• Create memories (his suggestion was to participate in a Project 365 kind of activity and post it publicly) = Done!
• Have a blog = Um…Done!
• Make things (real things not digital) = Hmmm. I make messes. Does that count?
• Have a collection. He said something like collect something that is unsung because that elevates it to important. He also said, while you needed to be passionate about whatever you collect, you don’t want to be viewed as crazily obsessed. (He said this all much more eloquently)

I starting thinking about collections. I was always collecting things as I grew up. I had my Dad’s stamp collection for a while and I added to it a bit. I collected rocks and bits of other natural materials during treks to various spots on earth. More recently, I enjoyed the 10 year run of collecting the state quarters. I tried to do it with my nephew as he was turning 1 when it started but he really didn’t get into it like I had hoped.

One thing that I have always collected, though, were the tickets to concerts, plays and, sometimes, movies that I have seen. There are some prize ones:

• The ticket to see Hal Holbrook’s one man show, Mark Twain Tonight. We got to go backstage and he autographed it. I was in junior high school at the time.
• A ticket to the Newport Folk Festival. After the concert, my friends and I went to eat and Emily Saliers from Indigo Girls came in shortly after. As she was walking by, we caught her eye and told her how much we enjoyed their show. She was very kind and signed the ticket at the end of our short conversation
• The ticket to see Bette Midler back in 1983 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. I didnt’ think I would ever see her. (I have since added the ticket to see her in Las Vegas earlier this year)
• Front row seats to Yaz (aka Yahoo in the UK), a favorite group from the 1980s that I also had abandoned hope of every hearing live until my youngest brother found out about their short reunion tour in the US and we met in Chicago to catch a show.

And the list goes on.

I kept them in large manila envelopes for years and a few years ago, I dismantled a toy drum set I had also had for years and now I store the tickets in the bass drum of the set in a “sculpture’ I created (hey, I do make things!) for my office.

Why does this even matter, you may ask? Good question. The most recent concert I attended (Mary Chapin Carpenter in a great downtown smaller venu) didn’t really have a ticket. I bought the ticket online and chose the “Print at Home” option to avoid having to pay mailing fees. That makes sense and I didn’t really think about it until I got home from the show and thought abou putting my ticket in the drum. I have a piece of paper with a barcode on it and the seat assignments. Not a cool rectangle of paperboard with colors and such. Not even a thermal printed ticket. Just a regular piece of paper out of my printer.

Hmmmm….

Certainly, I love the convenience of buying tickets online. I like being able to pick seats (if possible on the site) and I like not having to stand in line. But, do I want to trade that in for losing my beloved collectible? I can pay the extra fee so, I guess the decision is more – is my collection worth it?

Do I want to keep getting this?

Or just keep going with this?

I just am wondering what other collections folks have that could possibly be replaced as technology moves forward. Will we keep having stamps? Perhaps coins will go away too? There will always be those who will continue to collect these items, it will just be harder and more expensive so new collectors probably will be fewer.

What will replace it? QR Codes? Media Storage formats (replacing the LP and cassette collections of today?)

I guess the point is to have a passion for something but I am not sure you can keep changing the focus of that passion with the pace that our technology and what it produces is changing.

I took a workshop a few years ago about finding your life’s purpose. It was an appeal to my Feely side and it turned out to be much more beneficial than I dreamed it could be. The end result of the day-long seminar was to create a personal mission statement. It was supposed to be short enough and easy enough to remember if you were being held at gunpoint and asked to recite it. After going through several worksheets to help identify verbs and values that should be included in the statement, I eventually derived this statement:

My life’s purpose is to illuminate, celebrate and participate in the circle of life with friends, family and the Universe.

I like it. The verbs really resonate with me and what I find valuable, useful and important in life- both at work and not. It also was important to me to recognized the Circle of Life as I know it is constantly moving and must be a part of how we live in this world.

Parts of the circle of life are easy for celebration and participation. Birthday parties. Graduation. Weddings. First bike ride. All kinds of things. And, some parts are harder.

Yesterday, I had to participate in one of the hard parts of the circle of life as I said good-bye to my dog, Haleakala. From a post I wrote back during my Project 365:

Back in March 1999, this skinny scared dog showed up in our yard upon returning from a trip to Hawaii. We named her Haleakala and on April 22, 1999 (Earth Day) she came inside the house for the first time. So, we declared Earth Day as her unofficial birth day. She got some treats from a vendor at yesterday’s Earth Fest. She loves them!!!

Saying good-bye to her was one of the hardest things I ever have had to do. She was diagnosed with cancer three months ago and the decline started shortly after that. It is a gift that we can prevent suffering and pain but it is a hard gift to give.

But, I want to celebrate her life and what she gave to me.

I went through my Flickr account and pulled together a slideshow of good, bad and ugly photos of her over the past 4 years or so. You can see what a pretty girl she is.

The Circle of Life keeps moving and so will I as I keep illuminating, celebrating and participating.

Earlier this month, I was sitting in a webinar learning about new functionality for a system used at my school. It was quickly getting over my head so, of course, I went to Tweetdeck to see if anybody was tweeting about the same webinar. I found one person who mentioned he was watching the same session. Okay. One other person. Fine.

Later that same day, I was dealing with a technical issue with a plug-in for our WordPress Multiuser system and started working via email one-on-one with the developer of the plug-in. He was very helpful and we got the issue resolved relatively quickly. (it was one of those issues where it finally started working with settings that made no sense but neither of us wanted to take the time to figure out why it broke or why is was working with those settings – sometimes you just have to take the victory and run).

After working with him, I decided to check on Twitter and see if he was there. One search query later, I found his Twitter page and in his tweet history was the ONE TWEET about the earlier webinar.  He was the one person I found also watching the same presentation.

Small world, isnt’ it?

Are you in for Earth Hour this year?

But, the changes have got me thinking about other changes in Facebook from December as well as other social sights as well as with my own thinking about privacy. Facebook basically appeared to do a 180 degree turn in their thinking. What used to be a very closed network that only allowed first folks from one school ever increasingly morphed into a site that only those with a “dot edu” email address and then full tilt when into encouraging well, the entire universe to join. The founder of Facebook basically has said that “privacy is over“.

I hope he is wrong.

I am not thrilled with 100% open with no privacy. I want to have control over what I want to share. And, if you give me enough time I usually get comfortable with it. I started out on Twitter and protected my tweets. Eventually I decided to open it up to all to see. While many social network types seem to think that if you don’t open your tweets you are not “worthy” to follow. I have also read some pretty good reasons on why someone would not want to open up their tweets.

It’s all good.

Different streaks for different freaks, I always say.

The point is, on Twitter you have that control. So far on Facebook, you do have some control But, the controls are much more granular and much more, shall we say, complicated. On something like Twitter, the binary of YES or NO is pretty easy. Facebook becomes shades of gray very quickly: “Let’s see, I want my family to see that I am a fan of HGTV but I don’t want my co-workers to see what 80s hair band best fits my name”. Hmmmmm?”

But, if the privacy controls are too hard to use, way too open upon creation of an account and more opt-in for increased privacy rather than opt-out for increased openness, then I am thinking that will become a “count me out” opt-in for this girl.

It might be all about control and my friends and family will be the first to tell you that I certainly enjoy things my way. But, in the case of privacy, that should be the case all of the time. Privacy should be MY way on any site.

So, check your Facebook settings. Organize friends into groups and apply settings for each group. Take yourself out of search if that is what you want.

Need more help? I like this guide as a starting point and this one does a good job of helping you think through the options as well.

Image: ‘Privacy is not a crime‘