Larry Swanson’s Blog

Well, that was interesting. I just spent the past few weeks as a “Compassion Ambassador Concierge,” offering customer service to major sponsors of the Seeds of Compassion.

This was a truly unique event. It spanned five days and engaged children, parents, care-givers, teachers, curriculum developers, scientists, policy-makers, politicians, business people, philanthropists, religious leaders, and others in the event’s goal of instilling compassion in young kids.

I had decided a few months ago that service would be a priority for me this year, and I had just started reading the Dalai Lama’s “An Open Heart,” so it was a no-brainer to commit to a few weeks of part-time work for the event (it actually turned out to be more like full-time, but no worries at all about that).

Highlights

You’d think that shaking hands with the Dalai Lama would have to be the big highlight of the event, but, no, that wasn’t it. More interesting to me was discovering that the lovely Seeds of Compassion lotus-blossom-and-heart logo was designed by a Rat City Rollergirl. The only sticker I had ever put on my car to this point was the Rat City Rollergirls logo. I had grabbed a Seeds of Compassion sticker during a folder-assembly project and had vague ideas of putting it somewhere on my car. I couldn’t imagine how those two symbols could ever go together. Then at a wrap party for the event Tuesday night I met Amy Redmond of the Wong Doody agency. She is both a “fresh meat” jammer for Grave Danger of the Rat City Rollergirls and the graphic designer who created the Seeds of Compassion logo.

Shaking Hands with the Dalai Lama

Sunday morning I was helping out at a thank-you breakfast for sponsors of the event. I and a couple of other concierges and staff were standing off to the side near the door through which the Dalai Lama would enter. After a long wait, he arrived in a sleek black limo. I watched through the window as he walked up the sidewalk, seemingly oblivious to all of the security and police surrounding him. I noticed that he was wearing comfortable-looking brown shoes and that his legs were externally rotated (I can’t help but analyze any interesting gait), I assume due to his many hours of sitting cross-legged while meditating. Something on the sidewalk caught his eye, and he stopped for a few seconds to look at whatever it was with child-like curiosity. The next thing I knew he swept through the door. Instead of going up the steps to where all the VIPs were waiting to hear him talk, he walked over to our little row of volunteers and greeted each of us. I had been briefed on how to address him, and I had the presence of mind to say something like, “It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Your Holiness.” And that was it. He went up the stairs and delivered a nice talk. Touching him and being in his presence was, well, it just was. No clouds parted. No great wisdom was imparted. I didn’t get all fuzzy-headed. Time didn’t stand still. It was just me and another human being greeting each other. He insisted all weekend that he’s just a human being like anyone else, and that was definitely how I perceived him.

I hate it when people start a blog and then drop off the face of the earth.  And now here I am doing just that.  Not that any of these are necessarily reason enough to deprive you of my breathless prose, but here’s what’s cooking in Larry-land that’s keeping me from posting much lately:

• Heavy-duty volunteering for the past couple of weeks for the Seeds of Compassion event, 4 to 10 hours a day, on top of a fairly busy massage schedule
• Rehearsals for a gig with Sahlee (not Dahlee, as the typo on their schedule states) at the Green Festival Saturday at 6:30
• A bunch of new massage patients and clients
• Listening to some fun music (HonkFest West, Orkestar Zirkonium, Golem, Soyaya)
• Watching the debut of Johnny Jetpack’s latest creation at the Moisture Festival, as well as some great comedy and aerial acts
• First Thursday Art Walk and other gallery prowling
• Getting ready for my next couples massage class, April 20

There’s that old saw about how “the unexamined life is not worth living” and its converse, “the unlived life is not worth examining.”  Anyhow, think about that and put the word blogging somewhere in there. . .

A few years back it seemed like every other “Stop for Me - It’s the Law” sign in town had been altered to add a claw to the pedestrian’s hand and a “C” in front of “Law.” I snapped the photo at right on 39th Street in Fremont a couple of years ago.

This is a particularly adeptly modified one. I like the quality of the hook on the hand, the way it almost looks like an open-end wrench, and the compact-yet-not-squashed-looking typography. The exclamation point is a nice addition, too. Normally, I’m not a big fan of exclamation points, but this one turns a simple traffic sign directive into an urgent movie-trailer tag line.

At this point in the development of web savvy-ness, most of us have developed pretty good instincts about what we can trust on the web. But still I wonder. . .

There’s an old Doonesbury cartoon about the knucklehead journalist Roland Burton Hedley. During a visit to the Walden commune, Zonker convinces Hedley, among other things, that the Walden commune’s lilac bush is a marijuana plant and that Hedley can trust him because he gives his word that he represents a national trend. So Hedley writes a big Time cover story about the resurgence of the hippie movement, relying solely on Zonker’s assertions.

The web is far enough along that most topical areas have enough eyeballs on them to keep the BS artists in line, but there are still venues where the level of participation is low enough that a few determined purveyors of misinformation could plant their own row of lilac bushes and sell them to us as pot plants. I can’t point to any specific examples, but I bet it wouldn’t take a whole lot of sleuthing to identify Amazon book authors, wonder-drug sales people, and black-hat SEOs who are essentially doing this.

I believe that the Bartell drugstore here in the Medical Dental Building is the original one in that chain. In any case, it still employs a couple of cashiers who look like they may have been around back in the middle part of the 20th Century. Everyone there is friendly and helpful, but I find the two older ladies’ slow-paced service (not slow like a snooty upscale-store clerk, more like a waiter in a small Parisian bistro) endearing. It reminds me of when, not that long ago, people would drive 45 MPH (now it’s more like 65 MPH) past the Twin Teepees on Aurora or slow down as they drove by The Blob on lower Queen Anne. Every Tuesday morning I go into Bartell (I say Bartells in my head, the way old-time Seattle-ites say Nordstroms or Boeings) and buy the New York Times, and most Tuesdays Gail, the more youthful of the two, rings me up and always says, “Thanks a lot, dear.” I just love that.

The music in Lara McIntosh’s Sunday-morning Wassa Dance class has been really hot lately. This morning, though,Thierno Diop took it up a notch with some of the wildest djembe phrasing I’ve ever heard.

It was improv as always. I was playing a modified Soli Rapide sangban part on my dununba and kenkeni:

1 * * 2 * * 3 * * 4 * *
x . x . x x . x . x . x
D . . . K K . . . D . .

Caxambu was playing a goat-skin atabaque, Mohammed was playing what looked like some sort of kpanlogo drum, and Naby was playing Thierno’s bougarabous.

I’m not entirely sure what he was doing, but it sounded like Thierno was playing in roughly 4/4 time with a heavy sabar/mbalax flavor and emphasizing the sixteenth notes just before and after the beat. Whatever he was doing, it was some of the coolest damned drumming I’ve ever heard. I wish I’d had my minidisc recorder running. . .

A massage client the other day referred to the “disco nap,” a quick 40 winks after work and before you head out for the night. This got me thinking about other kinds of naps. There’s the “cat nap,” the “power nap,” the siesta - and that’s about all I have come up with so far. I know there must be others that I’m missing. If you can thinkof other kinds of naps please add a comment to this post and let me know.

I’ve decided to move all of my various blogs to one central location here at LarrySwanson.com.  Over the years, I’ve managed to write blog entries in at least three different places.  I’ll be migrating all of the old posts over to this WordPress blog over the next few weeks, so you will suddenly see a bunch of old entries here.

I’ll use 301 redirects to point the old entries to their new location (luckily there aren’t too many of them) and tidy everything up with the nifty categorization that WordPress lets you do.

Years ago, back when I was a college textbook rep, a professor told me that when new college campuses are built the designers don’t put in all the sidewalks right away. They wait to see where the students wear a path in the grass and then build them there. You can use this same idea when you build a big, database-driven web site. You create stable URLs for all of your site pages and then build rudimentary navigation and then see how your users actually navigate, or try to navigate, your site. Once you’ve got a feel for how folks actually want to use your site, then you can go back and tailor your navigation to their needs.

I’m trying this with my new massage education directory, Bodywork U. Sure, there’s probably a more elegant and proactive way to do this, but 1) users will always do what they want anyway, so why try to outguess them, and 2) I don’t have the budget to hire a hot-shot website navigation expert.

I have a regular client who is always very complimentary of my work. As she comes out of the treatment room she almost always exclaims “Fabulous!” or “Amazing!” or “Excellent!” or something similar. Today, as she was preparing to leave and I was glancing at my planner, I decided to start jotting down her comments in my calendar. So she comes out of the treatment room and says, “very good.” That’s it. No effusive adjectives. No exclamation points. Just, “very good.” That will teach me to get all proud and self-congratulatory. Needless to say, I have dropped the planned compliment-documentation project.

This actually gets at one of the things I like about this job. In the massage biz, there is no room for resting on your laurels or phoning in your work. You’ve got to be 100% present and 100% non-egotistical every day, every hour, every minute, or the mojo will get out of whack. How humbling.