Heartcrossings

The afternoon of the Sandy Hook shooting, I was working from home. When J came home, I was sitting on the stairs and crying - it had been over an hour and I could not stop until I had hugged my baby. Never felt so grateful to have a day end normally and have my family still intact. It was an unnerving experience. When DB came home, we talked about empathy, perspective and the anxieties of parenthood. He suggested that I stop watching the coverage of the event and try to think about it in context of the atrocities on children around the world - in my home country. Not to minimize the loss of life, the shattered innocence of childhood and the real concern of something like this happening in our own community; but getting a real sense of the denominator would help reduce the pain I was feeling. It was good advice. Then a few days later, I read the news of the woman gang raped in a Delhi bus and of her subsequent death . Being on vacation at the time, I did not catch most of the news cov...

I don't need this kind of help with keeping my daily calorie intake in order One of my Twitter buddies recently joked that the ideal fitness device will be a neck collar that monitors the food going down your throat and then chokes you when you hit your calorie limit. A temporary amnesia inducing device that will make me forget where I have my stash of dark chocolate would be far more helpful. In our household DB and I have the sweet tooth but J not so much. If I want to ration my chocolate, I hand the bar over to J and have her dole out the portions. She can make a bar of chocolate stretch a very, very long time - to the point that I lose my craving. Sadly, she does not have a super secret location to hide away the supplies. S o sometimes when I am at home alone, I have exceeded my ration by quite a bit. She takes her role as the chocolate police very seriously and a very dim view of s uch behavior - the need for a lock and key has been brought up several times. Tradi...

We were looking for an interesting spot for brunch a few weeks ago and I found something on Yelp that sounded just perfect. The place had great ratings and the reviews were uniformly positive on all counts . But when we reached there, to our dismay the establishment had boarded up door s and w indow s . It was pretty late in the morning and J was very hungry - the leisurely pace of the morning had been jolted as we rushed as fast as we cou ld to find someplace to eat. The experience made me wonder if I should even trust the reviews on Yelp anymore. Looks like one restaurant has found an answer to that question .

Client I have been working with off and on for the past year is a good old fashioned company with a very traditional pro d uct . The marketing team has decided to get into the social media business guns blazing. They have hired a small army of social media experts to help them out - the median age of this population is about twenty two. That of the customers they hope to serve is closer to fifty.  How this recipe is set up for success is not to clear to anyone but no one can question the zeal of the social media team. They are on everything from Facebook to Foursquare to Pintrest to everything in between. Decorative lederboards with success mile-markers are everywhere around the social media work space. Yet, the sales team will tell you social media is doing absolutely nothing for them - there are no numbers to prove that statement wrong either.  This Wired article is a great example of where social media and an old school business can have effective partnership. The prem...

Read The Waste Land after many years today. The first few lines were like meeting a dear friend after many years. So familiar and undiminished APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers The part about feeding a little life with dried tubers has changed in meaning for me. Indeed April was the cruellest month once and made me want to seek shelter in the anonym ous bla ndness o f Winter - a time of limited need or want. D ried tubers ke pt me a live but never qu ite fed the soul . In ti me April wo u ld not be so cruel any more. Memory could mix w ith desire and not t urn i nto p ain . In today's reading, these lines made me pause, r ead again and wonder about the many way in which to thin k about the m yster ious t h ird on the other side of you. Who is the third who walks a...