Today is the day when…
Today February 4 is the day before my life changed. On February 5, 2010, my husband broke his neck and should have died because 95% of the people who break their C2 vertebrae do.
That’s why it’s called the Hangman’s Break: it’s what causes people to die when they are hung–they break their C2 and that’s it. It’s usually what has happened when someone dies and they say that person died instantly.
If you are one of the 5% who lives, you’re in a wheel chair. And you’re paralyzed, usually from the neck down.
Of those 5% who live, 
3% are not in wheel chairs. They weren’t paralyzed but the risk is so great of paralysis while the neck heals, and they are in so much torturous pain, that the vertebrae in their necks are fused together, and they lose 75% of their movement in their necks. But they can walk and run and do everything else.
My husband’s neck was so badly broken that Read more…
Philip Seymour Hoffman 7/23/67 – 2/2/14
I think you should be serious about what you do because this is it. This is the only life you’ve got.
If you’re a human being walking the earth, you’re weird, you’re strange, you’re psychologically challenged. Philip Seymour Hoffman (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014)
guest blog post
by Ron Wells
Such a talented man.
The range of roles for one so young is breathtaking.
He will be greatly missed.
His long, long list of movie roles include: Read more…
… if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway. (Stephen King, “Reading to Write”) Read more…
Know Your Rights: Blogging in College
In March 2012, I attended the Triiibes Conference in my hometown of Ventura CA. The conference was inspired by Seth Godin’s book, Triiibes, from which an online ning community was formed. That ning is full of Linchpins, whom Godin described in his next book on the same name; however, readers of this blog may be most familiar with Godin from his manifesto on education Stop Stealing Dreams.
That March, while Godin was unable to travel across the country in person from NYC to CA, thanks to technology, he Skyped in to speak with us about being Linchpins and creating and leading Triiibes. We also had the chance to ask him questions; since I am a college teacher who has also taught undergraduate and graduate classes in educational philosophy and had just read Stop Stealing Dreams, I asked him for his advice. Read more…
52 Pick Up: Sit Up Straight!
Art Predator aka Gwendolyn Alley hard at work
I hate to admit it, but I am a couch potato.
Not the kind that sits with a remote watching TV while eating a bag of chips couch potato, but the kind that sits with a laptop, feet up on the coffee table, drinking coffee or wine.
While I used to sit on the floor in virasana or other yoga poses while I tapped away, somewhere in the past two years of grad school for my second MA (this one in Depth Psychology), the yoga block and the zafu were no longer in reach and that habit was shed during the Year of the Snake. (Photo of me being goofy and sitting on a yoga block at the coffee table by my son who was about 8 at the time.)
On the heels of the article I posted the other day about inactivity and how it is BAD FOR THE BRAIN not just our bodies, a recent article in the Washington Post provides this infographic which describes the impact of our poor posture on our body and our health including organ damage, muscle degeneration, leg disorders, foggy brain and more:
“People who watched the most TV in an 8.5
-year study had a 61 percent greater risk of dying than those who watched less than one hour per day.” Now how is watching TV that different from sitting and being online or working on a laptop computer?
Check out the hazards of sitting and take a stand for your health in 2014–the Year of the Horse! Or at least, sit differently!
As for me, instead of staying home and writing a blog post for Wine Predator and lamenting that I’m not at ZAP, I’m heading down to LA to taste the 2011 Bordeaux then going to a Speakeasy Art Happening complete with 20s costumes and a password to celebrate Elle-Je Freeheart’s art and birthday!
52 Pick Up: Weeks 1 + 2 Gallop In
No I’m not talking about a car or a card game when I say 2014 is the year of 52 Pick Up. Read more…
In Recognition of Martin Luther King Jr
From Martin Luther King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, given on 4 February 1968:
Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.
You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.
You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.
You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.
You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. Read more…
Art Predator’s 2013 in Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 51,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
In June 2013, I hit 500,00 page views for this blog. Read more about this milestone here.
New Year, New Semester: What is school for?
As my regular readers know, I teach writing at the local community college and I’ve just earned a MA in Community, Liberation, and Ecopsychology.
Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has been a huge influence on my teaching philosophy, and some semesters, my students and I have read chapter two of that book where he discusses the problems of banking education and suggests instead a problem-posing approach where students name a problem, investigate solutions, and put a solution into action.
Recently, marketing guru Seth Godin and author of Tribes and Linchpins targeted the ills of education: in 2012, he published Stop Stealing Dreams as a free pdf. (I last wrote about Godin’s advice here–this is about public speaking.) As I was already a big Godin fan (see photo!), I read it immediately, and had a chance to talk to Godin about his suggest
ions for community college education. He recommended that I get my students blogging–which I started doing in January 2008. (Read Cathy Davidson’s argument for blogging in the college classroom in this January 2012 NY Times article.)
If you don’t want to read the pdf, you can get a great sense of his argument from this TEDX talk above from October 2012.
