Dopp Juice Archive

Running to the warm night beach before the sky loses all of its pink and the water fades from sapphire to black. 8:52pm

I found magic, and its tide is up. 8:53pm

Standing here alone. I’ve never seen the SF ocean so gorgeous. Want to share it. It smells like sushi. I have no camera. You’re missing it. 8:59pm

Right now, I get it. We’re building all these tools so we can connect everything because connection is the only way anything feels right. 9:02pm

I’m standing feet firm in the sand, dumbstruck that i’m talking to people who have no idea how this air feels, and that I can’t change that. 9:09pm

And at the same time, this conversation puts this experience into my narrative. Because you’re listening, I will remember this. 9:11pm

Our stories are stronger when others interact with them. I can spend entire days alone because I’ve created an audience that isn’t here. 9:17pm

I feel like my reality is changing in a direction I have too much control over. If my experience is so explicitly narrated, my ego owns me. 9:26pm

The sky and the water are both dark grey blue now, both highlighted with specks and streaks of white. But you only know cuz i’m telling you. 9:32pm

If I stand on my tiptoes and sink my feet in deep, the sand is still warm from the heat today. Even tho my head is getting cold from wet air 9:43pm

I’m still here. If you were here, you’d stay, too. But maybe only cuz I’d tell you why you should. I live-narrate meaning in meatspace, too. 10:00pm

Ok, so I don’t have more control. I just have a stronger filter on my perceptions because I have more tools to narrate and frame experience. 10:03pm

And I’ve totally disregarded my self-censoring limits on reasonable twitter frequency and intimacy tonight… making this even more surreal. 10:10pm

Before I walk away, you should know that the waves are moving like that nylon parachute you stood around in gym class and made ripples with. 10:14pm

That’s all. 10:14pm

Twitter is addictive for a lot of reasons.

• You can do it from your cell phone.
• You’re required to be brief (140 characters max).
• You can stay aware of what’s going on in lots of peoples’ lives with very little time investment.
• You can customize your experience by using 3rd party apps that meet your quirky specific needs.

Email, on the other hand, isn’t impressing me so much these days. Why? Because its etiquette is outdated. The following behaviors are still considered rude in the land of email:

• Not responding
• Taking more than 24 hours to respond
• Expecting an immediate response
• Not responding to every point in an email
• Responding to a long email with a very brief email
• Not including friendly small talk at the beginning and end of a message

Email is still trying to be a cross between phone calls and handwritten letters, and we don’t need that anymore. We need to replace Email Culture with a new set of tools and etiquette that helps us convey information and strengthen relationships in less time.

Twitter is showing us how it’s done, other social networking websites aren’t far behind, and SMS text messaging has exploded like a pack of Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke. We’re craving lightweight communication and embracing it however we can. But there’s one lingering problem: Email is still our default form of communication. I might favor Twitter above all else, but I can only use Twitter to talk to other Twitter users. Email, on the other hand, is still the center of everyone’s universe.

So that’s why I’m calling you out, Email. It’s time to change.

• We want email clients that visually cue us to write shorter messages.
• We want really short emails to show up our cell phones as text messages.
• We want threaded message views that take Gmail’s interface a step further and look like iChat.
• We want the same freedom and flexibility that we’ve always had with email, but with tools that reward us for being brief.
• We want long messages to be special again.
• We want guilt-free communication.
• We want to be able to respond to more quickly, and therefore, to respond more.

What’s it gonna take to make this happen?

A Jewish friend of mine called me tonight after attending a lecture on the history of Christianity. When I answered the phone he started speaking a mile a minute about charisma, redaction, contradictions, Paul, gentiles, marketing strategies for salvation in ancient times, and the difference between “what likely happened” and “what was written about later on.” The lecture gave him a framework for looking at the story of Jesus in a way that actually made sense to him for the first time in his life, and he was bursting with revelations.

He said, “I had to talk to someone about this, and I knew you’d understand.”

My mom is a liberal UCC minister who is married to a Catholic. My aunt is a Reiki healer who is married to an Episcopal priest. My uncle is a Methodist minister. His son married a female rabbi. My other uncle and his wife and kids are all born-again Christians who have done extensive missionary work in other countries. My other uncle is 17-years sober recovering alcoholic who hits his knees every single morning and every single night to thank God for keeping him alive another day. My grandmother has been teaching Bible Study since God created the heavens and the earth, and she will continue to teach it until she gets swept up by the Rapture.

My mother says, “There are many ways to get to God, but you need to pick one.”

In the spirit of both acceptance and rebellion, I’ve been calling myself an Eclectic Agnostic since I was 16. This means that I don’t care who wrote what down in any book; I acknowledge that I am human, and that I don’t get to know much of anything at all. It also means that I play around in religion like it’s a swimming pool full of finger paints. I’ve considered myself a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Christian, and a whole lot of other things that I’m not quite sure how to label. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re all different words for the same experience of feeling connected and recognizing the importance of life.

A friend of mine in high school said to me, “You can’t just up and be a Taoist.”

I walked away from Christianity when I started picking apart the words. The image of a personified God made absolutely no sense to me. I put my hands on my hips and announced defiantly, “No, there is NOT an old man with a long grey beard in a white robe sitting in a big chair in the sky behind a pearly gate, pushing buttons and turning levers and determining what’s going to happen to us next. Uh-uh. No way. Ya’ll are stupid.” Fortunately for me, my über-religious family is also extraordinarily patient and accepting of the fact that people need to find their own paths. I’m a logic-brained writer. My path takes language very seriously.

If images of God are just metaphors, then aren’t monotheism and polytheism essentially talking about the same thing?

So I picked it apart. For awhile, I was convinced that Time was my higher power. It’s way more powerful than me. I’m always trying to speed it up or slow it down and I have absolutely zero impact on it. It’s also a reliable force to lean on when I need help. If I just let Time do it’s job while I focus on doing my own, it will pretty consistently save my ass.

That’s like God, right?

But I keep coming back to the core of my spirituality — a space in my life that I only started to be able to refer to as God again about a year ago (although I find I get fewer raised eyebrows when I refer to it as “The Universe” in the Bay Area). I recently grappled with it from a gender perspective and ended up with a beautiful poem that healed a lot of my old anger.

If we are all made in the image of God, then how in God’s name can God be gendered?

Tonight I found my thoughts on someone else’s blog. The completely amazing Emma McCreary wrote a beautiful post about the difference between our culture’s old ideas of God versus its new ideas of God. It perfectly sums up the tension I’ve felt around religions and explains why I keep going back to it: the new ideas work for me. In typical Emma fashion, she writes in a voice that is fluent in both Business and Spirituality — a mix I too rarely get to enjoy. Please go read her post, God is Bottom-Up, and tell me if it doesn’t resolve all of this stuff and put us all onto the same page once and for all.

I think the joy ninja’s got it.