#so their relationship must have been a pressure cooker for decades

[incorrectsibunaquotes]

I could watch/read/write a whole prequel about Harriet and Caroline. Their relationship is so fascinating to me and so under-explored in canon. How did things get so bad between them?

[batomarbo]

Why We Hunger for Novels About Food

While putting imaginary meals on the page, I have thought a great deal about the central role that food plays in our lives. Food is love. Food is conviviality. Food is politics. Food is religion. Food is history. Food is consolation. Food is fuel. Food identifies us and who we are. It can even help us make sense of our world. We live in a culture where food porn is one of the hottest hashtags and seeking out the best new ramen or avocado toast trend is a more popular hobby than collecting stamps. And the “culinary enthusiasts” among us can’t get our fill of books about food.

But what about authors of food fiction? What compels them to write about what—and how—we eat?

Louise Miller, author of The Late Bloomer’s Club “Food is the great equalizer—everyone eats—and what we eat and how we eat it can be so emotional and can carry deep meaning. Food can also be so revealing. I remember an old New Yorker cartoon that pictured a mother and her young daughter sitting in a restaurant looking at a menu. The mother responds to her daughter’s question: ‘Chocolate pudding? I think you would like it. It’s a lot like chocolate mousse.’ That one line tells us so much!”

Phillip Kazan, author of Appetite “Food for me is very tied up with memories of my Greek grandmother, whose tiny kitchen in London was a treasure-house of tastes and smells in the grey, flavorless world of ‘60s and ‘70s England, where olive oil was something you had to buy from a pharmacist as a cure for earache. Presumably the pharmacist in our village thought our family had appalling ear problems, because my mother bought hundreds of his tiny bottles of oil for her cooking. I remember cookbooks as this wonderful escape route to exotic, warm, generous places: Greece, from where relatives would visit with huge tins of olives and bags of sugared almonds; or India, where my father was born. Writing, in a way, is an extension of my cooking, and vice versa. Cooking taught me how to create, that I needed to create.”

Randy Susan Myer, author of Waisted “I grew up in a family where food was the comforting evil (or the evil comfort). My mother—for whom dress size was the holy grail—watched every bite I took. When in a restaurant, first she’d not order what she wanted and then she’d steal bites from my plate. If I protested, she’d say, ‘If you love me, you’ll share your food.’ Often, we barely had food in the house and meals were haphazard at best. My sister snacked on raw Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. I ate uncooked matzo meal. We lived on cold cereal—which to this day is my top comfort food. My mother hid cookies and cake inside our giant pressure cooker and then put the pot on the very top of our already high cabinets. My sister and I were under ten, but a pressure cooker was no match for us. I’m surprised we didn’t become mountain climbers for how often we scampered up the peaks leading to buried sweets.”

Ramin Ganeshram, author of The General’s Cook “I’m from an immigrant family. My parents were from two countries that, at the time, had little representation here in the U.S.—even in New York City where I was born and raised. My dad was from Trinidad and Tobago and my mother was from Iran. I was also brought up in a time where people still really tried to assimilate so they downplayed their native culture with their kids. The one thing that remained a solid connection was the food we ate. I realized from a young age that I could get my parents to talk about their homes when we were eating the foods they had prepared from their respective cultures. My father, particularly, was a born storyteller and if you could talk with him while he was cooking you would get the best stories.”

Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light “The main character in my novel is based on Lee Miller, a woman who reinvented herself multiple times in her life—first as a model, then a photographer, and finally as a gourmet chef who wrote for Vogue and other women’s magazines of the day. In all my research about her, there was never any mention of her love of food prior to her becoming a chef. This makes no sense to me. Of course, she must have loved food—and she moved to Paris in 1929, where she would have enjoyed meals quite different—and presumably more delicious—than what she ate growing up in Poughkeepsie. I wanted her love of food to be palpable throughout the novel, both to foreshadow her shift to cooking later in life, but also because I think enjoying food—enjoying the pleasures of the body—is integral to who she is as a character. I see Lee Miller as a woman of voracious appetites: she was hugely ambitious and adventurous, and very sexual. Food seemed like another way to understand her overall hungers.”

Charlie Holmberg, author of Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet “In writing, I think food is an excellent method of transportation. If I were to detail a table setting with food you’ve never heard of, but I describe a flaky crust, the way a gelatin gives underneath a knife, and the smell of burnt sugar, you are there. You smell and taste and see that meal. It gives a story, ancient magical tales included, a sense of realness.”

David Baker, author of Vintage “A dish is a story . . . it’s the story of the culture that created it, the person who made it, the story of the ingredients and where they’re from, the tale of the meal’s creation—successful or otherwise—and then of sharing it. The whole process is a form of narrative. The same goes for wine . . . it’s the story of millions of years of geology that created the region where the fines grow. It’s the story of the culture of the region and then a time capsule of what happened weather-wise the year in which the grapes ripened, and finally what the winemaker did during that year. There are so many layers of narrative in food and wine that it’s a rich field for exploration in writing.”

Amy Reichert, author of The Coincidence of Coconut Cake “I didn’t realize I was a food writer until after people responded to my novels, and I’ve embraced it. One of my favorite parts of writing has become sharing my regional cuisine with them—writing about Wisconsin culinary delights like a Door County fish boil or our classic brandy old-fashioneds. It’s one of the ways I share my love of Wisconsin.”

Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop “It happened quite organically—pardon the pun. But it’s impossible for me to write about Iran and Iranians without including a lot of food because the preparation of huge meals is an integral part of the culture, and sharing those meals at feast-like parties is common across the classes. Food takes on added significance for my characters because they are displaced from their original home. They are Iranians living in America. There is a longing for the familiar foods they know and a constant search for ingredients they love. Cooking Persian meals links my characters to their past and heritage. Sharing Persian food with Americans is a way for them to create and deepen new relationships.”

Jenna Blum, author of The Lost Family “While I was writing The Lost Family, I cooked a lot—to meditate on the day’s writing as well as to kitchen-test all the recipes I then featured on the book’s menu. Some of my favorite lines for the book would bubble up that way, as if from a Magic 8-Ball, and one of them was ‘vegetables have no language.’ I revised this slightly for the novel, but it means that food is universal. The produce and spices will vary from country to country and cuisine to cuisine, but if you love food, you have a vast family out there. We can all communicate about how our beloved dishes are different—and how they are the same.”

*

I myself have been smitten with books about food since a friend of mine recommended that I read M.F.K. Fisher decades ago. I devoured The Art of Eating and everything else she had written. In her books I found both the exotic and the comfortable. I had never been to France or eaten escargot, but I reveled in her descriptions of food, in her use of simple phrases to evoke such specific sensations: “The air tastes like mead in our throats,” she writes in The Art of Eating. I hope to stir the same feelings and create the same sensory pleasures in others with my novels about famous culinary figures in Italian history.

Now this is a book I can really sink my teeth into, I thought as I once read the opening paragraph of The Flounder by Nobel prizewinner Gunter Grass.

Ilsebill put on more salt. Before the impregnation there was shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, the season being early October. Still at table, still with her mouth full, she asked, “Should we go to bed right away, or do you first want to tell me how when where our story began?”

The rest of the novel, which tells the story of an immortal fish who meets an immortal man who falls in love with cooks over and over through the centuries, is just as delicious and delightful in its descriptions of food. To this day, it’s one of my favorite novels.

In reading The Flounder and other sumptuous works of culinary fiction, I’m reminded of something dramatist George Bernard Shaw once said: “There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” It’s a statement to which I think we could all gladly raise a glass.

[darlingnik]

Survive, Thrive, or Both?

For years every person that have has gotten the chance to know me, almost always suggests that I should write. Writing is hard for me. It’s physically hard because I have the worst handwriting in the world and literally can never stay focus on the task of writing my thoughts.  Writing requires the writer to be vulnerable.  Being vulnerable; actually acknowledging vulnerability is something I have never been comfortable doing.  But because this is my 40th birthday and because (as usual) I procrastinated (no fabulous photo shoots, parties, dinners, vacations or any of the stunting for the gram events have been planned), I am gifting myself this action. Actually, I am tasking myself with this project. I realized recently that my 30′s are ending along with the decade.  2020 is upon us whether we are ready or not. I am not prepared for this next chapter, though it is happening regardless. Lack of preparedness has never stopped time.

Most of my life I held on to things well passed their expiration dates.  I am a secret but, overt hoarder.  Not like the kind you see on television, I am a hoarder of memories, people and trauma.  Some of my favorite items to hoard in particular is names. As I boldly step into my new chapter, a new season and a new decade, it is imperative that I shed anything that no longer serves me, this includes identities.  Why should I continue to pine for the names of the men who have either hindered, harmed or hurt me; to forgo the name of the one who helped, loved, elevated and celebrated me...This new path requires a new name steeped in love, sacrifice, joy, strength, and honor.  It is the amalgamation of the asé, love, hope and sacrifices of my mother that I am able to take on this work.

But what is this work? One of my gifts is critical thinking. I am critical of everything from the flick of the wrist of the barista at Starbucks to counting the number of clicks required to make an online purchase.  With the aforementioned question in mind, I began the task of deep self-reflection because that is the only area where I seemed to have difficulty assessing things accurately.  I realized that though I am the eldest of my mother’s and father’s children, a natural leader in all realms of my personal and professional life, I am in fact, a person who is in the between of things: generations, zodiac signs, and now life. I loathe the in between the same way I despise “the gray area.”  The dreaded, feared 40 is now upon me and I am not as prepared as I thought I would be.

Depending on whom you ask, I could be considered a millennial vs generation X.  I am on the end of generation X ushering in the millennials.  My birthday is at the end of one zodiac sign (Libra) and the beginning of the next (Scorpio), thus making me a cusper of sorts. My birthday is after my mother’s and before my father’s, which now makes for an interesting four week period every year. Despite being hamstrung between so many things mentioned and not, I never realized until now, how uncomfortable the middle is.  I am now at the top of the hill and the view at the top is not anything close to what was expected.  I feel my mortality more now than ever.  I feel my mother’s mortality even more.  Death, loss and change are the hurdles I must contend with, regularly.  No longer can I feign ignorance, avoid responsibility, or be conveniently confused as to who I am or what I want.  40 is supposed to be the arrival of self-confidence and self-esteem and simply not giving a damn.  I am unsure of myself more than ever before.  The season for rose colored glasses is over and never to return.  

As I approach 40 I'm overwhelmed with the idea of what life looks like for the latter half.   I somehow missed all of the memos about the changing of the new decade and honestly as a millennial vs. gen X, one would think that I would be on top of 2020’s arrival. However this period of time has caused me to do some deep reflection.

Society has taught women to dread 40 and I am no different than any other woman in society. I look at the milestone markers of things that I should have achieved by now and honestly I am lamenting over the fact that most of them I have not achieved and most likely will not achieve (marriage for a 2nd time, children, home ownership, paid off student loans, etc).  It amazes me that while I hoard identities, names, and critiques; I never realized my long love affair with trauma.  I secretly get a rush being in the pressure cooker. Need to write a paper? Let’s wait 1 hour before it’s due to get it done.  Need to study for an exam, let’s cram!  Want to move across country? Pack up and leave with barely enough to get there safely. Need to write your blog/think piece/online journal entry?  Do it the day before your birthday.   I am a quintessential procrastinator.  If there is a way to add pressure to situation, I am all in. But why crave such high octane experiences?  The only conclusion I can come to is my love/hate relationship with trauma.  Growing up in a home where abuse abounded, I learned early the importance of survival. If my mother taught me anything, she taught me how to get knocked down and stand back up, quickly.   I watched in amazement how she took the hard knocks of life and come back fighting harder. I promised myself that I would never be vulnerable enough to allow a man or anyone the chance to take me off my square.  Physical abuse, never.  Mental, emotional, spiritual abuse, bring it on!  

My survival skills required intense situations and while I wasn’t going to allow any man to hit me, I for damn sure would let you string me along, take me on the long wild ass ride of an emotional roller coaster for the thrill of “surviving” it. I routinely seek out personal and professional spaces that push me past my boundaries and comfort.  Thus a queen of creating thunderstorms only to cry profusely when it rains is born.   The quintessential procrastinator is actually a professional victim.   But at 40 the theatrics of yesteryear are contrite and exhausting.  I can no longer tolerate high pressure situations just for the thrill.  If pressure can create diamonds or burst pipes, then consider me human confetti.  

Survive, thrive or both? I have proven that I can survive but now I choose to thrive, even if it means taking a loss, falling from grace, or not achieving the milestone markers.  It means regardless, if I professionally am a success, lose the weight, win the lottery or meet and fall in love with Travis Cure (@Travis.Cure on Instagram), I am enough.  Thriving in life at 40 means saying no more, creating pockets of joy daily, not comparing myself to others, allowing myself to be vulnerable, allowing myself to feel even when the feeling hurts and last but not least letting go of all the people, places and things that do not elevate or celebrate me. Life is like a basketball game. We all get four quarters and 40 is my halftime.  Will I walk into the locker room elated or defeated?  Will I leave the locker room inspired or tired?  Will I continue to make the same bad plays over and over or will I play smarter?  Will I take chances or continue to play it tight and safe?  Will I trust my coach (my higher self) and my team (the friends and family that love and support me)? It is not important to assess the potential to win the game of life.  It is important that I live my life all of my life not just the highlight reels.  I will always be a survivor, but as Dr. Thema (@DrThema on Instagram and Twitter) so aptly tweeted “You’ve mastered survival mode. Now it’s time to live.” No better time to start living than at 40. Now I am off to have my cake and eat it too…but first I must bake it. :)

Nik M.

[4626songs]

Everyone deserves a great love story. This one is mine.

So. Here’s the thing.

Is it even appropriate for a 38-year-old guy to obsess over a major studio teenage rom-com flick? People my age who saw it usually say they wish they had something like that when they were that age – like, 20 years ago? I probably should behave like a proper adult, too: just love the movie and wish I had it back then when I was seventeen.

The problem is that after watching the movie and reading the original book, I feel seventeen once again. In all the right and wrong ways.

The case in point: Love, Simon.

I mean, yes. I’m done keeping my story straight.

When it comes to the emotional intellect – i.e., empathy and ability to recognize others’ as well as my own emotions – I am a certified piece of dumb and voiceless deadwood. I mean, I even officially have it in my DNA. But it also did not help that I grew up with emotionally detached parents and had very few friends during childhood. I’ve been struggling with the lack of emotional intellect all my life.

But when I hit adolescence and started to feel something big, it was the worst. I could not recognize and understand what the fuck was going on. And definitely I could not talk about it with anyone. Not even because I was scared. Simply because I literally did not have the words to describe it.

Eventually, it was music, movies and, ahem, slash fanfics that helped me find those right words that explained me to me. That big thing was me being helplessly and hopelessly in love with my best friend.

Curiously, I did not have any struggles with my sexuality or identity after this revelation. I sort of accepted me being gay as a matter of fact and moved on.

Telling anyone – and especially my best friend – about this was a completely different matter. Obviously, I was scared. As Simon says in the movie, announcing who you are to the world is pretty terrifying. But it was not just this fear. Once again, I did not have the words to tell my story. My go to sources of emotional cognition – music, movies and books – were failing me. You know, there was not a lot of coming-out, coming-of-age films or songs or books quarter of a century ago. Except maybe for Smalltown Boy. The most beautiful song. But do you remember the video? One more reason to be terrified and NOT come out.

So, I was silent. It also did not help that I knew for sure from our conversations that if I told my friend about me being gay and my feelings for him, pretty much everything good in my life would end.

I was correct. After suffering for several long years feeling increasingly cold inside from not being able to speak up and express what I feel, I finally managed to confess to him somehow. And yes, it went almost as bad as I expected. I was told that I was a misguided fool, and that I should never speak up about it again. Never speak up.

See. My first coming out experience was pretty bad. But not something objectively bad. I was not beaten up or bullied or outed, thank god. That was out of question, I knew him too well for that. But still. Somehow I was left even more dead and frozen on the inside than I was before. Not something to look for in the future.

But eventually, things got better. I found new funny and geeky hobbies, through which I met great new friends-for-life. I got three university degrees, including a PhD, and became a scientist. I started a music blog, and eventually freelanced as a music journalist. Finally being able to talk about what music meant for me was a liberation.

On a personal front, things were also moving somewhere somehow. There were other unrequited loves. Deeply engaging epistolary relationships with anonymous penpals. (Hi, Blue!) Casual sex. Proper offline boyfriends, and even serious long-term relationships. Some drama along the way, of course. But, until recently, no great love stories coming along with that. Somehow, deep inside, I ached for a great love story to happen in my life.

And then there were those other coming outs. Nothing objectively bad. Always insanely awkward. When I told my mother, she said that I had an irrevocable right to ruin my life and do whatever I want, and we hadn’t talked about me being gay for the next twelve years. A roommate did not believe I was gay at first, and then, when I insisted that I was not joking, he cussed and stopped talking to me for two weeks. A girl who had a crush on me laughed with relief that there’s something wrong with me and not her as I didn’t return her feelings. But there were other friends, who accepted me unconditionally, sometimes even without fully understanding what I was talking about and what it meant for me. I am so grateful to them. But in the end, it was not enough for me to shake that feeling of permanent awkwardness and fear of being me. I chose to remain in the closet for the rest of the world.

But you know what’s (not really) funny? That the same happened with all other important things in my life. It’s like I was permanently living in a giant ball of awkwardness. I had to keep mostly silent about my geeky hobbies at my wonderful science job, even though these hobbies were the main source of my creativity and inspiration. In turn, my wonderful geek friends could not care less about my music tastes. My music friends kind of respected me as a science guy, but I could never talk with them about actual science. And beneath all of that was this big-ass gay secret. It’s like I was living at least four parallel lives, but never a complete one.

I guess once you decide to remain in the closet about one thing, you cannot fully be yourself about other stuff. I became so used to self-editing. Self-censorship. Strategic omissions. And, worst of all, being mute about most important things with most important people.

There are all those reasons why you should continue doing so. It’s dangerous to come out in my home country. It could harm me. It could cause collateral damage to my colleagues, students, professional networks, projects I worked on. It could hurt my family.

But the truth is, people can get no less hurt when you choose to be mute. I know I hurt people by not speaking up about something important to them and choosing silence instead. But there is even a bigger danger. Once you start to pile up silences, little white lies, and strategic omissions, they may grow up to the size of a mountain, and one day simply crumble under their own weight. There will be a lot of pain and harm involved. And I wonder: what if there was no mountain from the very beginning?

Still, the worst is what you are doing to yourself. When you cannot make yourself talk about things that are important to you, you either become a pressure cooker and explode one day – or they slowly die within you, freezing you in the process. And these may be too precious things to lose.

I have thought that eventually, I became better at talking. I have a group of wonderful friends with whom, I thought, I could be more or less myself in every sense, including gay stuff. But somehow, even after all these years, I still cannot do it all, even with them. I cannot even reply to a Facebook challenge about 10 favorite albums, because, like, at least 3 of them would be too gay. I cannot make myself talk about my favorite movies that made an impact on me, because, again: gay. I mumble something unintelligible about my career goals in science, because, in truth, what I mostly care about is how to solve not a grand scientific challenge, but a classic academic “two-body problem” further complicated by a gay twist.

Then one day I saw Love, Simon. That same night, I immediately bought Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, devoured it in two sleepless nights, and re-read it twice since then. I went to see the movie, like, another seven times. And have listened to the wonderful soundtrack and the score, like, a hundred times already, and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. I simply cannot get enough of this movie and of the Simonverse. And all the time I’ve been trying to sort out why did it hit me so hard and sweet? Why have I suddenly turned into an obsessed teenage fanboy?

Then I realized, I am just so fucking sick and tired of not speaking. I simply cannot stand it anymore. I need to speak. I have to speak. I must speak. Somehow, Simon and his story made it so obvious. Why I was so stupid not realizing it before?

But there’s another twist to that. Everyone deserves a great love story.

I’ve never seen a movie in my life to which I could relate so strongly. Yes, I was that “just like you” kid back then. Living a normal life without any really big problems. Obsessed with music and friendships. Awkward and unable to speak about important things. Alone.

(Oh god. Do you even realize how lonely Simon should have felt if his favorite song is Waltz #2??)

Unfortunately, my great first love story never happened. Instead, I shut myself up for decades to come. But somehow, Love, Simon movie and incredible writing by Becky Albertalli put me right there, back into my seventeen year old me, and finally showed how that first love story could have happened differently, retroactively replacing those long-buried feelings of sadness and despair with joy about the things to come.

And, boy, they did come. Who knew that you can finally get your own very personal great love story when you are at 34, almost ready to give up on happiness? It was wild, it was unpredictable, it was fateful, it was insane, it was unbearably romantic. It was – and, four years later, still is – love.

This story also physically moved me across oceans and continents to, out of all places, the city of Atlanta, Georgia. So, imagine this extra little level of relatability in Love, Simon / Simon vs. (That damn Radiohead, April 2 concert that I did not get to! That gay bar scene!) And now I’m dying to tell my story. Because that’s the most important and amazing thing that happened in my life. Because it is about hope. Because it is about breaking through. Because it is about believing that you deserve everything you want. Because love is a game we deserve to play out loud.

The problem is that I still haven’t quite figured out how to tell my story. Old habits die hard. But I will try. As I said, I cannot stay silent anymore. I need to come out. And I’ll start here.

[myowncentralperk]

I hope Catalonia stays with Spain, but I support its right to leave

by OWEN JONES for THE GUARDIAN

It is difficult to dissent from the summary delivered by Barcelona’s deputy mayor, Gerardo Pisarello, of Catalonia’s political plight: “There are those who walk with a lighter in the middle of a petrol station full of fuel.” At stake is a basic democratic principle: the right to national self-determination – “the right to decide”, as the Catalan slogan has it. You do not have to support Catalan independence to support this principle – just as accepting the right to divorce does not mean endorsing a couple’s separation. Imagine one partner in a marriage expressing doubts about whether the relationship is working, and the other vetoing not only a divorce, but any discussion of such an outcome. It would not only be an affront: it would simply fuel the desire for a separation on the part of the spouse. This has been the net consequence of the Spanish government’s pigheadedness, its ruinous economic policies, its refusal to negotiate – and its brutal clampdown on civil liberties in Catalonia.

The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, has shown commendable restraint after a referendum in which Spanish police dragged elderly women by their hair and injured hundreds of citizens exercising the most basic democratic right of all: the right to vote. More radical elements are agitating for a unilateral declaration of independence; Puigdemont has postponed such a move to allow for negotiations.

But when the likes of Rafael Hernando – spokesman for Spain’s ruling People’s party – describes a pro-democracy Catalan general strike as a “political Nazi-style strike”, there is clearly precious little goodwill for discussions in Madrid. The danger now is if Spain’s rightwing government activates article 155 of the country’s constitution, suppressing Catalan autonomy. Senior officials in Barcelona’s administration fear this would provoke riots on Catalonia’s streets and a renewed Spanish police crackdown – with frighteningly unpredictable consequences.

Catalonia cannot be understood in isolation. Here is another manifestation of the crisis enveloping the western world: another morbid symptom of a decaying system. “2017 may be the year when politics finally caught up with the crash of 2008,” is how Jeremy Corbyn hailed Labour’s recent surge, but the economic crisis spawned a vast array of political responses. It fuelled a new left that ranged from Greece’s Syriza, Britain’s Corbynism and Bernie Sanders in the US. It helped propel rightwing xenophobic populism, from Donald Trump to Farageism, France’s Front National and the Austrian far-right. It certainly played a critical role in the Brexit result. But the crash also undoubtedly acted as a midwife for a surge in civic nationalism in Scotland and Catalonia.

In the wake of the crash, Spain’s economic turmoil ranked among the worst in Europe. Half its youngsters were out of work; hundreds of thousands of families were evicted as a decade-long property bubble imploded. And six years ago protesters – the indignados – occupied squares across Spain, including in Barcelona: it was the beginning of the end for a two-party establishment that had ruled the country since the end of Franco. But the political disillusionment that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age found a home in Catalonia. In 2012 up to 2 million Catalans marched in the so-called Diada – the National Day of Catalonia: many of them were fed up with stagnating living standards, unemployment and slashed public services.

The governing centre-right nationalist forces capitalised on this mood, demanding that either the Rajoy government devolved more financial sovereignty, or Catalonia would be off. As the independence forces called for Catalans to escape the Spanish system, Podemos – Spain’s new left party – and its allies called for the system to be overturned.

The offer of independence, as Raphael Minder says in his invaluable new work, The Struggle for Catalonia, “promised change and prosperity in a new Catalan state, instead of stagnation in a rotten Spain”.

Nearly half of Catalans voted for pro-independence parties in 2015: the evidence suggests that support for secession doubled in a decade. It wasn’t just the economic crisis which fuelled this pro-independence discontent, but the authoritarian and contemptuous behaviour of the People’s party. A statute of autonomy – approved by referendum – defined Catalonia as a nation and gave special status to Catalan language. But the People’s party successfully campaigned to have these clauses stripped away. Ever since, growing calls for an independence referendum have been aggressively resisted. Even worse, the People’s party has relished inflaming the Catalan crisis for partisan reasons.

Railing against Catalan “separatist” forces, as Rajoy’s administration calls them, stirs up Spanish nationalism and jingoism. Even more conveniently, diverting Spanish attention to the Catalan authorities helps distract the electorate from corruption scandals that have enveloped the ruling party for years. Some Catalan leftists – who support a referendum but oppose independence – fear that the Spanish government has already calculated that Catalonia is lost, and is simply stirring up resentment and grievance in the rest of Spain to gain political advantage.

There are those who say that referendums bitterly divide nations. But the denial of a referendum has already done it

So what next? The EU has failed to explicitly condemn Rajoy’s behaviour. It must now exert pressure on Spain’s government to negotiate with Puigdemont and other politicians. The Canadian and British governments allowed independence referendums in Quebec and Scotland. Surely the Catalan people too should be allowed a free and fair vote without being brutalised by riot police. While the leftist Podemos party has sided with this democratic argument, the opposition Socialists – under pressure from more conservative elements – have so far failed to support what is surely the only possible resolution to this crisis.

I have little truck with pro-independence movements unless a nation is oppressed, like those subjugated by Europe’s former great powers – and Catalonia is not. Supporting Catalonia’s right to divorce does not mean endorsing it. But when democracy comes under attack anywhere, it is our collective responsibility to show solidarity.

There are those who point to the experience of Scotland and to Brexit, and say that all referendums do is bitterly divide nations. But the denial of a referendum in Catalonia has already done just that. If the Spanish government had actively wanted to drive Catalonia away, it is difficult to know what it would have done differently. It bears the greatest responsibility for this crisis.

Ultimately, only a new Spanish government that addresses the endemic social and economic grievances afflicting Catalonia can guarantee that Spain does not fall apart. But this Spanish government has built a pressure cooker that is ready to blow.

[antthonystark]

lol I agree with your unpopular Alec opinions...honestly I don't think Magnus should be yelled at but I also think he's definitely not as invested as Alec and it's useless to pretend otherwise. I mean he barely likes jace. And to leave the institute and not help find someone who's being tortured because his boyfriend got yell-y? I think Magnus deserved an apology but idg why people are acting like Alec is wholly irrational and Magnus handled the situation perfectly.

Yeah, exactly! There’s no question that Alec should have apologized to Magnus, but to paint the situation as though there was one person in the right and one person in the wrong - as most people are doing - is sort of weird to me, and I feel like people unnecessarily have it out for Alec these days (just yesterday, I saw two posts calling him a “bitch”, one on tumblr and one on instagram, and i wasn’t even actively looking to get infuriated, but I did rage for about six hours).

Like, I get it - Magnus doesn’t owe them his help, and Alec was being less than gracious - like you said, he doesn’t have much of a relationship with Jace yet - but then “I want to find Jace just as much as you do”…? Like, if it was just “I don’t have to help you if you’re going to be rude, because this has nothing to do with me” then that’s fine, that’s his right, he doesn’t owe them anything. But the whole “I want to find him just as much as you do, but you’re being rude, so I’m leaving” is less than the perfect way to handle it. It’s completely understandable and I sympathized with both Magnus and Alec over the whole argument, but to say that he handled it significantly better than Alec is disingenuous tbh. 

And Alec…i don’t want to come here and say “Alec does nothing wrong ever” but let’s just rationally break down what Alec said: he had a minor outburst in the ops room and asked everybody (not specifically Magnus) to leave him alone, which is fair enough in my opinion. Then he immediately apologizes for it as soon as Magnus comes to him (and come on did you hear the way he said it…like he’s just utterly defeated and lost and alone and why can’t people just cut him some slack pls). Next thing, Alec tells him that he doesn’t understand what it feels like to have a parabatai. I mean, fair enough?? He really doesn’t?? The way Alec describes it, it’s not saying that Magnus doesn’t know what loss or sadness feels like - it’s very much parabatai-specific suffering that he says Magnus doesn’t understand, which he doesn’t, because he’s never been a parabatai. It’s not the nicest way to respond to someone who’s trying to comfort you, to be sure, and Alec could have handled it better, but again, it must be awfully frustrating to be the only person who feels all of this so strongly and have people say that they understand it when they can’t, so can you blame him all that much? Also he’s not yelling at Magnus or anything (”No, Magnus, I don’t think you do” is pretty mild lol), if he raises his voice it’s in general frustration that there’s nothing he can do about Jace’s suffering. Then Magnus asks him if there’s anything he can do (note that Alec doesn’t ask him to do anything before he asks). 

So this is the part that Alec crossed a bit of a line and very much needed to apologize for - the “Why can’t you just do this one thing for me, after everything I’ve done for you?” line. Again, I’m sure Magnus is used to being taken for granted and used by Shadowhunters, so I can imagine how it might sting to hear such a thing from someone with whom he’s so close, implying that Alec only wants him to do what he needs him to do, without regard for how Magnus feels about it. But on the other side of the coin, you have Alec hearing somebody who cares about him say “I don’t want to risk your life” and responding with anger that they won’t do that is incredibly tragically telling of Alec’s twisted sense of self-worth, that his life is only there to throw away for other people. 

And now the big one - the wedding thing. I’m going to skip ahead to the scene in the foyer of the Institute, because I think that’s the most telling of what was actually going on in Alec’s mind. It was wrong for Alec to throw the wedding in Magnus’s face like that, but I don’t think he fully understood that until after Magnus had to spell it out for him. See, the thing about Alec is that he is completely disconnected from his own emotions; he doesn’t have the ability to properly understand them or handle them, because he was never allowed to develop that ability over a decade of forced self-repression. So you already have a pressure-cooker, and adding the extra pressure of Jace, he starts erratically bursting out these feelings that he doesn’t know how to process or understand, and has not yet processed or understood. So he’s not saying “I called off my wedding for my own happiness, but I’m going to throw that in your face so you do as you’re told,” he legitimately believes that he “chose” Magnus by calling off the wedding in a way (since Magnus was, after all, instrumental in the choice to call off the wedding). So in the scene when Magnus leaves, you have Magnus saying “you did it for you” and if you look at Alec, he’s not saying “what?” as in “why are you saying this right now” but he looks completely taken aback - like this isn’t how he had been viewing the situation. Even Magnus looks a little surprised when Alec responds with confusion rather than defensiveness. So, in defense of Alec, the intentions behind the things he said did not come from a place of malice. It doesn’t mean they weren’t hurtful, of course, so Magnus was well within his right to leave and I would not be defending Alec if he had even once defended any of the things that he had said. But, much like after the initial outburst, the only thing he has is regret and apology; nothing he says is meant to be hurtful, but it’s difficult for him to communicate and relate to others in meaningful ways, and people can get hurt in the fallout of that, and he acknowledges it and apologizes.

(And, “You did it for you” sounds nice when we say it about Alec, but imagine Alec hearing that in the heat of an argument - it doesn’t sound like a brave, courageous statement about love like we think about it. Even if what Magnus said was completely true (and it completely was), to Alec it might sound like the decision is being perceived as selfish, it sounds like Magnus wasn’t a part of it at all.)

And I mean…Magnus wasn’t being entirely rational throughout like you were saying. I mentioned the whole ‘walking out’ thing earlier, but that’s not all. Like, the “you’re new for me too” line I liked a lot because it shows how Magnus is not this all-knowing or invulnerable being when it comes to love, that he’s not just there to be a wise guide to Alec, but that this relationship is complicated for him too. But if we’re taking it in character context, I don’t see why couldn’t at least hear Alec out before snapping at him (and if we’re talking relative “new”-ness, sure Alec is his first Shadowhunter, and Alec’s myriad emotional issues are no easy task to take on, but Magnus is Alec’s first ever anything at all, and that coupled with the immense pressure of losing Jace, which we saw from the 2x02 clip he clearly blames himself for, you can’t exactly blame him for not being the paragon of boyfriends). Also, the major part where I was like….Magnus, please…is actually at the start of the balcony scene, where Alec starts talking about how he feels about how Jace is missing and how that’s affecting him (”The ground is shifted and I can’t keep my balance”) - for the first time since he left - rather than bottling it up like he has been all episode and having it come out in erratic bursts of anger, and Magnus just starts walking out on him? Like, I get that what Alec said before at the Institute wasn’t nice in any way, but neither was that.  

TLDR both boys could have handled it better. magnus is not a paragon of righteousness and neither is alec. 

[mastcomm]

The Joy of Cooking Naked

LUTZ, Fla. — Karyn McMullen is tired of being asked how she cooks bacon without any clothes on.

It’s one of those jokes people can’t help but make about nudists, and to Ms. McMullen, who has been cooking naked for more than two decades, it shows how misunderstood nudism is. Many people think only about the pitfalls — spattering fat, minor burns — and not the benefits.

“Embracing the nudist lifestyle has given me permission to feel my feelings,” she said one morning as she sautéed bell peppers while wearing nothing but a glittery manicure in her home kitchen at the Lake Como Family Nudist Resort in Lutz, about 20 miles north of Tampa. She lives here with her husband, Jayson McMullen.

“But if you want to know the truth,” she added with a resigned sigh, “I buy precooked bacon, and I microwave it on a paper towel.”

The McMullens are two of more than 10 million Americans who identify as nudists, or naturists, according to a 2011 study, the latest available, by the marketing services company Ypartnership and the Harrison Group. Some historians say the modern naturist movement in the West emerged in Europe in the 18th century as a means of promoting health, exposing the body to fresh air and sunlight; others trace its origins to Germany in the 19th century, as an effort to resist industrialization by living simpler and closer to nature.

No-clothes resorts, groups and beaches sprang up, and when Germans immigrated to the United States in the 20th century, some brought along the naturist ethos. Now nudists live all over America — though understandably, many are concentrated in warm-weather locales. Erich Schuttauf, the executive director of the American Association for Nude Recreation, said they tend to skew older, more educated and wealthier. In 2017, the group estimated that nude tourism in Florida, which then had 34 nudist resorts, brought 2.2 million nudist visitors to the state each year.

So it was no surprise when The Chicago Tribune ran a recent feature on the rising popularity of the clothing-free getaway, or “nakation,” Or when Bon Appétit published “9 Rules for Naked Dining: The Etiquette of Nude Resorts.” (Tip No. 7: “Eyes Up Here, Buddy!”) Or when the American Association for Nude Recreation last fall sent out a news release with three recipes — baked chicken-and-rice, a roasted brisket and a chicken lasagna — that it deemed safe for members to bake.

But many nudists balk at any suggestion that cooking — or vacationing, or living in general — is more fraught for them than for the clothed. In fact, when it comes to cooking and dining, many nudists are unequivocal: It’s better naked. They feel less inhibited, more creative.

“It’s like a painter when his mind is free of everything else,” said Jack Clark, who lives part-time at the Lake Como resort. “He paints whatever.”

The nudist movement has historically been connected to food: When it emerged in Europe, it was as much about diet as about clothing. Some nudists avoided meat-heavy dishes, and embraced vegetarianism and healthy eating.

Today, food is still integral to the experience at Lake Como. The oldest continuously operating nudist resort in Florida, it feels like something between a summer camp and a retirement home.

Some nudist clubs and resorts offer either a restaurant or lodgings with kitchens. Lake Como has both, ensuring that guests never have to don clothes to dine. Its full-service restaurant, the Bare Buns Cafe, serves flank steak and shrimp scampi, while a bar called the Butt Hutt, decorated with license plates and string lights, offers naked karaoke and open-mic nights.

There are no dress (or undress) requirements at the restaurant or bar, beyond the rule that each naked guest must bring a towel to sit on, for hygienic reasons. On a Saturday morning in January, a man stared at his phone as he devoured a plate of fried eggs, while another rode by in a golf cart, munching on a powdered doughnut. Others gardened, played volleyball, walked dogs, read books. They just happened to be unclothed.

Residents and guests said most of the people at the resort are white. (Nationally, there are organizations like the Black Naturists Association seeking to build community among nonwhite nudists.)

Some at Lake Como said being naked had helped them cultivate a more positive relationship with food.

Ms. McMullen, 60, a flight attendant, grew up in Massapequa Park, N.Y., and in her late 30s weighed 310 pounds. “I would go to the beach in this giant balloon of a bathing suit, and hear people laughing and whispering,” she said.

A friend recommended that she visit a nude beach in New Jersey. “I got the nerve to get in my car and go, and for the first time, no one was looking at me. No one was judging. I knew right then that this was for me.”

Ms. McMullen has since lost 185 pounds, but considers that less important. All it took to feel good about her appearance, she said, was taking her clothes off.

She spoke about being naked and being a cook as if they were one and the same, as she made carnitas in her electric pressure cooker. Her husband, Mr. McMullen, 63, who is retired from the plumbing business, strummed his guitar.

“It is very creative,” Ms. McMullen said. “It is very do-your-own-thing. You take what you want and leave the rest.”

The McMullens live here but travel often, staying at nude resorts when they can. Their walls are hung with group photos from nude cruises. Ms. McMullen has two adult sons who visit from time to time, and go naked. For occasions that require them, like grocery shopping, the couple maintain a stash of clothes in a room where they keep cleaning supplies.

On the other side of the resort, another couple, Mr. Clark and Maryanne Rettig, prepared to host a dinner party — something they probably wouldn’t have done back when they always wore clothes.

“I was a very shy and nervous and introverted person,” said Mr. Clark, 63. “I’d stay isolated. I didn’t have a lot of friends. The second I was nude, that disappeared in two seconds. My whole life changed.”

Four years ago, Ms. Rettig, 62, was treated for lymph node cancer, which limited the mobility of her right arm. That arm swelled frequently, so she had to wear loosefitting clothes. One day, she accompanied relatives to a nude beach. As soon as she was naked, none of that mattered. She felt comfortable.

The two split their time between Orlando and their house in Lake Como. During the week, Mr. Clark works as an optometrist, and Ms. Rettig runs a nonprofit group called Tampa Bay Free Beaches, which lobbies for opening up more areas of Florida to nude recreation.

“I feel freer and more imaginative when I am nude while cooking,” said Mr. Clark, standing over his stove, tossing clams into garlic broth and boiling angel-hair pasta. A sign above his head read, “It’s naked o’clock somewhere.”

He deftly maneuvered around the kitchen, nearly grazing his belly with a pot of hot water while draining the pasta, wearing only oven mitts. “I’m fine!” he insisted.

Around 5 p.m., guests arrived, each dutifully carrying a towel — though some chairs already had towels draped over them, in case anyone had forgotten. They ate at a table on the deck, paper napkins slung over their thighs, slurping strands of pasta as the sun slid from the sky and Jimmy Buffett crooned from a speaker.

“I used to hate dinner parties,” said Ms. McMullen, who was in attendance. “They were always pretentious. There was all this small talk I didn’t get. Now I get to be myself. I don’t have to hide it when I don’t understand someone.”

That ease, they say, extends to eating out. At the Bare Buns Cafe, government health rules require that the staff be clothed, but most customers dine in the nude.

Nudists “are more friendly and more understanding than people who are not nude,” said the restaurant’s manager, Stephan Krienes, 78, who is not a nudist. “They are not uptight.” He said it took him “about 10 minutes” to adjust to being around naked people.

Tara Pickett, a cook at Lake Como and some other nudist resorts in the area, agreed. “They walk around like they have clothes on,” said Ms. Pickett, 36. “You walk up to someone and don’t even notice they are naked. They make you feel welcome.”

Where the restaurant does struggle, she added, is in hiring help. “When they find out people here are nudists, they seem to shy away,” she said. “They think they have to be nude here, and they don’t.”

Dee Lyman, 52, a bartender at the Butt Hutt, said she missed mixing drinks without a top on — legal in a bar setting, but Mr. Krienes requires uniforms. “I feel constricted,” she said.

For the uninitiated, residents are quick to explain their ways and distinct parlance. It’s “top-free” rather than “topless.” “Community” or “resort,” but never “colony.” Non-nudists are referred to as “textiles,” like a wizard calling out a muggle.

Being a nudist invites questions: Is it the same as swinging? Is it exhibitionist? Predatory? (No, no and no.) What if it’s cold outside?

“The philosophy is, nude when possible, clothed when practical,” Ms. McMullen said.

For all their enthusiasm about eating, cooking can pose some challenges. Ms. McMullen has learned to take a big step back when taking food out of the oven, to avoid being clipped by a hot rack. Her husband mostly refrains from frying, and wears an apron when he does. When grilling, he keeps a good distance from the flame.

Nancy Rehling, a retired restaurant owner who lives at Lake Como, said she wears a T-shirt when she cooks, to combat splatter. “I have scars all over my tummy and the top of my boobs from cooking,” she said — incidents involving fried fish, boiled-over soups and melted cheese, which “really sticks and keeps burning.”

But several cooks pointed out that safety and hygiene concerns are inevitable in any cooking. Table manners are no different whether someone is clothed or not. And a nudist is equally capable of preparing bacon, or any other food, as a cook in a full-length outfit.

“It’s not about the bacon,” Ms. McMullen said. “It’s about the freedom.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/the-joy-of-cooking-naked/

[am-com]

Hey Alanis! Wow! It's been a decade since the release of Jagged Little Pill! That must be a very fulfilling experience, but also one in which you must look back on it and think a lot. How would you describe the changes that have occured in you, as a person and a soul in the world, since the release of Jagged Little Pill? Gregory __________________________________________________

hey there gregory thanks for your question the first couple of years after jagged little pill was released, and i was touring, were years spent more "holding it all", more so than assimilating it. i was adjusting to the culture shock of moving away from canada (and it was more of one than i'd anticipated), and growing into a young woman. still struggling with a deep loneliness that i didn't know how to soothe (try as i might), i made choices that felt like the best ones to make both in my business life and personal life. i think back on that time and i see how i was ready to sing, and to perform and to play live..i was just not prepared for being thrust into being a CEO of a large machine/company that was my world all of a sudden. i remember my manager at the time, pulling me aside when i was 21 and saying "you're going to have to be a strong boss now, alanis", and i was so scared. i barely knew how to be the boss of myself at that point :) big pieces i remember (it's slowly coming back to me as i spend this anniversary time reflecting.. -having inner conflict about awards in general, trying to bridge the competition aspect of it all (how can yellow be better than green?) and yet also work on taking in the acknowledgment of my contribution and authentic and unique expression somewhere buried within all the mayhem -grieving (big time!) my no longer being able to people watch, just look into people's eyes as i walked down the street, with my newfound notoriety -missing my family and friends, and also having the quality of those relationships be so challenged by fame and money -enjoying writing jagged little pill, and then feeling the pressure cooker that was writing supposed former infatuation junkie -loving writing "that i would be good" on the floor in my closet -having reached the brass ring that i'd been taught was life's pinnacle ("success! grammy's! many records broken!"), only to try to understand what comes next after having "achieved" it (at one point, i told my friend, "am i supposed to die now?", because all the images in my head had been realized--those photos of my future that i'd seen since i was 3 being fulfilled creatively and otherwise...around 1997 there were no more pictures, and i was terrified. --since then, of course, LOTS of images! thank god :) -adoring traveling the planet when i wasn't burnt out (like i'm enjoying it now! all paced!) -delving into my spirituality -continuing to read my face off....everything from: early on neale donald walsch to ken wilbur to ekhart tolle to debbie ford to harville hendrix (i had started to read him in 1988), margaret paul (healing your aloneness was particularly helpful with that loneliness i wrote about above) and the list goes on (and on and on, if you could see my bookshelves :) -in my late twenties i started to seek out communities and workshops and rooms in which i felt i belonged, and while there is rarely a place i feel i completely belong (is this possible? with how distinctly unique we each are?), there were places i felt parts of me that were starving belonged, which was very calming for me :) -took some coaches trainings from debbie ford and imago therapy training (stepping out from the shame of being "psychology girl". i finally realized "it's what i love dammit, and i'll rock out and know all this at the same time! i refused to have my being categorized!" :) i was so happy taking those formal trainings, and i was surrounded by people who lovingly and wisely challenged me. i finally started letting some people in.       i think that was a big key...i had gotten so much unsolicited feedback from people (some that i just couldn't take in, some that felt was all about the other person, not about me etc). that finally, i was placing myself in environments where i was getting a lot of feedback (sometimes very challenging!) and taking people up on those challenges, because i felt they were coming from a very supportive and loving place. i started taking more responsibility, and i also allowed my relationship with my fiance to affect me deeply---oh, how i have been called to grow up and become more whole in being with him. i truly do believe that being in a relationship is a deeply spiritual practice. i have had my eye (and heart) toward being loving when it is hard. (it's so      easy to love when it's easy). but to love when it's the last thing i want to do :) to myself first, and of course, thereby, to others. i am far from reaching this goal :) but it's a great path to be on, if you're going to be on one! and along the way, writing about all of this in my journal, and turning them into songs and writings. for me to encapsulate all the reasons for 10 year's worth of evolution is very difficult (impossible) for me/anyone to, i think...but i hope this gives a little bit of an answer! i send you love along your journey!!!       oxoxxo a

[chrisabraham]

The salesmanship of influencer marketing

If you’re doing influencer marketing right, you’ll have a lifetime relationship with your influential.  And, like any family member or friend, relationships require consistent and attentive attention.

Likewise, if you’re selling high ticket items, especially products and services that require new contracts, new leases, refills, upgrades, or are pricey and powerful but highly commoditized, then you need to go well beyond simply selling widgets.

Every sale is an engagement ring that you’ve put on your prospect’s finger. The best salespeople in the world are wed to each and every one of their accounts. And, like marriage, you need to be on board for way longer than the honeymoon.

The best salesman I know is Michael Obraitis. We’ve been friends since Freshman year at GWU and he’s been selling ever since, from executive laptops sitting atop Grecian columns to hosting, bandwidth, networking, and telecom services to language-learning platforms. He’s become my mentor and I, his protégé.

He told me that the real money is in the long run. That most first-buys are tentative. That once trust is built and the relationship goes from initial excitement and newness, it’s all about showing up and doing what you say you’ll do. Only then does that magic happen. Only then, when lust turns to love, can your sales relationship grow through upsells, referrals, recommendations, and company-wide, federated, commitments and conversions. From a thousand seats to ten-thousand, from one site of ten-thousand seats to ten sites, to a hundred.

One might call it the network effect — or the bandwagon effect: “The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others. In other words, the bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so.”

And that doesn’t happen by itself. It happens through engagement, persistence, connection, and trust. And, no matter how much momentum your network or bandwagon effect achieves, rationally, carefully, or irrationally through fad, it takes time, attention, friendliness, and a personal, human, touch — and a good, solid, innovative, reliable, and extensible product, of course — to keep folks in the network and on the bandwagon for months, years, and even decades.

It never comes down to price-per-seat or the discount offered by any one widget, it comes down to people, to relationships, to meeting needs, to solving problems, and to being responsive to needs and changes.

If you’re doing it right, there’s no difference between being a top salesman and a top PR man.  What works in high-end sales works in high-end PR. Neither sales nor PR, especially influencer marketing, which is really influencer PR, can ever afford to be fire-and-forget.

Rather, both sales and PR are wire-guided, requiring keeping one’s eye on the target from the moment of first engagement all the way through the life of the relationship.

Unlike cold-calling or direct-mail “spray and pray,” picking up the phone or walking into an office’s reception is only analog to pulling the trigger. There’s lots of stuff going on before and after.

Before, there’s extensive autodidacticism required to become functionally literate in the prospects’ industry, their products and services, and their slang, buzzwords, acronyms, and corporate jargon.

Then, there’s your backgrounders, your scripts, your message models, your conditional if-thens, and some of the best even run rehearsals, attempting to channel their very best Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski.

With the confidence to being both method and rehearsed, the elite salesman (and PR man like) will have the answers to at least 80% of the defensive questions and query walls that any potential prospect might have without needing to back down into, “let me check and get back to you.”

The best salespeople and pr agents are empowered to improvise and adapt.  This is well above the pay grade of the traditional sales pressure-cooker.

Then, there’s the deep research and reconnaissance required to both discover and acquire your targets. Then there’s the search for common-ground and possible people-in-common (it’s always easier to connect with someone through friends, colleagues, fans, clients, and confidants).

Finally, there’s the choice of your tools. Which club to choose from the bag. Or, to continue in the same analogy, what’s your missile?  Are you going to get dressed in your finest big boy suit and buffed and burnished briefcase? Are you going to pick up the phone and dance through the wires?

Do you plan to write the perfect pitch and send them out by hand? Are you going to dance the light fantastic amongst your connections of LinkedIn? Maybe cruise some Groups or even engage folks via Twitter and Facebook. Will you collect a dozen, a hundred, a thousand into a list and send your perfected and scrutinized pitch email via Yet Another Mail Merge or Contactually?

They’re all sound ways, especially if you start with one then try another. Walk to the offices, see if you can make magic in person, then follow up with a call, “hey, I dropped by,” and then pop a note via email and then another one a couple weeks later. Then another a couple weeks after that.

When you finally make that love connection, schedule a call or webcast or screenshare or desktop-share or demo, then you’re cooking with gas. And, even after you make the sale, ring the bell, countersign the contract, and get your first royalty check, spending it on a congratulatory bourbon, that’s simply your wedding day, the anniversary date of your marriage.

After the blush drains from your cheeks, after all the wedding gifts have been returned and re-gifted, there’s the “to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part” that you really must respect, follow, and deliver.

It’s not about widgets sold, it’s not about backlink SEO, it’s not about a positive review on Yelp or the best unboxing or YouTube review, it’s about building equity over time. It’s about a partnership. And it’s about growing together into the future, even after you have both left your positions.

Never forget that all those people on your spreadsheet are not simply bunny-slipper-wearing basement trolls like you may have stuck in your mind, but they’re beautiful children of God who are not only who they are or who they have been, they’re also who they will become and what they will become.

Firing-and-forgetting is a terrible idea. You want to keep that wire connected for as long as you both shall shall wish. It doesn’t always work out but the moment you start treating people like widgets or commodities, you’re not long for this earth, be it the world of sales or the world of PR.

Amen.

[chrisabraham]

The salesmanship of influencer marketing

If you’re doing influencer marketing right, you’ll have a lifetime relationship with your influential.  And, like any family member or friend, relationships require consistent and attentive attention.

Likewise, if you’re selling high ticket items, especially products and services that require new contracts, new leases, refills, upgrades, or are pricey and powerful but highly commoditized, then you need to go well beyond simply selling widgets.

Every sale is an engagement ring that you’ve put on your prospect’s finger. The best salespeople in the world are wed to each and every one of their accounts. And, like marriage, you need to be on board for way longer than the honeymoon.

The best salesman I know is Michael Obraitis. We’ve been friends since Freshman year at GWU and he’s been selling ever since, from executive laptops sitting atop Grecian columns to hosting, bandwidth, networking, and telecom services to language-learning platforms. He’s become my mentor and I, his protégé.

He told me that the real money is in the long run. That most first-buys are tentative. That once trust is built and the relationship goes from initial excitement and newness, it’s all about showing up and doing what you say you’ll do. Only then does that magic happen. Only then, when lust turns to love, can your sales relationship grow through upsells, referrals, recommendations, and company-wide, federated, commitments and conversions. From a thousand seats to ten-thousand, from one site of ten-thousand seats to ten sites, to a hundred.

One might call it the network effect — or the bandwagon effect: “The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others. In other words, the bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so.”

And that doesn’t happen by itself. It happens through engagement, persistence, connection, and trust. And, no matter how much momentum your network or bandwagon effect achieves, rationally, carefully, or irrationally through fad, it takes time, attention, friendliness, and a personal, human, touch — and a good, solid, innovative, reliable, and extensible product, of course — to keep folks in the network and on the bandwagon for months, years, and even decades.

It never comes down to price-per-seat or the discount offered by any one widget, it comes down to people, to relationships, to meeting needs, to solving problems, and to being responsive to needs and changes.

If you’re doing it right, there’s no difference between being a top salesman and a top PR man.  What works in high-end sales works in high-end PR. Neither sales nor PR, especially influencer marketing, which is really influencer PR, can ever afford to be fire-and-forget.

Rather, both sales and PR are wire-guided, requiring keeping one’s eye on the target from the moment of first engagement all the way through the life of the relationship.

Unlike cold-calling or direct-mail “spray and pray,” picking up the phone or walking into an office’s reception is only analog to pulling the trigger. There’s lots of stuff going on before and after.

Before, there’s extensive autodidacticism required to become functionally literate in the prospects’ industry, their products and services, and their slang, buzzwords, acronyms, and corporate jargon.

Then, there’s your backgrounders, your scripts, your message models, your conditional if-thens, and some of the best even run rehearsals, attempting to channel their very best Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski.

With the confidence to being both method and rehearsed, the elite salesman (and PR man like) will have the answers to at least 80% of the defensive questions and query walls that any potential prospect might have without needing to back down into, “let me check and get back to you.”

The best salespeople and pr agents are empowered to improvise and adapt.  This is well above the pay grade of the traditional sales pressure-cooker.

Then, there’s the deep research and reconnaissance required to both discover and acquire your targets. Then there’s the search for common-ground and possible people-in-common (it’s always easier to connect with someone through friends, colleagues, fans, clients, and confidants).

Finally, there’s the choice of your tools. Which club to choose from the bag. Or, to continue in the same analogy, what’s your missile?  Are you going to get dressed in your finest big boy suit and buffed and burnished briefcase? Are you going to pick up the phone and dance through the wires?

Do you plan to write the perfect pitch and send them out by hand? Are you going to dance the light fantastic amongst your connections of LinkedIn? Maybe cruise some Groups or even engage folks via Twitter and Facebook. Will you collect a dozen, a hundred, a thousand into a list and send your perfected and scrutinized pitch email via Yet Another Mail Merge or Contactually?

They’re all sound ways, especially if you start with one then try another. Walk to the offices, see if you can make magic in person, then follow up with a call, “hey, I dropped by,” and then pop a note via email and then another one a couple weeks later. Then another a couple weeks after that.

When you finally make that love connection, schedule a call or webcast or screenshare or desktop-share or demo, then you’re cooking with gas. And, even after you make the sale, ring the bell, countersign the contract, and get your first royalty check, spending it on a congratulatory bourbon, that’s simply your wedding day, the anniversary date of your marriage.

After the blush drains from your cheeks, after all the wedding gifts have been returned and re-gifted, there’s the “to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part” that you really must respect, follow, and deliver.

It’s not about widgets sold, it’s not about backlink SEO, it’s not about a positive review on Yelp or the best unboxing or YouTube review, it’s about building equity over time. It’s about a partnership. And it’s about growing together into the future, even after you have both left your positions.

Never forget that all those people on your spreadsheet are not simply bunny-slipper-wearing basement trolls like you may have stuck in your mind, but they’re beautiful children of God who are not only who they are or who they have been, they’re also who they will become and what they will become.

Firing-and-forgetting is a terrible idea. You want to keep that wire connected for as long as you both shall shall wish. It doesn’t always work out but the moment you start treating people like widgets or commodities, you’re not long for this earth, be it the world of sales or the world of PR.

Amen.