when life shoves brown paint down your throat you can choose to paint a pile of poop… or a teddy bear. or you start with poop and turn it into a teddy bear.

October 26th, 2009 by steph | shades of perspective | 2 Comments »

either way, this has been a month for the record books. basically, my daily mantra has been: “the universe knows what it’s doing steph, trust it, give in to it, and let it play out. also, trust yourself, and your intuition to guide you as to how it will play out.”

this weekend, i dove head first back into writing on stephdub.com. with datenight demanding much of my attention, i had left stephdub to thrive off of one very controversial and comment gathering post. i felt inspired and in touch with stephdub the writer. so i wrote, and posted on a saturday evening. when i knew that no one would be around to read it.

sunday morning i went to log into my site analytics to see how many un-noone’s did read the post, and my page was giving me this crazy weird error. so i sent a nonchalant email with a screen shot inquiring about the error.

i leave, have a wonderful and craft packed sunday and come home to watch bored to death and reply to a comment on my post that came in the night before.

at which point i see a 403 error on stephdub.com. and then i see someone tweet about not being able to access stephdub.com.

so i text @gerardramos, try not to worry, and go to bed.

at 10:38am i receive this text: ***king hard drive’s crashed. they are working on getting the data and restoring.
i respond: oh nooooo, i’m sorry, is that as terrible as i think it is? (thinking, well if they are restoring the data, this is one hell of a nightmare that will blow over for me, but be a royal pain in the ass for g.)

at 1:51pm his response: it’s way worse than you think :(

at 2:58pm my blackberry buzzes with an email titled “complete failure.”

i open it to find, among a few others, these paragraphs:
Over the weekend the server was hit with an attack.  One by one, the services were brought down and eventually all data was corrupted.  When the backups ran over night, they were corrupted as well and both hard drives crashed to an un-recoverable state.

The company will not send me the drives because of security issues and they do not have data recovery services internally. They did what they could, but there is nothing left. 

apparently, this is a similar thing that happened to ma.gnolia a few months ago. the recovery process… well, what recovery process?

it’s time to scavenge what’s in google’s cache and dive back into getting stephdub back up and running. a.sap.

and as i read that email i was oddly calm. and said ok, universe… i trust you.

you see, october has handed me doozy after doozy. and i have thrown my hands up, embracing this crazy crooked path with all of the love and trust i have in me.

it started, actually, in september. g and i were spending a sunday afternoon, post brunch, chatting about dating, business, success and progress as i prepared for datenight radio. we reflected on how stephdub.com had been going strong for a year and a half, and how far it, well, i’d come.

when he convinced me that fateful day in May 2008, to make all of my writing public, and start stephdub.com i had just quit my job, moved across the country, and was sleeping on a couch in a dear friend’s bedroom. how was i going to start a site? well, thanks to a good friend all i had to do was register stephdub.com, play in photoshop one sunday afternoon drive down the coast to create a “logo,” and have him set up my wordpress account and host it on his server.

and there i was, a year and a half later, with a radio show, a content filled blog, and a paying job discussing that it was maybe time to ‘revamp’ stephdub.com. time to incorporate datenight and my podcasts with shades of perspective and my writing. but where to begin? i still only had a couple hundred dollars to actually spend on any sort of upgrading… in what area do i spend it?
an actual logo or printable image for stephdub/shades of perspective/datenight?
some sort of site design?

and even when i made that decision, who will do the work? see you all, my designer friends in SF. you’re too badass for me. i can’t afford you. and i respect friendships too much to ask for favors…and i know your work is worth way more than i have to spend.

either way life was good. the weekend after this was my birthday party, and g’s birthday party. i was excited to party hardy and then get back on the exciting track to success with datenight and stephdub.com.

and then it started. without going into too much detail, i had to make a very difficult decision. one that created a battle between my rational, pragmatic self and my intuition. i wrestled with what to do for a while, ultimately choosing intuition and signs i would love to have ignored and…

i quit my radio show. i am no longer a dj at pirate cat radio.

like i said, there were many factors that went into this decision, but it was the right one. since, however, it was such a challenging decision, i didn’t really tell anyone. i needed to sit with it. i needed to process it and own it.

and this past weekend, i started telling a few close friends.

i also threw myself back into writing. and started planning on continuing datenight, in simply podcast form.

and then this.

i lose stephdub.com.
it is a message, universe? well i hear it loud and clear: “step up, steph. keep pushing.”

so here i am thinking… i have a clean slate. and a little bit of money, and a long ass october almost behind me.
what do i do next? well, i decided to put it out there to you… the interwebs, the twitterverse…. my friends.
i see this as the perfect opportunity to rebrand stephdub. or, well, create a brand.

and i’m asking for your help.

with my refusal to risk affecting important friendships by asking any specific friends for help or favors i will put my request right here, for anyone to accept, or adjust, process or deny.

i would like to start fresh with stephdub.com and datenight: i have limited (and i mean limited) funding (like a few hundred dollars) and want to put it towards any or all of the following things:
new site desgin
wordpress theme
logo/s
image/branding (instead of logo)

so- do you have a little free time and want to gain good karma by just donating your badass talent to the stephdub fund? are you a college student, or intern (or know one) that needs a final project? do you have any designers hanging out in your back pocket ;)? are you unemployed, getting paid by the government and want to build your portfolio but you just need a project to do it with? do you love hearts and the color black and like to doodle/sketch while on break from your high paying clients?

if you think you are any of the above, or you know someone that would categorize themselves as any of the above i swear this will be easy and fun and gain you major props by the universe.
if not. that’s cool. cause i’ll totally figure this shit out.

but a very successful saleslady friend of mine always says, “if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.”

all my love,

<3 stephdub

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i don’t know what the hell i want. ok?

October 24th, 2009 by steph | shades of perspective | No Comments »

you, you used to have all the answers. and you, you still have them, too.

so. here it is. the not so ‘unjudgmental’ part of steph that i usually try to hide at all costs. if i had to chose one thing in life that i have almost zero patience for i think it would have to be indecision. we all know my obsession with personal accountability (and the fact that it is so difficult to actually enact, and find in others), and i think my annoyance with indecisive people stems from my push for, and expectation of personal accountability. essentially, it’s this simple: make a decision, and own it. period.

decide what you are going to do/say/be and own that decision. but i know, it’s not that easy. we live in society that makes us question ourselves m o m e n t  a f t e r  m o m e n t. so what type of people does this society breed? indecisive, wishy washy, too ‘nice,’ unaccountable, finger pointers. now i know that there is a ton more that goes into making these people than the society we live in, mainly our upbringing, so i’ll go ahead and say that somewhere in MY upbringing i attributed value to the ability to make a decision and act on it. maybe it’s because i’m a virgo. i think things through, i plan, i am pragmatic to the core.  or maybe it is because i have so many fire signs in my astrology chart (energy, action, spark). either way, all of these things lead me to place immense value on the ability to think something through enough to know/act/do/or be.

and i understand that some people don’t place so much value on such things. however, i do. and i see the inability to make a decision as a weakness. i know, there it is, sorry. judgment. my nemesis. however, i say this all knowing that it is an extreme and in everyday life i curtail that massive judgment with self awareness and perspective to act in a normal manner. i’m just trying to give you an understanding of my core instincts. indecision = weakness.

and recently, i had a revelation that ignited a great amount of cognitive dissonance in this analytical brain of mine. so i ignored it. and didn’t tell anyone. not on the radio, not my friends, not here. i what i realized about myself, my life, my needs right now just didn’t fit with one of my core beliefs. so it couldn’t be true. so i ignored some more.

and then, as things most often do with me, it just came out. t he words were spoken.  it was there. the truth. and i had no idea how to process it.

you see, the revelation that i was so willing and desperate to ignore was this: i have no idea what i want.

what’s the big deal with not knowing what i want, you ask? i’ll tell you. let me lay it out there in a nice and rational psychoanalytical fashion. i value knowing, decision, and action. and the ability to do. and to use those characteristics, one must first know what they are knowing, deciding or doing. and therefore, when i have no idea what the ‘what’ actually is, then i am left with zero ability to decide how to do. thereby leaving me paralyzed with inaction. thus, i am a weak person.

make sense? if not, i’ll use this example instead of theory: i, personally, feel strong and confident in life when i act. i have a goal and i make it happen. the ability to create a rational plan to make something i want happen is what brings me true joy. and challenge, hell, challenge just invigorates me more. because i have to reevaluate the plan, and apply more thought and reason to the situation to meet the goal. you see, in my brain, not meeting the goal is not an option. every situation can be analyzed enough to figure it out, and make it happen. i am sure that it is this mentality that helped me get through grad school successfully while working full time, and unsuccessfully deal with a breakup that was due to circumstances out of my control.

i’m a virgo, i like order and rationale, and perfection, and systems, and process, and logic. at my core, it’s where i’m most comfortable.

so, when i am faced with a situation like the one i just revealed to you (that i have no idea what i want in my dating life), i am a complete mess. i feel exposed and vulnerable, out of control and lost.

how am i supposed to create a logical plan, and rationalize my emotions when i don’t know what i’m planning for, or how i even feel?

after coming to this terrible conclusion i tried to just be with this moment in life. allow myself to just not know. tell myself that it doesn’t make me weak, it doesn’t make me less anything. it just is.

but that was hard. because, believe it or not, dating is something that people, in general, are pretty decisive about. “i’m not dating.” “i’m ready to settle down.” “i’m ready to meet someone.” “i want nothing to do with it, it takes too much time.” “i just want to make out.” “i’m heartbroken and can’t even think about dating.” “i’m in no place to date.”  (now, people’s relationship craziness that lead them to whatever decision they’ve made about their dating life is a whole nother story.)

so there i was, stephdub, the relationship writer with a radio show about dating, having no i dea what i wanted. unable to make a decision about something that everyone can make a decision about.

i decided to sit with this anxiety provoking uncertainty and hand the doozy of situation over to the universe.

and about a week and a half later i remembered that the universe doesn’t respond to idleness. so i made a list.

lists are organized, thought provoked entities. they fit with my m.o. well. i figured if i could make a list of my wants and don’t wants in dating, then i would have enough data to categorize the items and determine where i am in my dating life. hmp. here it goes:

don’t wants:

* something serious. i’m trying to focus on some big goals i’ve set for myself, and absolutely cannot get distracted by love and stuff.
* to go on dates with people i don’t know. it’s awkward, and basically i hate traditional dating (for me).
* to do internet dating sites
* to sleep around
* too  much responsibility to someone else

do wants:

* flirting fun
* physical attraction
* physical attention
* a ‘fun’ buddy. someone to do fun things with. while holding hands. maybe. once in a while. but not too regularly.
* someone that gets me, enough
* to do the ‘fun for now’ thing, knowing that it won’t be long term

there are the lists so far. in what category do those juicy nuggets of information put me?

i guess in the “just want to have fun and go to bars and parties and maybe have you there to smooch and laugh with, but you have to be attractive and somewhat intellectually interesting to me or i’ll get annoyed and/or bored and it will become stressful and defeat the purpose. oh, and you don’t want something serious either, but you’re not just trying to sleep with me and move on.” yea.

alas, SF boy for right now… where are you?

watch things on the vcr, with me and talk about big love… but you, you just know. you just do.

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