Buddhist Marketer

The Royal We Interrupts This Program

Can I just say how much I love blueprinting processes and data flows?

That is all.  Back to engineering some raw data.

Google Reader Has Swine Flu!

This isn’t funny, you little piglets.  All my socializing are belong to RSS feeds, thanks to the breakdown of the traditional walking community, family values, and free-market capitalism.

Wise Words From Warren Buffett

I did not read my acquaintance TLoh’s full “Booth Tribe Visits Buffett” post but I did look at the picture and read (most of the) words in boldface.  I liked these, which were words from the lips of one Monsieur Buffett:

I was told you should only work for someone you admire so I decided to work for myself.

Good call, Buffett.

You need reasonable intelligence but really need temperament – to be unaffected with what people are doing or thinking.

I think this is absolutely true not only in terms of investing but also in terms of managing and, most importantly, living.

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

First degree weapons, at that.  R D R R.

[ Related:  Pointing And Laughing Is My Only Recourse ]

Stop Asking Me To Donate To Your Little Walk A Thon

I give money and time to NFPs and don’t mind when they hit me up for donations.  But fundraisers drive me apeshit.  The vast swath of ‘em are ineffectual, wasteful, inefficient, bloated exercises in feelgooder tokenism.

• If you want to give money to a charitable cause, then you give money to a charitable cause
• If you want to trot your ass around town, either by walking, running, biking, or swimming, then you trot your ass around town
• In particular, if you want to try and cure cancer, then may I suggest advocating on behalf of preventative health measures, especially radical shifts in nutritional intake?  Me paying you to waddle around in spandex is about as likely to cure cancer as the mean IQ of callers into C-SPAN suddenly skyrocketing above 100.

Of all the possible avenues for effecting meaningful change in your chosen pet area of giving-a-shit, may I suggest demoting that fundraiser to the bottom of the list?

Click here to donate $1 to my Please Stop It With The Pledge A Thons campaign.

Older Sister Arrested (Again)

My older sister Rahnee (shown in the below picture with Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Illinois’ 9th) was arrested yesterday!  From Mike Dorning on the AP wire [via Chicagoan arrested in DC protest]:

WASHINGTON– A Chicago activist for people with disabilities was arrested at a protest in front of the White House today.

Rahnee Patrick, 35, who has arthritis and psoriasis, said in a phone interview that she handcuffed herself to the White House fence after a meeting with Obama Administration officials to call attention to efforts to get more funding for long-term home care services for disabled people.

The Associated press reported that U.S. Park Police arrested 91 people for violating a regulation that requires demonstrations of more than 25 people outside the White House to gain an advance permit.

Patrick said she was released after being finger-printed on-site.

Unfortunately, I was not able to add “poked little sister in eyeball with wooden spoon in approximately 1980″ to the list of charges.

I tried calling her just now to get a quote but all I could hear was a bunch of chanting and yelling, suggesting that she’s at it again.  Go get ‘em, tiger!

European Mystery-Tolerance vs. American Mystery-Tolerance

My go-to source for All Things Everything, Googlefight suggests that Americans have a higher tolerance for mystery than Europeans.  This, however, is not what Will Leitch suggests in his review of Dave Cullen’s Columbine in the April 27, 2009 ish of New York Magazine [bolding mine]:

Columbine was a rare circumstance, beyond classification or easy explanation. Which is why we struggle so much trying to explain it. This is a uniquely American concept: We require answers and motivations, quickly, even if they’re ultimately wrong. We do not handle mystery and uncertainty well.

Perhaps Leitch’s editor left the support points for the “uniquely American” in a desktop recycle bin.  But it left me doth protesting.  I don’t think Americans are unique in tryng to root out explanations “even if they’re ultimately wrong.”  But you don’t have to take the word of Googlefight or even me; you can take Freddy’s words:

The notecard, which I must have created my junior year in college, is taken from Monsieur Nietzsche:

as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:  — we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.

The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical.

Hmm.  Seems that even Europeans From Back In The Olden Days looked for explanations too, no?

Situational Seeing

My colleague, one painting - marketing - creating - social medienne named CJ Nye, put this on my radar last week.  Her accompanying text read

This, later turned into a book, was the Bible of SVA:

Having just played #1 (of 4), if I weren’t wearing a skirt I’d declare that I just came in my pants.

For those of you who want to try before buying, here’s what the first seven minutes have included so far:

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I coordinate any and all points of the universe wherever I want them to be.

– From a 1923 Dziga Vertov manifesto

Right, right, okay –

Everything around it confirms and consolidates its meaning.

Re: paintings, pre-reproduction, which makes me start to think about self-identity, group identity, branding, yaddi yadz …

The images come to you; you do not come to them.

This is life in a post-reproduction world.  It is self-centered.  It shapes time and space around its own needs.  Which makes me wonder:  would the “innovative financial products” catastrophe have happened in a pre-reproductions’ world? Is man’s domination via machine a domination that comes with a very long boomerang, and has now our domination dominated our thinking so profoundly that we no longer see the detrimental ways in which we are behaving, we no longer see the alienating, destructive forces that our hands and our Excel spreadsheet assumptions render?

Is our way of seeing (self, other, yaddi yadz) itself situational?

Which makes me wonder — can we extract ourself from this “habit of mind”?  Can we undo the way we see the world, or, are we chained to a self-centered, non-pilgrimaging view of the universe?

Ooff, I need to crawl into a dark cave for a while and think about all this.  * sigh *

This Is Just Wrong

As someone whose first job outta the gates was in Fairfield County, Connecticut — home of “Thanks for the credit card; we know you suffer from status quo bias and aren’t gonna cancel this membership, sucka!!!!” direct marketing genii — I can always get behind a contextual cross-sell / up-sell membership club offer.

• Cross-sell / up-sell in line with original offer?
• Credit card opaquely passed to third party on the backend?
• Compelling benefits, err … benefits positioned compellingly?

Oh yeah.  Sign me up for some leather-bound classics, dawg!  I gots a library to outfit with books I’ll never read!

But the funky, amateur-hour, ham-fisted attempt at marketing below makes me want to clench my ba-donk-a-donk in abject marketing shame.  It’s crap like this that makes every Tom, Dick, and Harry think they know marketing.

Now, I know that women aren’t very good at math, but all the more reason to clarify your numbers.  $20?  $40?  $215?  $100?  What is this, a federal stimulus package?

Of course, you know that with train-wreck marketers driving the Frederick’s of Hollywood marketing engine, I’ll never unsubscribe from their list.  Who knows what glorious tragedies await me?  Kind of adds a nice sprinkle of humanity amongst all the spot-on marketing coming out of the Starwood hotel chain peeps.

Hooray for trashy lingerie peddlers!

[ Related:  The Liberation Of My Inner New York City Housewife ]

Facebook Status Updates’ Week-In-Review

Most Thumbs Up

• gets irked when she clicks on “Management Team” and sees a flock of white dudes [7]
• thinks a funny toilet paper theme song would be, “I wipe big butts and I cannot lie!” [7]

Most Comments

1. thinks that chastising Miss California for speaking her truth, no matter how 1982, is the fast track to conformist groupthink. Honest, open conversations only happen in spaces sans fear. And if you disagree with me then U R DUM. ;) [15]
2. can never tire of Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 and Souls of Mischief’s ‘93 Til Infinity [10]
3. gets irked when she clicks on “Management Team” and sees a flock of white dudes [8]

It has been decided that there will be a link underneath “Management Team” on my theoretical future company theoretical web site reading “Douchebags”.  Said page will contain rev-share options for, um, feminine hygiene products.

Perhaps by then my campaign for no-taxes-on-tampons will have been met with success.

Bye byyyye

Why I Stay In The Dorms During Reunion

It’s as if crawling into those dorm rooms is a crawling-back-into-the-lap-of-my-younger-self. Which is odd. I was lost then, so why am I looking for her?  Maybe it is my looking now that guided her then — if you believe in that sort of thing.

In this industrial strength desk drawer — behind this oversized armoire door — am I expecting to find a narnia, an indigo arc of light reaching towards me?  As if in a dorm room I can seal my eyes, inhale the scent of campus, bathe in the lightshaft and encounter my former self.  Long-haired and soft in the face from the all-you-can-eat dining halls.  Barricaded from the world by books and the fuzz of shoegazer music and a sleep cycle that put me at odds with attending any class held during daylight hours.

It is into this space that I wish to reach, this girl that I wish to bring to my chest, nuzzle her scalp and tell her to keep underlining those passages in Kierkegaard, in Koestler, in Kafka.  Please leave the breadcrumbs for the future so I have some idea as to how to find my way back.  Because after the trials and the darkness at noon, after the castles of fear and trembling, there are tomorrows, there is light, and love, and bottomless contentedness.  There is me.  Here I am.

And perhaps it’s this dream of more-than-nodding-with my former self that brings me to the dorms, her plastic mattresses, her soap-formed Y.  This is, maybe, what Yale is and was to me, an unfolding expansive watercolor of selves, of chance meetings, of dreams.

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Register here for the 9Y9 ten year.