Buon Appetito

1. Catch the momentum.

2. Challenge the audience.

3. Don’t show and don’t tell.

4. Create subtext.

5. Break the pattern.

6. Empathy is stronger than sympathy.

7. Make your own black bean burritos.

You might naturally think this is a ‘which one of the above is not like the others’ test, but it’s not. It is a recapitulation of my notes prior to the start of this post. I do that on a daily basis as a way of editing my real-time borderline unreadable cursive notes to see if I might have left them standing in the rain. Needing a ride to their destination. This, ‘where were we?’ moment connects the past of ‘thinking out loud’ to ‘getting it down’ with the present reality of pushing a project, pulling a tangent idea or mashing the ‘best of’ in an altogether new way. In the above example, the first six were scribbled notes taken from an on-line instructional video on film editing, one of my favorite topics. As you may have guessed by now the seventh was simply what I was eating as I watched and a note to self that I could build a better burrito given adequate motivation and proper incentive. As a footnote, I learned through this process last night that I can watch, learn, eat and take notes, all without indigestion or dripping hot sauce on my notepad or keyboard. Little victories!

Things on today’s to-do list, updated just prior to the start of the post:

1. Finish the interview stage set up, hang lights, calibrate and test. 

2. Prepare outlines for the ten guest speakers in their respective areas of commentary. 

3. Create tomorrows set-list for spin class. 

4) Vacuum the living room and kitchen.

5. Go shopping and get gas. 

6. Prep for tomorrows start of house (and dog) sitting assignment. 

7. Move to Sicily. 

Too easy? Not hardly. The seventh, the most unlike the others, represents an opportunity so unlike them that they aren’t even in the same galaxy, let alone neighborhood. Items one through six will all get done today, with as much present moment awareness, grace and gratitude that I can bring to them. But move to Sicily? Mamma Mia. If you have been following along all these many years, you know that I have traveled to Italy several times, speak enough Italian to get a good local meal, bottle of wine and inquire to the location of the nearest museum, train station, concert hall or bicycle criterium. To be even more accurate, the reason I am here writing today is a direct result of my failure to attract 50,000 US dollars in 1996 and return to the Le Marche region and buy the 17th century former grain mill we had visited with local realtor in tow. Or because our magnificent plan to open and operate Cultura Italiana Ai Molini (CIAMO) outside of Venice ended prematurely due primarily to start up funding being woefully inadequate. That was in 1999. And here we sit twenty years later investigating the $1 offer from the tiny town of Bivona, Sicily to move there and do some repairs on the crumbling infrastructure of houses left to decay by three generations of Sicilians looking for fame, fortune or upward mobility. Here is the link. 

Mixing the cultural metaphor today, it appears that fate has picked both the meal and the location in which to enjoy it. 

Today’s special is black-bean burritos in Sicilia. Buon Appetito.