Day 2384: Expect the unexpected

Yesterday, I got this unexpected email:

Dear Ann Koplow

We have been looking at the database of shows who still want something, either runs or infills.

We would like to offer you the slot(s) below:

Show number 306 provisional title Group “Therapy” with Ann

Mo 19 13:00-14:00 Natural Food Kafe Basement Room

If you accept, please email this address immediately.

If these are extra performances, you will already have sent a picture and blurb. If you have not sent a picture and blurb, please immediately send one via the form. Full instructions are attached.

If you don’t want what’s offered but want something else, please email back saying what. Be as precise as you can.

If you don’t want this at all, please email back and say so. Make things as clear as possible. For example, if you’ve asked for extras but now don’t want extras, but want to keep your main run, say that. We don’t want any mistakes.

All offers are immediately void if you have breached the Ethos and Rules by applying to any other free-admission promoter, including pay-what-you-want and pay-for-priority-admission-otherwise-free. Or breached them in any other way.

Please reply as soon as you can so that we can fill the spaces as well as we can, and get your show in the Wee Blue Book.

Thank you

Free Fringe Team

I didn’t expect that!  I expect that email means that I will have a show at the Free Fringe in Edinburgh on August 19 at 1 PM, unless my responding back six hours later wasn’t immediately enough.  I expect it was, but I never seem to expect anything for sure.

With my life (see as many posts in this blog as possible), I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. I expect good things will come my way and they often do! I also expect I’ll have trouble sleeping trying to anticipate and plan for the unexpected.

I expect I’ll have to market the hell out of this Edinburgh Fringe Festival opportunity, especially because of the time and location of my show.  Expect to read more about this, here, in the month ahead.

I just posted this unexpected news on my Facebook page:

I GOT A SHOW AT THE EDINBURGH FRINGE! August 19th, 1 PM, The Natural Food Kafe. Consider making this part of your vacation plans.

Unexpectedly, somebody already has replied that they’ll be going.

Expect the unexpected photos.

 

Expect an explanation of at least one unexpected photo.  That little fishing dude, directly above, reminds me of the old saying “Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach someone to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.”  I expect you’ve heard that one before.

Expect the unexpected video:

I expect that no one will watch or listen to that whole thing.

I expect the unexpected comment, below.

Expect gratitude here, every day, for all who help me live each unexpected day, including YOU!

 

 

Day 1510: Patience

If you’ve had the patience to read all my daily posts (including this one), you might remember that a very helpful aptitude/personality test I took decades ago revealed three high indications of impatience. Therefore, patience is a virtue I work on, every day.

Yesterday, I saw these two indications of patience:

That cup and that bunny are inspiring me to be patient, especially as I look for a new home and continue to heal from heart surgery.

Do you have the patience to look at all my other photos from yesterday?

Do you have the patience to listen to the music I’ve chosen today?

If you have the patience to leave a comment, I have the patience to read it and respond.

Many thanks to all who helped me create this patient post and to you — of course! — for your patience, here and now.

Day 1497: Why wait?

Why wait?  Why not just act, here and now, and deal with the consequences?

Why wait to

• move?
• change?
• grow?
• love?

Why wait for two signs I saw yesterday about waiting?

Why wait to move to a new place and leave the old place behind?

Why wait, when we are all mortal?

Why wait, when we don’t know what tomorrow will bring?

Why wait to share confusion about two opposite sayings about waiting?

He who hesitates is lost.

Look before you leap.

Why wait to show you my other photos from yesterday?

Why wait for Tom Petty and this great song about waiting?

Did you wait for “The Waiting”?

Why wait to express your thoughts and feelings in a comment?

Why wait to show gratitude and appreciation?

Day 392: Possibilities, Patience, and “IM”

Yesterday, I coined the word “dreadless” —  as a possible opposite of “dreadful.”  That was fun.

Today, as I was considering possible topics for this post, the word “patience” came to mind.  And then, its opposite. And I thought:

Why, oh why, is the opposite of “patience” “impatience”?  Why isn’t it “unpatience”?  Or “nonpatience”?  What the heck does “IM” mean, anyway? Are there OTHER words that use “IM” to create the opposite?  The only one I can think of, right now, is “possible” and “impossible.”

I suppose I could do some research, right now, on the use of “Im” to create the opposite of a word.   But I’m not interested in checking corroborating details or data, this morning. ¹

Imstead …. ooops!  I mean, instead, I want to just riff on what we’ve got in this post, already.

Here we go!

Patience is something I think about a lot.  When I was in my 20’s, I took a comprehensive test² of my aptitudes and skills, to discover why I wasn’t satisfied with my career ³. And they told me, “You have three exceedingly high, natural indications of possible impatience” (or words to that effect).

Recognizing that I am “naturally impatient” has helped me, as I have continued to work on developing the other side of that — my capacity for patience.

Yesterday, I was expecting a visit from my friend, Carol, and I was timing my creation of yesterday’s post to coincide with her expected time of arrival.  A few minutes before that, when I was just about to press “publish” ….  I realized — to my horror — that I had closed the wrong window and had lost the last hour of my work.  I get very freaked out when something like that happens. What bothered me the most about that?

• I was happy with the post.
• I hate having to rewrite something I’m already done with.
• It kills me when I realize I’ve done something “stupid” (as in, “Ann! You should have known better than to close that window until after you published the post!”)
• I realized  I had two choices: (1) to ask Carol to wait, until I rewrote the friggin’ post or (2) wait until after her visit to complete it (and I knew I would be upset and distracted while she was here).
• I assumed that I would NOT be able to reconstruct the post back to its former glory.
• I COULD NOT BELIEVE THIS HAD HAPPENED!

I felt an incredible rush of …. panic, disappointment, adrenaline, upset-ness, whatever-you-want-to-call it.

What did I do?  I talked to myself:

Ann, it’s not the end of the world. You’ve lost stuff you’ve written before, many times in many ways. As much as you hate when this happens, you will rewrite it. And it will be good enough.  Maybe, it will be even better!  That’s not beyond the realm of possibility …. that has definitely happened before.

When Carol showed up, I was already in the midst of rebuilding what had been lost. I asked if she could have the patience to wait for me until I published my post. She graciously and enthusiastically said, “Of course!’

Nevertheless, I was very nervous while re-building that post.  Despite Carol’s reassurance, my knowing her for years, and my logical self knowing that this would be fine, I stumbled and froze several times while fixing that post, which had been pretty intricate (with several “bells and whistles”: links, footnotes, videos, photos, etc.)

Why was I so nervous?  Possibly because I was imagining all sorts of negative reactions, including impatience. Not only from Carol, but from …. you, dear readers.

That is, I was imagining Carol’s impatience with me, as she waited. And I was imagining your impatience with me, when I published a post I feared would (1) have errors and (2) would NOT be as good as it could have, should have, would have been, if I had been more careful.

But, it all worked out.  I finished the post, Carol was loving and understanding (as always), and the post was good enough.  Yes, there were a couple of missing links and typos here and there, but I was able to fix those, well enough, later in the day.

And if anybody noticed those imperfections, they didn’t think those were important ⁴ enough to mention.

Okay!  I can see by the clock on the wall

… that it’s time for me to end this post.

Probably, I could find another image, quickly enough, that fits the topics of this post.

But you know what?  I haven’t got the patience.

Thanks to all those who deal with patience, possibilities, perfectionism, probabilities —  and their opposites — and especially to you, for visiting today.

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1. Actually, a lot of my posts, lately, have had an “attitude” about data and proof. Sometimes, it seems, I just can’t be bothered with details. This reminds me of a story: When I was in college, I decided to take a Calculus Course. I suspected that I didn’t have a natural talent for Calculus (unlike other forms of math), so I took the course “Pass/Fall.”  And, indeed, I neither enjoyed that course nor did particularly well in it, but when the time came for the final exam, I knew that I’d done well enough to pass, with some wiggle room.  When I got to a section of the test where I was supposed to solve something I just didn’t understand, I wrote, “Here are the formulas. I’ve done all I can do.  Please solve these yourself.”   And, that was good enough.

2. At Johnson O’Connor in Boston.

3. Technical and marketing writing.

4. Possibly the opposite of this is … “portent”?

Day 264: An Inadvertent Tweet

Yesterday evening, I found out that I had inadvertently tweeted a tweet.

This was the tweet:

T

I don’t know how that happened.  (I have some theories.)

When I saw it, I knew how quickly that “T” had gone out into the universe.

And there was no taking it back.

How did I know it was out there? Because people responded to that tweet.

The first response was from Teresa (who appears in this blog post).

Teresa replied,

yes?

I appreciated that response, because it was quick and effective.

My friend, Janet (who appears in this post), replied,

Were you trying to dot your Is and cross your Ts? Because, half success.

I appreciated that response, because it was both clever and kind.

My 15-year-old son’s response to my inadvertent tweet?  He favorited it, and re-tweeted it.

I appreciated that response, too.

What were MY responses to that tweet?

Here were my feelings, when I first saw it:

1. I felt perplexed.  (“Where did that come from?”)
2. I felt embarrassed.  (“That’s a mistake.”)
3. I felt worried. (” What will people think?”)
4. I felt safe.  (“People will understand.”)
5. I felt happy. (“This is fun!”)

The really good news is that I went through Feelings 1 – 3 very quickly …

… and settled on Feelings 4 and 5.

(Somebody, at work, asked me yesterday, “Will I ever stop having these anxious thoughts?”

I said, “I’m not sure.  But maybe you’ll be able to let go of them so fast, you barely notice them.”

We both agreed that would be great.)

As I’ve been composing this post, today, I have been trying out different ways to express the concept of speed. And, as you have seen (and heard), I settled upon a sound bite.

In an earlier blog post this year, I  was also looking for a way to express the concept of speed.

Apparently, that’s something I sometimes want to communicate, clearly.

Speed.

Speed is not the same thing as rushing, though.

Something else I yearn to communicate clearly is this:

You have all the time you need.

I hope this is not confusing.

What else did I want to tell you, this fine morning?

Well, I told you about my feeling responses to that inadvertent, fast-as-a-spaceship tweet.

I didn’t tell you about my action — the next “right” thing, that I chose to do.

For many hours, I let that “T” hang out there.

And that was okay.

I realized it might confuse people.

But that was okay.

This morning, I thought of a way to “conclude” that inadvertent tweet, for a sense of closure. To add something to it, so it “made sense.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, though. There are things to be said for putting something mysterious out there, that makes no immediate sense.

For example, if you do that, people can put their own interpretations on it.

Various tools of therapy are like that:

And so is abstract art:

Yes, there is something to be said for ambiguous things.

But, I have to admit, I like closure sometimes. Especially if I’ve started something (even inadvertently).

Also, I don’t like confusing people. I can be partial to clarity, myself.

Plus, I rarely pass up a chance to be clever, or to refer to something I like.

So, this morning, I sent out another tweet.

…TFN

Was that the perfect next step?

Nah.

Could I have been more clever?

I’m sure.

Might that still confuse some people?

Definitely.

What was I thinking about?

This guy, for one thing:

Hey, look!  Tigger‘s tweeting, too!

Ta Ta For Now, dear readers. (And thanks to all.)