Hello again! Here’s a taste of what’s been going on lately with our community and around the internets.

How to be telepathic

This is an interesting article about how to avoid the usual error. The upshot is to imagine what the other person would think at some point far away in the future, rather than imagining what they would think right now. When it comes to guessing what others are thinking, our future-guessing is far more accurate (even for now!) than our now-guessing.

Taylor Muse

Our friend Taylor Muse shares his thoughts about religion, music, Daniel Quinn, and the control paradigm. It’s a moving post, and there’s some interesting discussion in the comments. You can read it here.

Idea Catalyst Kit

Our friend Megan at IdeaSchema (you may remember her as the talent behind the book design for The Usual Error, among many other things) has launched a new product called the Idea Catalyst Kit. It’s for entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to come up with a brilliant idea for a successful business, or entrepreneurs who already have brilliant ideas and don’t know what to do with them.

We don’t make any money if you click on these links; our only goal in sharing this with you is to help you get those ideas out of your head and into the world, any way you can. We’ve peeked inside the box, and it’s not just hype — there’s impressively good stuff in there! Megan is high quality. Click and see for yourself!

The Narcissist: A User’s Guide

Our friends Betsy and Lori have written a new e-book: The Narcissist – A User’s Guide. It teaches you how to recognize and deal with narcissists in your life.

What kind of people are we talking about here?

• Friends who sap you of energy.
• Co-workers who make your life miserable.
• Family members who criticize you, incessantly argue with you, and drive you crazy.
• People who demand lots of emotional maintenance but rarely reciprocate.

What they call narcissists, we might label "emotional manipulators", "codependent abusers", or "emotional vampires".

This is very important stuff here. If anyone in your life fits this description, then please give this e-book a read. Think of it as a troubleshooting appendix to The Usual Error.

It’s only 30 pages, but it’s packed with practical wisdom. It’s a great read and it’s also written in a way that’s easy to skim. And best of all, it’s free!

Here’s the link! Narcissist: A User’s Guide

Austin Makes a Book

Austin, TX residents: Check this out, it’s a crowdsourced book! 100 people, 100 pages. Kyeli and I just submitted our page (an essay about the monkeysphere), and now there are only 25 24 pages left. Hmm, since they let Kyeli and me share a page, I guess that makes it 101 people, 100 pages. Off-by-one error. (:

If you live in or around Austin and would like to submit a story, essay, photo, art, or whatever, check out Austin Makes a Book.

Pace and Kyeli are Retreating

How will Pace and Kyeli be spending our Valentine’s Day weekend? At Jen Louden’s Virtual Retreat, that’s how!

Oh my gosh, this is going to be so good. Jen is such a sweetheart, and we’re doing a bunch of lovely things with Patti Digh, Hiro Boga, Fabeku, and oodles of other shiny people. (:

We’re looking forward to it ridiculous lots. It’ll be like a huge emotional and spiritual sigh. The kind where you breath in deeply, let it out slowly, and you feel like your shoulders relax and sink all the way into the soft bouncy peat bog grass. Or maybe that’s just us. (;

The price goes up by $50 tonight at midnight, so if you feel inspired to join us at the Virtual Retreat, you might want to register soon.

Click here (affiliate link, direct link) to read more, and to see the whole list of interesting and fabulous people!

Time for another dose of what’s going on in our community!

Hildy

Our friend and fellow world-changer Hildy Gottlieb presented a workshop in Tucson. She mentioned The Usual Error and gave us photographic proof! Look on the whiteboard behind her head!

I (Pace) recently finished reading Hildy’s book, The Pollyanna Principles, and it feels like the connection paradigm applied to nonprofit organizations. (Sorry, “Community Benefit Organizations”, which I agree is a much better name for them.) It’s like reading something I could have written, except in a different context, and I’m working on a whole blog post just about this book. If you’re at all interested in changing the world through organizations that benefit the community, you probably want to get to know Hildy, because she’s awesome like that. She’s also on Twitter. (:

The Buddhist usual error

Speaking of the usual error, I came across the oldest reference to the usual error I’ve ever seen: a quote from the Buddha, who says “We see as we are.”

Lespreneur

We made the front page of Lespreneur, the magazine for lesbian entrepreneurs! Here’s the cover story.

Quiet Company

Do you like Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn? Do you like music? If so, check out this music video by Taylor Muse of Quiet Company. The song and the video are inspired by Ishmael, and it made me really happy.

Here’s the video: On Modern Men

Also, thank you to Green (who wrote the lovely poem we posted on Wednesday) for introducing us!

Being Out at Work

We wrote an article for Out In America on being out at work and how it can change the world.

Opening the Moneyflow

My friend Mark Silver is offering a year-long course called Opening the Moneyflow. It’s about a heart-centered approach to building or growing a business of your own. Many of you have asked that the two of us offer a course on how to start your own business in an ethical, non-slimy way that will change the world for the better. We’re not ready to offer that course yet, but in the meantime, we wholeheartedly recommend Mark Silver as our proxy. He’s the real deal: honest, authentic, knowledgeable, and just a super sweet guy. His earlier course, Heart of Money, certainly helped me a huge lot.

If you’re interested in starting or growing your own business in a heart-centered way, I suggest reading about it to see if it’s for you. Here’s an affiliate link and here’s a direct link if you prefer. (:

Last but certainly not least, we’re eagerly preparing for the launch of 52 Weeks to Awesome, our exciting new e-course that starts in January! Pre-registration opens on December 14th, and we’ll be telling you more about it as it draws near. Keep it in mind as a potential gift for friends — who couldn’t use a little more awesome in their lives? (:

To kick this off, we’ll be hosting a free, 52-minute How to Be Awesome teleclass on Monday, December 14th at 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific (here’s a time zone converter) – and if you join the Freak Revolution newsletter, we’ll remind you via email in plenty of time to sign up. We’ll give a brief overview of what we’ll cover in the course — the Basic Principles of Awesomeness.

Hope to see (or hear) you there! (:

Trust your past self

Our friend Benji wrote in to us, and we wanted to share his email with you, with his permission.

So I was thinking the other day about "Trust your future self" - BTW one of my favorite lessons from your book, one I badly needed to hear, and one I tell others about very often!

And I stumbled upon the obvious corollary, which you have not mentioned (at least not with this phrasing):
TRUST YOUR PAST SELF
Remember all those horrible decisions you made about leaving your boyfriend, buying that new car, changing jobs, etc.?
Well guess what, you thought it was a good decision at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 so obviously it looks like a bad decision now, but when you made it, you thought it was good! It doesn't make you a bad person. Learn from your mistakes, forgive yourself for not being omniscient, and move on.

love,
Benji

Right on! It also reminds me of Kyeli’s post about never making a mistake! (:

Institute of Noetic Sciences

Someone on Twitter linked to this video and I, curious, explored the website of the folks who produced it. They’re the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and their mission is:

“…to promote forms of consciousness that shift humanity from separation and conflict to collaboration, forgiveness and interconnectedness.”

Sounds pretty darn connection paradigm to me. It looks like they’re taking the “wacky science” approach to shifting the paradigm, whereas we’re taking the personal growth, community, and spreading world-changing ideas approach, but they look interesting. And it looks like they’re affiliated with the HeartMath Institute, which I think Paul Pearsall is also affiliated with. I loved his book The Heart’s Code.

Do you know anything about these folks?

The Freak Revolution Manifesto!

We’ve been hard at work on the Freak Revolution Manifesto. We’ve finished the first and second drafts, we’re currently waiting for feedback from our freaky revolutionary editors, and then we’ll ship off the final draft to our daring designer Megan and our amazing artist Marty and let them do their magic. Megan is a bit swamped so it’ll take until mid-September, but trust us, it’ll be worth the wait.

We rearranged our house!

We found that we often preferred to work in the living room instead of the office, so we rearranged our entire house, made our living room into a living room/office, and turned the ex-office into a sanctuary! It’s ridiculously wonderful to have a room dedicated to sacredness. And working in the open space of the livingroomoffice is wonderful, too. (:

52 Weeks to Awesome

While Megan and Marty meddle with the manifesto, we’re getting ready to bring you 52 Weeks to Awesome! 77% of you who took the poll voted for that one, and we aim to please. It’ll be an e-course where each week, we’ll send out one baby step that will make your life awesomer, in plain, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-practice language. Concrete things you can do to be happier, be more motivated, and be more productive. 52 minor life improvements add up to one huge life improvement. And we’ll be sure to provide a 100% awesomeness guarantee or something that sounds equally silly and equally cool. (: This news is so fresh that we aren’t even taking pre-orders yet, so hold your horses. If you want to be the first to know when it goes on sale, sign up for our newsletter.

Kyeli broke her foot!

Kyeli slipped on some invisible water on the kitchen tile while carrying crystals for a crystal grid. She clung tightly to the crystals and wrenched her foot to avoid falling, and fractured her big metatarsal slightly. She’s wearing a big clunky ass-kicking boot while it heals, which will take 4 to 6 weeks. In the meantime, I (Pace) am trying to hold her down, take care of her, and keep her from doing things. I’m sure she’d appreciate some sympathy and support if you’d like to leave her a comment. (:

You gave us your feedback about this blog, and we’re listening.

You asked for more open and vulnerable posts. We’ll do our best.

You asked for more audio and video posts. We’ll continue posting those occasionally.

You said that the community updates were the posts you most often skimmed or skipped. So we’re cutting down on those. From here on out, we won’t post community updates weekly; we’ll only post them if we have interesting and/or important news to share.

On the Fridays when we don’t post a community update, we’ll post something about communication, how to be awesome, or revolutionizing the world instead. So our blog schedule, starting next week, is:

Monday: something awesome and unscheduled
Wednesday: Book Bonanza Wednesday
Friday: Community Update or something awesome and unscheduled

How does that sound? Leave us a comment if you have something to say.

Thanks for experimenting with us and finding out what works best!

Gravatars

We have Gravatars! We figured that seeing each other’s faces is a good way to get to know each other, so we added gravatars (globally recognized avatars) to the comments section of our blog. If you leave a comment and your picture doesn’t show up, sign up at gravatar.com and upload an icon. It’ll appear not only here, but at oodles of other blogs that use gravatars! It’s pretty nifty.

Pace and Kyeli

This week has been mixed between stressful and awesome. On Tuesday, we talked with Naomi about our business plan. (Reminder to myself: post about why the Freak Revolution is a business rather than a nonprofit, a hobby, or a charity.) That was wonderful. Naomi is always lovely to talk to, and we came up with some great ideas together!

With that, plus Pace taking the Heart of Money course, there’s been a lot of soul-searching. We’ve been asking a lot of big questions, about our business, about our blog, and about all sorts of things.

It’s time to stop asking each other and start asking you. (This seems embarrassingly obvious in retrospect.)

Tell us what you want.

We’re writing this blog for you. Please, tell us what you like and what you don’t like. We’re listening. We want to write things that will help you, inspire you, make you happy, and maybe even change the world.

Here’s a short, anonymous, three-question form for you to tell us how we can best do that.

(If you don’t see the form, click here.)

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Thanks oodles!

We appreciate you, and we appreciate your input! With your help, we’re an amazing force that will change the world.

News flash: Scientists make the usual error

Jodi pointed me to this article, which basically says “Be precise in how you want your work to be used, because other people are going to make the usual error.”

Guest Post!

Pace wrote an awesome guest post about the usual error for Social Work p.r.n., a social work company based in Pennsylvania.

We were connected to them through our dear friend, Bob Poole – thanks, Bob!

OMG Daniel Quinn!

The brilliant author of Ishmael and The Story of B, two of the three most boat-rocking, life-altering books we’ve read, put a short blurb about us in his news column last weekend.

This is a big deal for us, as these two books were a huge part of what inspired us to create the Freak Revolution! We’re honored to be featured on his site.

We made a new friend!

Our new friend Tracy, of Fiercely Loved, wrote a very interesting and touching blog post about how we’re pushing her boundaries and her journey from fear to acceptance.

It’s beautiful and well-written, and managed to accidentally step on one of Kyeli’s triggers – who is currently still processing, but we’ll post a podcast about it on Monday.

Decluttering Goddesses is happening soon!

Leonie and Lisa’s course, Decluttering Goddesses, starts this Monday! It’s all about creating sacred space in your home so you can do your Work without the clutter-stress impeding you.

Kyeli is particularly excited about this course. She’s very sensitive to her environment, and clutter stresses her out big time. She’s already signed up and hopes you join her! It’s going to be amazing!

Time’s almost up to register, so why don’t you click here right now and check it out? Even if you don’t buy anything, you still get to look at Leonie’s luscious handwriting and art. (:

Here’s a taste of what’s going on in the Freak Revolution Community.

Member Tiara won third place in the New Talent category in Brisbane’s Cabaret Burlesque! Congrats and well done!

Member KN is getting ready to lead a Summer Solstice ritual for a conference of the North American Interfaith Network, which will happen on June 27th as part of a long weekend of workshops and religious services from various faith traditions. Kyeli wishes she could be a part of that; it sounds super cool.

Member Ari is going back to university after a two year hiatus – excellent! She also gets to meet her godson for the first time – he’ll be 10 months old.

Member Rachael is reading Zen to Done in hopes of finding something peaceful and helpful; we wish her luck!

What’s going on with Pace and Kyeli?

We had a schedule change last week; Dru started spending weekends with his other mom instead of Saturday through Monday, so we’ve been adjusting to that. It’s been a bit rough.

Kyeli has been working on optimizing her life. She’s been feeling stressed out and overwhelmed with the many hats she wears, so we’ve been working on a hat-rotation schedule so she can only worry about one hat at a time. A hat for everything and everything in its hat! She’s also been working on letting go of some superhuman expectations of herself that she picked up throughout her life. We’ve had ups and downs, laughter and tears. Progress (and hats) are being made, but this week has been pretty rocky in the emotional department.

Pace started Heart of Money with Mark Silver, who is amazingly awesome. She’s just into the pre-assignment, and is already 100% convinced that this course is going to change her life! (And she says “Thank you, thank you, thank you” to Kyeli for convincing her to sign up.)

And you?

That’s it for us, how are you doing right now?

Squirting lemon juice on your face makes you invisible to video cameras.

Our friend Biogant sent us a link to this video, which talks about the fact that incompetent people are often unaware of their own incompetence. It’s interesting. We all have our blind spots, but it’s scary to realize that we’re often blind to our blind spots.

This video, on the other hand, talks about the same thing, but is even more amusing.

5 Concrete Things You Can Do to Improve Your Relationship

Kyeli wrote a guest post for Out In America. You can read it here! (:

Andy Hayes

Today is a big day for our freaky revolutionary Andy Hayes. It’s his first day of self-employment as a travel writer and photographer! Let’s give him a big round of applause! (So that he can hear you over the internet, leave him a comment with *clapclapclap*)

Jonathan Mead

Andy’s not the only one! Our friend Jonathan Mead quit his day job earlier this week! Way to go, Jonathan! *clapclapclap*

Decluttering Goddesses

Our darling and dear friends, Leonie and Lisa, have joined forces to create a smashing decluttering program to help people get unstuck and cleared out. From the site:

There are adventures to be had, projects you’d love to dive into, and people you want to have time for. You want room to breathe, to think, to play. You want to shine as the amazing Goddess you are.

But you know there’s more to life than managing stuff. You know that your time and your energy and your special light are your most precious resources. And you know that life doesn’t have to be so complicated.

Are you signed up yet? Kyeli’s in!

Athena Bradford

Our friend Athena wrote a very sweet post about giving her daughter a vibrator for her 15th birthday. Unsurprisingly, a right-wing blogger took offense at this, saying “This is the kind of thing that kids end up going through years of therapy for.”

I think the poster on that blog are making the usual error. Since it would be inappropriate and possibly traumatic for their daughters (more than likely because they’ve been “properly” raised with the “sex is dirty and bad” meme), they’re assuming that it would be inappropriate and possibly traumatic for everyone’s daughters.

It’s the same as when people get all hot and bothered about nudists. Since nudity is tied to sex in their minds, they assume it would be inappropriate for a child to be around naked people all the time. But in fact, it’s completely normal and natural if the child doesn’t see nudity as sexual.

(Favor request: Please don’t get into any arguments with these folks. It won’t do anyone any good and has the potential to cause unnecessary drama.)

Toilet Lid Mystery

Night before last, I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It being all dark and scary, when I used the last of the toilet paper, I opted not to go into the garage and get more. I left Kyeli a signal – I put the toilet lid down and stood the empty TP roll on top of it.

It failed. She wound up stuck for quite a long time the next morning, getting increasingly mad at me for not leaving her a signal. We have cats, so that explains the TP roll having fallen to the floor (being knocked, no doubt), but how did the lid get raised? Neither I nor Kyeli have any recollection of raising the lid, and Dru doesn’t ever use our bathroom – and said he didn’t on the night in question.

I realize our cats are interesting, but opening the toilet? It’s a mystery, and we can’t figure it out.

A-kon

We had fun at A-kon, mostly by spending lots of time with our friends: Marty (he was all zombi-fied and terrorizing children), Megan, Kathy and her husband, and Frank and Kori.

The Kon itself was fun, but this year there was a distinct lack of anime we were interested in watching more than one episode of – which is the entirety of why we go. Kyeli’s saving her money for our Irish honeymoon, so she didn’t shop like she usually does, and Dru bailed at the last minute, having mistaken A-kon for AggieCon in his mind til the morning he was due to join us.

All in all, we came away with a single question: Does anyone know of a Netflix-like thing that’s good for anime?

Oceana

All three of us went to see Oceana yesterday. Our friend Kira is in it – the same Kira who co-taught Iron Pentacle class. It was incredible. Awesome. World-view transforming. If you’re in Austin, get thee to the Vortex! Show ends this weekend!

Your turn!

That’s it for us this week; what’s going on with you?

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?

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!