Don’t fly standby.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw - William Maxwell, author of ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’
Don’t place question marks where God put a period.
People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.
Trust people until you can’t trust them.
Choose. Between 36 book covers.
Tell me what you like and don’t like about them. Top three? Bottom three.
Last night, around the time I stopped having fun was when giving thinking on an author’s marketing decisions and then defending it against the input of other people who are not in the publicity or publishing business.
While I think layman’s opinions and outside thinking are so very important, it grinds me when my downtime turns into doing work. It’s something I can accept when the request is in-bound as an e-mail. Not when it’s in-person.
I don’t think work-life balance really exists, although downtime has got to be downtime or else you’re always going to feel like you’re under fire.
The way to manage these kinds of situations, I think, is to make sure clients know you’re always available, and that office hours are office hours. Work that has to be done after hours is called an emergency and it will show up on their monthly invoice in the form of an emergency.
Crisis PR is costly because bad behavior is, too. So is letting people step over your boundaries.
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. “A good social media follow policy.” - allanschoenberg
Applying myself to the moment.
What I’m going to remember most about New Year’s Eve wasn’t when a relationship clicked into place for one of my best friends who spent half the evening on the phone with a guy halfway around the world, the venomous snake wine… crystal skull vodka and crystal skull shot glasses, trying to rescue a drowned phone by dunking it in quinoa (not an absorbent grain bt-dubs), Dan’s birthday, Johan and Ena’s final weekend in Chicago before moving to Kansas City, the view from Luke’s condo at the Wacker River-bend, but the hour I spent on the phone with my friend S at three in the morning.
This happened after I fell asleep and woke up again, clear, coherent, and cathartic about what I was thinking and feeling with no pause; none at all. Even to people I’ve known for years, it’s not easy to open up, though for some reason, it’s okay with very certain people and not others.
I’m amazed by the ways and methods the universe has of bringing people together. 2012, you have much to teach me.
Black Book: Ashley Madison on The Profitability of Infidelity
Sometimes I’m asked why I don’t pursue certain girls, and it’s because of the scenario Ashley Madison founder Noel Biderman lays out in the second paragraph. A girl who’s making herself available is a lot different from a girl who’s really available. I want to believe a girl who’s interested will still be interested once she sorts out whatever she has going on.
I didn’t create infidelity, and it happens. Unfortunately it happens in environments where there is collateral damage. I’ll give you an example: An affair that happens in the workplace — and listen, more affairs happen in the workplace than on Ashley Madison. Someone gets an unfair promotion as a result. There is a victim there that wants nothing to do with the affair and gets roped into this nonsense. Someone loses their job, and then investors suffer from that whole kind of thing.
Or an affair happens on a singles dating site – imagine you’re a single who meets someone on a singles site, gets involved with someone, sleeps with them, only to find out they’re taken. They didn’t realize that’s what they were getting into. They were lied to, to the nth degree. That’s a little different than saying I have a nice job or whatever. That’s saying, I’m available, and let’s see where this can go, only to find out you were never really available.
I can’t convince people to be unfaithful. Even one to one, let alone with a TV commercial – what I can convince them is, if they decide to have an affair, not to do it in the workplace, not to do it on a singles site, not to do it on Facebook. To do it on Ashley Madison.
This kind of behavior; I think it invites a lot of bad karma. I just can’t see something positive that comes out of a Web site like this, especially if installs boldface on the kind of trust issues people develop once they pile on dating experience, or have been married and/or cheated on. But, at least people like the girls I know who target married men now have somewhere else to go besides my favorite bars. Maybe Ashley Madison deserves a little more credit than I’ve given it.
