The climax of your day has arrived; it’s day 3 of ‘Women vs Men’ week!
Is this true? Can it be true of either gender? What’s your experience?
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Drawing and questions by Marty Coleman
Quote by Sharon Stone, American Actress, 1958- not dead yet
Sharon Stone – 2012
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What? I am against reading? Yep, I am. Not all reading mind you. but over indulged in, mindless reading. Reading gets an exalted place in our western world, at least among the intelligentsia and wannabees (that’s me). The idea is if you read you are intelligent, wise, learning, growing and open minded. It means you are self-aware and a good person. But that is not true.
It isn’t any more true than watching TV means your a vacuous idiot who is satisfied with shallow crap. I watch more hours of TV than hours of reading. So, am I just being defensive? No, I am being realistic. People watch substantial TV and they watch idiot TV. People read substantial books and they read idiot books. What I am against is the persistent illusion that reading in and of itself makes someone admirable. It doesn’t.
If you learn, grow, share and become enlightened while reading then it’s good. And they same is true about watching TV. If you get entertained in either medium, that is good too. But not if that is all you are doing. Escaping to the boob tube and never critically evaluating what it is you are watching isn’t good. And it isn’t good with reading either. What you read and how you think about it make you admirable, not just that you read.
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Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman, who is reading Frankenstein and having a hard time getting through it.
Quote by Albert Einstein
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Stretching in morning dark,
Edge of light past trees,
Dogs wiggling, I am on the floor with them.
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Here we are fluttering into day #3 of Public Relations week.
I get a lot of publicity. I am in the newspaper and on TV much more often than makes sense. Even when I am not trying to get publicity I tend to get it. People are always saying to me, ‘Marty, don’t forget us little people when you become famous!’ They usually say this when I get interviewed on TV about something. My response has recently been, ‘haha…I have been ‘almost famous’ for decades now, don’t expect me to get really famous any time soon.’
Why is that? Well, the truth is I am better at being a butterfly than I am at being a caterpillar. It’s not that I don’t work. I work really hard at my various jobs as artist, photographer, designer, speaker and running coach. I work equally hard at my principles of love, encouragement, forgiveness, critical thinking, and intellectual integrity. But there is more to working than just working hard. It’s about working smart and focused, with repetition and habit. It’s about timing the work with the public relations, meaning integrating the two with diligence, consistency and follow-through.
That is where I am not all that good. I am still working on it.
So remember, this is not about being angry at some dandy that gets publicity due to good public relations while you toil away in obscurity. Why? Because you and the dandy are one. You are the caterpillar AND the butterfly of your own destiny. Maybe you are the opposite of me, maybe you are a really good caterpillar but shy away from the bright lights that the butterfly lives in. If you believe in something, if you believe what you offer is good and valuable for the world, then it’s time to start your work on that area you aren’t very good at. It’s time to put on the sunglasses and get out in the butterfly sunshine or perhaps it’s time to take off the shades, draw the curtains and work in the caterpillar shadows. Whichever it is, it’s time to do it.
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Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman
Quote by George Carlin
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I got into a long and deep discussion today on FB over a story on ABC News/GMA about girls not being allowed to wear strapless dresses to a middle school prom because they were deemed ‘too distracting’ by the principal of the school. Click on the pic or link to read the story.
There were a lot of points of view, mine primarily being that what is needed is proper training for boys on how to respond to girls, no matter what they are wearing. Limiting girls because boys might be distracted is placing the blame on the girl, just as when someone blames a rape victim because she wore too short a skirt or too dark of eyeshadow. Not only is that not the reason behind rape, even if it were, the solution is to get the boys/men educated and trained about appropriate and moral behavior, not telling women they have to wear clothes that conceal.
That’s my initial take on it, what’s yours?
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Drawing, quote and commentary by Marty Coleman
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“Training boys is wiser than limiting girls.”
In 1971 we bought a 47 ft houseboat. We lived in Darien, Connecticut and had it at a marina on the Long Island Sound in a town nearby. We spent the next few summers out at the far eastern tip of Long Island, in the town of Montauk, New York, at Captain’s Marina.
In the summer of ’72 Hurricane Agnes bore down on Long Island. It was close to a direct hit as those things go. The tidal storm surge made Montauk Lake rollick violently. Many of the boat owners on the floating docks decided they would ride out the storm in the middle of the lake instead of risking having their boat get out of synch with the dock and smash down on top of it, ruining the hull, propellers, etc.
Our boat was tied up to a rigid dock, not floating with the tide. At first we thought that meant we would be safe as long as we kept the bumpers between us and the dock. it was unlikely we would go up and down so much as to put the boat in danger. What we didn’t realize was that once the boat started going up and down, even mildly, the ropes tying us to the dock were getting tighter and tighter around the cleats.
As the storm got more violent one of the cleats tore out of the boat. At that point we made the decision that it would be best if we waited it out in the middle of the lake instead of at the marina. We tried to untie the remaining ropes but it was hopeless. They were way too tight, and even if it were still possible to untie the ropes, the violent moving of the boat made it very dangerous for fingers to work with rope that may snap tight at any moment. Our only choice at that point was to take an ax to the remaining rope and cut ourselves clear. It was quite a dangerous scene making that happen.
We were able to cut 2 other ropes and had one remaining rope at the bow. But because that was the only remaining rope tethering us to the dock and the wind was blowing us away from the dock we were not in immediate danger of hitting anything. Getting up on the bow in the storm to chop away at the rope was considered too dangerous and we chose to ride it out with that one tether, as long as the wind didn’t start to bring us back to the dock, which it didn’t.
After the storm passed we saw almost all the boats that remained at the floating docks had been damaged to some degree. Those that had gotten free had some seasick captains but were not damaged at the end of it all. Our boat only suffered the one cleat having been pulled out and some chop marks on the teak walkway.
We learned an important lesson that day. You can’t wait until the storm is at its worst to make your decision. You need to figure it out in advance, just as in life.
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Drawing and life story by Marty Coleman, who a year later got blown up on that same boat.
Quote by Joseph Joubert, 1754-1824, French moralist and essayist
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Here is how the Boston Marathon terrorist or terrorists were competent:
Here is how the Boston Marathon terrorists were and are incompetent:
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Drawing and bottom quote by Marty Coleman
Top quote by Eve Sawyer and others
Visual inspiration from Aimee Mullins – double amputee athlete, model, speaker.
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In remembrance of violence, no. In remembrance of love, yes.
Can you barely see the quote? That’s because it’s hardly possible to see clearly in the ‘fog of war’. It seems scarcely possible to see anything else when blood is all around. It seems beyond possible to hear love when hate is so loud.
But barely does not mean can’t. We can see love. Always triumphant, always victorious in the end. That’s because violence is a symptom of impotence. Though it seems so powerful at that moment, so strong, so hard to overcome, it can’t sustain itself. It falls because it is a lack of power, a lack of ability that led to it, not the opposite.
Love on the other hand is the essence of power itself. It is power. It is potency. It is capability. It is triumph. Always.
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Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman, a runner.
Quote by Anais Nin, 1903-1977, French writer
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I went down to Dallas this past weekend and bought 5 new quote books. I an going to take a quote from each one over the next 5 days. Today’s is from ‘Language Is a Place of Struggle – Great Quotes by People of Color, Edited by Tram Nguyen.
I often think about how much people depend on facts and statistics. It’s 3 hours driving to Wichita so we better leave by 1 if we are going to get there by 4. I ran my last 10k in 55:54, a personal record and the first time under 56 minutes. One of those facts is neutral, not a lot of interpretation to it. The other, the one about my run, is also a fact, but it has some emotional or psychological meaning to me, and perhaps to others who hear it.
But what about facts that aren’t facts at all? For example, Rebekah Evans (my daughter) wrote an article in her blog ‘The Cellular Scale’ titled, ‘Do small men think like big women?‘. It’s a great read about flawed science, gender bias and ‘facts’ that aren’t. It’s about the Corpus Callosum, a part of the brain that connects the right and left hemisphere. It’s been said for many decades that women’s are bigger than men’s and that as a result women have a more unified brain, can multitask better, etc.
But the truth is that is not true. Later studies showed that it isn’t based on male or female, but on the actual size of the brain. The larger the brain, the less proportion of the brain the corpus collosum is, leading to the wrong assumption it had something to do with women or men. Check it out and see how a ‘fact’ can be delivered and believed by many people due to many reasons not attached to the veracity of the truth. In this example it lead right into already existing gender bias.
What do you believe, not because it is true, based on facts, but because it feeds into a need to control yourself or others, or fits a bias you have?
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Drawing and Commentary by Marty Coleman, factual.
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Quote by Nikki Giovanni, 1943 – not dead yet, African-American writer and activist
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The President recently proposed a ‘brain mapping’ research initiative. I think it sounds like a great idea but it would really be better described as not drawing a map of the brain but creating a key to the map of the brain. Why is that? You think the human genome was tough to catalog? Try doing that for 85+ billion neurons and 100 trillion or so synapses. In other words, there is a lot of ground to cover.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t get started on it, it just means it will take a while. And a lot of money.
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Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman
Quote by Emerson Pugh, American Physicist, 1929 – not dead yet
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