I Desperately Need an Accountability Partner

This isn't so much an informative blog post as it is a plea for help. My life once again mirrors the not so nice elements of this post: endless TV, living off my tax-refund; the whole nine yards. I need a work-partner of sorts. I have rediscovered that when there is noone I am directly accountable to, I don't work.

You may be wondering how this whole accountability partner system works. Well it's really quite simple. Throughout the day the partners check in with each other at set times to discuss their respective work tasks and their progress towards completing them. These check-ins can occur in person, over the phone, via SMS, or instant messaging. The important thing is that both people are actively trying to use the system - if it's clear that one partner isn't working on their tasks or isn't motivated to check-in, it all falls apart.

Do you need an accountability partner in your life? If so, please contact me ASAP.

Get Your Ideas Out Into The World

A great short video on why it's important to get your ideas out into the world:

Objective: Volunteer. Obstacle: Massive Bureaucracy

I've been feeling a little down of late for any number of reasons, but mostly from lack of daily interaction with other human beings. I decided that I should do some volunteer work to get my people fix and help some folks out along the way. I went online and found a number of websites that direct you to various not-for-profit organizations that need volunteers. After my stint in China where I was functionally illiterate, I thought that a literacy assistance program would be a great place for me to volunteer my time.

I figured I would find a library or an adult school, offer my services, and show up during tutoring hours and read with folks. Instead I'm slowly marching through what feels like an endless sea of bureaucracy. Before I can actually volunteer my time I have to go through the following:

1. Find a volunteer opportunity.
   
2. Contact the organization.
   
3. Fill out online application.
   
4. Attend in-person training and evaluation.
   
5. Fill out a paper application.
   
6. Apply for background check.
   
7. Sign photo release.
   
8. Get TB test.
   
9. Fill out LAUSD volunteer application.
   
10. Get fingerprinted.
    
11. Wait 1-6 weeks for approval.
12. Contact service provider partner & setup an appointment.
    
13. Receive information packet regarding the SPP site.
    
14. Inform another agency of my intended volunteer schedule.
    
15. Await confirmation of schedule.
    
16. Attend first tutoring session.
    
17. Talk with lead teacher about goals and resources.
    
18. Begin Tutoring.
    
19. Attend additional ongoing training.
    
20. Log hours tutored and report to literacy organization on a monthly basis.

This is absurd. Absolutely absurd. It shouldn't take 18 steps before a person has the opportunity to help someone else out. This is a more convoluted process than a job application. I want to participate in a literacy program, and I will go through these steps to do so, but this is just beyond the pale.

Anyone out there have a lead on some good volunteer opportunities that don't involve quite so many hoops?

EDIT: Forgot to include that I also need two letters of recommendation. Seriously?!

Does inspiration lead to action?

I'm beginning to wonder whether inspirational talks lead to anything beyond an audience feeling inspired.

One of my favorite pastimes is to watch videos on TED.com. The TED videos are a series of recorded lectures from the Annual Technology Engineering & Design conference. The people featured in these videos are some of the most amazing, thought-provoking, and inspiring folks you could ever hope to meet.

I could watch TED videos all day long. In fact, sometimes I do, and that's the problem. By watching amazing people do amazing things, my empathetic emotional response gives me all those same feelings of awesomeness without any of the outlay. I get all the benefit of their labor with none of the effort.

It's been said that actors are valuable to the world because they do what the rest of the world can't or won't allow themselves to do. Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia unifies the Arabs to fight the Turks, Michael C Hall as Dexter murders serial killers, and Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview sacrifices everything in his life for the sake of success. Through these performances, the audience is able to experience what the extremes of life would be like, without leaving the safety of the choices they have made.

Which makes me wonder - Do inspiring performances create a better world? Or do they simply allow us to feel like we've accomplished something even when we haven't?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments for this post. For now, I'll leave you with some of my favorite TED talks:

The Jansen creates walking sculptures:

Al Gore on Climate Change:

Jill Bolte Taylor shares the experience of her stroke:

MeetWays.com: An Easier Way to "Do Lunch"

If you've ever met someone and then said "We should do lunch," you (like myself) are probably living a tired Hollywood cliche. A lot of these lunches never come together because the other party never wanted to do lunch in the first place, but a subset of these meetings don't happen because it just seems like too much work to find an agreeable meeting place.

MeetWays.com provides a very simple solution to this problem. Simply type in both of your addresses and the type of place you'd like to meet (Japanese Restaurant, Starbucks, etc) press the "Get halfway location" button and in no time at all you'll have a google maps search result of all the starbucks near the exact halfway mark between you and you're lunch-date.

Examples of where this might be useful:

• Find a meeting place for you and your rehearsal partner.
• Discover new restaurants or bars with a friend.
• Reduce the hidden power-dynamic found in friendships where one person does more driving than the other.
• Find the most convenient seedy-hotel for you and your Craigslist Casual Encounter.

Now if only they had a means of finding a mutually agreeable time we'd really be cooking with gas.

Edit (3/22/2009):

MeetInbetweenUs and aPlaceBetweenUs both provide a similar tool for finding a meeting point except they allow for more than two addresses to be entered.

Packing for a Trip with the Universal Packing List

After a trip around the world you'd think I could manage to pack for a two week trip without use of the internet. Well, for better or worse, I'm way too neurotic for that. I'm leaving for Washington D.C. (my half-marathon + family), NYC (friends), & Columbus OH (business) tomorrow. Enter: The Universal Packing List.

This website is ugly as hell, but quite useful. Simply fill out a brief questionaire about your trip and press the "Create packing list" button. In no time at all you'll have a categorized list of everything you need to bring to have a pleasantly uneventful trip.

My favorite feature is the "Things to do before you leave" section which includes gems like (comments are mine):

• Wash the dishes
• Unplug electrical stuff
• Empty all trashcans (I've forgotten this in the past which makes for an odiferous welcome home)
• Forward (or hold) delivery of newspapers and magazines (You can now do it online) 
• Pay rent

It even reminds you to pack:

• Charger to Cell Phone
• Battery charger for camera

“A Skull in Connemara” @ Theatre Tribe in NoHo

Since my return to the States, I've been desperately trying to regain my excitement for acting. Uncertain economic times, and 5 months of filming in sometimes adverse conditions drained me of my desire to seek out acting gigs. Seeking to remedy this, I devised a plan. I would see some stage plays so that I might recreate the environment in which I first fell in love with it all. I saw a number of plays; none of them particularly good. I was starting to suspect that acting was a wholly selfish act and the audience members were but hapless victims paying to be kidnapped and held in silence for as long as the actors and director deem a show should drag on.

I was losing hope. Then I got an email from GoldStar offering discount tickets to "A Skull in Connemara" by Martin McDonagh. McDonagh is one of my favorite playwrights (the next play you buy should be "The Pillow Man"). So I bought myself a ticket. I'm glad I did.

From the opening moment with Mick Dowd standing alone in his house searching for the last drops of booze at the bottom of his glass to the closing scene with the same Mick Dowd speaking a heartfelt promise to his dead wife – it was absolutely enthralling. Morlan Higgins, John K. Linton, Jeff Kerr McGivney, and Jayne Taini all give great performances. The set design by Jeff McLaughlin was ingenius in it's use of space; the opening of the second act managed to instill the same sense of awe I felt when I saw the giant-robot transformers-style set of Le Miserables when I was 7. I left the theater in an altered state, once again believing that while there are few things more torurous than bad theater – there are even fewer things better than a truly great live performance.

Also, Stuart Rogers, the director this production apparently teaches acting, directing, and pedagogy at the Stuart Rogers Studios. One must first go through an interview process before joining his class, but I'm definitely interested.