Tuesday, February 13, 2007
After having undertaken a number of projects over the past couple of decades, I have come to understand that you can not, in advance, predict how a project will go... but you can almost BET that there will be a point where you are tearing your hair out, where everything that could possibly go wrong does in fact go wrong, and where things you never IMAGINED could go wrong simply go haywire...
I told myself I'd give myself a year to write my first book, and by the end of that first year I was sure I had failed and that project was over -- but I just kept blindly going forward and four years after I started, I saw that book in bookstores everywhere...
This gave me the confidence to begin a second book project -- surely a second book would go more smoothly, more quickly, than a first book, I reasoned... So the second book took TWELVE years...
In my Backpack Nation project (www.backpacknation.org), I recognized in advance a number of areas I thought might contain potential for breakdown, but when the killer breakdown finally did come I was left banging my head on a wall and moaning, "Not THAT! I'd thought of this thing that could go wrong, and that other thing, and the other one too..., but I'd never imagined THAT! Not THAT!"
In the Beach Impeach Project I'd never imagined that two days before the date I'd picked for the event, I would get a phone call from the Park Service warning of "a major Pacific winter storm with 28 foot swells" and "the potential for major erosion damage" SPECIFICALLY "at Ocean Beach" on the very day, in fact the very hours, I'd picked for the project... Of course I quickly postponed the event -- the storm fizzled, and on the scheduled day I went to the beach anyway, and found clear blue skies, a placid ocean, no wind, 65 degrees...
So while it should probably come as no surprise, I nonetheless find myself disbelieving that at this critical stage of THIS project, I find myself in the bizarre position of having been without a viable website and without the ability to communicate with the 1500 people on my mailing list for the past two and a half weeks... seems unbelievable, but there it is... In those moments when I am not pulling my hair out, I -- non-technical me -- am working hard to untangle this mess... which mostly consists of me begging tech-savvy people for favors and hoping for some tech-miracle...
But tonight, that's life...
And these are all absolutely tiny things in comparison to the disaster that this administration has been to our country and our world...
Onward!
I told myself I'd give myself a year to write my first book, and by the end of that first year I was sure I had failed and that project was over -- but I just kept blindly going forward and four years after I started, I saw that book in bookstores everywhere...
This gave me the confidence to begin a second book project -- surely a second book would go more smoothly, more quickly, than a first book, I reasoned... So the second book took TWELVE years...
In my Backpack Nation project (www.backpacknation.org), I recognized in advance a number of areas I thought might contain potential for breakdown, but when the killer breakdown finally did come I was left banging my head on a wall and moaning, "Not THAT! I'd thought of this thing that could go wrong, and that other thing, and the other one too..., but I'd never imagined THAT! Not THAT!"
In the Beach Impeach Project I'd never imagined that two days before the date I'd picked for the event, I would get a phone call from the Park Service warning of "a major Pacific winter storm with 28 foot swells" and "the potential for major erosion damage" SPECIFICALLY "at Ocean Beach" on the very day, in fact the very hours, I'd picked for the project... Of course I quickly postponed the event -- the storm fizzled, and on the scheduled day I went to the beach anyway, and found clear blue skies, a placid ocean, no wind, 65 degrees...
So while it should probably come as no surprise, I nonetheless find myself disbelieving that at this critical stage of THIS project, I find myself in the bizarre position of having been without a viable website and without the ability to communicate with the 1500 people on my mailing list for the past two and a half weeks... seems unbelievable, but there it is... In those moments when I am not pulling my hair out, I -- non-technical me -- am working hard to untangle this mess... which mostly consists of me begging tech-savvy people for favors and hoping for some tech-miracle...
But tonight, that's life...
And these are all absolutely tiny things in comparison to the disaster that this administration has been to our country and our world...
Onward!
