Daniel Greene

Blog

  • Review of 2009 and goals for 2010

    I haven’t felt like writing a blog entry in a long time, but I have been updating my friends, colleagues, and the world about my life in other ways. This morning, I feel moved to recap the previous year and look forward to the next.

    I continue to take photographs and share them on Flickr. Some of my recent adventures include hiking Camelback Mountain for the first time, a weekend getaway to Jerome, going to the Arizona State Fair for the first time in the five years that I’ve lived here, going “full frame” by trading in my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and EF-S lenses for a used Canon 5D, and meeting a longtime Flickr friend from Brooklyn who visited me and my husband with his husband. It was great to bring the online life and real life together, and we all really hit it off. There are several other photo sets I’ve posted in months since my last blog post as well. The best way to keep up with what I’m up to in a visual way is to follow my Flickr photostream.

    I’ve also really gotten into Facebook this year. I don’t add people I don’t know as Friends, and I don’t have a Fan Page, but I do enjoy keeping up with my friends through status updates, photos, videos, links, etc. I am sort of the designated photographer at gatherings of friends and coworkers, so it’s always fun to upload an album from a shared event and tag everyone in it who’s on Facebook– which is most of them. For a while there, I was spending a couple/three hours a day on Facebook, but I’ve cut back because I have so many other priorities. I felt I was neglecting my photography and Flickr social circle for a while there, so I’ve returned to spending a bit more time on that. One thing I love that Flickr added in the last couple of months is People in Photos, which allows you to tag your Flickr friends in photos the way you can tag your friends in photos on Facebook. Those friends have to be Flickr members in order to be tagged, so it’s most useful for photos from FlickrMeets; that is, when a group of photo geeks get together to go on a shooting spree. Not necessarily good for your neighbor’s family’s Thanksgiving party unless they’re all Flickrites themselves. Thanks to this new feature and my general hamminess, I can now point you to photos of me on Flickr. As of this writing, there are over 900, though I’m not sure they are all public!
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  • Our Wii Family

    Our Wii Family

    Our Wii Family
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    Now that we got the Wii Fit Plus that allows you to create Miis for your pets and weigh them (and track changes), I set up Buxley and Lady. Now we have our whole family represented in Miis. When I saw the screen this morning, it reminded me of those people who have the cutout sticky people on the rear windows of their vehicles. Those people always have straight families: Mother, Father, Daughter, Son, with maybe some cats and dogs. I’ve always thought it would be funny to have stickers of two men and two dogs on the back of my car. Well, this is the closest I’ve come to that yet: my family in Wii Miis.

    And yes, I did mean “Our Wii Family” to be a pun of “Our Wee Family.”

    Oh, and by the way, Lady’s already lost 2.5 pounds in the past month since we’ve been feeding her less. Yay, Lady!

    Um, do I need to say that Wii Fit Plus is a registered trademark of Nintendo, Inc.? =)

  • Beautiful Jerome (I sing thy praises!)

    I think I got high on the thin air up at the mile-high altitude of Jerome, Arizona. There I was, taking a video of the beautiful panorama around me, when the beauty of Nature inspired me to sing! Ah-ha! Oo-hoo! Ha ha!

  • Laughing hysterically at hubby playing Wii Fit Plus

    My husband & I got the Wii Fit Plus game today. That’s him flapping his arms like a bird to play Bird’s-eye Bull’s-eye, and me laughing hysterically in the background. I don’t know how much exercise we got out of our Wii Fit Plus tonight, but the laughs were priceless!

  • The dilemma of self-promotion

    Tonight, after posting the participant’s review of my workshop this morning, I see that there are no comments on the blog post and no “Likes” or comments on the Facebook post. My first thought is “people thought it was obnoxious.” Self-promotion can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. You want to win people over, but you risk turning them off in the process. I don’t know if I ever strike the right balance when it comes to talking about my accomplishments or promoting my work. Lately, I fear that some of my status updates have been boldface brags; e.g., “New blog post: Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop http://bit.ly/zWrno” (tweet), “I’m happy that 24 people came to my workshop in Phoenix, five of them all the way from Yuma and four of them all the way from Tucson.” (tweet), and “New blog post: Speak & Spell II a Successful Workshop http://bit.ly/171bC9” (tweet), especially the fact that I shared my teacher evaluation scores. Ugh.

    What may or may not be apparent is that I have felt shame and failure in my life, and there have been a few times I doubted I’d ever achieve anything. When I do manage to do something good, my feelings of past failure and inefficacy drive me to shout my achievements from the rooftops. “See! I’m not a complete failure! I DID something!”

    Perhaps it is the fact that there have been so many times in my life when I have felt paralyzed into inaction. I’ve wanted to do many things that I didn’t do because I didn’t believe in myself. Now, when I finally do things that I’ve only been dreaming of doing for years, I feel… well… vindicated! Especially when other people didn’t believe in me, either. It’s like, “How do you like me now?!” Well, maybe not very much, I fear.

    What good does it do to shove my success in the faces of people who doubted me? Are they really going to “like me now”? Or are they just going to resent me for rubbing it in their faces that I succeeded in spite of them? My fear is that they are going to resent me as much as I resent them. Resentment begets resentment. The thing to do is forgive everyone for everything, starting with myself.

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