Seth’s blog

I was surprised how much I liked the Olympics opening ceremonies on Friday. I hadn’t been so transfixed by an Olympic event since Joan Benoit won the first woman’s marathon, leading the whole way. At one point during the opening ceremonies a young girl in a red dress sang a Chinese song. Or so it seemed:

The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.

But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.

At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth.

Weston Price’s research, described in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, implies that buck teeth are caused by too little of a dietary growth factor, which a commenter described as “the menaquinone-4 form of vitamin K2.”

During Bill McKibben’s book tour for Maybe One (1998), an argument for having no more than one child, he gave a reading in Berkeley. I attended, and asked a question: Jane Jacobs says the problem isn’t too many people, the problem is the undone work. (Which I also said at the end of The Shangri-La Diet.) For example, air pollution. The solution won’t be fewer people, it will be cars that pollute less. I asked McKibben what he thought of this. He said he thought highly of Jacobs, but  the EV1 was a failure. Terrible answer, I thought.

Yesterday I spoke to the owner of an electric car. It is entirely powered by electricity from solar panels on the roof of her house. It can’t go on the highway but is perfectly good for taking her and her two children around town. She’s had it about a year; she bought it after seeing someone else drive one. Leaving aside the cost of the solar panels, driving costs her almost nothing, is very quiet, and produces no pollution. The car was made in Vancouver. In America, it’s small; it wouldn’t be small in Japan. Looks like the future, I thought.

Green Motors, a Berkeley store specializing in electric cars, started by the man she bought it from. Lovely website, his enthusiasm shines through. Car-maker difficulties.

At a cooking class, I met Ami DeAvilla, a professional organizer. It’s a profession so new — 15 years old? — that I was curious what sort of problems she works with. She told me some examples:

Example 1. A woman who was 4 years behind filing her taxes. She was collecting the letters from Franchise Tax Board and the IRS. There wasn’t that much money involved — she might even have had some money owed to her. Became overwhelming and daunting. As the years went on, doing her taxes became overwhelming. She had a “fear basket”: those letters went in it. I was able to come in & open the most recent of the letters. She did have all of the info. There was a lot of fear involved. Also she had gotten divorced. Emotion of having to handle financial stuff on her own. She contacted me because she knew she needed to file but couldn’t do it on her own. Her sister found me through the website of the National Association of Professional Organizers. We met twice/week for a few hours. We did 3 years together; she did the last one on her own. Total 15 hours [Ami’s current rate is $100/hour]. One 3-hour session was about her current relationship to money, which was as important as the taxes. Just as having a heart attack can lead you to improve your health habits because it indicates a greater problem.

Example 2. A woman who for 37 years had been in same home. She needed to make a decision about whether or not to stay there because her husband’s health was getting worse. It was a two- story house. Two sets of steps to climb because it was on a hill. Not possible for him to be mobile in and out of the house. He had severe back pain and had trouble getting up the stairs. It was her home. She didn’t want to leave. She was feeling overwhelmed with the decisions to be made. After she decided to move, then there were decisions about their stuff. They were moving to a much smaller place. Moving from four-bedroom house to three-room apartment. Sorting through their entire life. Dividing belongings among all their children and grandchildren.

Example 3. A small business owner who had been in practice for over 20 years. His home-based office was a mess. People not billed. Papers all over the office. He works on site. He came to me because it was daunting to take care of tasks that needed to happen. He would hire someone to help in the office but they wouldn’t work there until it was cleaned up. They didn’t want to feel overwhelmed by the clutter. He wasn’t able to clean up his office. He was working a lot of hours, trying to balance personal life with business life. Now that he was taking some personal time, and not working all night, business things weren’t being taken care of.

Example 4. Published author, several books out. She was juggling four pressing projects and trying to start a website. Continuing on a book she was halfway into. Couldn’t make the writing work. I worked  her with for 2 hrs to help her prioritize her time. Previously she was able to manage some of this better. When the website came along it became another project that kept the writing from happening. She’d been working on the book for a year or less; she was more than halfway through, and now falling behind the publisher’s deadline. She wanted a plan, plus physical organization of her workspace. We shifted the space a little bit to help her focus on writing. She was getting distracted too much.

Example 5. A woman called me because her house was not the way she wanted it. Three people had died and she had inherited their belongings. She felt overwhelmed in her own home. She’d lived there over 20 years. It was overwhelming to go through things and make decisions about what she wanted to keep. Stuff had gotten packed in quite a bit. We went through her house room by room and cleared stuff out. Started in the kitchen. Less emotional. Not much room left on the counters. We did 4 or 5 rooms, including office space. She had been a graphic designer.

You can reach Ami at amisolutions at mac dot com.

In the checkout line at Monterey Market:

ME Are those mangosteens?

MAN They’re baby artichokes.

You eat them raw, he said. Peel off the outer leaves and slice them thin.

MAN With some Pecorino sliced thin, pinenuts, a little olive oil . . .

ME Sounds Italian.

MAN Yes, it is.

Everyone laughed.

1. A one-month test of The Secret.
2. If you can’t see the Frida Kahlo exhibit, read this.
3. Google Talk with a lot of laughs: J. A. Janis, author of Damage Control, a murder mystery. A masterpiece of public speaking.