Very Important People talk casually about their personal branding. They don’t have personal style, they have personal brand. The pockets of said “brand” are stuffed with the names of celebrities and pseudo celebrities that VIPs have a “very important relationship” with. Because the pockets are so stuffed, this person just litters names all over any […]

Never thought of self-importance as a defense mechanism. Perhaps I’m just used to filing them wholesale under the “narcissist” category and relegating them to the part of my mind for people who are just too shitty to be a)trusted or b)viewed as fully human. I do have to admit that there are people who are […]

The way Wet Blanket Matadors get at me is to accuse me of being close-minded. This way I’m open to their closing me off. I actually work hard – too hard- to keep an open mind to the ideas and perspectives of others. The determined crazymaker then accuses me of being stubborn, narrow, even bigoted. […]

Wet blanket matadors are the people that will concoct any excuse at all for you to not pursue creativity. Have I met them? So many, so often that I have a hard time remembering them all. They blur together after awhile. Sometimes the specifics will come to me. Sometimes they won’t. The matadors I have […]

I grew up very aware of all status symbols. I also grew up consciously resisting them. In a school covered in brand names as a means of communicating social order, I did weird things like cutting the logos off my Keds and hating Porsche owners solely for the environmental damage they perpetuated. When I see […]

There is only one status symbol I would absolutely NEVER be caught dead with: any non-electric sports car, ever, that is not a DeLorean. That’s the only “absolute never.” I’ve been an environmentalist when I as 16; I lived in a town where kids my age had sports cars. The kids that had them – […]

For anyone that knows about my baking, this is no surprise: a Kitchen Aid Mixer. But I’d settle for a Viking. I would also totally love it if I owned a condo in Hawaii. Mike and I were sorely tempted when we were in Kauai. The whole vacation rental/insurance thing makes that problematic, though.Filed under: […]

Dear DM: There really was a difference between us. It wasn’t that I was loved more by our parents. Quite the opposite; if you had payed the least bit of attention you would have seen it as plainly as everyone else in the community did. It wasn’t that I had any natural advantage. All advantages […]

Those of us with creative demons do get a lot of patterned relationships. My most common distorter? The wannabe authority figure. Someone, male or female, wants to convince me that they know so much better than I, that there judgment is so much more solid. They do their damnedest to make me doubt myself, to […]

Almost all the teachers at CPHS at some point uttered the words “You need to have a fallback if you’re in the arts.” Sometimes this speech was addressed to me. Sometimes to others. I strongly suspect that it was part of the curriculum. For fans of Veronica Mars, you’ll get this: the demographics of the […]