Benji

Our friend Benji sent us a link, saying, “I don’t know if J. Jacques reads The Usual Error, or if you guys read Questionable Content… or if this is just some bizarro cross-over moment… check it out!!”

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=858

Neat! It’s feeling considered and the veggie burger. (:

(Kyeli does read QC and is a huge fan – this strip made her giggle for hours.)

The Merch Girl

Our freaky revolutionary friend The Merch Girl thinks that burlesque can change the world. I think she’s right.

Trish

We had a 3-hour conversation with Trish Lambert about the Freak Revolution, Landmark, how to avoid letting evil creep in as the revolution grows, the Think Big Revolution, horses, and lots of other stuff.

Deb

Deb Owen wrote a great post about being too “nice”. Good stuff about fierceness and holding healthy boundaries.

Pace and Kyeli

This week has been full of ups and downs for us.

The downs

Stressful conversations about money and sex. (Unrelated conversations, mind you.) Still too raw to post about in detail.

The ups

Yesterday, we had a long talk about both issues and made good progress. Today, we talked more about both issues and made more progress, and then had good connect-y time together.

And tomorrow, we’re going to A-kon! It’s a big anime convention. It’ll be lots of fun; this is the fourth year in a row Kyeli and I have gone together, and our first year with Dru along all weekend. Dru is cosplaying as Detective Conan. (:

Our evil illustrator, Martin Whitmore, will be at the Con. He’ll have a table with the lovely and talented Megan E. Morris. Our awesome, cat-hat knitting friend, Kathy, of Platypus Dreams, will be there, too. We’re looking forward to it – we always have a blast!

OH! And I (Kyeli) went to the bank this morning, and they asked me for a second form of ID. I presented them with my Freak Revolution membership card, and they TOOK IT! It was so cool.

How’s your week been? Anything you’d like to share with us?

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 20: Memory

We like to think that we have a single memory, an autobiographical history of ourselves stretching backwards into our past, from the present back to when we were very young. We understand that there are gaps and that it gets more vague the further back we go, but we still have the impression of a single fairly consistent record of time. We rarely question its accuracy. If we say, “He was there. I remember seeing him,” others will likely believe us. We believe that our eyes and ears are like video cameras, relaying sights and sounds to our brain, which records everything for later use like a mental VCR.

Memory isn’t like that at all. In truth, we have a collection of fragments and familiarities. We process only a fraction of the information our senses take in, and far less makes it into our long-term memory. Our long-term memory fades over time, leaving islands of memory in a sea of haze. What’s more, even those islands may be difficult to recall. Many of our memories lie dormant, requiring specific reminders to “jog our memories” and bring them to the surface.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 20: Memory (web page)

Until last week, I used Remember The Milk to keep track of my to-do lists. We’ve posted before about how to get organized, but recently I realized that my system was stressing me out more than helping me, so I’ve switched.

What I noticed was that when planning a new project, I created a text file instead of putting it into Remember The Milk. Kyeli and I have a schedule of what types of tasks to do on each day, so I didn’t even look at Remember The Milk anymore. It had become stale and irrelevant. I had a schedule and a bunch of text files.

Observe, don’t judge.

When trying to be awesome, it helps to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

This means to look objectively at what you’re doing rather than judging it. “Descriptive” means to describe what is actually happening, either out loud or in your head. “Prescriptive” means “telling what to do”, as in when a doctor prescribes medicine to you, she tells you what drugs to take, when, and how much.

I had been stuck in prescribing Remember The Milk to myself instead of describing what I was actually doing.

Ask why.

I looked at what I was doing, and I realized that I was avoiding Remember The Milk because it wasn’t easy to use for me. I couldn’t order the items in the list as I liked, I couldn’t cut and paste easily, I couldn’t edit and reorganize easily. Apparently that was important enough to me that I’d rather have ease of editing than all the other features of Remember The Milk.

One thing that I used to like about Remember The Milk back when I was using it was the email reminders. If there’s a time-sensitive task, I want to be reminded of it. If it’s sitting in a text file somewhere, I might forget about it.

Get to the root.

Kyeli and I talked about this, and eventually I figured out that what I need in a to-do system is:

• easy to edit
• easy to share
• easy to store and find information
• a way to keep on top of time-sensitive things

We decided to completely ditch Remember The Milk in favor of MediaWiki + a schedule.

What? A wiki?

A wiki (any wiki will do, I’m just partial to MediaWiki because I like Wikipedia) is easy to edit, easy to share (no more “but that file is on your laptop, I can’t get to it”), and easy to store and find information on. Far easier than a bunch of text files, because it has hyperlinks, which are even more flexible than nested folders.

To keep from getting overwhelmed with a huge pile of scattered to-do items, we created one main page on our wiki that lists our weekly schedule.

• Monday: current project
• Tuesday: conversion + tribe building + website
• Wednesday: learning + planning
• Thursday: blog + newsletter + coffee house
• Friday: misc + catch-up

Each of the daily items is a link to a “project page”: a wiki page with that project’s to-do items on it. All to-do items live on a project page; we don’t ever put to-do items on just any old random wiki page.

This is far better than having one huge honking to-do list, or even one huge honking to-do list separated by subheaders. The advantage is that each day, we only have to look at a to-do list of a manageable size, because we’re only thinking about one or two or three projects each day. The rest can wait until their day comes. Of course there are always urgent things that need to be done quickly, but most things can wait up to a week.

On each project page, we put the to-do items with deadlines at the top of the list, with the deadline in bold. At the beginning of the work day, we review the project to-lists for the day’s projects, and we make sure to complete all the tasks that are due within the next 7 days.

Any to-do list is useless if you never look at it.

Of course this system wouldn’t work if we didn’t stick to it, but it’s been pretty easy to stick to so far. We like the wiki, so we like to look at it and update it throughout the day. We use it for storing information as well as to-do items. And most importantly, we established a routine. Each day, we say to each other “What are we going to do today?” and we look at the wiki together. It’s working really well!

In fact, it’s working so well that I’ve gotten down to zero emails in my inbox for the first time in… EVER. I’ve had an email address for 14 years, and this is the first time I’ve had a to-do system so good that I didn’t need to store to-do items in my inbox as well.

How To Be Awesome

While I was working on all this to-do list stuff, I realized that the pattern I used to work through it was pretty much the same pattern I use for self-work, for relationship issues, for business decisions, and all sorts of other stuff.

1. Notice that something isn’t right or could be better.
2. Observe without judgement.
3. Keep asking why until you get to the root.
4. Come up with a solution to the root problem.
5. See how it goes!

Okay, we’re a little scatterbrained today. It’s the cusp of a three-day weekend, after all.

As the headline suggests, so many neat things kept popping up today, we decided to throw them together and add a follow-up to this morning’s first Community Update to include them all.

Did you become a social worker to change the world?

Bob Poole wrote another awesome article about the Freak Revolution. This time, I was flipping out while Pace read it aloud to me, devoutly hoping that it ended with someone who was either already a FR member or who would be by the end of today (Bob’s a member, so it all worked out). It’s incredibly cool.

Project Mojave & The Liberation Manifesto

Johnny Truant and Jonathan Mead and a bunch of other cool people (like Dave Navarro) have gotten together and are doing incredibly awesome things. Things like a 3-month course to get people out of their day jobs and into their dreams.

The last chance to be a part of it is today, so we couldn’t wait to share this tidbit. We think it’s going to rock. (: Check it out here. (Warning: video starts playing automatically, and is difficult to shut off.)

Also, Jonathan Mead wrote a really fucking awesome kick-ass manifesto, which we highly recommend you read.

Clutter Clearing

The sweet, darling Lisa Baldwin is doing a clutter clearing course, starting Monday, which will help you organize your stuff so you can get shit done.

And you’ll like working with Lisa. She’s one of our favorite people – and a fellow Freaky Revolutionary.

and, late-breaking news from the personal lives of Pace and Kyeli…

Our landlord, awesome dude that he is, gave us a full week off our rent this month for all the inconvenience of dealing with the mold and the ensuing repairs and guys trekking in and out of the house at odd times and having our cabinets ripped out and our cats terrorized.

Sweet!

Okay, that’s really it this time.

Have a fabbity fab fab fabulous marvie-darvie Memorial Day weekend (or minus Memorial Day, depending on your country and your choice). We’re gonna go spend some money on something fun! (Well, Kyeli is. Pace will hoard her half. After we split the cost of dinner.)

Ta!

What’s been going on in our community this week?

It’s raining freaks! Hallelujah!

Over 70 freaks have already joined the revolution! Click here if you want in, too! We’re awash and sparkling with all the awesome around us.

Extra! Extra!

We sent out our very first newsletter! It had some news (which seems appropriate for a newsletter) and a tip on compassionate communication.

In blog news, we’ve set our posting schedule: We update every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9:30am. Wednesdays are Book Bonanza days til September, and Fridays will be Community Updates. Monday is a free-for-all!

Freak Revolution Coffee House

We’ve been getting to know each other and having some great conversations at the Coffee House, some serious and some silly. (The Coffee House is our community meeting place; it’s currently a Google Group but will metamorphosize into a shiny new forum soon!) We’ve been talking about NLP, Core Transformation, culture and family structure in Singapore, our families of origin and our families of choice, a bronze statue of two dancing clowns, and tossing around ideas for the collective noun for a group of freaks. (:

Tim

Pace guest posted on Tim Brownson’s blog to explain to everyone why Tim will save the world.

Johnny

We had an awesome conversation with our good friend Johnny Truant about what’s wrong with the world and how to make it better. We talk about why we don’t watch the news, how to opt out of the fear culture, how to change the world with laughter, and why we started the Freak Revolution. It’s a good listen, and Johnny is hilarious. (:

Naomi

We also had an awesome conversation (scroll down to “Changing the Fucking World, Part 2″) with our BFF sister-from-another-mother Naomi about homeschooling, unschooling, why the job culture is so fucked up, how to get out of it, and how living an awesome life can make a big difference in the world. In Naomi’s words, it’s about “galvanizing those of us who don’t fit the mold and helping us change the world.” (In case you don’t recognize Naomi from her voice, that’s her on the header of our website, on the far left.)

Pace & Kyeli

We found mold in our bathrooms, so they’re tearing out the cabinets and replacing them. It’s a huge pain in the butt, but luckily our landlord is totally awesome and is being really great about it. We’re hoping that getting rid of the mold will cure our son’s recurring cold-like symptoms. Poor kid, he’s been sick off and on ever since we moved to our new place.

How ’bout you?

You’re part of our community, too! What’s been going on with you this week?

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 19: Meta-communication

Meta-communication is communication about communication. When communication isn’t working, you can use meta-communication to help you figure out why and to make things better in the future. Many of the techniques we talk about are meta-communication in a broad sense, but in this chapter we’ll talk about a particular kind of meta-communication: conversations you can have once to make lots of future conversations better.

What if someone often uses a particular word or phrase that sparks an unhelpfully defensive reaction in you? Meta-communication can help: bring it up a single time so you don’t continue tripping over it again and again. What if a particular kind of misunderstanding arises over and over again? Meta-communication can help: bring it up once to talk about how to avoid the misunderstanding in the future or how to deal with it more gracefully when it does happen.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 19: Meta-communication (web page)

Over this weekend past, I underwent a lot of change.

Truth be told, I secretly underwent a lot of change when I wasn’t paying attention, and last weekend it all came out.

I have this inner lake. Vast, dark, still waters. Epiphanies and important things and events will sometimes plop in and make ripples, and the sands at the bottom shift. It can be moments or days before I feel the shifts.

Last weekend was very shifty.

I gave my ratlings up for adoption. I’ve always considered myself an animal person. I wanted to have lots of cats, rats, birds, fish, maybe even a dog or two. But at some point, that shifted. The pets I had became too much. Given that the ratlings were also terrified of the cats, and I couldn’t spend enough time with them to soothe their fears, I realized the best thing to do was give them up – even though it broke my heart.

My identity shifts. I am no longer an animal person.

I babysat my sweet adorable toddler “nephew” overnight. He was his sweet adorable self and we had a lot of fun (and a lot of baths). But by the time his parents picked him up, I was utterly exhausted. At one point, he was screaming his fool head off because I had to change his diaper. He was screaming and screaming and wiggling and wiggling. I said, “Darling, if you hate having your diaper changed so much, being still makes far more sense. If you’re still, I can finish much faster, and we can get back to playing much sooner.”

I realized I was talking to someone much older than he. A toddler doesn’t communicate like I do, like my pre-teen son does. And it frustrated me severely!

After I finished changing him, I sat back on my heels and watched him continue to scream and thrash. He was so caught up in his protests, he hadn’t realized that I was finished. I watched, he screamed. After a moment, he rolled and found that he could move, so he stopped screaming – immediately – and went on his merry way. I continued sitting, breathing deeply. I felt different, more clear.

My identity shifts. I no longer want more children.

We think of identity as static. We are who we are, and that rarely fundamentally changes. Sure, we tweak. We grow. We make adjustments. But we rarely, if ever, make changes in the who-we-are part of who we are.

But shifts in who we are make us more real. More clear. More open and more honest. Acknowledging our inner shifting sands brings us clarity and hones our knowledge – not just of our selves – but of the world around us. Because we are our world. Our change brings change.

I often have stomach problems when I eat certain types of food, and I’ve finally started paying more attention to exactly which foods cause the problems. (Yes, this is actually a post about communication, not poop.)

Last night I ate pizza and didn’t have any stomach problems afterward, so I said to Kyeli, “Pizza doesn’t cause it.” “Some kinds of pizza,” she clarified. I boggled for a moment, realized that we must have miscommunicated, figured out the miscommunication, and then launched into an impassioned tirade about quantifier scoping as Kyeli’s eyes completely glazed over.

I’ll spare you the gory first-order logic details, but I do want to talk about the miscommunication.

When I said “Pizza doesn’t cause it”, what I meant was that I have a list of potential causes in my head, like this:

• Spicy food
• Chips & Salsa
• Indian food
• Cheese
• Pizza
• Domino’s Pizza
• Tony’s frozen pizzas

and I’ve been putting mental checkmarks or X’s next to each one as I figure out whether it causes tummy badness. When I said “Pizza doesn’t cause it”, I meant that I was putting an X next to “Pizza” on my list. I wasn’t putting an X next to “Domino’s Pizza” or “Tony’s frozen pizzas” (which, in fact, have a checkmark next to them), I was only X-ing out “Pizza”. On my list, “Pizza” means “ALL pizza”, so I can now X out “Pizza” because I now have a counterexample to the “all pizza makes me sick” theory.

When Kyeli heard “Pizza doesn’t cause it”, she heard “No type of pizza causes it”, and she felt the need to clarify, because she thought I had overgeneralized.

This miscommunication happened to be about something random and not very important, and it was easy to fix. However, I can easily see something similar happening and causing an argument.

Example 1: Sue is thinking about why she’s unhappy in her life. Sue says out loud, “It’s not because of my friends.” She might mean that her friends in general aren’t making her unhappy, but maybe one or two of her friends in particular still are. Or Sue might mean that none of her friends contribute to the problem in any way.

Example 2: Devi says, “I don’t like fish.” Her friend Maartje is later surprised to see Devi eating salmon. Devi clarifies, “Oh, I meant that I don’t like most kinds of fish. Salmon is an exception.” Maartje says, “But you said you don’t like fish. I thought you meant that you don’t like fish. At all. Any kind of fish. If I had known you meant most fish, I wouldn’t have thrown away that HUGE-ASS SALMON I bought for your birthday!”

Example 3: Kyeli says, “I’m not attracted to men.” I’ll stop there before I get in trouble. (;

Which type are you, a Most-enator or an All-ifier? If you heard “I don’t like fish”, how would you interpret it?

• The Most-enator hears: “I don’t generally like fish. (But maybe there are exceptions.)”
• The All-ifier hears: “I don’t like any kind of fish. (Not in the rain, not on a train.)”

Are you a Most-enator or an All-ifier? Let us know in the comments!

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 18: Coming to terms

Mary and Kathi’s Example: A Few Sandwiches

Mary: “I’m hungry. What is there to eat?”

Kathi: “There were a few sandwiches left over from dinner last night. I put them in the fridge.”

Mary: “I can’t find them. I only ate three this afternoon. Where are the rest?”

Kathi: “Oh, I think that’s about all there were, three or so.”

Mary: “I thought you said there were a few!”

Kathi: “Yeah, you know, a few, three or so.”

Mary: “What?! Everyone knows ‘a few’ means at least five or six. Now what am I supposed to eat?”

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 18: Coming to terms (web page)

Today’s guest stars are Amanda Braman-Ray as Mary and Heather The Great as Kathi. Don’t they make a cute couple? (;

As you might have heard by now, yesterday was a big day for me and Pace.

We dropped everything and followed our hearts, bringing us here to the Freak Revolution.

The outpouring of support, love, and cheers has been overwhelming in the most positive sense of the word.

A few highlights:

The Magnificent Megan M., one of our dearest friends and biggest cheerleaders, posted an awesome (and fun) podcast about the FR and unschooling and how important what we’re doing here together is to us and the world. It’s long, but it’s rollicking, and I recommend you kick back with a mug of some beverage and give it a listen. Megan is always fun to talk with, and this time was no exception.

E. from GeeksDreamGirl.com, a geek-focused dating-profile-writing site (which I think is a kick-ass service), posted our review on hot dating spots in Austin. She’s a fellow geek, a partner of the Revolution, and a new friend. We’ve been having lots of fun getting to know each other, and writing the post reminded me and Pace of some choice dating spots we haven’t hit in a while. Bonus!

Bob Poole, author of the recently released “Listen First, Sell Later”, gifted us with his own incredible interpretation of our Revolution. Bob is our kind of salesman: kind, generous, smart, funny, amazingly sweet, and genuine. We’re friends, but more than that, I deeply respect him and am honored to have him on our team.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In only eight hours, we had over thirty people apply to join the Revolution. We had a few phone calls. We had a slew of emails. We had countless tweets, including several that were so sweet we cried. Dearest friends and brand-new friends and soon-to-be friends, all reaching out and connecting.

And the applications! They’re so full of awesome, we barely know what to do with ourselves! We’re so touched and so honored that so many incredible, awesome, intelligent, and thoughtful people are flocking to join us.

You guys are showing us that this is the right path. All the fear, all the tears, all the hard work… Worth every second.

This is the heart of the Freak Revolution. Together, we’re strong. Together, we really can – and will, I have no doubt – change the world. This is only the beginning.

Thank you.