Wanted: female lynx

Posted on March 19, 2012 by gydle

Today’s headline:

Jacqueline de Quattro demande aux chasseurs de l’aider à débusquer le lynx.

One of the canton’s elected officials (like a state senator in the US) is asking the canton’s hunters to help her thrush out a lynx. I read on, my pulse rising. I find the Swiss attitude towards wildlife very disturbing. This doesn’t look good for my blood pressure.

There are reportedly two female lynx in the “Prealps” region of the canton. Since April 2011, cantonal officials have been trying to trap one of them, in order to give it to Austria, who wants to reintroduce it to help control their deer-like game animal population (chevreuils and chamois).

“As of April 1, Vaud can still capture the lynx, but it will be competing with the cantons of Fribourg and Bern.”

So let’s get this straight. This lynx has evaded capture by cantonal authorities for almost a year. If Vaud doesn’t manage to nab her by April 1, the stakes of the hunt will go up a notch, because the other two neighboring cantons can join the fray. Huh? Is there some kind of bounty on her head? Is Austria paying for the lynx? What’s with the competition? The article doesn’t say.

On Saturday, the state councilor addressed a crowd of more than 300 hunters at the annual meeting of “Diana Vaud” – the canton’s hunting association. She asked them to step in and help find the lynx.

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The seven-year itch

Posted on March 7, 2012 by gydle

Little things have been bugging me lately.

This post is pretty snarky, so please bear with me and try to read it all the way to the end.

I went to see a movie last weekend. Before the previews start, there’s an ad featuring a close-up image of the torso of a reclined woman wearing a dark brown bikini. She has one arm raised over her head, revealing her armpit, and the other hand is holding an ice cream bar. On her left breast there’s a light brown smudge that looks like spilled chocolate ice cream, until you look closer and realize it’s a palm tree. This ad has preceded every single movie I’ve watched in Switzerland, the whole time we’ve lived here. I can’t believe it. You’d think that by now they would have changed the ad, particularly since it’s so awful.

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Time of reckoning

Posted on March 3, 2012 by gydle

Last week, when I was writing about the kilogram and got sidetracked into calendars, I realized two things:

One. Gydle is a year old now! The first post was on March 2, 2011.

Two. We’ve been living in Switzerland for 7.5 years, 8.5 if you count the sabbatical year in 2002-2003.

Time flies, huh? There’s way too much in these two momentous events for a single post, so today, I’m just going to bask in the glow of Gydle’s one-year birthday. I’ll write about number two tomorrow (maybe).

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The measure of things

Posted on February 29, 2012 by gydle

The headline caught my eye back in September, and I knew it was a subject that I had to write about for Gydle. I stashed it in my “writing ideas” bookmark folder and there it sat, waiting. Last week, an article appeared in the local paper, reminding me. And then yesterday it hit – today, February 29, is the perfect day to write about this.

Did you know that the kilogram is losing weight? So you, therefore, are gaining weight?

But, you say, a kilogram isn’t a thing, it’s a measurement unit! You’re right, it’s one of the SI units, which together make up the solid mathematical foundation upon which all science is done. When you study science, you study units. Rule #1: make sure the units balance out.

(Well, if you’re an American, it’s more like First, stop thinking in feet and ounces. Then make sure the units balance out.)

A kilogram can’t lose weight! That’s just absurd.

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Open up

Posted on February 26, 2012 by gydle

A couple of years ago, a co-founder of an EPFL start-up came to me for help. Their html5 video player had just gotten fantastic reviews on gizmodo, and they wanted to make sure the English on their website was good. I suggested a few corrections, he asked me how much they owed me, and I said it was on the house. I thought their product was great, their enthusiasm was palpable, and I knew they probably didn’t have much money. He was very appreciative.

A few weeks ago, I translated an EPFL press release about another start-up. I visited the company’s website to check some details, and noticed that it had some serious problems. I wrote the two young co-founders an e-mail, telling them that I would be willing to help them polish the English on their website. I didn’t mention money explicitly, but I hinted that I was prepared to spend a couple of hours working for free, like I had with Jilion.

No response. Not even a No, thank you.
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Colorful language

Posted on February 21, 2012 by gydle

I’m sure at some point in your life – even if only as a teenager under the influence – you’ve asked yourself this deep, philosophical question:

How do I know that what I’m experiencing is real?

The answer? You can’t. What you see as reality is unique to you, because it’s a complex interaction between the physical world, your senses and your brain.

As proof, here’s a little snippet from my reality:

It’s Tuesday. We’re on the top part of this week’s circle, heading counterclockwise in the direction of Wednesday. We’ve come out of Monday’s black zone successfully, and because Tuesday is red, I’m pretty energized. It’s February, which is my favorite color (green), so all is well. We’re heading clockwise towards March, which is mauve and located at roughy 8 o’clock on the circle of 2012. I think a bit more about the word I described in my last post, plebiscite, and realize that because of the p and b, it’s a very blue word. Could that have been why I didn’t associate it with approval, which is much more yellow-orange, despite the double p?

What? Continue reading →

Translation and transition

Posted on February 16, 2012 by gydle

There it was this morning, on the front page.

Un jury unanime plébiscite le nouveau stade de Lausanne.

Lausanne is going to get a new stadium with an Olympic-size swimming pool. I’m happy about this, because I like to swim laps. I love doing flip-turns at the end of the lane, stretching out for that long glide off the wall. I love the baby-blue of pool water and the crisscrossing, wavy lines of light that form on the bottom. I love doing breast stroke and watching the bubbles form at the tips of my fingers as I carve out the water in front of me.

But I digress. What really caught my attention was the word plébiscite. No matter how many times I see it, I still do a double-take. Is it just me, or is there something icky about this word?

Plébiscite.

Usually when I read in French I have a good sense of what a word probably means. But this word? Undermine, infiltrate, infect? It almost sounds like someone blowing their nose loudly into a handkerchief.

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The life of the book

Posted on February 12, 2012 by gydle

Last question, said the moderator, scanning the room.

I’d been ruminating on something said in an earlier workshop at the writer’s conference I was attending. An agent, one of two who had come to help all us clueless writers try to figure out the labyrinthine process of getting a book into print, had responded to a question about contracts with a sentence that included the curious phrase “the life of the book.”

The life of the book. This resonated. A book is a living thing. Like a baby, the idea is planted, it gestates, you work and work and work, and then one day it is born into the world. Yes, I thought, it’s more than just a a physical thing, or even an electronic thing – it’s a living thing. It’s the distilled energy, hope, effort, blood, sweat and tears of its creator, offered up in human communion. It’s the physical (or electronic) embodiment of the relationship between writer and reader. What a beautiful concept!

I had carried that idea around with me all day. The life of the book.

I raised my hand. Last chance to look like an idiot. The moderator nodded at me.

I looked at the clean-cut representative of Scribner right in front of me, here to help us navigate the confusing world of traditional publishing, and said:

Suppose you manage to get an agent, who then gets a contract with a publisher – how long does your book stay on bookstore shelves, once it’s published? How long does your book last? What is the “lifetime” of your book?

He looked uncomfortable.

Realistically? he said. I just stared. The moderator stared. We all stared. He squirmed a little.

I wasn’t interested in the one-in-a-million blockbuster bestseller that no one saw coming. (Although, of course, he was.) Miracles happen — but I’m not counting on it in my case.

Realistically? Six weeks to two months. If it’s not selling well, it will be pulled off the shelves.

The room was quiet.

But as long as it’s selling electronic copy, even just one, it will still be available in e-book format, he added quickly, brightening. Several people started breathing again. Phew.

What a lovely baby, fantastic job, I know it was a tough pregnancy, you did everything right, but sorry love. We did everything we could, but this one isn’t going to see its first birthday. In fact, it’s going to die even before it’s gotten over that tricky three-month colicky stage. You can keep the pictures, though.

I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. But I was very, very glad I’d asked the question. Because his answer hammered the last nail into the coffin that holds all my former ideas about what a book is and how it’s published. Now I can bury it and move on.

The internet is changing everything. The industry’s gatekeepers – publishers who decide what readers get to read and how long books stay on shelves, agents who decide what publishers get to see, all in an effort to make as much money as possible for themselves in the process – are so twentieth century. The traditional publishing model, as another speaker at the conference had said earlier, is broken.

Last year, Dave sent me a link to a blog post written by author Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She made a very convincing case that the publishing industry is now where the music industry was ten years ago. I think she’s right. I think the panel of agents and publishers at the conference were representing a dying industry, one that no longer serves the interests of either writers or readers. In a last gasp effort to keep the money rolling in and their jobs intact, to stem the hemhorraging influence of e-books and the Internet, the industry preys on nobody writers like me, writers who are naive enough to entrust them with their babies in hope that someday they can say with pride: I’m a published writer.

UPDATE: I didn’t like the way this blog post ended, so I’ve changed it.

I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know if Amazon is evil, out like everyone else for one thing and one thing only: our money. Probably. But I do know one thing: if you’re willing to do the hard work involved in exploring new territory, it’s a good time to be a writer. The paradigm is changing. There are possibilities today that were not there yesterday.

I came away from the conference a bit lost and confused. A week later, I’m optimistic and motivated. I’m having a “baby” – hopefully the first of several. Like any expectant mother, I’m anxious about whether or not I’m up to the task. But I’ve done pretty well with humans, so I like my chances with books as well. Cheers!

A fork in the road

Posted on January 26, 2012 by gydle

I’ve been thinking a lot lately (yes, it hurts). My reading on cognitive biases has naturally led me to reflect on my own decision-making processes. From there, it was only a short leap to casting a critical eye on what I spend my time doing. Where do I put my energy, my creativity, my passion?

I’m not getting any younger, after all. Neither are you, by the way. (You’re welcome.)

I wasn’t all that satisfied with what I came up with.

Then, today, I read something on Seth Godin’s blog:

So many things are now completely up to us, more than ever before. Where and how and when we work and invest and interact and instruct and learn… If you think you have no choice but to do what you do now, you’ve already made a serious error.

This prompted even more philosophical ~~constipation~~ introspection. What motivates my choices for how I spend my time? I decided that when I spend time doing something, it’s because:

I really want to do it
I have to do it
I think it’s what I should do
I do it because I’m avoiding doing something else

All four are arguably legitimate modes of action.

Perhaps the key to a satisfying life is making a conscious effort to maximize time spent doing things that fall under category number 1. And because there are only 24 hours in a day, maximizing number 1 necessarily means minimizing 2, 3, and 4. Simple math. I can do that!

Well, I spend a lot of time procrastinating (number 4). This one should be easy to deal with, right?

Not so fast. The thing I’m avoiding doing is obviously a number 2 or 3. Do I really have to do it, or don’t I? Sometimes it’s really hard to differentiate between have to and should. Avoidance is much easier.

Oh, I say, I have to pay the bills, do the shopping, fix dinner, change the sheets. But do I, really? How many of those number 2s are really number 3s in disguise? How many of them were once upon a time number 1s? There’s probably a lot more wiggle room here than I think there is. They’re sneaky little devils, those number 2s.

And then there’s number 3. Could he be the elephant in the room? Clearly, what I think I should do with my time is a complex construction that I’ve been building up since childhood, dependent on my parental upbringing, the culture in which I live, the financial and emotional situation I’ve gotten myself into, the social feedback I get on a daily basis. How can I quantify that rationally?

Geez, this is getting thorny. I can see I’m going to get snagged down in semantics. Math only gets you so far (right, Descartes?). Time to get out of this particular philosophical bramble patch.

In fact, I think this kind of rational reasoning applied to decision-making is fundamentally flawed. Here’s why.

When I said, above, “The thing I’m avoiding is obviously number 2 or 3,” you agreed with me, didn’t you? Who would procrastinate to avoid doing something they really want to do?

Answer: most of us.

Rationally, it’s totally counterintuitive, but I think it’s true. Dig deep and think about what it is you really, truly want to do. And I’m not talking about eating a handful of jelly bellies, here, I’m talking about how you use big chunks of your time during the day. If you feel like you’re doing what you really want to do, that you’re living your dream, then congratulations. Pass Go and collect $200. Send me $100.

But if you don’t, if you wake up every morning and fill your days with 2s, 3s and 4s, it’s likely that doing the thing or things you really want to do would put a lot of what you’ve carefully built up over your whole life into jeopardy. That’s a scary proposition. My adrenaline spikes just thinking about it. Run away! Run away!

See, we’re emotionally hard-wired to avoid scary situations, and if the thing we really want to do feels dangerous, we’ll avoid doing it. And we’ll make up a whole lot of reasons to explain it all away, reasons that involve have to, should, and later.

Here’s my thesis: Number 1 is the elephant in the room.

How badly do you want to do what you think you really want to do? Because until you can commit to really wanting to do what it is you really want to do, then you’re going to fill your life up with 2s, 3s and 4s. You will probably feel vaguely unfulfilled and dissatisfied. You might even complain about it. Oh, well, that’s life.

So here goes. There’s something I really want to do, but doing it will be a big deal. It will mean that some of my number 2s, 3s, and 4s – in other words, what I am doing now – will have to change.

It’s my choice. It’s up to me.

(to be continued…)

Make me care

Posted on January 24, 2012 by gydle

I mentioned last week that I had somehow gotten through the filters and was accepted as part of the audience for last Friday’s TEDx Lausanne conference. I was really excited, because I am a huge TED fan. I’ve listened to lots of TED talks on the internet, and been very inspired. TED’s motto “Ideas worth sharing,” resonates with me. I’m an idea person.

So there I was, nametag around my neck: Self-Employed. I should have put CEO, Gydle Publishing Empire but I didn’t realize I’d get it on a nametag. Oh well, next time. Other people’s nametags also sported words describing things they cared about: virtual reality, world peace, vegetarianism, Internet of Things. I think it was supposed to be a conversation-starter. Since I’d apparently left this bit blank on the registration form, I just roamed around, not conversing. That was okay, because Nespresso co-sponsored the event and so there was plenty of coffee.

Maybe I set myself up for disappointment. Maybe listening to the best TED talks on the internet didn’t prepare me for this reality: very few people know how to give a good talk. Out of a hundred 15-minute talks, you’re lucky to get about ten good ones. On Friday we were lucky, because a few were relatively decent. But nothing really inspired me. The organizers of the conference probably will blacklist me for this, but when it was over, oddly enough I felt kind of like the girl in the conference’s homepage image (above): disconnected. What was that we just sped past?

During the breaks, I had some interesting conversations with people who weren’t intimidated by my lack of professional affiliation; and after the talks were over I met some of the speakers and talked with them as well. They’re great people who are quite passionate about their work. It must be scary as hell to give a TEDx talk to an audience secretly hoping to hear somebody like Al Gore or Sir Ken Robinson. (I hope none of them read my blog. If you’re reading this, you know who you are, I think you’re great and keep up the good work…).

I’m not going to deconstruct the talks here, or my conversations with other attendees, even though there were some interesting ideas exchanged in both venues. Instead I’m going to share what I thought about during most of the conference, at least when I wasn’t thinking about what I should have put on my nametag or why none of the speakers was talking about gamification, given that the theme of the conference was ostensibly the future. Which was: What makes for a good TED talk?

At about 3:30 pm, I had an epiphany of sorts: In fact, a good TED talk isn’t about the speaker at all. It’s not about the audience, either. It transcends all those individual egos. A good TED talk is really just a novel form of energy transfer.

In a good talk, the passionate idea in the speaker’s head somehow takes hold of the heads and hearts of the audience. In a good talk, the speaker builds a connection with the audience using words, pictures, laughter and silence, until a kind of mental bridge forms between them and energy flows freely through the room. The audience ends up really, truly caring. If you hooked them up to brain wave monitors, I’m guessing their hippocampi would be lighted up like Christmas trees. The idea is shared. It’s emotional, it’s inspiring and above all, it’s uplifting.

In a good talk, the audience doesn’t have to work to follow the talk or to be inspired. No, quite the contrary: it’s practically impossible for them not to be inspired, not to care, to remain indifferent. Unless, of course, they’re psychopaths. But the likelihood of an audience of psychopaths at a TEDx conference is pretty slim – even in California. Certainly not in Lausanne.

So next time you have to give a talk, I challenge you to think about this energy transfer: Why do you care about your idea? Where is its energy coming from? Dig deep and find the source of your passion, the place where it all starts. Tap into that. That’s the story the audience wants to hear. Look into their eyes, work some magic with words, pictures, jokes and pregnant pauses, and then beam it out there, Scotty.

Disclaimer: I am not a public speaking expert. I would probably give a horrible talk, although I’d try hard not to. For some really useful tips on how to give a speech, I do actually know a real public speaking expert, John Zimmer, and he has a blog called Manner of Speaking. I recommend it.

Photo Credit: Ward. via Compfight cc