The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. ~ Alfred Austin
I love gardening! It’s probably my oldest hobby after eating pizza. I remember working in the garden with my mom when I was four or five years old. My job back then was radishes. I still love growing radishes and when I talk to teachers about bringing a gardening lesson into the classroom I always recommend starting with radishes. Basically they’ll grow almost anywhere, they grow fast and are colorful so they are really exciting for little kids, and big kids like me. The other plant I recommend are peas, it’s really exciting to watch them both grow and climb. Unfortunately my peas didn’t do great last year. I start almost every gardening season by laying in a quick crop of radishes. For my tiny patio garden this year, I’ll be putting in my radishes later this week, it would have happened yesterday but I forgot to buy the seeds.
This is my second year in an apartment with a patio while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last year was really an experiment to see what would grow, and how long of a growing season I really have here. The biggest surprise really was how incredibly long the growing season is, particularly for tomatoes. I was still getting tomatoes well into November.
This year’s tomato crop
Without a doubt my single greatest love in a vegetable garden is growing tomatoes. Last year, I had six tomato plants and I experimented with a cherry tomato plant, I’d never grown them before. I also cheated on the cherry tomatoes by buying a fully grown plant. My main hope was to get some early cherry tomatoes to appease my desire until the big tomatoes started coming in. This year I went a little hog wild on the tomato side. I’ve got six tomato plants and then I bought two fully grown cheaters, the one early girl plant already has two golf ball sized tomatoes already on it. Last year I planted this garden in late May, but this year I’m in a month earlier. Given how late my tomato plants produced last year I’m looking forward to five to six months of homegrown tomatoes, that’s just heaven. For this reason I also only planted indeterminate species.
In addition to tomatoes, I’m growing basil, a variety of lettuces, spinach, cilantro and of course my radishes. I still have some scallions from last season, as well as lemon balm and mint that survived the winter. Last year I grew cucumbers and squash and frankly they produced but not very well, the same with the carrots that I grew so while they are all staple garden plants for me, in the patio garden containers they just didn’t work very well.
My Grandpa Kane, standing in his garden.
My other love in a garden are roses. I got that love from the man pictured above, my Grandpa Kane who taught me how to grow roses when I was young. I wasn’t really into flowers and he brilliantly got me into growing roses by explaining that first, you have to go fishing. I was really into fishing, so I was in. To explain why he said this, he always put a fish in the bottom of the hole where he would plant the bush to act as fertilizer. I’ve been growing roses ever since. So in his honor today I bought a rose bush to add to the tiny patio garden.
One thing I’m really happy about is how well my lavender bush did over the winter and here it is in all of it’s purple spring glory, lavender is one of my favorite scents and I love growing these plants. I hope you had the chance to do something that made you happy this weekend. Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Some of the greatest minds on Earth, live in the seas. ~ Anthony Douglas Williams
Happiness is Hanging with Whales
So as I mentioned last week I spent a week in Mexico, Baja generally, San Ignacio Lagoon specifically in the breeding/calving grounds of the Pacific Grey Whale. The trip I did was with Baja Expeditions, I did this trip several years ago during the pandemic and below are links to the posts I did about that extraordinary trip.
On this trip I didn’t get as lucky as I did the first time but it was still an amazing trip. The trip works out this way, you fly into Cabo San Lucas for a day, check-in for the trip the next day. You get up insanely early and take a bus to the private airport at the San Jose Del Cabo airport. You board a small Cessna and fly 150 miles up the coast of Baja and land on the beach. It’s a lot less adventurous than it sounds but still pretty exciting. You eat a quick lunch and immediately board a 15 foot panga (a small local style fishing boat} with six or seven other people and head out into the lagoon and the whale sanctuary. The whale sanctuary is a UNESCO World Heritage site and well regulated to protect the Grey Whales. These regulations include limiting the number of boats in the lagoon, the speed they can travel and the amount of time each boat can spend there.
The really amazing thing about this place though is that the whales have become incredibly curious about humans, to the point of wanting to interact with them. This time I was there near the end of the season, the males had moved on and it was just mothers and calves left in the lagoon. These little babies are already eight to twelve feet long. The whales seem very comfortable being near the boats and very curious about the critters in the boats. The baby whales especially spend a lot of time swimming up near the boats and playing with the people. Often people on the boats splash water at the whales hoping to attract them. And the whales seem to really dig this. Probably the coolest interaction I had this trip was a baby whale that we were splashing a couple feet from the boat who appeared to love it. The little whale stayed at the surface while we splashed it, and even rolled over so we could splash it’s belly. All the time this little whale was looking right at us making full eye contact the whole time.
There isn’t much else to say about the trip, I talked about the people on the boat last week, I was fortunate to have a good group on my boat. The photo at the top of the post was taken by Jen on the boat, she also took this one:
This particular whale did no less than a dozen spy hops in about twenty minutes. It was wonderful to be in the sun on the ocean, but even with SPF 70 on the first day I got a little too much sun on my face, so I took precautions:
Below are a series of videos that I took on the trip, enjoy and have a happy day. ~ Rev Kane
In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. ~ Khalil Gibran
I love making friends with toddlers, I love their honesty as well as their creative dishonesty. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they have not yet been fully initiated into the social contract of “polite society”. This allows them to be utterly brutally honest. Where as an adult you would never dare to point out that a person is overweight. I have seen and been the target of a toddler asking, why are you fat? And after giving a rambling, babbling answer about eating too much, you usually then get, why do you eat too much, just don’t do that. Of course they are not fully aware of all of the complexities of life and society and as such their kid logic often doesn’t hold up, but I find it refreshing.
On the flip side, I really love their creative dishonesty. It has it’s downsides, I will never forget the havoc that my nephew brought on one night. My grandmother had called my sister’s home and he answered the phone. When she asked if he could talk to my sister he said she was in bed crying, that the police had come and arrested his father for hitting her and hung up. None of this was remotely true and it precipitated calls to my mother who then also called my sister, everyone in a panic. This is the downside of toddler creativity.
The upside for me is their storytelling. I lived with my sister’s family for a time as I was preparing to hike the Appalachian Trail. Her other children were busy in activities, my brother-in-law worked late and my niece was a toddler, four years-old at the time. And as a toddler she had a set dinner time that needed to be kept, but that didn’t coincide with her siblings later schedule. So I happily ate early dinner with her every night. And every night I would ask her the same question as we started dinner, “how was your day?” Every day she would proceed to tell me all about her exciting day at day care. This would involve her and her imaginary friend woowoo taking out a boat on the river or going shopping. Sometimes my sister would overhear and interject with, “that isn’t true.” I would send her away and let my little niece continue. The stories were beautiful and insane and made no sense and I absolutely loved them.
I spent this past week in Baja, Mexico at a camp in a lagoon up the coast from Cabo San Lucas in the breeding and birthing grounds for Pacific Grey Whales. Every day I was blessed to be out on the lagoon, three times a day whale watching and having up close encounters with Grey Whales. I’ll most more on this, including pictures and videos next week on the blog. If you’re interested in those, I’m currently editing and working through my images and posting them to my Instagram account, @michael_rev_kane.
In the group I was in, the group that shared the same boat and guide was a toddler. We became friends on the second day. She very much reminded me of my youngest niece, who we call the boss. She is brash and confident and will in an instant turn it all around and melt your heart. My new little friend was very much the same. We bonded over a couple of games we played on the boat, one was to ask me if I new every single Pokemon, of which I only know two. We played guess what animal I’m thinking about and one hysterical game where she pretended to remove her fingers and magically return them.
The tables in the dinning hall had six seats. Our boat was comprised of seven people, so the first few meals I had I floated between tables. But after becoming friends, my young companion decided I needed to eat with them. So she got the people running the camp to add a seventh chair to their table. Then she proceeded at each meal to tell everyone where they would sit and I was always assigned to sit next to her. My favorite part of our friendship was our storytelling, she told me all about how she had met and talked with aliens by going into space in a spaceship she built herself. She kindly offered to build me one and outfit me with a spacesuit and all the rocket fuel I needed, all for six dollars. I made up a story about a pet bug named Herman and she grilled me all about him and his life. We had a wonderful time together. On our flight out of the camp back to Cabo, she couldn’t set next to me and I slept on the flight. When we landed she came up to me, her family was heading to a different terminal at the airport, and she asked me how my nap was? The she took my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m going to miss you.” She totally melted my heart in that moment. She was such a sweet kid and had an equally sweet brother and getting to know them added tremendously to the enjoyment of the week.
A little selfie on a break from whale watching
There’s a joy and happiness in making a new friend, it is there no matter how old or young they might be. ~ Rev Kane
Authenticity can’t be replicated or faked. You’re either real or you’re not. ~ Bibi Bourelly
Making Happy Choices
So my early adult life was quite exciting and I certainly owe that to the fact that I was heavily indulging in a number of vices. This of course had it’s downside in terms of drama, life issues and damn near clinical levels of depression. But it was never boring. Now that I’m older my vices are a lot less exciting, I gamble a little bit and probably my biggest vice, if you can even call it that, is that I like soda too much for my health, and as a diabetic having any Cokes are a bad idea.
So when the idea comes forward that there’s a soda out there that doesn’t have a lot of calories, very little sugar and still tastes like a Coke, well it’s a temptation too hard to pass on for me. Of course this is a familiar promise, over the years there have been lots of forms of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to claim to have the same taste but none of the sugars. There have been lots of other fake sodas created, each making similar claims. But, technology advances and Poppi especially has been getting a lot of press. So I took a chance on both Olipop and Poppi sodas. They are billed as probiotic sodas with the same taste as the real thing.
First, they’re expensive, a 12 ounce can at my supermarket was $2.49 for Poppi, $2.79 for Olipoppi. The initial taste on all of them wasn’t bad, the Watermelon actually was very tasty. However not quite like the real thing, the root beer and cola reminded me of the cheap store brand root beer and colas we used to get anytime my family threw a party as a child. I always thought the grape and orange value brands tasted ok. I’d put the watermelon Poppi in that category, value brand fruity soda. The problem with all of these sodas, just like most of the other non-sugar sodas, is that there’s an aftertaste that lingers that I just don’t like.
We’re all always looking for happiness in different ways, and when we can’t get it the way we want it, we often look for a suitable substitution. Like me drinking these alternative sodas. The fact is, often we can get what we need to be happy, but we feel the cost for whatever reason is too high, so we settle for the alternative. I’m sure if I drank Poppi Cola long enough I’d come to deal with it, the so-called acquired taste, which of course means it doesn’t taste that good in the first place, you’ve just gotten used to it. For me, settling for substitute happiness just isn’t enough, not in having a Coke or anything else in life. I fully believe that if you want to be happy, make the effort, pay the price and get the real thing, you’ll have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Over the last few years, especially when working on a project in my office I’ve taken to listening to podcasts. The type of podcasts I’m talking about are for the most part serial stories, whether they are fictional radio plays or true crime I like something that tells a long story and can hold my attention over time.
Now there are some standard podcasts shows I keep up with, I love Marketplace on NPR, Radiolab and Throughline although I pick and choose which episodes I’ll listen to and the same thing goes for This American Life as well, for me, the original podcast.
So tonight I wanted to share a list of some really great podcasts that I’ve enjoyed and have provided me with some happy listening and hopefully will do the same for you.
True Crime
Bone Valley – my most recent discovery, very interesting nine or ten episode podcast about the murder of a woman in Florida.
Serial – I loved season one, the story of Adnan Syed. Subsequent seasons have also been good but to me didn’t have the same impact.
Bear Brook – I really liked this one, had some good twists and a really interesting story that follows the discovery of a couple of bodies in 55 gallon barrels.
S-Town – The main subject is a total freakin character and paints some really interesting pictures of life in Alabama.
Satanic Panic – really cool podcast from the Canadian Broadcasting Company about the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s
Dystopian/Post Apocalyptic/Paranormal/Twisted
We’re Alive – As far as I’m concerned the best in the genre, very long series with a couple of short spin-offs, survivors of the apocalypse trying to survive in LA.
Blackout – Rami Malek stars in this story of what happens when the power goes out, forever.
The Black Tapes – for me this is kind of like the X-files of podcasts, lots of down the rabbit hole kind of stories that tie together.
Archive 81 – a really interesting found footage podcast, think Blair Witch as a podcast with a deeper and more engaging story.
Escaping NXIVM – This cult got a lot of press because the Hollywood starlets involved, also a lot takes place near Albany, NY, close to where I grew up.
Tanis – Really cool and fascinating story with a lot of depth to it.
The Left/Right Game – crazy mindbending podcast about something that will make your next drive a little more interesting.
Limetown – One of those stories that just feel like they could be real.
The Horror of Dolares Roach – a nice little story with a twist that will smack you in the face, I love this one.
One of the most meditative times of my day is when I’m cooking. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein
Cooking Makes Me Happy
So this week a friend posted a picture from one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans, Cochon. He was there on my recommendation and even got my favorite dish, their rabbit and dumplings. While I was glad he got to enjoy it, it made me miss New Orleans terribly, likely because it’s only been a few weeks since I’ve been there. The picture at the top of the post is my little NOLA haul of parade throws. So Sunday nights for me typically mean two things, writing this blog and cooking food for the week. If I prepare good food for the the week it’s more likely that I’ll eat healthy, so it’s important for me to do. For this week I decided to make a pot of jambalaya as well as some chicken bone broth.
The reason I picked the quote I used for this week is because it really does fit for me. There is something very meditative or Zen about cooking for me. Being in the kitchen, prepping ingredients, stirring pots trying to juggle things so everything is ready when it should be allows me to get into a flow and just be there, completely focused on what I’m doing. With the giant added benefit that I get to eat what I cook. I’m a pretty good cook, my biased opinion of course, but I’ve had some other people tell me this as well. The simple fact is, we’re usually good at the things we really enjoy doing.
Last week was a bear of a week at work, it impacted my sleep and even bled into this weekend a bit. So this weekend was definitely a weekend of rest. I slept late, I exercised, I enjoyed the first sunny weekend in a while and of course I cooked. Life can throw a lot on our backs and as we’ve discussed many times before, it’s important to reset, take a step back and take care of ourselves. That’s what cooking tonight was for me, and the jambalaya was damn good!
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. ~ Albert Einstein
Changing the Definition of Success
I’m closing in on retirement and so I’ve been sitting back a bit and looking at my career and my life overall and thinking about the idea of success. Personally, I feel like I’ve had a pretty successful career. By the most important metric to an educator, which is have I helped students, I believe by that scale I’ve achieved a large amount of success. Out of the thousands of students I’ve had the privilege to have worked for, I can point to a large number of what I consider success stories. No, not the students who went to Harvard or Berkeley. Not the 4.0 students who won scholarship and awards, sure I helped them too, but they would have likely gotten their without my help.
The students that I feel are my success stories are the students that wouldn’t have made it without my help. The kid from Memphis whose family were drug dealers and expected them to be as well, the student who started out by blaming me for their failure and accusing me of racism, but came around a year later to thank me for getting them on a path to success. The student who was date raped and I helped them get the help they needed. The 80 year-old student who was starting college for the first time. Success to me, was when these students graduated, my 80 year-old student went on to complete her PhD at 88. I can think of similar stories over each of the colleges I’ve worked at, over each of the roles I’ve held as a counselor, advisor, teacher, director and dean. I’ve also, as a manager, had success with helping employees achieve their goals as well. Whether it was to complete a degree, become an instructor or manager or even just get a particular position.
But not everyone would consider my career to be a success, because I stopped my career climb at the position of dean. Sure, I’ve been manager of the year on one campus, I’ve been twice a finalist for a national award in community college excellence and even won the award once. But I’m still just a middle manager. Many people would consider me to be only slightly successful because I never became a vice-president or a president.
In America we really define success by title and money, and usually those two are completely intertwined. If you have the big title, you’re making the type of money that people would consider to be at a successful level. But what I want to make a case for tonight, is that we’re using the wrong metric for success in America. What should that metric be instead of title, money and power? I would argue it should be happiness and quality of life. I’ll start specific and then get into a more general discussion.
I think I’ve been incredibly successful in my career. Not because of the students I’ve helped, the awards I’ve won, the grants I’ve been awarded, not because of the title I have or the salary I make. No, I believe I’ve been successful because of the way I’ve cultivated my work/life balance, built my own happiness and established a solid current quality of life and have put myself into a position to have a good quality of life in retirement.
About 25 years ago I wasn’t in a great place. I was dealing with heavy levels of depression, I was significantly in debt, over $200,000. That was a $140,000 in student loans and $60,000 in credit card debt. I was in a great job, living in paradise but I was only making about $40,000 a year. As I started evolving in my career and thinking about my future I really didn’t see a chance at a normal retirement. I couldn’t imagine making enough given my salary at the time, and my debt, to ever be in a position to take a normal retirement. So I started wondering what the hell I should do. The idea of just working my whole life until I died was abhorrent to me. So what to do?
For a while I just worked like a madman, climbed the ladder, made more money but honestly it didn’t change my circumstances significantly. Plus, working massive hours, at one point 80 hours per week was not good for me in any way. So eventually I was making ok money and only working 50 hours a week but it was still too much. I was doing what I could to find balance through hobbies like cycling, Tai Chi, writing and photography but it wasn’t enough, and the long-term outcome still looked the same.
Then I hit on the first bit of genius, taking my retirement in bits. I decided that if I couldn’t retire at a reasonable age, I would take my retirement in bits. You see in my retirement I’ve always wanted to do a few things like hike the Himalayas, the Appalachian Trail, I wanted to travel and cycle and not just see places but really be able to explore them. And if I wasn’t going to retire until my 70’s or ever, I wasn’t going to be able to do those types of things the way I wanted to do them. So in 2010 I took my first retirement leave. I took nine months off to travel and train for a 30 day hike in the high passes of the Himalayas including hiking to base camp at Mount Everest. It was a magnificent trip, to use a cliché, a trip of a lifetime. But it was just the first.
After accomplishing my first retirement bit, I set into a pattern. I would work three years, enough time to thoroughly plan and save up money for the next big adventure. Then I would take a year off to travel and explore. That’s been the pattern for the last 15 years. I’ve played with whales in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, photographed Polar Bears in the Arctic. I’ve visited all 50 states, walked across Scotland several times, cycled around Galway in Ireland, walked part of the Camino in Spain and backpacked around Spain, Portugal and Morocco. I’ve hiked the Great Glen Way, The Western Highland Way, and 1000 miles on the Appalachian Trail and wrote a book about it, Appalachian Trail Happiness.
Along the way, a really amazing thing happened. Although I had many opportunities to leave, staying in California and in the State Teachers Retirement System has put me in the position to have a very good retirement. And not at 65 or 70, but at the end of this year a few months after my 60th birthday. But these breaks were just half the battle.
The other side of this was actually much harder. As a middle manager in higher education, my job can easily become all encompassing. There is easily 50 or 60 hours of work you could put in as a dean every single week. Additionally, the job is 90% dealing with people and politics, it’s not easy to wind down after a nine, ten or twelve hour day. You’re on call 24/7, the emails come 24/7 and since the pandemic the phone/text messages come every day and at all hours, if you let it.
That was the second bit of genius that came to me and it happened during the pandemic. You see as that 50 – 60 hours suddenly exploded to 70 hours, part at home, part as one of the few people on campus, things were becoming unmanageable. The added responsibility of also needing to check in with all of my people (all 70+ direct reports), of having to redesign how we do everything, having to create safety protocols and find ways to bring programs back to campus, it was overwhelming. There was no extra pay, no support, just more and more piled on your plate every single day for months at a time over an 18 month period.
As the emergency portion of the pandemic wound down, and there was some semblance of normal returning, the job didn’t let up. Now it was masking protocols and PPE distributions, modality changes, paperless processes and a whole new paradigm in doing business, while the powers above pushed for the status quo to return, tomorrow. It was at this time I finally learned something I wish I had learned much earlier in my career, that I actually could choose. I don’t need to spend 50, 60 or 70 hours a week to do a good job. I realized that I have some control in the reasonableness of my job. The fact is, that there are things in every job that if they don’t get done, they really don’t matter. Sure, someone wanted it done, but if it doesn’t get done the institution moves on and everything we have to get done still happens. It was the moment when I truly realized that my life/work balance was more important than what the institution wanted to do.
I still serve students, I still serve my staff and faculty, but I learned to truly put off, that which was truly not that important. I should have learned this lesson a long time ago from a woman who was a legend, her name was Wallace Mayo. Wallace was one of the earliest tenured computer science professors at the University of Tennessee. When I got to know her in the late 90s she was the chair of the department and winding down her career. One day she told me how she kept up with the eternal piles of paperwork we all faced. She said, that every Friday at 5PM, she swept whatever was still on her desk into her garbage can and if it was important, it would come back. I of course thought it was hyperbole, until one Friday afternoon, months later, when I found myself in her office. The week is over she said, grabbed the garbage can and swept the papers on her desk into it. I was amazed and she’s been one of my heroes ever since.
The lesson was there, but I missed it. There is a portion of what we do, that does not matter to us responsibly doing our job and meeting our obligations. We can let those things go. We can also push our institutions to do things in more reasonable ways. Each semester we used to do this insanely complicated reporting. It involved taking information from two systems and having to fuse the data into a single report, with little to no exaggeration this report would take 9 – 12 hours to complete. Then it needed to be printed in triplicate, oh, and if there was a change, and there was always a change, it had to be redone. So sometimes you’d have to do it two or three times each semester. All to verify that the schedule matched what was in the payroll system. After throwing a fit about this and proposing solutions for two years we finally moved to a simple spreadsheet that takes 45 minutes to resolve and can be done electronically and updated in minutes. And it serves the same damn purpose.
So now, most weeks, I work my contracted hours. Sure, there are weeks when things arise that absolutely need my attention and I work more. But 90% of the time now, I work my contracted hours. This means trusting others to do what they are supposed to do, scary I know. This means you take the responsibility and lose some control. But two things happen, your people feel empowered and they become more responsible, in general. The other piece is, when others don’t meet their responsibilities, you need to make sure there are consequences. And finally, you just have to let things go. I’ve become fond of giving people choices, you need this by Friday, well I can do one of these three things, which would like done by then? As long as you deliver on what’s most important, by their true deadlines, and serve your students well, you’ll never put your job in jeopardy.
So I put to you that the metric for success that should be used for higher education administrators is as follows. Someone who first and foremost serves students, maintains a reasonable work/life balance, and normally works close to their contracted hours should be considered highly successful.
Work/life balance means putting that which is truly important at the priority it deserves and not short changing those things for the institution. So that means prioritizing your mental and physical health, your family and friends at least as high a priority as your job.
Having a balanced life, where you give the appropriate amount of attention and time to your physical and mental health, family and friends should not only be a measure of success for you. If institutions truly care about their employees, it should also be a metric for them. We hear a lot in our businesses about caring campus initiatives, wellness initiatives and campus climate. But how do any of these mean anything, if the institutions we work for push us ignore our personal priorities for the benefit of the institution?
In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful. ~ Anthony Bourdain
Happy Mardi Gras my friends, Fat Tuesday is this week, the end of the Mardi Gras season, and for those of you who are practicing Catholics, Ash Wednesday and Lent begin the next day. Last year, I visited New Orleans on the weekend before the big (last) weekend of Mardi Gras and had a great time. It’s a weekend full of parades and the giant crowds the last weekend bring were not present. So this year, I did the same and have just returned from a wonderful week in New Orleans.
Last year it was a little rainy and very cold, this year, we had one day of really heavy rain, so much in fact they shifted all of the evening parades to early morning and even then several parades rolled through heavy rain. Which created an interesting situation, the parades rolled by at top speed trying to beat the rain.
Happily, the rest of the weekend parades rolled by in great weather. I was fortunate to be able to connect with some friends I’d made last year and like always happens made a handful of new friends that I spent time with. One of my big goals for this year’s parades was to catch a fourth grail from the Krewe of King Arthur, I’d been super lucky to catch 3 last year and wanted 1 more to complete a set of 4. How I got that fourth grail is a perfect illustration of why I love Mardi Gras Parades so much. On a parade day you are often out on the parade route for five or six hours. So you get to know the people around you pretty well. This particular day, in addition to the folks I already knew I was seemingly in the international section of the parade route. I ended up hanging out with a couple of women from France, and a woman from Brazil who was eventually joined by her sister and father.
Having worked in Brazil and knowing a good bit of Portuguese, I love meeting Brazilians and getting the chance to speak a little Portuguese, so we were having a good time. During the parades you catch so many things and people share, if you catch something you don’t want or catch multiples you share with the folks around you. So throughout the day I gave a lot of beads and throws to the Brazilian family who were at their first Mardi Gras. By the end of the day when the Krewe of King Arthur rolled everyone knew I was on the hunt for a grail. As the parade rolled by I was stiffed and didn’t get close to a grail but at one point the Brazilian woman caught one. She immediately turned and gifted it to me, it was a truly kind act that made my night.
I made a friend last year at the parades who rides with the Themis Krewe and we hung out at the parades with some of her family and friends. Themis’ signature throw, much like the grails, are hand painted umbrellas and my friend Dana, in honor of my 60th year gifted me a really amazing umbrella.
This trip to New Orleans and Mardi Gras was one of my best trips ever to New Orleans. It felt fantastic to be in a city I love, to be having a great time at the parades with great people and to be eating great food. It was a week where I felt like myself for the first time in a long time. I was having fun, telling stories, having great conversations and generally just feeling happy to be alive. It’s going to be one hell of a downer going back to work tomorrow.
Fat Tuesday is meant to be a day where you cut loose one last day before starting a period of self denial, and internal self focus. So my friends, take Fat Tuesday to do a little something special for yourself, even if you aren’t revving up for Lent. Have a nice cocktail, or a decadent desert and just take a few minutes to be selfish, sated and happy. It will make for a very happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
No Act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted ~ Aesop
Kindness
I receive two acts of kindness on Friday, neither was expected. The first came as I was having a discussion in the hall with a faculty member one of my fellow deans showed up. She came bearing a gift, a small box of chocolates and a thank you card. She’s a great colleague who I really like working with and this just makes me like her even more. And while I think they were technically truffles, I felt like I was in my office eating bons bons.
Secondly, one of my staff members, a lovely older Vietnamese woman who works at night was working Friday night. As I did my walk-through she said to me, “stay right here.” She then walked away and returned a few minutes later with a bag, she smiled and said, “I remembered.” Looking in the bag I was so excited, it was a plate of banh beo, my favorite Vietnamese dish. This dish is really time consuming to make and as such, most restaurants don’t serve it. It’s actually been several years since I had any and it was wonderful. But what really touched me, was that she had remembered this from a conversation we had at least two years ago, such a kind act.
These small acts of kindness mean so much to us. It’s important to remember my friends, whenever you have a chance to do these, take the opportunity. The impact will almost always outpace effort.
Mardi Gras
I’m getting ready to head to my favorite city soon for Mardi Gras. I love New Orleans, I’ve traveled to many cities all over the world, but New Orleans was a place that felt like home from the first minute I set foot in that city. My mouth is already watering for that first bowl of gumbo at Coteri and I’m carefully planning my trip to Cochon for their Rabbit and Dumplings, my favorite dish at any restaurant anywhere. I’ve previously posted this guide to New Orleans giving some of my favorites in the city. But it’s not only about the food, it’s the music, the opportunities for photography, the weirdness of it all. And of course, Mardi Gras parades, I love them so much.
This past week in talking about heading to Mardi Gras, I was reminded of how little most people know about Mardi Gras itself, so tonight a quick primer. First off, Mardi Gras is not a day, most people seem to confuse the last day of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) for Mardi Gras as if it’s a one day holiday. Mardi Gras is a season, it’s a season of festivities leading up to Lent. The reason Mardi Gras dates change every year is that Easter and the six weeks of Lent prior to Easter move around on the calendar. Fat Tuesday is the end of Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, the next day, kicks off Lent. Which is also why Mardi Gras ends at midnight on Fat Tuesday, and yes, they do clear Bourbon Street at Midnight.
The first parades of the Mardi Gras season this year were on January 6th, so you can see with Fat Tuesday being February 13th this year, Mardi Gras season lasts for over a month. And in New Orleans, the city does celebrate for the month. Here’s a little clip of what the parades look like, this is Endymion one of the biggest krewes that does a huge parade:
There are a lot of misconceptions about Mardi Gras. The biggest is that Bourbon Street is where Mardi Gras happens. And yes, Bourbon street for most of Mardi Gras season is effectively the equivalent of a large frat party. Yes, there are women flashing their breasts so people will throw them beads and drunken fools at every turn and I spend almost no time on Bourbon Street. Everyone who goes to Mardi Gras will have beads thrown to them, even on Bourbon Street without flashing anything, no one is in a hurry to see my breasts and I get tons. At any Mardi Gras parade you will catch more beads then you have ever imagined. At every parade, while giving most of the beads I catch away, I still end up with ten or fifteen pounds worth of beads. I send boxes of beads to three different people every year and I get all of those beads at my first parade.
The parades are not the drunken debauchery of Bourbon Street, the parades come through the neighborhoods in the city. The parade route is full of families and little children and only a few walking parades even happen in the French Quarter. Sure, there are drunk people, mostly tourists wandering the parade route, but mostly it’s a G rated affair. The naughtiest thing are some of the themes of the floats that I’m guessing most of the time, aren’t even comprehensible to the kids, as they are typically political in nature.
I have met so many kind and wonderful people at parades, been invited to join families as they ate their dinners they bring, been invited to parties after the parades and made friends with other tourists. The parades are absolutely fantastic affairs.
Countdowns
The countdowns are on! As I’ve mentioned in the past I’ve already started celebrating my upcoming 60th birthday a little less than seven months away. Mardi Gras will be my second event of this celebration. The other is my retirement, while my official date looks to be Feb 18th, it looks like my last day physically working on campus will be Friday, January 31st next year, so this Wednesday marks the start of my last year of work here in California.
Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement. ~ Joyce Meyer
It’s been a pretty bad couple of weeks for me. There have been some family health issues as well as some interpersonal issues and work has been more of an insane asylum than it usually is. It’s one of the reasons I missed posting last week, something I rarely do. This blog has gone through a lot of changes over the years and over time has really morphed into something of a public diary. A blog that mirrors my life and my interests as diverse and nutty as they are. So some weeks you get a lesson on happiness, sometimes a pizza or movie review, travel anecdotes or maybe just a bit of rambling. I usually try and bring most of the posts back to a lesson on happiness, and I do that with varying amounts of success. I greatly appreciate those of you who read the blog regularly and love when you comment, it’s what has kept this blog alive for the last dozen years.
One of the main reasons that I started this blog was to share what I learned as I worked through my own issues with severe depression. As I’ve related many times, I expected to share out for a year or so and wrap this up, so much for the plans of men. This last week was a great reminder of the progress I’ve made over that time, aided by what I learned, the writing of this blog and your support.
I quite honestly, at the beginning of this past week, was in the foulest mood I’d been in for years. Where I’ve been very good over the last ten years of not letting issues in life impact my mood, I failed miserably recently. The anger and frustration I was feeling set me on a path to dive back into the well of depression in a way I haven’t in over a decade.
Over the years I’ve done a good job of understanding my triggers, the things that send my mood diving. I obviously missed them this time around. I’ve also over the years learned how to bring myself out of these moods, but normally it’s not so big of a climb. And this is the good news and what I want to focus on in this post, because I was able by this weekend to climb back out of that well and get myself back to balance.
Over time I’ve learned a lot of strategies to bring myself back to balance and I needed all of them this past week. First, it’s always important to be living healthy, eating properly, drinking enough water, keeping my workout routine and get enough sleep. Then it was important to boost my dopamine and serotonin levels. Which at the simplest levels, without diving into the brain chemistry details, means providing yourself with feel good experiences. So this week, I actually got a little looser with my diet. I didn’t go nuts but I made sure that every meal was something satisfying. So while ordinarily tacos would be a cheat meal, I made tacos for dinner one night. Another day for lunch I allowed myself some enchiladas, I had a slice of pizza another day. I also did everything I could to find ways to reduce my stress levels, which also included cutting back on my social media and news consumption.
All of these things were definitely helping and as often happens, when you make an effort things seem to start to go your way. As the week went on I had some really nice interactions with kind strangers, I was able to help out some students and made more of a conscious effort to express gratitude internally and externally for what was happening. Then on Thursday night as I sat down to eat those tacos, I flipped on the TV to find something to watch. And starting at that exact time, on TCM (so no commercials) was the movie that makes me laugh more than any other movie, The Big Lebowski. So that night I ate dinner and laughed and laughed as I watched that movie. Friday and Saturday were laid back days and I even had a couple of great conversations with people who make me smile, including my two nieces.
I feel really good about this, honestly I was scared that I was going to go into a serious depression. To have pulled myself out of the spiral in a week seems honestly like a minor miracle to me. One I’m incredibly grateful for, and now, next week, back to our regularly scheduled discussions about happiness. Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 