Hasta La Gadget!

College students are the best. They are full of life, whimsy, and energy. But one conversation I have had with college students frustrates me immensely. It goes like this:

College student: “I’d love to (get together, help out, make that meeting, do that thing), but I’m so busy.”

Me: “Really?”

Forgive me if it sounds short, but I don’t have a ton of patience for “busy” college students. I get that they may feel busy, but they control more time than they ever will again.

Whatever season of life you are in right now, until retirement, is likely to be the least busy you will ever be.

Let that sink in.

As the years pile on, so do the responsibilities and the recurring appointments on your calendar. Career, family, civic engagement, boards, fundraisers, kids’ activities, church, committees, business ventures.

This isn’t a call to boredom and despair, rather it’s an invitation to fight for the things that are meaningful to you.

Perhaps you want to get married, start a new job, have a baby (or five like we did – who does that), adopt a baby, join a board, start a nonprofit, write a book, grow a garden, lose some weight.

The specific life stage or event isn’t the point. The point is that life will fill up with commitments, with or without your consent.

So if you are only going to get more busy, how do you make space for the things that matter?

Here are eight ways:

1. Get Up Earlier. I used to hate getting up before 7:00. I was grumpy and unmotivated. The snooze button was my codependent friend. So much can be accomplished before the rest of the world (or in this case – my house) wakes up. My morning now starts the night before by getting to bed earlier. I sleep at least seven hours a night, so typically that’s 11:00 – 6:00 during the week. 6:00 – 7:00 is plenty of time for a light but consistent workout, some reading and/or some writing.

2. Quit Making Excuses. I’m too busy. Life is too crazy. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the experience. I need permission. Someone else will take care of it. You get the point. If it’s meaningful to you, find the time to do it.

3. Conduct an Audit of Your Time. Start a simple audit of what you spend time doing each week. If your week is like mine, you’ll find pockets of time that you can begin to reclaim. Commute time can be turned into podcast or phone call time. Time on Facebook can be replaced with time cooking a healthy meal at home. Time in your DVR can be replaced with time in a book. Simply being aware of the areas of your clock that you allow to fly by without a second thought is critical to change.

4. Limit How Much You Consume. We live in an era of unending choices. Social media, a flood of channels on TV, books at our fingertips. We are drowning in information, but we are starving for wisdom. Be mindful of how much time you spend consuming. Being a taker is easy, the world needs you to give.

5. Withdraw. How much silence exists in your daily rhythm? If you’re like me, very little. There is noise, literal and figurative, all around us all day long. To create, to make space, we need a place of withdrawal. Retreat. Silence. Not to escape reality but to find it. It’s in the silence where the deep desires are given space to rise above the frenzy of everyday life.

6. Eat Clean. We are fooling ourselves if we don’t think the food we put in our bodies has a direct impact on our energy and impact. You don’t have to follow any one particular plan, but you need to have a plan. Mine is pretty straight forward: Sunday through Friday, I stay away from sugar, dairy, wheat and alcohol. Our family eats clean during the week including juicing. Then on Saturday, we cheat by eating and drinking whatever we want. Donuts, pizza, beer (adults only of course). You can do almost anything for six days. And then once you do it a few weeks straight, it becomes an entire lifestyle change.

7. Take One Step. Making space for important things feels like a huge, hairy challenge. But really the massive staircase is waiting on you to simply take one step up. Then another. Take one small step today. And then do it again tomorrow. You’ll look back months later and be amazed at how far you’ve climbed.

8. Identify What Makes You Come Alive. When we were kids we laughed, ran, played, and didn’t have a care in the world. As we grew up, we grew cynical, anxious and fearful. Part of the journey to finding more space to pursue what matters is to start to pay attention to the things that make you come alive. It may be triggered by a certain song, a specific time of year, a childhood memory or a favorite book. But when your sails are full, watch out world.

We all have terrific intentions but we struggle with execution. It’s not easy to create space, but it’s worth it.

Justified is a series that’s been inexplicably off the radar of award shows and the eyeballs of a mass audience even as it grew tremendously in sophistication and quality since first airing on FX in March of 2010. As it enters its sixth and final season, the show has found its best form to date, and with only seven episodes left until the series finale, it has set up an epic final showdown that could cement the series as arguably one of the best of the decade.

Based on the short story Fire In The Hole by Elmore Leonard, Justified is a truly unique television show. It is an odd and strange combination of Western’s that also touches on small town life and its themes, such as the resistance to modernization, with diverse genre elements such as the hard-boiled detective found in film-noir to the typical cops-and-robbers story lines. Each season has revolved around a major villain that attempts to establish their criminal empire and is brought to life by an outstanding cast of supporting actors and guest stars whose marvelous displays of acting are punctuated by impeccable dialogue and beautiful art direction that is able to establish the show’s Harlan County setting as a character its own.

The show’s protagonist is U.S. Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens. Played by Timothy Olyphant, Givens is smug with a devilish-grin, quick to draw and sure in his shot, a modern day sheriff in his own wild west. The plot is based on his reassignment to the small rural area town of Harlan County where he was born and raised in Kentucky following a shooting incident in his adopted city of Miami, Florida. What separates him from the typical anti-hero gunslinger cliché is how he himself is tied to the very people he is now responsible for policing. Given the nature of small towns, Raylan has a history with the various backwater families he crosses paths with, all of whom are attempting to run their own petty criminal enterprises. Ever-present in his brown cowboy boots and the trademark white cowboy hat, Justified rarely fails to reflect on how easily Raylan could have been on the opposite side of the law, and uses his empathy and connection to explore to whether he uses his badge as a source of justice and or as justification to break some of the same laws he claims to enforce.

The second protagonist of Justified is a man named Boyd Crowder, a criminal hell-bent on establishing a criminal empire his own. Played by the egregiously underrated but far more than capable Walton Goggins (just ask Quentin Tarantino), Boyd glides about with the swagger of an outlaw, dressed properly, and a southern twang for his awe-inspiring loquacious eloquence, and the swagger of an outlaw. Smooth-talking and charismatic as a southern preacher, Boyd’s motivations in the series are simple: he wants money and power. But it’s the evolution of his character, his motivations and his increasing ruthlessness in achieving those desires that make him the most complex television character since Walter White.

Initially presented as a white supremacist bearing a swastika tattoo, we soon learn he is far more interested in manipulating situations and people, with an added penchant for robbing banks and in his own words “blowing shit up,” than he is on the state of race relations. He is a man driven by a desire to achieve a non-existent end game, a process that has led to everyone and everything in his life becoming chess pieces, to be played or discarded depending on what the situation on hand demands. Stuck in his attempts to establish himself a king, the show’s final season presents him the ever tragic “one last heist” to transform his criminal activities into a legitimate business.

Introduced as the show’s first villain, as well as the first antagonist Raylan faces upon his return, their paths have crossed on numerous occasions over the series to both benefit and detriment. Forever tied, but inherently opposite, at its core the show is about a dance between two men, one in the hero’s hat and the other wearing the villain’s mask. Tied more closely than anyone else on the series, their relationship began in a coal mine as teenagers, a sacred bond in the rural town and has over the course of the series evolved into how each accepts and lives within their contradictory life philosophies. Both believe the notion that no one in this life is innocent, and we are but the series of decisions we make when circumstances transpire either for or against us, but to what end and to who’s benefit is where they diverge. And it is on this grey line that rests the beauty of Raylan and Boyd’s dance to the grave that lends Justified its heart. It twists these labels, forcing us to confront whether labels can be applied on what is and what isn’t considered moral, a recurring theme that raises the show from cliché to poetic.

While six seasons has seen its share of villains come and go, the series comes full circle to focus on the two men with whom it all began. In its all too short run, Justified has delivered a wonderful Western opera that drips with Shakespearian dialogue and the hubris of Greek tragedies, all rapped up in the Southern backwater world so poetically articulated and presented by Mark Twain.

If you’re looking to fill that Breaking Bad shaped hole in your heart, Justified is well-worth your time.

Justified is on FX on Tuesday’s at 10:00 PM. You can also stream the entire series on Amazon Prime.

Photo: Heather Piper

“It’s over.” Chances are that you have heard these words at some point in your life. Maybe even more than once. For me, it was nearly three years ago when I found myself in “Divorceland” after the end of a 12-year relationship. What’s a person to do?

Well, I did the only thing that I could do at the time. I took my broken heart and climbed into bed. I brought along a Kleenex box, turned off the phone, and pulled the covers over my head. This may be fine for a day or two, but it is certainly not a way to live.

In those early stages, my children (ages 4 and 3 at the time) drove my motivation to rebuild my life. When I reflect on those early days, it often reminds me of sitting on an airplane and hearing the flight attendant tell the passengers that in the event of an emergency, they should put on their oxygen mask first before assisting others. Sometimes the most important job of parenting is to take care of ourselves so that we can take care of our children.

Little did I know at the time, but I was on the beginning of a journey that would take me from denial to acceptance. I have since come to learn that the stages of grief for the loss of a close relationship are similar to the five stages first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying.

• Denial and isolation: In this early stage, I can’t believe how many times I thought, “This can’t be happening,” “This is just a rough patch,” and “Maybe there is still hope.”
• Anger: As reality set in, the pain of the loss reared its ugly head as anger. I blasted my horn at clueless drivers on the 405 and snapped at checkers at the supermarket. I just felt angry, most of all at myself.
• Bargaining: In a desperate attempt to un-do the pain of the loss, I engaged in a long list of “if onlys.” These internal negotiations ranged from “If only I had been a better person to him,” to “If only the stress of raising two young children had been easier,” to “If only we had not moved to Singapore for his job.”
• Depression: This is when the reality of the loss hit two-fold. First, there were the practical implications of the loss, such as setting up a new home and sharing custody. Second, there were all of the emotional implications of the loss of a close relationship, facing the sadness, pain and regret and coping with it head on.
• Acceptance: Seeing past all of these emotions afforded me an opportunity to accept that there is a life after the loss of my marriage. Sometimes what feels like an end is actually a beginning. In my case, this statement has never been more true.

As I reflect back on these stages of grief, I realize that not only did I experience each stage, but more importantly I survived each stage. Maybe time does heal all wounds. How did I navigate the stages? As Joe Cocker would say, “With a little help from my friends.” Actually, I had a lot of help from friends and family. And yes, I’m not embarrassed to admit it — a really good therapist.

Over time, I have come to appreciate Woody Allen’s advice about getting through life. As Allen said in his 2013 interview with Esquire:

… we’re just temporary people with a short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.

You name a so-called distraction (good and bad), and I probably did it, whether it was finding work that I enjoy, running on the beach, cooking for family and friends, or playing Monopoly with my children. And yes, at the age of 41, I took up my worst distraction: smoking Capri cigarettes alone on my deck after I put my children to bed.

The leading thing that helped me navigate the stages has been “The Canyon.” The Canyon, you ask? Yes, it is actually a physical place. It happens to be a little canyon near the beach in Santa Monica. It is the physical place where I created a home for my family and developed new relationships. It is the place where I physically run my heart out (after finally realizing that chain-smoking Capris is not an effective means of dealing with the stress of divorce). It is the place where I can connect daily with beauty and nature. In addition to being a physical place, the Canyon represents an emotional place. It is the place where I finally took charge of my life, made new joyful memories and traditions, and came to really know and love myself. The Canyon is truly where I found my heart again.

I realize that not everyone can move to Santa Monica Canyon and ride off into the sunset. That would be missing the point. The Canyon represents a microcosm that exists for all of us, regardless of where we live. Find that one mini place in your community that is “yours” and where you feel safe and grounded, whether it be a hiking spot, a yoga studio, a coffee shop, a park or a reading nook. You will know it when you find it. It is the place where you can navigate the stages of grief. It will come to be the place where you can savor the beautiful moments and distractions of this thing called life. It is the place where you, too, can find your heart again.

Be sure to follow Ms. Canyon Girl on Twitter.

When you’re in that Monday to Friday grind with only the distant promise of spring break to look forward to, you may start feeling like your days all kind of blur together.

When that happens, it’s easy to let a perfectly good day or week pass by without doing anything fun, productive or creative. To keep you from slipping back into old bad habits or slacking off on your goals, here are 13 quotes to help you take advantage of the here and now:

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Source:
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Source:livin3.tumblr.com

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“Guardians of the Galaxy,” last year’s highest-grossing comic book movie, was nominated for two Oscars during Sunday’s ceremony. But despite the inclusion, “Guardians” and its brethren were on the receiving end of a diss from Jack Black during the Oscars’ opening musical number.

“Opening with lots of zeroes, all we get are superheroes: Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Jedi Man, Sequel Man, Prequel Man, formulaic scripts!” Black sang in “Moving Pictures,” a tribute to the power of movies performed by Neil Patrick Harris.

The shot came one day after “Nightcrawler” writer-director Dan Gilroy praised independent film for surviving against an onslaught of superhero movies.

“Independent film, the foundation and everybody here today, I think, are holdouts against a tsunami of superhero movies that have swept over this industry,” Gilroy said after winning Best First Feature at Saturday’s Independent Spirit Awards. “We have survived, and thrived, and I think that’s true spirit.”

Not to director James Gunn. On Monday, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director wrote a response to Gilroy and Black on Facebook:

Whatever the case, the truth is, popular fare in any medium has always been snubbed by the self-appointed elite. I’ve already won more awards than I ever expected for Guardians. What bothers me slightly is that many people assume because you make big films that you put less love, care, and thought into them then people do who make independent films or who make what are considered more serious Hollywood films.

[…]

If you think people who make superhero movies are dumb, come out and say we’re dumb. But if you, as an independent filmmaker or a “serious” filmmaker, think you put more love into your characters than [when] the Russo Brothers do Captain America, or Joss Whedon does the Hulk, or I do a talking raccoon, you are simply mistaken.

Read Gunn’s full response over at Facebook.