Kirk Kittell was here

You are responsible for your own experience.

Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.

Thanks for that, Hugh.

I'm not practiced at selling other people's stuff, so let's try this... Dear everyone: go and buy Hugh McLeod's book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. It's available starting today, Thursday 11 June 2009. Don't walk, run, to your local book store, etc. It will be there. Waiting for you.

I'm an appreciative subscriber to Hugh's insights on gapingvoid.com and on Twitter as @gapingvoid. It was "How to Be Creative," the predecessor to this book, that hooked me a few years ago. If you want an objective review about the merits of this book, I'm not the person to give it to you.

I'll leave the biz cards biz to Mr. McLeod

It's a small book. If you're into buying your books by the pound, well, sorry. And it has a load of pictures, namely, the cartooned business cards that are Hugh's notable medium (and this is cliched to death, but: the drawings themselves are worth a thousand words). I didn't know how well that would translate from softcopy to hardcopy, but I'm very happy with what I have in my hands. The wisdom is mostly the same, but I like having the real thing that I can flip to any chapter I like -- at will, at random -- to get a good dose of Hugh's uncluttered point of view.

Ignore Everybody is listed as a guide about how to be creative, but for me it is a guide about confidence. (Perhaps these two are the same.)

There you are -- there I am -- navigating the cubicle canyon on foot, wondering if this is it. There's a small voice in your head that says, "Well, I have this idea that might be awesome," but what do voices know? Voices are going to get you in trouble. But you have everything you need at your disposal to make an end run around your chosen mediocrity. But. What if you don't make it? But. What if you don't have the right tools? But. What if your idea is too small? But. What if you find your voice and it isn't interesting?

That's where Hugh enters. The simple ideas in Ignore Everybody point out that the path ahead of you has been traveled -- not the exact same one, as the chapter "Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside" is meant to explain -- and that there is the chance of success. You just need to do it. You just need to stop thinking that other people are going to see your dream as importantly as you do. You just need to understand that no one is qualified to give you permission except you. It reminds me of the chapter on writing memoirs in On Writing by Bill Zinsser where the author points out that people mistakenly think that they need permission to write about themselves, as if this was something that needed to be approved by the world at large. Then he says, fine, I give you permission to do it, go. That's the kind of lasting feeling that I take from Ignore Everybody. Get the book, and it will help to bridge the gaps of uncertainty that you encounter along your path. It's a swift kick in the tail to get you past your own hangups.

There are no recipes in this book. There aren't any shortcuts. There are forty short, short chapters littered with pithy business card doodles. Like anything done directly from the heart, it resonates.

Now go buy the freaking book.

I picked up three books this evening from the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell:
New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren. A million years ago -- or maybe just ten, I don't remember -- I was in high school. I remember flipping through the enormous book of a million different stories and poems -- or maybe just a hundred, I don't remember -- that was our English literature book. One poem that caught my eye, although we never covered it in class, was a poem that I simply remembered because it had the line, "Canteen now dry and of what worth." That was the only line I remembered, though I remembered it in the context of, "OK, we've made it here, now who are we and why?" Today I looked up the line -- thanks, Google Books -- and tracked down the book at the library.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. Of course this deserves a terrible pun: I found this book during a random walk down the aisle at the library. It wasn't completely random that I chose it: I recognized it as a respected book on investing. Also, it stood out on the shelves in the section on finance because it didn't proclaim to make me a millionaire or beat the Dow or do any other number of things that I would expect to hear from someone that was just trying to sell me a book (looking at you and your books, Jim Cramer).
Dialogues of Plato, Volume I, translated by B. Jowett (Fourth printing, 1941). Let me explain what I know about philosophy: I don't know anything about philosophy. In the summer of 2005, at the University of Illinois, I had to cross campus to get from my apartment to work at the ElectriCOIL lab. To get there, often I would duck through the Main Library to catch a little shade. One day, they were selling used books, and I picked up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (for a quarter or fifty cents or something ridiculous). In this book, the narrator mentions the dialogues of Plato, as well as several other ideas and books on philosophy. So I saw this book while browsing the shelves, checked to see it was the one with the dialogue with Phaedrus, and got it.
By the way, I'm kittell on LibraryThing.

Interesting songs heard on Etherbeat Radio -- saved here so I can find them later and so you can go to last.fm to listen to them yourself:

• "Mood Indigo" by Dr. John
• "Touch" by Divine Styler
• "Potholes in My Lawn" by De La Soul
• "Of Course You Can" by Spearhead
• "Yerbabuena" by Voo Doo Phunk
• "Offspring" by Del the Funky Homosapien
• "Experiment Number Six" by Lemon Jelly

I'm kittell on last.fm, by the way.

The last thing that I need is more books. Which is why I went and bought a few more books today.
Of course, this time it wasn't quite as financially demanding as it used to be, when I would almost compulsively raid the Barnes and Noble at Seven Corners in Falls Church, Virginia. This time, the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell was hosting a used book sale as a fundraiser. The three books that departed with me cost a grand total of $3 (which included a $0.50 raffle ticket for... I'm not sure what it was for).
It was a good excuse to get outside, walk along the canals in the morning sun, test another Lowell coffee shop (Caffe Paradiso, my favorite out of two so far).
Here are the new additions to my library:

• Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. If anyone needs to know why I picked up a Kurt Vonnegut book, even if the dustcover was ripped all to hell, immediately leave this site, never come back.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
• The More Than Complete Hitchhikers Guide by Douglas Adams. This book has all four books of the trilogy in one volume. As a former member of the space cadet cult, I was still a sort of outsider because I had never read any science fiction. (I read the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson when I was in grad school, but I would classify that one under "geriatric sex," not "science fiction.") I have, however, played a little bit of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the Commodore 64. I'll give them a try. I'm no longer accepted by the space cadets, so maybe the books will be more fun without the corresponding baggage.

By the way, I'm kittell on LibraryThing.

Today I made a shift on kirkkittell.com: the site was previously based in WordPress; now it is based in Drupal. I still like WordPress because it was very, very easy to use. However, the sites that I have been developing recently for ISU and ISR alumni organizations are both in Drupal, which is better (in my opinion) for managing membership-based organizations. This site was the last one I had that used WordPress. I changed it so I could develop it along with the others, else it was going to atrophy.

Very exciting news, I know -- thrilling, etc. Things are weird or inoperable here and there, but it happens. You're getting this junk for free anyway.

Also, I've been away for three months because I moved from Texas to Massachusetts. (One might also say I've been away for three months because I've had nothing to say, but that has never stopped me from faking it before; see the other two hundred entries on this site for proof of that.)