Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Julie, Julia and I
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/15/2009 - 05:34Last night, Kim and I went to see the movie Julie Julia. It is about cooking, and blogging, and this is my review of it. Well, not exactly. It is my chance to use someone's famous name to talk about myself in hopes that someday, I will get discovered for what I am passionate about, and maybe get a book deal, or maybe even a TV show or even have a movie made about me. But, that is what the movie is about as well, so I guess it all fits.
One sign of an effective book or movie is whether or not you could see yourself in the same situations as the main characters. The movie I saw most recently before Julie and Julia was the latest Star Trek movie. Yes, it touched on universal themes, rebellious youths learning to channel their energies to overcome some great evil. I could relate to that part of the movie and enjoyed the escapeism, but it was very different from my lifestyle sitting in a small rented house in Woodbridge, CT.
Julie, Julia, however, masterfully captures the hopes and dreams of so many bloggers, like myself, busy pecking away at their computer keyboards and hoping for some sort of recognition for their passions. It ties back to Victor Frankl's great book, Man's Search for Meaning. The desire to be recognized for our passion is as basic to our own stories as the hero myth of Joseph Campbell is to so many great stories in literature.
The movie explores how blogging relates to our marriages, our families, our work, how we see ourselves, and how we support these explorations, financially and through our circle of friends.
Julie is presented as a frustrated writer. All her friends are having wonderfully successful careers while she is working away at a miserable job in a cubicle. She's written half a novel and can never finish anything. Well, through the discipline of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I've written one and a half novels, although I never completed editing the first or getting it published. I had a horribly successful career on Wall Street, but now I spend more and more time on my writing and less and less time consulting to the financial services industry.
Julie decides to put a PayPal button on her blog. That was years ago, and I think I did that at one point as well. However, I never received the recognition Julie has and never really received any Paypal donations to speak of either.
Now, so many bloggers are scrambling to find other ways to monetize their blogs. I've written about this from time to time, and spent a bit of time yesterday talking with a person who is planning to launch a new scheme to help bloggers monetize their blogs. He wanted to know what really makes bloggers tick, so that he could be more effective in recruiting bloggers and setting up a system that would be more successful for himself and the bloggers he hopes to recruit. He is wise in reaching out to bloggers to get a sense at what makes them tick. If he really wants to get a sense, he should go see the movie Julie, Julia.
Another theme explored in the movie is narcissism. Bloggers often get a bum rap by people who don't get blogging. They are accused of being narcissitic. To a certain extent, this is true. Yet it may not be as bad as it seems. In elementary school, one of the important reading skills is learning how to relate a story back to ones personal life. This is a skill that many bloggers have mastered. See, I'm relating the movie back to my life. When you get older and start learning creative writing, you are told to write about your own experiences and things that you know and have experienced. This is done wonderfully in Julie Julia, and drives my writing as well.
The problem with narcissism is when it does not relate to the world around it and somehow share in the human condition. That is what differiates between the narcissist as self absorbed jerk and the narcissist as the great writer. I'm probably still too close to the narcissist as self absorbed jerk, which is the problem with so many bloggers. I believe we all need to strive to be more in touch with the people around us if we wish to be great writers. We also need to strive to be more in touch with the people around us for plenty of other reasons as well, and that drives much of my political activism.
In the end, Julie and Julia have both won the recognition they have sought. Meanwhile there are millions more bloggers out there, pouring their hearts and souls onto their keyboards in hopes that some day, they too, will be recognized for their passion. All it takes is a blog and a dream.
Protecting Us From Big Government and Misinformation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/10/2009 - 19:51As I was doing my typical rounds visiting blogs, I stumbled across this post: FDA and Wilderness Family Naturals. It links to articles claiming the FDA Hits Small Family Food Ministry for $100K for HyperLinking to Health Research and urges its readers to
Help fight for our rights and freedoms in the US of America and join a 912 Project, Tea Party Group, or other group of your choice to protest the present government takeover of all our freedoms and property.
So, I thought I should investigate a little bit further. It turns out that in on November 9, 2005, the Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Kenneth H. and Annette C. Fisher, Owners of Wilderness Family Naturals, concerning labeling violations with regard to Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
That letter listed dozens of violations, not only on their website, but on the labels of their products, including claims, “Clinical studies have associated kefir with many beneficial effects including … anticancer properties” and “This is a salve with tremendous anti-fungal and antibacterial properties. It can be used with wonderful success on athlete's foot, ringworm, and to prevent infections where the skin is broken. Besides containing Goldenseal root, this salve also has Tea Tree Oil and Grapefruit seed extract which are very good at fighting infection”.
Over three and a half years later, a consent decree was signed:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that Wilderness Family Naturals LLC of Silver Bay, Minn., and its owners have signed a consent decree that prohibits them from manufacturing and distributing any products with unapproved claims that the products cure, treat, mitigate or prevent diseases.
I have not been able to find why it took three and a half years to reach this agreement, or why the Fisher’s felt they had to spend approximately $100,000 in legal fees to get to the point where they agreed to not manufacture or distribute any products with unapproved claims that the produces cure, treat, mitigate or prevent diseases.
Yet all of this raises several questions. How far should the government go to make sure that misleading information is not presented that might cause people to buy products with false hopes? What is the best way for companies to make sure that they can market their products as honestly, fairly and effectively as possible?
Most of the blog posts about this that I’ve read so far misleading information by making claims that it was only about hyperlinking or that it was the FDA that was solely responsible for the $100,000 in expenses that the company owners racked up in legal bills. It is also worth noting that all of this happened while the FDA was under the control of a Republican President.
I do believe we need to protect our freedoms. Yet I believe that a bigger threat to our freedoms is the misinformation that is too often accepted as fact online, on talk radio and around the water cooler.
Blogging about the Health Care Debate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/30/2009 - 18:13As I noted in previous blog post, I enjoy reading different opinions in various blogs that I find through traffic exchange networks. One blog that I particularly enjoy is A Disgruntled Republican. We have different views on many topics, but his views are often well thought out and interesting.
Today, he linked to an article which talks about how the current health care system is not a market.
As I did in my previous post, I want to share the comment that I made on his blog:
I must admit, coming from the other side of the aisle, I also think this is a very good article. The current health care system is a big problem. The question becomes, how do we best fix it.
This is where I question what seems to be an underlying assumption. It seems like Mr. Williams believes that market forces are always the best way to address a problem. I am not sure I believe that.
While competition is generally a good thing, and profits is generally a good way of determining the success of the competition, I believe that there are other considerations.
Our schools, libraries, and roads are generally public services provided by the government. The ability to send your child to a good school should not be limited to those who can most afford it. The ability to access good books should not be limited only to those who can most afford it. The ability to drive to the office, or to town hall should not be limited only to those who can most afford it. We, as a country, as well as individuals are better off if everyone has a fair chance to get a better education, drive on public roads to better jobs and get to town hall to work on forming a better government.
Likewise, I believe we, as a country, as well as individuals, are all better off when a certain amount of public health is available. If we can help the less fortunate avoid catching and spreading dangerous diseases, we all are safer.
So, how do we balance the need to promote the public good for everyone with advantages of competitive systems? I don't have a good answer, but some of it, I am sure, has to do with the need for checks and balances; the sort of checks and balances that have helped our country survive and thrive for so many years.
Unfortunately, we do not have such checks and balances on our medical system today. The medical industry is spending millions of dollars a day lobbying to make sure that we do not get a more competitive system, a system with more checks and balances; and there is no check or balance on their spending money from our premiums this way.
So, what can we, as Democrats and Republicans working together come up with for a better health care system? I would love to hear your thoughts and the thoughts of some of your other readers.
He has posted a good response from his viewpoint, and I believe that such discussions are of much more value than so much of the rhetoric that we currently see.
Social Media for Kids
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/30/2009 - 11:45One of the things that I like about various traffic exchanges is that they encourage me to visit blogs that I would not normally otherwise visit. Today is a good example.
I stopped by and read Kellyology's post about email and ten year olds.
I am a big proponent of encouraging kids to use and learn about social media and I left a comment about it on Kellyology.
I thought it was worthy of highlighting, so here is the comment:
Being the social media maven that I am, I've encouraged my seven year old daughter to explore several different aspects of social media. These include:
Email - She doesn't do much more than your son does on this, but every once in a while, she gets motivated.
Twitter - This is nice that you can send quick messages. We've had similar success with this as we have with email. What is nice and yet of concern about this is that it is very public. The good part is that I see everything she sends. If there are potential issues it is easy to intervene. It has provided good opportunities to talk about online safety.
Flickr - She LOVES my digital camera, and for that matter, taking pictures with my cellphone. So, I set up a Flickr account for her. She doesn't use it very often, but every now and then, she grabs the camera and takes lots of pictures. I then sit down with her and we select which pictures we think are the best and upload the best of them.
BlogTalkRadio - This one we kind of fell into. I was at a conference on podcasting which BlogTalkRadio was one of the sponsors. I decided to give it a try and on the first radio show I did, she called in. It has now evolved into her radio show which we do just about every Sunday evening. It provides a great opportunity for some great father daughter time. It provides an opportunity for distant friends to listen in and is stored as podcasts, so we now have an audio archive of the two of us talking about our lives. It has been great to hear her as she gets more confident with her own voice.
We've played a little bit with video, but haven't gone very far with that.
I would encourage you to check some of these options out.
Follow Up – Aging without Makeup
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/10/2009 - 10:03On Tuesday, I wrote a blog post entitled Blogging without Makeup discussing some emails from a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists that I read. On Thursday, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday and wrote about turning fifty. Both blog posts have received a lot of comment and I would like to try and combine some of my reactions to this in a single, somewhat coherent blog post.
Anthropology Professor Dave Jacobson of Brandeis wrote about the question of what is the ‘real self’. Who is the self real to? Ourselves? Others? Some combination? How does it change based on context or time? To me, it seems as ‘self’ is a function of both our own experiences of ourselves and the experiences others have of ourselves and that it is constantly changing as we grow and have new interactions and experiences.
One experience that a friend from the mailing list suggested is blogging with makeup; that is presenting ourselves as something other than how we currently see ourselves. It seems to me that this is a valuable insight in how we might change ourselves into something we would like to be.
Another person brought up the image of Pygmalion and the modern musical version, My Fair Lady. It seems like this is a very powerful idea for therapy. To the mailing list, I wrote:
Your comment about Pygmalion particularly jumped out at me. In Pygmalion, like My Fair Lady, the hero creates someone else. Yet isn't that, in a certain way, what we do in therapy?
When I was younger, I resisted therapy because I was pretty happy with who I was, in spite of my own issues that I really needed to work out. At one point, however, I came to realize that these issues where impeding me and making me unhappy, and that I needed to, shall we say, recreate myself into an image closer to what I would like to be. In short, I was my own Pygmalion.
Isn't that what we want from people entering therapy, an exploration into who they could be if they addressed their insecurities, their inabilities to properly control anger, drinking or drugs, their need to be in the spotlight, their difficulties finding joy and happiness, etc? Yet doesn't this also bring up interesting issues of where transference and counter transference come in? Who is the patient trying to recreate themselves as? Their own vision? The vision of their therapist? A vision they gain from a group or society around them?
To return to My Fair Lady, perhaps we can change one of the songs just a little bit to
"The gain in pain is helpful to obtain"
In a discussion where myself and another person were being wished happy birthday, one person noted that so many of the birthday wishes focused on youthfulness. To this, I wrote:
It seems like we live in a culture that values youthfulness more than it values wisdom. Why is that?
Perhaps some of it is the fear of our own mortality. Each year the older we get, we are a year closer to death. As we get older, various parts of the body stop working as well as they used to, which can result in the loss of some pleasures and an introduction of new displeasures. I seem to recall Yalom talking about that in one of his novels and about how if he ever got to a particular difficult impasse, he would ask the patient how the patient would want to be remembered at a funeral. As an aside, this fits nicely into the Pygmalion thread, how do we choose to envision what we would like to be?
So, what about wisdom, or perhaps to use the words from another email, "being old in spirit"? I must admit, it is the wisdom of this group as opposed to any youthful spriteliness that I find so attractive.
Perhaps I am sensitive to this because here in Connecticut a reporter has brought an age discrimination suit against a local television station. The station is alleged to have repeated demoted women when they have gotten into their thirties to have younger, more nubile reporters. Personally, I think our news would be much better with the wisdom of older reporters.
With that, let me return to the emails and again thank everyone who shared birthday wishes. What a wonderful world it would be if we could aspire to the wisdom of older members of this list instead of youthfulness of the 23-year-old female reporters.
