The Power of a Word

Nail-biting, over. Furtive checks to the website, unnecessary. Plan B, not activated.

One word changes everything: “Congratulations!” My son was accepted to his first choice college, Class of 2012. That’s how the letter from the admissions director began, and the future was immediately clearer (if more expensive for his parents).

The mood around the house in the last week or two was anxious, no one wanting to talk about “it” (decision day) too much in order to protect each other. I found a website with discussion boards filled with nervous students and parents, which I consciously chose not to tell anyone else in the family about.

He’s already found a Facebook group and a fellow newly admitted student who is a friend of a friend. He worked for a goal and got it. It took one word: Congratulations.

Verbal Journaling

Here’s what I mean by “verbal journaling”–saying out loud (but to yourself, not to someone else) a few sentences about what you did, how you feel, what you are planning.

Why?

If you spend a lot of time by yourself, at your computer, have you ever noticed how long you can go without using your voice? Sometimes, I realize that I have not said anything out loud for hours, even though I have “communicated” with people all day via Internet. If the phone rings or I need to make call, my voice creaks.

So “verbal journaling” can affirm goals or acknowledge accomplishments in the way that any journaling can AND use a different part of your brain to do it.

Just an idea–see if it works.

Cultural Exchange, Old Style

We members of the Alexandria Sister Cities Committee had a busy weekend. We hosted mayors from three of our four sister cities (or “twins,” as the less gender-specific Europeans call them)–Caen, France; Dundee, Scotland; and Helsingborg, Sweden. A fourth mayor, sort of a relative once-removed, also visited from Wurzburg, Germany, which is twinned with Caen and Dundee.

The ostensible reason was to dedicate the Sister Cities Conference Center in City Hall, a set of meeting rooms already scheduled for renovation that happily could be decorated with appropriate art and artifacts and given this expansive-sounding name.

The city hosted the mayors at several more formal events. Our committee did two potlucks, including a Thanksgiving-themed dinner at a colonial-era house in Old Town.

For a while, we could enjoy cultural exchange apart from concerns about security, the war on terror, and public opinion about the U.S. elsewhere in the world. Is the Sister Cities program an anachronism–or maybe something we should all be doing more of?

A Faint

I fainted on the top floor of the Holocaust Museum, someplace between the boycott on Jewish businesses and the turnback of the Jews on the S.S. Louis.

It wasn’t the messages, disturbing as they always are to see, although the dark, closed space of the exhibit hall didn’t help. I fainted because I took two medications prescribed for a toothache in one of my small bottom molars (Tooth #29)–the antibiotic Levaquin and a pain-killer–on an empty stomach, in a rush, in order to get my first dosage of the medicine in before leaving for the day downtown with my mom, who was visiting.

Turns out that my little molar was the least of my problems. As we ascended in the elevator, I declined. I got very hot and a little queasy. I had no patience, once in the exhibit hall, to view the images or read the display boards. I remember looking around for a bench, leaving my mother someplace behind.

Next thing I knew, I was on the floor, people gathered around me. My mother says she had been wondering why I had wandered so far ahead, and suddenly saw a crowd around…..something….someone…..me! I had a bright-colored jacket, which was on the floor with me. Otherwise, it was dark, and I was wearing dark-colored pants and shirt.

People were very kind. Did the fact that we were viewing such horrific acts accentuate their concern? I had offers of water, kleenex, a cell phone to call 911, and even a young girl’s wheelchair (her father held her so I could use it) within seconds.

“I’m fine, I’m fine–I know why I fell, I know why I fell, I don’t need 911,” I kept saying, meanwhile stopping up a bloody nose. I fell (I guess) right on my chin, or hit my chin on a railing. Big black and blue mark on the bottom of my chin, and two chipped teeth resulted. I managed to get over to a bench and we sat for a while.

I went through Thanksgiving weekend looking like I got the worse end of a lacrosse stick and feeling very “what-if” vulnerable. Yesterday, the teeth were repaired, you wouldn’t know that I was ragged a few days earlier. So, resilience.

In retrospect, as wonderful as the museum visitors were, it is a bit strange that no museum staff realized that a woman had passed out on the floor for 5 minutes or so.

Jet lag

Coming back from a quick trip to California, I am struck by how many people travel a lot more regularly than I do. They must be the people who carry on their roll-on bags, no doubt with their “3-1-1″ bag of toiletries (3 ounce maximum bottles in 1 quart-sized bag in 1 carry-on) prepare, Blackberries at the ready.

To them and to those of us who travel less frequently, I found a nifty Jet Lag calculator on the British Airways site. Key in the time difference between where you are visiting and where you are from and the “adviser” tell you when to seek and avoid light. (No special instructions provided for the three hours between the East and West coasts of the US.)

I’ll have to consider the advice for a trip to Ireland I am taking in March. Will the advice truly help minimise (British spelling…) jet lag?

How Do You Measure Engagement?

A conference at Wharton considered whether offline media is relevant anymore, supplanted by blogs, YouTube, and other online vehicles. (Read about it here.)

One speaker said, despite all the measurements of click-through rates and unique visitors, we still don’t have a useful measurement in terms of engagement and brand awareness. An e-commerce site can measure how many products sold, but how do you measure what the awareness means in terms of off-line decisions?

I personally don’t sit around watching You Tube videos–am I in a minority by now?–but another speaker felt that online video was breaking down the divide between digital and broadcast TV. Maybe.

Women Entrepreneurs’ Expo

I must admit, I wasn’t sure about attending the Women’s Entrepreneurs’ Expo, held by the Women’s Business Center of Northern Virginia last Friday, even after I registered and paid–especially because the flyer said something like “bring a girlfriend.” Ugh.

But I went and got a great lift–as well as, maybe, some business down the line.

The workshops I attended (on search engine optimization and e-mail marketing) were useful, definitely some new information. But, even more, the place had a positive vibe. People (mostly women, some men) went out of their way to help each other. I would go to an exhibit booth, even one with no seeming relevance, and try to think of some contact or business idea, or at least asked a lot of questions for “some day.” Meanwhile, others were suggesting leads to help me as a writer. At our lunch table, each person posed a question to which we could all suggest solutions.

So it was a good thing to get out from behind the computer.

Only drag was I didn’t win anything in the raffle.

Printing Press Field Trip

I hadn’t visited a printer in many years, so the chance to tourKirby Lithographics, coordinated by Washington Book Publishers was a treat. We were a group of mostly editors and writers.

Kirby is a family-owned firm that specializes in books of mid-sized runs. (As interesting as the machinery were piles of pages in various stages of printing, from titles on the Russian economy to hiking trails along the Appalachian Trail.) While technology has reduced the number of employees needed and changed the process–so much for the bluelines I remember–it still takes skill to get a good product.

Feedback on Websites

I taught a class through Fairfax County Adult Ed on writing for the Internet. Great group of people–all already quite e-savvy.

Some questions I suggested people consider as they evaluate their own or another website, e-newsletter, blog or other writing:

Name/subject of the piece:

What do I like about this piece?

What is its main message?

What am I expected to do as a result of reading this (and does it make me want to)?

What frustrates me about this piece?

What would I suggest to improve it?

I will post some of the other materials in the next few days or so. And I’ll offer the class again on February 27/March 5, 2008.

The Power of a (Seemingly Simple) Idea

In 1967 an economist named John Krutilla published an article in American Economic Review, which he claimed to be the last article that appeared in that journal without math or data.

I can’t vouch for that, but his article–which I learned this past week at a panel discussion at Resources for the Future began as a funding proposal to the Ford Foundation–bucked decades of thinking about the environment.

Simply put, he said that clean air, wilderness, scenic views, and other “non-market” uses of the environment can have as much value as timber, minerals, and other “market” uses. The panelists, who included Krutilla’s former research assistants and colleages, noted that the article did not transform the world at the time.

But the idea persisted, to the point where it even seems obvious to most of us. And, interestingly enough, very relevant as we struggle with what costs to incur now to head off the effects of climate change in the future.