my name:

iBet.

I am now a gambling app for an iPhone. I'm sure I'll be very popular.

Next time I go to Starbucks for a latte, I think I'll tell them it's for Holly. Or Hollie, or Holli, or....

The Remodel

[Kathy, just in case you're still paying attention, this is for you!]

My husband and I have been undergoing a rather dramatic remodel of our home for the past six months. We ripped out many of the key elements you would want to have functioning in order to live a relaxed life -- things like the kitchen, a shower. You know, the basics.

Forget what they say about simplifying. That only works if you really get rid of everything or never had it in the first place. Life seems more complicated, not less, when all you have is a rack full of summer clothes in winter, and a small sink with no place to put your toothbrush. The kitchen in the garage I didn't mind too much. It was oddly fun to figure out how to make an omelet on a panini press or explore the possibilities of a $20 toaster oven. Besides, there's always Acqui and Starbucks...

I realize that many people live with few comforts. I've visited a number of places where poverty is the norm and people build their homes from refuse found in the nearby dump. But context is important, and in the West we're mostly used to certain comforts. I definitely appreciate what I have in a whole new way now.

As our remodel comes to a close, I can't help but think how the whole experience is a parallel for life. For example, you always start such a project with big plans, but eventually reality requires you to make adjustments.

Then there's the dust -- every part of the house is always dusty, especially the part not under construction. You can dust & vacuum on Monday and by Tuesday afternoon it's a quarter inch thick again. In life, try as you might, you'll never eradicate all the messy bits.

Relationships? Not only do you test your marriage, but you learn that not everyone has the same standards as you do for doing their jobs or executing their craft. Our contractors were quite good overall, and most of the subs were as well. But it's those situations where something goes wrong that take over in terms of time, money and frustration level.

Patience in the extreme is required to get through it all. It's exhausting to work a long day then go home and choose paint colors or cupboard doors. But you do it, knowing in the end it will be worth it. Some day, way in the future, when you will once again shower at home and look at that really cool tile you and your partner picked out.

And that's really the point...you get through it. Sometimes you even experience moments of elation as you glimpse your fantasy turning into reality. Then the day finally arrives when you move back in. You finally get to unpack your kitchen and bake a cake. Two weeks of dinners later you are sure your new kitchen totally rocks and you can pack up the crappy toaster oven for good.

Whether you are remodeling your house, your attitude or your whole life, it takes creativity, patience, perseverance, and great partnerships to get it done. I wonder what I'll learn when we redo the back yard landscape....

Getting Spooked

I know. It's been a loooong time since I posted anything. Since I'm sure I have no regular followers, I doubt anyone out there has been saddened by this, but I'm going to try and get back into it. Thing is, my dad passed away a bit suddenly last year in December and that got me off the blogging track for a while. So here we are, on the Day of the Dead, All Souls Day, Halloween. It seems like an oddly appropriate time to get started on talking about life again.

True to weighty times like these, I am worrying about the most important things, like my Halloween costume. Eek! What to be? What to be? This is the ongoing mantra of Halloween. And if you have a party or two to attend, the voice in your head telling you to come up with something really creative gets even louder!

My problem on Halloween is that I love to come up with really abstract costumes. Not only are these tough to conceive of on a yearly basis, but no one ever 'gets' them. When my husband and I were The Fandango Puppets last year, no one had a clue what we were, though at least they thought we looked pretty cute (we were even carrying paper bag puppets!).

Sometimes people get pretty close to figuring my costume out. The year I was an African Safari everyone thought I was a zoo, and the year I was the Great Barrier Reef everyone thought I was an aquarium. But being Autumn Leaves was just too much for most to figure out (I dressed up in black and sewed felt leaves in red, orange and yellow to my clothing). I dressed as Gum Stuck Under a Shoe and a Road before they were popular, and one year I was a Candy Cane.

The shaping of my adult Halloween years began very early. I blame it all on my middle sister. When I was a wee lass in elementary school she decided to dress me as a Pillow Person. That should pretty much tell you everything you need to know about my family and the desire to be creative.

When you're part of a couple, which I've become fairly recently, the whole costume game gets even worse, if that's possible. One costume is bad enough, but it's torture to come up with two!

This year I'm very, very tempted to be something 'normal,' like a punk rocker, a skeleton or a cat (no way will I be Cat Woman though, the clothes are too tight!). Heck, I even considered Sarah Palin but my hair is all wrong and I wouldn't want to leave the impression that I actually admired her. Besides, who wants to compete with Tina Fey?

However, my sense of the esoteric is already getting the best of me. I'm seriously considering being something like an Exit Poll or an Identity Crisis. Seems appropriate for the times.

Getting Lost

On a recent trip to Boston, I decided to add a GPS to my rental car. Although I'm great with direction and finding my way via a paper map, I had to drive about an hour outside of town -- at night -- and I figured having a satellite-based mapping system on my side would be a good thing. How wrong I was. I've never been so lost in my life.

I should have know it was going to be a disaster from the moment I tried to leave the airport. The correct highway onramp was right there in front of me, but so was a copy car and a slew of flashing lights barring access. Did the GPS know about this? Of course not. Not only did it want me to drive over a cop car to get on the highway, every time I followed the detour signs and was getting somewhere, the GPS would redirect me back to the same, closed-off entrance. I went in a big fat circle at least three times before I purposely got so lost that the GPS was forced to look for another entrance.

Sure, it found a new entrance -- actually about four of them -- but that still didn't help. The GPS became very fond of sending me through the Big Dig tunnels all over Boston. What happens when you go in a tunnel? The satellite connection fails of course! I would be driving along, needing to choose which direction to take out of the tunnel, and my GPS would disconnect. Of course, I almost always took the wrong direction because the GPS doesn't tell you where you will eventually be going, it just tells you where to turn and when.

Another problem in Boston is that each tunnel road also has a corresponding side road not in the tunnel. Can the GPS tell these apart? Of course not. It would tell me to take the road on the right when it actually meant the tunnel road on the left. So the next time I would reach one of these tunnel and side road choices I'd say "o.k., I really need to take the tunnel instead." ...and then it would turn out I was supposed to take the side road after all, so I could make a left turn over the tunnel. Argh!

It took more than an hour just to get on the freeway that night. I drove through some pretty cool looking parts of Boston, I just have no idea where they were! I do know I was in the vacinity of Fenway park at one point, so at least I got to salute the World Series-winning Sox the day after their big win.

You think the return trip would have been better...by then I'd figured out some of the foibles of the GPS and was learning to compensate. But oh no, I still got lost trying to get back into the airport. This time, the problem was street names. The GPS would tell me to "stay right and enter the McKinley (or whatever) highway" but there wouldn't be any such highway. There might be the 93 or the 1 or the Americas Avenue, but heaven help me, there was no McKinley highway to be found.

At least by now I was quicker on the uptake. After only one missed highway, I gave up on the GPS and resorted to that good ol' standby, the directional sign...you know, the signs with that nifty airplane symbol? Yeah, the ones that take you to the airport if you just follow the little picture. Much better than a GPS.

And for other locations? I'm sticking with the archaic paper map.

Happy driving!

What makes a myth?

Last week people all over the world commemorated Che Guevara's life and death on the 40th anniversary of his execution in Bolivia.

I often wonder about the myth that has become 'Che.' I've been drawn into this myth at times, yet I have to ask, "Who was he, really?"

Other than religious personages, I doubt any visage is as globally recognizable as that of Che with his beret and scraggly beard. I've seen his image on fridge magnets, buttons and t-shirts while traveling in countries on every continent: Turkey, South Africa, Australia, Croatia, Peru, England, the U.S. The list could go on.

These images take the 'Motorcycle Diaries' version of Ernesto Guevara as a young man developing a desire to help the poor and oppressed and create an idealized revolutionary.

On the anniversary of his execution, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote one of the few articles I've ever seen that focused on often-omitted facts about Che. For example, Che oversaw the executions of hundreds of dissenters and 'traitors' in Cuba at the end of the revolution. Today, we would question such actions from a leader. Just look at the fallen leaders in Serbia and the Middle East. How does Che's memory avoid the question altogether? Why are his actions often considered noble when similar actions from others are talked about as evil?

One of the men who caught and oversaw Che's execution was interviewed in the Chronicle article. To this day, he can't understand why people revere Che. He expressed distress that Che had become such a mythological figure...an icon who's human failings and evils had been long forgotten in favor of recalling only his purest principles.

I personally have encountered some of Che's detractors. I was talking to a woman from Peru about a year ago and I made some comment about how popular Che seemed to be in South Amercia -- Peru included. She got very frustrated and made it clear that she was not someone who idealized him "Not all Peruvians consider Che a hero," she told me. "I most certainly do not. He was a murderer."

So, what makes a myth? How do some people win the myth game, and others lose? Do we create these myths around people because we don't want to remember the truth? Or is it because we have lost faith in our leaders and need to believe in someone who fought for his ideals, regardless of what they really were and regardless of the consequences?

I wish I knew...maybe then I'd be able to understand my own conflicting emotions about Che Geuvara.