Allen Iverson and the quiet gratification of semantics

Official SavingCymbria Iverson Tribute ~We'll miss you!~

 

The husband and I got into a heated debate last night over Allen Iverson’s retirement. I argued that ’ego’ had to have been a factor in the gifted basketball player’s decision to leave the game. This accusation came across as cruel blasphemy to the diehard fan beside me on the couch.

“He doesn’t have an ego!” my husband spluttered. “He’s just proud and uncompromising.”

Point. Set. Match.

To those who face what we cannot…

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(image source)

One quaint little sentence proves our culture has gone completely off the rails…

“We know plenty of women and men that would wear a $3 million dollar diamond covered bra even if it made them bleed!”

- Perez Hilton www.cocoperez.com

Perfect picture of Canadian diversity for Canada Day

Three Canadian families enjoying three, equally diverse, families of waterfowl in Calgary's Prince's Island Park- Happy Canada Day from SavingCymbria!

A ‘Sign’ of our times…

A 'Sign' of our times - as seen on a Monday morning in Calgary

Our Albertan economy is finally feeling the pinch after decades of unchecked growth. Everyone knows someone who has lost a job, or worse. About a month ago on a rush hour city bus, I overheard a conversation between two well dressed business men. One was lamenting over how his high risk investments had virtually vanished.

“Why did you buy into them in the first place?” the other asked.

The man’s answer was spoken matter of fact, with an honesty not often heard on public transit, especially during rush hour…

“Greed.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and quickly changed the subject.

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The best way to stay motivated during this time of economic flux, is to push forward with our career plans using creativity to set ourselves apart. Make a list of all your soft skills (ie: social, organizational), to add to your more easily resuméd hard skills (ie: Microsoft Office, masonry). Try to make connections between both sets to expand your general skill set. You’ll be surprised to discover what services you can offer as a uniquely experienced human being, rather than simply a _______ graduate with x number of years working in _______ . Now is the time to market yourself creatively, as a whole person, as… You!

Speaking of marketing…

To my dear SavingCymbria readers, and to those of you just breezing by, I am now available for all your Creative Problem Solving needs. Freelance writing and design (fashion commissions, graphic design, & web applications) are my specialties, along with photography and general creativity consulting for both individuals and businesses. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and thank you all for dropping by!

It's time to get creative with our personal marketing!

Dancing our way into history at Calgary’s Greek Festival

Edmonton dance troop Kyklos takes the stage

Greek culture is a celebration of tradition and family, with a history rich in art, food, and – as three blonds discovered at Calgary’s Greek Festival – lively dancing. Of our three family trees, mine has come the closest to Grecian soil, but that’s only by way of my step-mother’s ex-husband. Needless to say, we’ve never been invited to any family reunions. We’re always up for a party though, and as we quickly discovered, going Greek guarantees a great time!

This year’s Festival was attended by thousands and took place under a giant white tent in SouthWest Calgary, next to the Hellenic Community Center. The late June air was filled with the wonderful smells of honey drenched pastries and spit roasted lamb. I can still taste the sweet warmth of the Loukoumades on my tongue when I close my eyes – and yes, they’re just as sensational as their name. After a delicious meal, we took our seats third row from the stage, having no idea we were to become stars of the show!

Click Here to read the full, unspeakably embarrassing story of what happened next…

 

The PaperTrail: Redirecting recyclable office paper to downtown daycares

PaperTrail member Michelle Clare makes a delivery to a Calgary daycare - bringing art supplies and smiles!

PaperTrail paper in action!

Recycling your office’s paper is a great idea, but with all the energy and chemicals required, it can seem almost futile. There is a better way, and it skips right over the middle man. Welcome to The PaperTrail, a community outreach program that turns your recycling bin into art supplies for downtown daycares. I founded the program in April 2009 after becoming frustrated by how much perfectly usable paper our company was blue-binning. The community response has been fantastic! We collect the paper during the week and make our deliveries on Friday mornings. From end cuts to pages printed on one side, all is appreciated. 

Children's Calgary mural on PaperTrail paper

The PaperTrail is a simple program to bring to your office. Help your workplace ‘go green’ by joining us in the most environmentally friendly (and kid friendly!) recycling gig around. Not only will you be saving trees and recycling costs to the environment (and pocketbook), you’ll be giving tots the unlimited chance to express their creativity.

Click here to learn more about The PaperTrail
Join us by starting a chapter at your own company!

How much usable paper does your company recycle? It adds up quickly!

Not so different after all…

North Americans are the biggest hypocrites! We Canadians readily submit ourselves to a meteorological climate so hostile that merely revealing an ear to the world can lead to permanent injury.  The picture on the left was taken this morning, on May 20th. MAY! Here I am, bundled to the hilt, in a society that would happily let me skip around in little more than a couple of spandex triangles.

How dare we judge our sisters, whose own climate, albeit cultural, dictates an identical costume. Her and I are both madly in love with our countries and our families; why shouldn’t we dress for the best chance of success and acceptance in both. What is freedom? Do I really have the freedom to run through the snow in a bikini? Can my personal choice to expose my body to frostbite ever be comparable to the cultural reprimand one of my sisters might face if she rebelled in similar fashion?

Hmmm.

 (hijab image source)

How a stone in your shoe makes it easier to get ahead

My new running shoes have a quirk. Small bits of gravel keep getting lodged in the treads. These pebbles cause the infamous Princess and the Pea syndrome with the way they poke up into the padding and scrape along the sidewalk. Yesterday I had one that wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard or long (or at which angle) I dragged my foot on the cement. I tried prying it out with the corner of the next sidewalk square, and even with the edge of the curb.

Finally, after wasting a ton of energy, not to mention looking like a complete yabo, I lifted my foot so I could examine the situation. It took just one tiny, concentrated, flick with the tip of my index finger to dislodge the stone. 

Most automobile engines operate with an efficiency somewhere between 25% and 30% (with up to 75% of the gas wasted!). In previous centuries, piston driven steam engines were only able to convert an average of 8% of their power into kinetic energy. These appalling stats show our historical inefficiency in maximizing energy conversions. Which is to say, we humans do a bang up job at plowing through our resources in whatever way gets us across the street (or eating the chicken) with the least concentrated effort on our part – aka we are addicted to the path of least resistance.

What am I trying to say? There is only one way to get ahead: concentrated effort.

Break out of the “path of least resistance” for a moment and take an new look at your situation. Your percieved parameters are 99% sourced from a brain looking for pattern and security. Just imagine what you could accomplish if stopped dragging your feet on the sidewalk and really took a good look what’s stuck (and why). Just imagine. I know I’m trying. Our futures might be only a finger flick away.

Best Political Cartoons: The Canadian Coalition Chimera

 

What reels and groans deep in the black murk of the Ottawa River? What strikes terror into the hearts of Stephen Harper and Michaelle Jean? Can it be? The Coalition Chimera lives! Brilliant illustrator Christina Nichols, who also happens to be my coworker, shows us the ugly, but beautifully brilliant, one true hope for Canada’s future.

Update: The central head – ‘The Dion’ – has been lopped off! But – Oh the horror – a new and ever so much more depraved above-the-neck entity has grown back in its place – ‘The Ignatieff’. Noooooooooo! Has anyone been utterly horrified at the lack of clarity, focus, and coherence in the man’s writing?

After the crash: Looking beyond the stock market to the new “Microconomy”

The next mutation, or evolution (depending on your creed), of our Western economic model will consist of a major upheaval in the trend of monopolization. Instead of localizing our needs geographically, as shown by the proliferation of big box one-stop shops, and administratively (all those endless mergers), we will see a dramatic shift towards a new model – the “microconomy“.

The microconomy will be a gradual reversal of monopolization, facilitated (if not necessitated) by the Internet. Historically, monopolization has been favoured for its ability to reduce operating (parts manufacture, administration, shipping, communication) costs and to boost the perceived “authority” of the parent company. This concept of authority was vital in the old economic model, because it fostered feelings of security and trust in the minds of both customers and employees. For example, the stock market used its perception of authority to secure seemingly endless investments from a naturally near-sighted public and from fellow money monopolizers (aka fat cats).

Authority is a universal concept, modeled for eons by families, governments, and religions, as well as in our present day globalized economy. But there’s change afoot. The recent popularity of political democracies is part of a relatively new global trend. Its evidence can be found everywhere, from the rejection of organized religion, to the breakup of the nuclear family. This trend, the gradual focusing on the individual, on his/her opinions and his/her personal power, unavoidably leads its subscribers to a bloated sense of individual entitlement and a rejection of authority – two traits that ‘just don’t jive’ with our current economic model. Why? Personal entitlement (ex: Loreal’s slogan “you’re worth it”), mixed with innate human greed, fueled the stock (and morgage) bubble, and our rejection of these conglomerates’ unquestioned authority (and therefor their contingent security) popped it!

So what’s next? Our generation has grown up in online communities linked by common interests rather than geography or generalized class systems. A new market model, without getting into all that nitty gritty supply/demand graphing, is on the horizon. The new “microconomy” will use personal entitlement to motivate both buyers and sellers in a net-based network of individuals using their “soft-skills” to meet each others needs and wants. Authority will not be assumed, but will be dynamic and trackable, based on individual sellers’ records (much like Ebay ratings), customer comments, and with how prominently they are linked in the network.

The microconomy will take people out of the conventional workplace and allow them to transition to the soft-skills marketplace of the home and like-interest groups. Skills and interest groups will connect on the network, but will travel and meet physically within the local community. In the old system, we are overly connected, not to people, but to transient images of people. In the microconomy, these people become real and whole.

Convenience and personalization are two key components that must be highlighted in this new model. The microconomy will be about sourcing the best of what we need/want, and making energizing person-to-person connections with new interested minds. The closest analogy would be the ol’ town square. The geographic convenience of a Walmart will be replaced by the logistical convenience of a local network of sellers of “hard” and “soft” goods. People will have the opportunity to specialize in their areas of expertise and interact in enriching ways, while eliminating so much of the “busy work” inherent in administrating and operating our present conglomerates.

There is an unbelievable glut of information, skill, talent, passion, and, yes, even money, circulating in our present economy. The microconomy will eliminate the “middle man” and connect people within their communities in meaningful ways. We are the first generation trained on the tools that will bring it all together. Now if only we could find the time…

(Note: This opinion essay is an original work by Cymbria Wood and should not, in a perfect world, be quoted or posted without a reference to this blog – thank you)

Do you mean to imply I’m not in “Vogue”?

“Thompson is preparing an organic lunch of thinly sliced fillet of beef with salsa verde, shiitake mushrooms, caramelized onions, and crisped mashed potatoes at her renovated, environmentally friendly 1862 brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, decorated with Russian Empire furniture, contemporary Russian art, hundreds of books and prints, and children’s toys and playthings – nothing plastic, naturally.” – William Norwich in September 2008 Vogue Magazine

Just when you thought you had your life together, along comes a “Russian-born and Stanford University-educated” New York photographer’s wife to put us all to shame. Sigh. Gotta love Vogue. They’re always a little tongue-and-cheek about it though. I mean really, a paragraph like the one above couldn’t have been written in earnest. Or could it? Oh William, did you really mean to set the bar so high? Are we humble folk, whose potatoes are merely mashed without the crisping, doomed to wallow in our overly plasticised existences forever? Shiitake…is all I have to say about that.

Why Obama won’t kiss up to the cool kids anymore

Journalists can be notorious for twisting quotes out of context, but where do these quotes come from in the first place? Their choice of sources is often the larger crime. Think about it…

I just finished reading Ryan Lizza’s The New Yorker article, “Making It”, which chronicles Barack Obama’s roller-coaster relationship with Chicago politics in the 1990s. He played the game to win…yada yada…stepped on some toes…yada yada. Obama rarely brings people’s focus to that time in his life, preferring to concentrate on his successes at Harvard, his community organizing, and his recent (“let’s change the nation”) political career. Lizza speculates that this omission is intentional, that Obama has something to hide. I beg to disagree. He was learning the rules, and that meant playing and experimenting with loyalties and messages. Can you really blame him? How else can one hope to become master of the game?

I liken it to High School. Now all his old “cool kid” friends from Chicago are bitter he never kept up with them through college. He left them behind. He had to. By their very nature, political loyalties are stifling, centered on interpersonal obligations, and crippling to any notion of change. No one in “the ol’ boys club” has the wherewithal to peek over the shoulder of the back they’re scratching. Contrary to Lizza’s take, I find Obama’s “perceived” betrayals heartening. Here is a man who has learned the rules, but has the guts to bend them to his vision’s needs. A little toe stepping gives him the freedom to move forward, provided he can still cultivate trust and confidence when necessary.

A journalist’s choice of sources will colour any reader’s view of the subject being profiled. Obama comes out of Lizza’s article looking conniving instead of astute, underhanded instead of strategic. And sure, if you asked my high school boyfriends to paint my portrait, I would come out looking like, well, a whole lot like the 2-D canvas of Dorian Gray. I’ll be honest, there may be some “minor” toe stepping to blame lol. I was still learning the rules of the game *wink*. Ask my other (past/present) contacts, and I’d like to think you’d get a more three-dimensional person, hopefully suggesting a keen mind and loving heart - and Oh Oh, can’t forget, possibly with great hair too ; )  

 

Obama campaigning for State Senate on Chicago’s South Side

(Image source: The New Yorker)

City’s tallest building shortest on humanity

Searching for signs of humanity on my daily 8:02AM elevator ride up Calgary’s tallest building…

First hope: News of a Pakistan suicide bombing flashes up on the elevator’s plasma screen. In a crowd of freshly creased dress pants, a woman’s skirt twitches. Her hand goes to her mouth to cover her horror. I’m touched by her honesty. She feels it too, the sudden sharp sadness, the helplessness. Her hand falls back to her side, and I see that she was only hiding a yawn.

Second hope: Two heads nod in recognition. A comment, a joke, then laughter. The elevator fills with the unfamiliar sound. The two heads have short, perfectly coiffed, fruit scented hair. But the perfume quickly turns the trapped air sickly sweet, and their laughter sharpens into a piercing cackle. I look down. Two pairs of pointy black leather toes. I should have guessed.

Third Try: The elevator fills to capacity. Everyone wants a different floor, and mine’s the highest. I groan. I always get motion sick on amusement park rides. Someone has to do something. So I stick a banana in the door. Technically speaking, I wedge one end in the doorframe, so it’s jutting out beside the number pad in all its bright yellow banana glory. Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled. No one even acknowledged that there was a big banana sticking out of the door! Oh the humanity!!

Maybe I’m asking too much from a crowd of drowsy businesspeople, who are already late to wherever they’re going if they’re on the 8:02. Sigh. When not even a banana will jazz up your office workday, there’s only one more thing left to try… (click here to get noticed on the elevator to your next job interview!)

Happy Canada Day!

SavingCymbria wishes you an incredible Canada Day with lots of fun and fireworks!

We Canadians can’t help taking a bit of our country with us wherever we go. It’s all well and good when those “bits” are our laughter, our compassion, or our friendliness, but the last time George and I left the country we shared a “bit” of our weather with our southern neighbours. We ended up snowed in at Myrtle Beach!! Next time we head over the border, we’ll just have to remember to pack some skies in with the golf clubs ; ) 

Size does matter! (at least it did in 1960s Hong Kong)

Humans are by nature a competitive species. Some tick in our brains compels us to one-up one another at every available opportunity. This is all well and good for “survival of the fittest” and all that tom foolery, but there are times this biological quirk not only throws off our sense of reality, but messes with our sense of proportion too.

How big are your rims? Do they spin? They do, eh? Well, isn’t that special. Car rims have become major macho talking points for my generation. You better be chromed up and ready to roll on twenty-two inches of sparkling Star-Wars-styled steel if you want to call yourself a man.

But back in 1960s Hong Kong, men spent their money boosting a different set of inches (inches they didn’t have to keep in the garage). The son of a Hong Kong tailor told me today how at the peak of the bell bottom fad, a man came into the shop asking for “twenty-two inch wide pant legs”!

Because you know, of course, there’s nothing more manly than a fellow walking around with a couple of skirts hanging off his knees lol ; )

Gladiator sandal trend could have shortened Iraq war

Ah yes, my ears are still ringing with the roar of the arena. Russell Crowe, circa 2000 AD, muscles bulging under sweat oiled brown skin, soaks the hot sand of the Colosseum with the blood of his enemies. Sure, we all wanted a piece of him (oops, I mean of the action), but was anyone really thinking “ooooo I’d love a pair of those sandals. What delightful footwear, so stylish and eminently practical.”? While it’s true that the gladiator sandal is the go-to shoe when it comes to protecting your shins from those pesky 5th Avenue gladius weilding dog walkers, Mondrian themed tan lines are not the best way to accessorise your vintage Yves Saint Laurent.

The gladiator sandal trend has followed the classic pattern. Just like when learning a brand new word, the trend always looks awkward and ungainly the first few times you see it in action. But then it slowly worms its way into your vocabulary, and before you know it, you start seeing sentences (and short black jersey dresses) that just wouldn’t look right with anything else. 

For those of us in the “know”, the gladiator has already begun to look (how do I put this?) “un peut passé”. It’s time to move on to other synonyms. It’s time to get in tight with its relatives. It’s time to stop messing around with these metaphors and get down to business.

So then what do we put on our feet? You can go with a more subtle version of the trend, or my favorite alternative: flat (or slight wedge) heel, and a non-superfluous system of dark leather straps featuring a bronze embellished T-strap and a single ankle strap (set low on the ankle to visually maximize leg length). I’d link to a pair, but I’m still hunting for them ; )  

The best part of the gladiator trend is its irony. Thousands of New York (and millions of american)fashionistas have wholeheartedly embraced a trend with decidedly middle eastern roots. The saying “to understand someone, walk a mile in their shoes” has never been more apropo. But it’s too late for the one pair of feet that really matter. If Hillary was still in the race, America might have a chance. Cultural understanding starts from the ground up (heehee possibly literally in this case). But something tells me Barack wouldn’t be too gung-ho about strapping his calves into these puppies. Someone should remind him, or Mccain (if that’s how it pans out), that the greatest warriors in history were, like, so, all over the gladiator trend in their day. The Coloseum’s arena was oval wasn’t it *wink*

(comic source: fashionista.com)

Barbara Walters comfirms America’s greatest fear

“What (the AIDS ward toddler) knows, in some primal way, is that someone special is about to show up. When (Bill) Clinton finally walks through the door, looking seven feet tall as he often does, the child’s face breaks into a giant grin, expectations met.” – Rebecca Trainster, Elle magazine.

On last night’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked guest Barbara Walters if she could feel a unique ‘presence’ when interviewing the world’s most powerful leaders. Her answer (only slightly paraphrased lol):

Jimmy Carter= Charasmatic intensity

Fidel Castro= Charasmatic strength and humour

George W Bush= Charasmatic personal confidence

Charisma, whatever its source, is a requirement for any successful world leader, especially in this media mad culture. The quote that begins this post demonstrates Bill Clinton’s charisma. His may have been more sensually sourced, but still gave him the larger than life persona crucial to inspiring a nation’s confidence.

Does Obama have “it”? Barbara Walters doesn’t think so.

She told Stewart a heartbreaking story about a conversation she had with Obama after one of his campaign speeches. Walters introduced herself and, after a quick chat, invited him to be a guest on The View.

“I’ve been a guest your program before,” he said

“You have? I’m so sorry I wasn’t there that day,” replied Walters.

“You were,” said Obama.

“Heather’s Hermes bag sits on a Consuelo Castiglioni rug…” – Harper’s Bazaar

The lives of the mega rich are so very different from our own. Privileged women like ”Heather”, who thoughtfully married two rich men (consecutively, though concurrently would have been far more efficient) don’t even have closets. All new clothing/accessories acquisitions go straight into: “Heather’s meticulously organized wardrobe area” – Harper’s Bazaar

Obama and the desk – a vision I can’t shake

Two years from now… Barack Obama standing, shoulders slumped, shaking hands clasping and unclasping, staring at the monolithic desk before him. His jaw set hard to hide a quivering chin. The desk is a monument, a resolute symbol in dark wood, solid and immovable. Obama closes his eyes and accepts the grim realization that the most powerful man in the world is totally, utterly, powerless.

Toilet paper solves global oil crisis

The world is slowly, but surely, running out of oil. I’m not concerned, even though our culture is guzzling it with total abandon. Not worried a bit, even though we are completely dependent on the stuff. We’ll be fine. Why? Because of the toilet paper paradigm…

We’re generally reckless with this household resource when there’s at least one more roll in the cupboard. And we’re still liberal with it when the final roll is first mounted. But there’s a distinct point, at a certain square, when the harsh reality of our predicament sets in. Our perception of each square’s value changes drastically. We become acutely aware of texture and thickness as we alter our absorbency calculations for maximum efficiency. How we use TP changes too. We test out folding versus scrunching. We discover we can get by with far fewer squares and still be perfectly hygienic. And, if the unthinkable happens and the roll runs out entirely, we are incredibly resourceful in finding substitutes ; ) 

We may be mounting that last roll right now, in terms of oil, but I have no doubt that once we reach that certain square we’ll have had enough practice in our bathrooms to know exactly what to do.

Advice from a genius

My Father is a renaissance man. He’s a stunningly amazing artist/inventor/physicist. The painting above is an example of his work (note: my apologies for the black distraction). But besides giving us a new visual language, the theory of the universe, and a revolutionary downhill ski, he is also the source of the most brilliant piece of advice I have ever heard…

“Put on a fresh pair of socks halfway through the day.” -David Fels

That’s it. Do it every day, and your life will never be the same.

It’s brianaustingreen! (scream)

Just so everyone knows…the actor who played little David Silver on Beverly Hills 90210 is engaged to Megan Fox (voted sexiest woman alive 2008). This fact is only half as disturbing as the “google moment” discovery my coworker and I made yesterday, that brian-austin-green released a rap album in the early 90s.

For your viewing pleasure… from the man once reviewed as “the poor man’s Vanilla Ice”… here is… You Send Me

Beware the robot suffragettes

The goblins inside my laptop were especially busy today. They plotted all afternoon while I worked. Then, after my last keystroke (which ironically happened to be the save button) they attacked. ~Page Error~ What do you do with a message like that? 

The closest comparison in human terms would be an emotional meltdown. If it was physical, you could still access the injury, maybe even fix it. The message would give a clue to the source of the pain. But page error? Error? It won’t even let me look at the code!!! 

My laptop has a fragile emotional inner being. When I offend it, which I often seem to(I suppose I’m the man in this analogy lol), it shuts down after telling me the equivalent of “if you really loved me, you’d know”. Well I don’t know! I’m not a darned technician!

If men and women still don’t understand each other after thousands of years, how long will it be before we can communicate with these machines we’ve programed. Don’t even get me started on Home Depot’s self-scan system! Humanity’s only hope is to keep technology subservient to us, if we want to have any say in the decisions that result from its calculations. Oh wait, oops, I just reasoned my way back to before the suffragettes. I thought I only lost an hour’s work this afternoon, and now I’ve gone and lost century’s! 

Coming soon

Coming soon…