Dopp Juice Archive

Woolf Camp is amazing. I was just gushing last night, in the group of women sitting on bean bags on hardwood floors, overlooking the foggy Santa Cruz ravine, that this place is a new experience for me. I often lament that my particular brand of tech geek, writer, and entreprenuer rarely exists in another person. Being here, being surrounded by these women (and a few men) who collectively embody all these qualities I love in myself but can rarely find in others… is validating, exciting, and most of all inspiring. You can check out the party here: WoolfCamp 2006 Blog.The people here are incredible. I want to tell you about all of them. I probably will when I get home and have the space to decompress. I performed two memorized slam pieces last night, in a candlelit impromptu poetry reading. The classic manifesto piece about what we put into our bodies, and the intense drumming piece about the woman dancing. The reception was wonderful — and it launched me into another hour of lamenting my unconscious decision to stop writing. It’s been years since I took poetry seriously. And yet, I still have these pieces memorized. It’s a constant internal battle, so it must mean something to me. I justify my absence from line breaks by saying my new creative release is forming work and organizations — and most significantly, The Writ. But really, I hate that I don’t write value poetry like I used to. Between fulltime work and fulltime school, I can honestly argue that I don’t have time, but that never stopped me before…

Tomorrow morning, I leave for Woolf Camp, a gathering of bloggers–mostly of the female variety–at a home in Santa Cruz for a weekend retreat/workshop/geek party. The question of my weekend is: “How do I want to use this blog space? What do I want my image and message and connection to be with you?” It’s time to get philosophical, introspective, and inspired. I think between cups of tea in a room full of women, each with one hand on her knitting needles and the other on her laptop, watching a jack terrier fly across the front yard… the answers will come.

I heard a blind woman talking about the weather today. She said, “It was so beautiful!”Beauty is in much more than the eye of the beholder. It’s also a feeling, an intuition, a sensation, and an experience. We can know beauty with our eyes closed, just as we know when a forced smile isn’t real.I’m intrigued by how the blind experience life. There’s a blind man in my neighborhood whom I’ve observed walking around on several occasions. He’s always smiling. He’s always cheerful. He strikes up conversations with the people sitting next to him on buses. He knows what he needs and asks for it from others, rather than trying to quietly slide through life on his senses. In China, there’s a significant market for blind massage therapists, because their hands know so much more than the hands of someone who relies on sight. I sometimes see a truck around town that says “Mobile Blind Cleaners” on its side… The first time I saw it, I thought, “Wow, that’s great. Employment specifically for the blind.” The second time I saw it, I thought, “Wait, but how do they drive the truck?” And then finally, I realized it was a company that cleans window blinds, and they were suddenly a lot less interesting.