Storytellers, Anonymous

Do you ever wish you could back through time and change things?

Whenever I teach a class in memoir writing, I'm struck by the high degree of emotional honesty of my students.

By that I mean they try very hard to tell their story as they think it occurred, regardless of whether it casts them in a good light or a less than flattering light.

I've often been struck by this -- that people are willing to try so hard to get it right.

What we have at least partially in common with others is our past together. The parts that overlapped between our lives and theirs is our shared history.

Each of us owns a share of that past, and to tell that story, we have to do it in our own way.

Because, of course, story-telling is generally a solitary art form.

There are new, collaborative story-telling models emerging, courtesy of technology, but these remain to be developed in robust enough ways that the traditional model gets broken.

For now, it is me telling our story my way and you telling it your way.

As a writer, I've always been very sensitive to the nuances of how the other person might choose to tell our story as opposed to how I do.

These are boundaries, creatively, that need to be preserved, IMHO.

Then again, when the other person absents herself entirely from the process, choosing silence, I suppose your only choice left is to reflect her POV best you can, as you truthfully try to tell the tale.

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How Many Special Things Happen in a Lifetime?

Here is a link to my oldest son Peter's work on how fruit flies use sunlight to navigate. The only time I (and a friend) visited his lab at Cal Tech is one of my fondest memories.

It is illustrated by my youngest daughter Julia's work on an iPad.

Seeing his research in print is an amazing honor for me, as his Dad. He is not only a talented scientist, but a fine writer. Most important of all, his work matters.

And so does his little sister's. She is trying to establish her voice as an artist.

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Today's News Today

I'm so proud of one of the companies I often work with, Wikipedia, for its leadership today in the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement. There is evidence that what Wikipedia and other leading Internet companies did today will perhaps cause these well-intentioned, but dangerous bills to go back for revision, so that they never get the opportunity to cause much more harm than good.

Which is what would have happened had they been passed and signed into law.

Don't get me wrong. I oppose online piracy, just as fiercely as I oppose all forms of plagiarism. As a lifelong journalist, I have been victimized by plagiarists on a number of occasions. And the content that I constantly create has been stolen by many.

One funny story in this regard is something a former staffer of then Senator Al Gore told someone I know years ago. It seems that Gore had prepared a statement declaring that he had created the concept of a "circle of poison" to describe the process by which banned pesticides from the U.S. were being dumped in Third World countries.

In fact, that phrase was the title of my first book, co-authored with Mark Schapiro. I can assure you that Al Gore had nothing to do with it.

Of course, stealing ideas is not necessarily a crime -- people have done it since time immemorial. And, with the Internet, everything happens at hyperspeed, including the theft of intellectual property.

But SOPA and PIPA are not the right way to deal with piracy, stealing and copyright infringement.

Those of us whose only real assets are our intellectual skills, in the form of the ability to create original content, stand the most to lose from those who poach, and copy and exploit us.

But we also must stand on the front line of free speech, because without it, we wouldn't be creating content. We would be in jail.

My note to our legislative leaders is to try and write legislation that actually addresses real problems in ways that promise real solutions. Do your homework. Don't create sledgehammers to fix problems better attacked with a well-placed pencil lead.

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This Site Is Blocked

In solidarity with the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement, this blog goes dark tonight. We will not post any new content during this Internet-wide protest.

End these legislative intrusions!

Or else, this blog, and many other, much more important communication channels, shall cease to exist permanently.

P.S. Just try to access Wikipedia right now...

Nuances of a Day

The first-ever meeting between the youth teams of the professional San Jose Earthquakes vs. the San Francisco Seals this morning was an entertaining match in blustery western San Francisco.

Bruised up a bit after the game, my player (#16) said he enjoyed the game, which was close, and that the opponents reminded him of a team he'd faced in Europe last summer, also a youth professional development team, that one from Sweden.

Afterwards, I drove down the peninsula for a work meeting as the startup I'm helping prepare for launch approaches D-Day.

Tonight, my daughter came over for a relatively rare evening alone. I prepared edamame, rice and beans, with cheese, and a plate of fresh fruit. When she's the only one eating with me, I'm happily vegetarian, just like her, I find.

It's a pleasing experience for me.

With the boys, I'm a carnivore, not quite a "paleo"-diet fanatic, but we eat a lot of meat-centric meals.

At the end of the evening, after our healthy food, my daughter and I shared a bowl of popcorn while watching one of her favorite TV shows.

Just another day here in our town.

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Awards Night

Awards, trophies, medals, certificates, speeches, applause. It's hard to believe how fast your kid's high school years pass by, so as you watch him being praised and honored by the school's principal, athletic director and his coach for the quality of his play, what's going through your mind is that this is the second to last time you'll ever be able to experience a moment like this.

It's an odd example of not living in the moment. Then, you snap back to your senses, and let out a whoop when he walks to the front of the room. There he is, wearing one of your shirts, and his black beanie, his gold earring and his star tattoo -- his own (young) man, a star in his own right.

After all, this is his night, not yours.

You are the observer.

Afterwards you shake his hand and tell him once again how proud you are of him. Something sits out there, in both of your minds, not yet expressed. It is a vision of the one last season to come, the season where he brings home something much more special to both of you than individual honors.

That would be a city championship, the first for his school in over three decades. For that to happen, he will have to have a breakout senior year, becoming even better at what he is already very good at, and also becoming a leader.

This may be more difficult that it sounds. As one of the few native English speakers on his team, and the only white person, he's always chosen to take a quiet role, in the background, on defense.

But there he is, with the rest, the tallest man in the room, smiling just a bit. Will he be up to the task?

Ask me a year from now. Even though I already think I know the answer.

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Bon Appetit

Among life's best treasures are those moments when somebody really wants to see you, and makes sure you know that. That happened to me today, as my three-year-old buddy and grandson had his Mom message me and find out if I could come over for a "play date."

"Yes."

It's pretty special at any age when somebody invites you on a play date. As I was driving across the bridge to the East Bay, I mused about lots of potential kinds of play dates, before shaking myself back to reality.

As always, I was greeted by my little friend in the most sincere and truly loving way a person can be, and soon we were off, him riding his little bike, me hustling on foot to keep up from behind. To a park, the library (where he selected many more books than we could carry home), and then back to his house for lots of fun games.

At some point in the afternoon, he convinced his Mom to let us all cook Christmas cookies. As we kneaded and flattened the dough, he got out those cookie cutters and started sorting them by name.

Here, I was impressed that his language of choice was French, which for some time now he has more freely and openly been mixing with his English.

First, I heard him say "arbre de Noël," then "étoiles," mainly to himself, then to his Mom and me, "bonhomme de neige."

Next, he came out with "Gingerbread Man," which I'm fairly sure is what a French speaker who have to say also.

Finally, after mumbling "reindeer" under his breath, he came out with "rennes."

It's a wonderful privilege to watch a young child, thoroughly bi-lingual, work out his linguistic choices at a time like that.

Neither his Mom or I could figure out why he suddenly chose French on this occasion, bit we went along with it and reinforced the words as he came out with them.

The cookies, once ready, were quite delicious.

Bon appetit...

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