Miss Charlotte’s Babblings

About ten years ago, I was privileged to visit the Statue of Liberty while accompanying my daughter’s high school drama class on a New York trip.  I can say that experience was one of standing on holy ground, with a deep silence and reverence that ignored the line of people waiting to walk up the stairs and and the others wandering around the grounds.

Looking up from Miss Liberty’s feet, I truly felt the numinous presence beyond the physical. This copper and steel representation of the spirit of freedom is only a physical focus of a much larger idea. The vital energy that flows through the American spirit resonates in this image.

When I read to day in the Reuters article that the Crown area of the Statue was to reopen to visitors on July 4th, unaware that the statue was closed after 9/11, I felt a sense of joy that we can again be in her presence. I have noticed in recent years how many movies have scenes based around this symbol, which indicates to me that we are concerned as a nation, about the underlying values of our country as represented by our symbols.  Flag waving has so often been a cover for questionable activities that I sometimes feel disquiet instead of pride when I see the stars and stripes.

But our goddess prevails, and on our birthday, she will be opened to us again. I hope that we as a nation will be able to get a new perspective from the crown chakra and transpersonal point  of our national goddess.

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About a month ago, I bought a copy of Making a Good Brain Great and began reading about Daniel Amen’s research on brain imaging and how brain function affects thinking and behavior. His research is relatively new, starting in the 90s, and now spanning over 50,000 brains of average people and people with behavioral and mental problems.

His research looks at activity levels in six major areas of the brain:

• the prefrontal cortex – planning, forethought, judgment, impulse control, expression
• the temporal lobes – language, reading social cues, short term memory, music, recognition of objects, insight and spiritual experiences
• the basal ganglia – integrates thought, feelings and movements, sets  body’s idle speed, anxiety and stress
• the cerebellum – motor coordination, walking, posture, processing speed, thought coordination,  makign adjustments in thinking and emotional response
• the anterior cingulate gyrus – cognitive flexibility, changing from one idea to another, goal setting, cooperation
• the deep limbic system – mood, emotional memory and bonding

What is interesing about his work is that both overstimulation  and understimulation of one or more areas can cause problems.  He uses a questionnaire to help a discover what areas are out of balance, before recommending a brain activity scan.  He recommends foods for brain health, including wild caught fish and excluding caffeine, brain building exercises like learning to juggle, and various supplements that may stimulate or relax certain areas.

In my case, a number of areas tend to stay overstimulated. He calls that The Ring of Fire in another of his books, Magnificent Mind at Any Age.  That means that most of the areas are over-firing, over stimulated, and that it is hard for me to on the one hand to get focused on one thing, and once I do, it’s hard for me to change gears. It’s a recipe for being overwhelmed much of the time, having too many ideas and not staying focused long enough to follow through on any of them.

I am making changes in my diet to eliminate the sugars, gluten and dairy products that make me wired and tired, along with caffeine. And I have started a round of Dr. Amen’s Neuro-Link, a supplement of amino acids and vitamins that is supposed to help regulate brain function without side effects. It contains  B6, L-tyrosine, GABA, L-glutamine, inositol, taurine and 5-HTP.  Years back, I read a similar book that suggested these amino acids and vitamins as a cure for depression, a way to stop taking antidepressants. It seemed to work then, but the combination was hard to find and expensive, as I had to purchase each separately.

This combination seems to be working, not in a brilliant flash of light kind of way, but in allowing reduced resistance to making changes that help me manage my life.  It has been much easier for me to do some  meal planning and to be more satisfied with the foods that are healthy rather than the  cheese and bread comfort foods of my childhood. I am more willing to make healthy changes and to think ahead rather than just muddling though and letting the chips fall. Given my current state of health and obesity, muddling through isn’t working.

I am aware of the placebo effect of any new activity or supplement, so I will give this a few months and see how it goes. The real test will be if I can put into action all the information I’ve been learning in the last year that has been just too much to get done. Find out more with these books:

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I started this blog to learn how to do marketing over the Internet, and I have been a slow learner indeed.  Yet it has not all been for naught.

The techniques I have been studying for online marketing are helping to put my day job website a bit higher on the Google charts–even made the top once for long enough to take a screen shot and email it to the college president. I think the site is working, as we put up a form for a special tour yesterday, and three or four people have already signed up. That means that they saw it and were interested.

My goal for my work is to attract 30 new students by May first, people who can enroll in June, people who have the grades for the proper coursework already completed.  Then I will work on attracting 30 more for Fall quarter in October, and another 30 for next January.

I had an interesting conversation with a marketing salesman who does not get the college model. He offered to cut his $4000 price to $2500 (was it worth $4000 to begin with?) and then to split it over 30 days.   I had to explain to him that we had just enrolled a smaller class than we hoped for,  were working on a budget that Ronco couldn’t slice any finer, and that we would not get any new students until June. It was not like we would be able to sell enough widgets over the 30 days to make up the difference.

He also kept telling me how he would put our ads on high traffic sites that would bring us targeted traffic. I wonder what sites he had in mind? Where do chiropractor wannabes hang out?

I have good traffic, over 7000 visits a month (down from November), and a very small but high ticket niche–people who want to be doctors of chiropractic. The price is more than $100k spread out over nearly four years. Nearly all the students have student loans. This is graduate school, and we re not looking for 5000 students a year, but only 500.

They don’t come just from the local area, but from 15 states and several other countries.  They are in their late 20s to early 40s, 60% male, 40% female,  equal mix of married and single, although the single ones often marry each other.

They have to like and be successful in  the sciences–biology, chemistry and physics–to learn the anatomy and physiology required to do chiropractic effectively, and they have to have an entrepreneurial mindset to be able to run their own practice or market themselves to sports teams, wellness clinics or other venues. They will always be educating their patients away from the pain relief model to wellness care, and to work against the prejudice that chiropractors are whack-em-crack-em quacks.

But I only need 500 a year, not 5000, and there are a lot of people on the Internet. We’re on youtube,  facebook and myspace, linked to a lot of our current students and alumni. We twitter and blog– even our president tweets now and again–and I’m starting some hubpages as soon as I get some picutures ready.

Seems doable.

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Yesterday I made my third tutorial video,  for my new blog How To Paint Acrylic, and I am starting to get the hang of it, even though it’s not production quality yet.  This is my setup on my desk by my front window in what used to be the dining room of my house.l

My video camera rig and desktop studio

The video is a tutorial for how to paint acrylic still life, and the set up and partially completed painting and palette is shown along with my neighbor’s garage.  My daughter has a nice Lumix camera that even took clear image of the screen on the window, which you can’t see here, of course, in this low resoultion shot.  The blue masking tape on the top of the light holds the web cam in the center of the light, where I took out the magnifying lens.  I can change the focus both manually by moving the arm on the lamp, and on the camera, although it just isn’t designed to be closer than 4 feet from the subject.  But it’s a learning experience.

Here’s what I learned:

1. Plan the video with some kind of outline – even if you write a whole script
2. Paintings do not follow a script. Go with the flow.
3. Get a USP microphone and narrate as you go. Putting in voice-over later takes three times as long
4. Shoot short segments – stop the camera every five minutes and take a short break. It lets you assess what to do next, and YouTube does not like long videos.
5. Be okay with less than perfection…aim high, but accept less while you are learning.

Now to get the hang of uploading the segments. It appears that you can’t do anything else while uploading. Maybe the dishes will get washed today after all!

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Why is there so much information about building relationships online with customers? Maybe it’s because we have forgotten or never learned how to build relationships face to face, how to make new friends, how to find our tribe. For those of us ho are still waiting for the mothership to come back, online is often friendlier than local-brick-and-mortar.

With so many ways to communicate, and so many people and companies wanting our attention, it is hard to know whom to trust unless we actually know the person.  Yet as anyone who has been through a divorce can tell, even knowing a person for a long time may not let us know who that person is, or who he or she has become in the time we have been acquainted. Lovers and friends lose touch, grow in different ways, and move on.

I have come to use Amazon.com for a lot of my shopping–enough to have gained two “gift” cards.  Part of that relationship came from saving money on books for grad school, but some of it was because Amazon offers other items that I want–like 11WW shoes.   Barnes & Noble is my coffeeshop of choice only 2 miles from my house, and I often buy books there, but I don’t get the same kind of choices at the local store or at BN.com that I do at Amazon.

Why pay full price to order a book from my local bookstore, when I can get a discount online that makes the purchase cheaper even when shipping is added?

Amazon is my convenience store. That’s the basis of the relationship. I use reviews on Amazon to promote my name in cyberspace, hoping one day soon to have my novel for sale there.  I can’t sell my stuff on BN.com.  

But Amazon is not my friend.  I don’t take Amazon out for lunch, though I do try to make a few nickels by promoting their stuff.   I don’t ask Amazon if my new hair color is right for me, or if I really should try a different style.  It’s cheaper in many cases, and offers things that my local stores in Spartanburg, SC just don’t carry.  But I go to Amazon when I am looking for something in particular, not to shop for the sake of shopping.

Amazon got my business by having what I wanted at the price I wanted to pay and by making it easy to find without smacking me in the face with hardsell copy. Attraction marketing builds relationship, both the kind of softsell attraction copywriting and percieved value information, and the kind of attraction that comes from raising one’s own vibration away from poverty consciousness.

Recently I added an affiliate link for my college to make a few extra bucks in these slim times. If you would like to support chiropractic education when you are shopping, go here first: http://www.sherman.edu/amazon/

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This time last year I decided that I needed to join the intern program that was offered at the time (now closed) by James Brausch. I felt that I was treated like pond scum by the Brausch minions, and I was kicked out of the program, but I learned some things that I needed to know.

Today I got some information that lets me know that it was worth it. It gives me hope.

My brother is unemployed, has had drug problems since he came back from Vietnam in 1975, and now at 55, he is too ill to work construction as he has done for the last 30 years–long standing effects of smoking, breathing mildew, concrete dust, asbestos, and using crystal meth and cocaine.  He can’t pass a background check of any kind, and my mom has been supporting him for several years since the last time he got out of prison. He does pickup work for people–fixing and building decks, doing yard work–he is a good carpenter and all-around handyman, but he can’t work 40 hours a week, especially in wet, cold weather. He has no transportation, and must rely on the bus system–not handy for carrying construction tools.

My brother is now able to sell his original songs on his own CDs when he goes downtown to play his guitar in the bus station, and from his website (MarkHenley.info),  his mySpace page, and he is listed on iTunes (search Mark Henley Heart Songs. I didn’t master the original CD, but I did the artwork for the jewelcase, the website, and the uploading of the product. I even fronted the money (less than $100) to get the CD produced and ready to publish, along with 15 CDs for him to sell. He’s not making even three figures a month, much less five or six,  but he does have the means to make a little money from doing something he loves, singing and playing his guitar.

If I could get my brother online–paying for him to have internet access and a decent computer with a minicam is out of the question at this point –he could do what needs to be done to market his work on his own. That might help him with his unemployability problem. He could make some grocery money at least online.

He might even be able to get some gigs playing the spiritual songs he is beginning to write. If James Brausch can overcome drug addiction and homelessness–I don’t know if he also has a habitual felon rap–then maybe my brother can too. I’m glad I know how to help him.  James Brausch’s business is now going by the name Diego Norte, so you might want to go there and see what he is up to these days. Or you might check out his blog.

Thank you, James.

Tags: Internship, Mentors, Thanks!, redesign life // 2 Comments »

It’s just over a week before Thanksgiving, and I have buds opening on an apaganthus plant by my back door. Aka Nile Lily, this flower has blue, lily shaped flowers that radiate from a central stem. They don’t bloom in November.

Perhaps the plant is confused about the weather, but it has been the usual near freezing at night and mid 60s on the sunny days, so that seems unusual. Another plant I bought at the same time has already bloomed and has an interesting, star-shaped end on a stalk, where I assume it already bloomed.

I hope the plant doesn’t freeze before it blooms. It is close to the house and the concrete driveway that absorbs solar heat during sunny days, which might be enough for it to open up. It’s a perennial, so its green leaves are still feeding its roots, whether it blooms or not.

It makes me happy to see it, because I feel like I am blooming in the autumn of my life. I hope I won’t be too afraid to open up, even though I might get a cold reception. My roots are strong, and there is always spring coming, one way or another.

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I have not looked at the election results yet this morning–another case of ignorant bliss, guilty as charged. I’ll know in a few minutes who won, yet I am at peace regardless of the outcome.

The president elect has many challenges to deal with, but at least neither of them has spawned a sitcom. No one is laughing at either of the presidential candidates, though many rumors and comedy sketches abound. No one is accusing either McCain or Obama of stupidity or of riding on the family’s coattails.

How lucky we are to live in a society that can change government without violence, where the biggest complaint about election day is the long lines. I went to the polls when they opened, and waited for an hour, but my daughter went after lunch and had only two people in front of her.

Of course, part of the reason for that is the low turnout in most years. I heard yesterday that in some years the list of voters did not fill the first page in my precinct–only 50 names to a page.  But yesterday, three first-time voters, young African-Americans were applauded for their excercise of their rights.  A woman in my office voted for the first time yesterday, as she felt that she needed to protect her rights as an “old” person–she is 50.  I envy her that she has both of her parents, to whom she looks for guidance, discussing how she should vote with her father.  My  mom and I are on different sides of the middle, but we can still talk about the people and the issues and agree to disagree.

The system works, despite greasy wheels, monkey wrenches and the occasional wooden shoe (sabot) in the gears. It’s easy to forget about a machine, like the refrigerator, when it works all the time. YEt it needs the maintenance of working the gears, whether with a pencil and paper ballot, a mechanical lever or an electronic touch system.

I’ll check the news in a few minutes. Either way, I’ll be at peace with the answer.  Unless we can each feel the peace within, there won’t ever be peace without.

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My boss is 5 years older than my daughter. She’s sweet, a young mother witt an adorable toddler, a loving husband and a great sense of how to soften my often blunt comments.  She’s the head of PR, and she was not born when I graduated from college.  She’s a joy to work with. She listens to my suggestions and then  makes a decision about what we need to do.

For many boomers, it’s bound to happen.  Any change to a new job is likely to change the hierarchal structure that so many of us expect, but it’s not so common any more for the person  on the top of the org chart to be the oldest fart in the building.

The president of my college is a bit older, but still young enought to be my child. He is sharp though, and like many Gen-Xers, more willing to work with people instead of commanding or browbeating them. I came in on Saturday to make a short presentation to our board of trustees. Now, I am on salary and “exempt” so that means i don’t get overtime for this kind of thing. I’m new to the college and the board needs to know what we are doing differently with the website. It was not a problem.

On Monday I got a hand-written thank you note from the President. not only did he thank me for showing up on a Saturday, he praised what I said. I really feel valued. This is so different from the experiences I have had in the past. Maybe it’s just because I don’t work for the state anymore.

But if this is how the world may shift as we Boomers get out of the way and let the Gen-X and Millennials take over, I’m all for it. Right on.

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Watch it. Listen.  Do it.  While you still can….

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