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Also last weekend, I went, with much anticipation, to get my hair cut and hilighted.
What. A. Disaster.
This is one very horrible part of moving all the time. I hate having to find new stylists all the time! (Note: if you’re in Montreal, go to SMOG – Laura is the best I’ve ever found.) Of course, recommendations are the best way to go and I try to do that, but as I discovered last weekend, even if the chick does a fantastic job on your friend’s hair (which is why I asked for the referral in the first place) there is no guaranteed that she won’t screw up yours. Which is what happened. Both cut and colour are horrid – my bangs are atrocious looking (on one side they’re only 2 inches long?!), when I put it in a ponytail I look like an idiot, and she lopped off too much length in general. It’s the worst cut I’ve ever had. But it gets worse. Yes, I agreed to some brown-with-a-hint-of-red low-lights… I’ve done it before and it was great… but these are chunks and the colour is disgusting… and there’s so much of it! Have you ever seen anything grosser?!
I almost pulled a Britney Spears. But I’m hoping this mess can be saved instead of shaved. Hair is so important… I feel so ugly!
This goes in the BLTN (Better Late Than Never File)… These are my thoughts from last weekend’s blogging conference which is, come to think of it, where I must have caught this nasty bug that has knocked me out the past couple of days. I think I may have single-handedly caused the Kleenex stock to rise today! Wait… Kleenex isn’t made in China, right? 
That title is specially for (my)Rob, by the way. He bugs me all the time. Funny, I don’t really think of myself as a “blogger” per se, after all, I’ve only been doing this a couple months, but I get awful defensive for some reason. What you may not know is that I originally started this blog as an excuse to learn WordPress, as we are using it to set up a couple of corporate blogs at work. But I’ve gotten into it and had some good feedback from friends & fam who enjoy the pictures and silly stories and so I’ll probably keep it up for a good bit. Even if Rob calls me dorky. Secretly, I think he likes the limelight.
So anyway. The blogging conference. When Duane told me about a blogging conference called Northern Voice going on in Vancouver, and then told me I get a t-shirt out of it, I said, Giggedy-giggedy, where do I sign up?!? Ok fine, I did not really say that. But I did think to myself that this was a great opportunity to learn a little bit more about blogging.
Just an aside: I didn’t tell any non-work people that I was going because a) I thought they wouldn’t be too interested, and b) they would think I was dorky. And to the latter, I felt a little miffed. Blogging isn’t dorky… it’s just writing a journal that other people can read… And besides, everyone’s doing it! So how come people still think it’s dorky? Well, because of things like this ——————>
That’s the logo/mascot that was created for the conference. Talk about perpetuating the stigma. I mean, can this guy get any dorkier??
Anyway, the conference had its highlights (Anil Dash did a great keynote and Travis Smith did a highly informative and entertaining session on Citizen Journalism) and its lowlights (a couple attendees blowing hot air about their oh-so-great blogs… one guy mentioned in THREE separate sessions about how he filters through 1200 sources every day for his blog… <me rolling my eyes>).
I have to say, as I sat in that gorgeous lecture hall at UBC, I couldn’t help getting all misty-eyed and sentimental about my own university days – sitting in a lecture hall, being blown away by profs like Ron Glasberg and my all-time fave, Fabio Lopez-Lazaro (absolutely brilliant, brilliant men). So as I was mentally reliving those days, my gaze fell upon all the other people in the room and I was soon distracted from my lovely thoughts by their glowing computer screens. I swear, every third or fourth person had their laptops open during the presentation, and only one that I saw was taking notes. The rest were reading or writing email, looking for stuff on YouTube, filling out their Twitter boxes, scrolling through Flickr photos, reading other blogs or writing yet another post to their own.
What the heck?!? Was this an exception just because there were a bunch of tech-savvy bloggers in the room or…
…is this what goes on in the hallowed halls of today’s universities?
(Image at left courtesy of Duane)
How on earth do these people actually hear what is being presented or discussed if they’re all in their own little bubbles. And more importantly, if you have better things to do than sit there and listen to the presentation, then why are you there?! I don’t care how great people say they are at multitasking, the fact is that when you’re doing more than one thing at once (depending on what it is, of course… here we’re talking about communication – listening to someone talking and writing/reading at the same time), the quality of one of your communications is going to suffer. That’s the sad fact of the matter. Is it so hard to stop everything you’re doing and just listen? I wonder how many problems out there in the world would be solved if we just did that one little thing.
If you’re in university or know someone who is, leave a comment and enlighten us – I for one am dying to know what the inside of today’s lecture halls looks like. Laptops everywhere? Or do some people still use good ol’ pen & paper?
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t know music. And those that don’t will learn quickly:
You: So what do you like to listen to?
Me: Um…. er… uh… NKOTB?
You: What?
Me: NKOTB. You know, NKOTB.
You: What the hell are you talking about?
Me: You know, NKOTB… New Kids on the Block..?
You: Ha, ha. Good one. No, seriously.
Me: ...uh… Seriously. I guess… No wait, lemme think… Hmm, I do like that one song, who’s it by…? You know, it goes, La La La…
Ok. So maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration (trying to save face here). I know what I like but I can never for the life of me remember songs or singers that I like. Except for Feist – but that’s because she’s my all-time FAVE and because it’s been almost 2 years now since Marty P introduced me to her (and ok fine, because it’s the only CD that I had sitting in my player at home for the loooongest time).
So you should be very very proud of me that I’ve remembered the following. Rob met with some guy from Universal Music last week (cool, I know) who gave him a couple CDs which he brought home for me to listen to. Most were crap (hey, at least it’s free crap) but one of them wasn’t. It was my new favorite CD! So here’s my plug for Shiny Toy Guns. Awesome. Love it. Go listen to it. (Link to song clips – I like You Are the One). And remember, this coming from the girl who never remembers band names (i.e. so it must be phenomenal… Forget I said anything about NKOTB. Unless you’re Joe McIntyre, in which case, I still love you Joey… call me!).
The secret was buried….
The secret was coveted….
The secret was supressed…
And with these overly dramatic statements (whispered, no less) begins the film that is sweeping the nation: The Secret.
Watch the preview of The Secret.
I first heard about The Secret in December. Rob & I had some friends over and I was actually talking with someone about something completely different when my ears perked up and tuned into a conversation going on across the room. Jurgen was talking to Mike about this amazing film that he had heard about I think through someone who worked at Lululemon (they’re all about that spiritual stuff over there). I didn’t get a chance to ask him much about it but before they left I said to Jurgen, let me know how it is, I’d like to borrow it from you.
Well I sort of forgot about it until the first week of February when I was at work searching for something or other via Google and totally randomly came across some website which mentioned that Oprah would be talking about the Secret on her Feb 8th show. What a coincidence (or was it? more on that later). Not knowing much about it but somehow feeling that it was important, I emailed almost everyone I knew and told them to watch the show.
I’ve since watched the Oprah show on it, seen the actual film The Secret, watched the follow-up Oprah show (the reaction to the secret) and the Larry King episode featuring it, read numerous reviews and thoughts on it and related theories, and am reading the book now.
It’s been fascinating.
I have to say, my initial reaction to learning Oprah would be covering it was disappointment and an immediate skepticism. We all know Oprah’s show often panders to the masses. Although I do believe that she as a person is authentic and good with good intentions, the show, at the end of the day, is a money-maker like all the rest. And so whatever goodness she intends to impart sometimes gets watered down with nauseating ‘real-life’ anecdotes. For me, the film itself (The Secret) does the exact same thing.
I do believe there is real truth in this idea. The trick is to disregard all the ridiculous promises and hype and focus on the truths.
The path to Success has never been an easy one. People looking for a short-cut may think they’ve found it in The Secret; after all, a first glance, it sure does sound fairly easy – just picture what you want, visualize it, and it will come true. Unfortunately, there are a few stupid anecdotes used in the film that support this shortcut view, baby food that is inserted, I think, to satisfy those wide-eyed believers who need to be spoonfed easy-to-chew ideas.
The one that comes to mind is the example of the boy who wanted a red bicycle so he cuts out a picture of it from a magazine and concentrates really, really hard and –poof!– is rewarded with the bike. The truth is, no matter how much you visualize something, it is not going to “manifest” (boy, do they ever use that word a lot) until you get off your butt and do something about it. There is an interesing little rant that I found on how the “magical thinking” part of The Secret is pure bullshit, which explains it quite well. And the saddest realization is that sometimes, no matter how much you visualize and how much you work for it and how bady you want it, you still can’t have what you dream of. There is evidence of this everywhere, from the would-be American Idols (who visualize their heads off) to the starving children in Africa (for whom no amount of visualization will make food and clean water materialize).
Another dangerous aspect of The Secret which is all-too-easy to simplify and therefore, misinterpret, regards the Law of Attraction. The proponents of the theory say that “everything that’s coming into your life, you are attracting into your life. And it’s attracted to you by virtue of the images you hold in your mind.” On the one hand, I believe that this is true to a certain extent, in that if you are projecting a positive attitude (good karma and all that) then yes, people will be more receptive to you and things will seem to fall into place. However, it’s too easy to take this too far.
How can it be that the person who crashed their car, was robbed, raped or otherwise ill-treated, was actually attracting these things to them? I for sure am not the first one to pose this question and the philosphophers have tried to explain it away: they say that when you think “I don’t want to crash my car”, the Universe only hears “crash my car” and not the “I want” or “I don’t want”. This is one of the lamest things I’ve ever heard. I doubt I have to explain why.
This idea that you attract everything in your life then is, of course, applied to money. And here’s the one moment in the film which infuriated me, courtesy of Bob Proctor (job title: “Philosopher”) who, in his pompous way states matter-of-factly:
“Why do you think that 1% of the population earns around 96% of all the money that’s being earned? D0 you think that’s an accident? That’s no accident. It’s designed that way. They understand something. They understand the sercret and you are being introduced to the secret.“
Which brings us to the biggest danger of all when it comes to The Secret. It is too easy and too tempting to think of this as a way to get more money easily, quickly, and with no work. Indeed, in the film, they keep saying, “picture yourself in that car, walking through your dream house”, basically, having all that money – and it can be yours. Why, oh why, does it always have to come down to money??? There are so many other things in life which we should be striving for.
I am convinced that the Universe, God, Allah, Buddha, the Force – whatever you call it – MUST have better things to do than grant you a parking space every time you envision one (as David Schirmer in the film ridiculously recounts) or make sure you have your dream car or house. I think that the Universe, or God, has nothing against you earning these things if they make you happy because at the end, that’s what it’s about, living a full and happy life – but you cannot have true happiness and fulfillment when it is not balanced.
There was a fantastic reference to this idea at the very end of the second Oprah show on this (The Reaction to the Secret) and I wish it would have been included in the film itself as well. I hope people paid attention to it nonetheless because I found it so important. It is this:
Real “wealth” is well-being in the 5 key areas of your life: financial, relational, intellectual, physical, spiritual.
I stand behind this and wish that more people would think about it. Indeed, there has been some talk that The Secret is just another prosperity theology. As I’ve said before, I think people forget or choose not to focus on things that are non-mercenary. Like kindness.
There’s actually a whole other post I could do just about this. Maybe I will one day. In the meantime, if you’re interested, check out these excellent resources:
The Secret: Prosperity Theology’s Moral Problems – The eBay atheist blog
Does God Want You To Be Rich? – Time Magazine (Sept 10, 2006)
*****
I do think that there are real truths within the Secret – the non-mercenary truths. If your goals are to attract love, attract goodness, and give back love and goodness to your community and to our world, then those I consider to be worthy goals.
And so here are the parts that resonated with me. They feel true, they feel right and they make sense.
It is important to visualize what you need in your life – in the pre-Secret era, they called this having a goal. There are countless self-help books out there touting the absolute necessity of this idea, and I believe it because I can relate to it in my own personal experiences. When you are floating around, unsure of where to go or what you want or how to change things, that is when you stagnate and it seems like there is nothing positive in your life, and you don’t grow.
It is important to think positively. We all know or have known people in our lives who radiate self-confidence. Think about those people for a moment… aren’t they the ones who seem to get the great work projects or positions, who have the most interesting friends, and who always seem to be doing something amazing that you’d also like to do? The Secret adherents say, “You can have, do or be anything you want” which I think is taking it to extemes, but if you are positive, and realistic, then you really can reach for the stars. And even if you don’t reach the star you were aiming for and instead land on another one, that’s okay. The joy is in the journey, or at least, it should be, and we are here to learn.
It is important to have gratitude, and lots of it. I feel incredibly lucky to have learned this in my own life so early on. Again, there are lots of self-help books out there which already explain this ad nauseum (the one that comes to mind is Simple Abundance, which I am sure you have seen dozens of times at Chapters) and I excerpts of a few of them. For me though, I have to admit that the significance of this simple truth didn’t hit home until I actually saw it in real life, in my relationship with Rob. In consistently thanking me for every big and little thing I did for him or for us, he showed me the immense power of gratitude and how having gratitude does bring, or “attract” more good things to you – in seeing his gratefulness, I was compelled to do even more for him… and I think this is one way in which the “Law of Attraction” (or whatever you end up calling it) works.
*****
If you’ve gotten this far – thanks and congratulations. I know this got a bit long-winded, but this is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile and I just had so much to say. There’s still so much to say, I could go on and on. So if you thought this was interesting or want to talk more, let me know. I am so curious to know what my friends and family think of all this.
*****
The shows discussing The Secret are available on YouTube, and I’ve collected the links for you below (the actual movie was there also in its entirety but has since been removed – if you want to see it, let me know as I have a copy).
Oprah – The Secret (Feb 8, 2007)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Oprah – The Reaction to the Secret (Feb 19, 2007)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Larry King Live – The Secret (Nov 3, 2006)
Part 1 Part 2
Here’s just a small part of the film, The Secret.
From our visit Friday:
What you said