Resolutions: checking in and checking out (reprisal)

Here’s how this went last year.

And now, checking in on those resolutions made for 2012:

Do awesome photo projects

Started the Brooklyn Bathroom Blog and have been going on fun photo outings. Also bartered grantwriting help with a photography lesson. Definitely giving space for photography exploration, though I’d like to enjoy what I do in physical form instead of just digital, too. 

Maintain strong connections with important friends and family

Very much so! I was proud of doing a better job than ever making space for people I wanted to spend more time with and spending that time in what I felt were meaningful ways. CARRY FORWARD the goal to continue this!

Continue to explore professional and personal growth opportunities

Did a lot of informational interviewing (aka chatting with people who do cool things about what they do), so that was exciting. Big victory too was developing and teaching four courses at the Brooklyn Brainery that have been successful as professional classes and also for me personally. I went to a few workshops and conferences to build professional skill sets, and jumped on various consulting opportunities that came my way. Oh, and I think getting a blogger profile with Huffington Post is a positive thing!

Function better in unplanned, last-minute scenarios or blips in plans

Yes. I like that this was a goal, and I think I overall executed. I got a bit less crazy when people were late, and went with the flow more in general. Accountability buddy Sam was a key part of this, and I hope to keep that partnership in place in the coming year. 

Make this blog or another writing venture something more public, as long as I keep enjoy doing it

See two bullets up. Also, I think more people read this blog than I think, because people randomly mention a post that stood out to them in conversations. Also, on the point of “as long as I keep enjoy doing it,” I am 1) aware that this was not an example of good editing and 2) still very much enjoying writing, and have realized that I love it because I can write in the exact style I’d like and about the exact content that strikes me. For now at least, this is the primary type of writing that excites me. I will CARRY FORWARD a more polished version of this goal!

Wear makeup a little bit more, but never spend more than 120 seconds on it.

Fail. And fine with it. Though I have taken more time to put together ‘a look’, which accomplishes a similar thing.

Take more improv classes, and continue to formulate what I want to do with it as it relates to longterm goals

I took Level 3 at Magnet and was also on a team this Fall. I continued to guest on PreRecorded.com as it worked with my schedule. I think the aspects of improv that are most appealing to me are groupwork, listening skills, creativity, and sincere fun. I’d love to integrate improv that truly embodies each of those elements into my life this year. Also, I took a storytelling class this year, which was profoundly impactful both because of the people I met and the power of the craft. I want to grow stronger roots in that this year. 

Become a member of a nonprofit board

Sadly, no. Silver lining #1: wouldn’t have had the fair amount of energy to give to it this year. I’m currently on my last planned year of co-chairing Young Friends of Tufts Advancement, which will hopefully free up some time for board membership. Silver lining #2: I spent a lot of time thinking about what my ideal role on a board would be, and what sort of organization that would work best at. CARRY FORWARD!

Cook more in cost effective, healthy, and fun ways

Embarrassed to say no. I think I didn’t accomplish it because I had no real driver and truly didn’t make the time for it. Chalk it up to city living?

Work on building a sustainable skillshare of some sort among friends

Didn’t end up doing, but mostly because of the wonderful community I found at the Brainery.

Get Anderson Cooper to come for dinner

Let’s just leave this one alone.

2012 was a good year. There were other successes on non-explicitly stated goals, Obama got re-elected, home feels even more like home, and I am overall quite simply excited to be doing everything I’m doing with the people I’m surrounded by. 
Onward to the new year! Here are some 2013 goals:
  • Maintain strong connections with important friends and family
  • Explore and activate professional and personal growth opportunities
  • Continue writing, publicly and privately, with enjoyment and while pushing limits of what I think I can do
  • Be more vulnerable
  • Seek out improv and storytelling opportunities that capitalize on personal creativity and fun, or that allow for meaningful group work
  • Send more snail mail to friends
  • Become a member of a nonprofit board
  • Travel at least once for me (and not just for four incredible weddings)
  • Read books in time that is otherwise wasted online
  • Exercise regularly while pushing myself a little bit harder
  • Learn to fix a bike if something simple goes wrong

Cheers! Happy New Year!

Interview with Robin Gelfenbien: Comedienne and Storyteller

Last month, I had the pleasure of performing in Adam Wade’s Whatever Happened To The Nerds storytelling show alongside the very talented and hilarious Robin Gelfenbien. She hosts and performs in a bunch of shows every month, has friends who are tax attorneys, and has been spotted on numerous occasions in a hot dog truck. Here’s more:

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Jen Bokoff: You’re a comedienne/writer/storyteller, but that means you’ve almost certainly had some weird jobs in between. What’s the craziest?

Robin Gelfenbien: I’ve done a lot of copywriting work, so I’ve been fortunate enough to be put on some unusual accounts including writing about ear and nose hair trimmers and toe fungus. I couldn’t bear to look at the photos. I’m exceedingly squeamish.

JB: Yum’s The Word is the most fun concept for a storytelling show ever. How did you develop the idea and make it happen?

RG: Awww. Thanks, Jen! I spent a lot of time thinking about starting my own storytelling show because I wanted to do something unique and memorable. Growing up, my family pretty much ate ice cream nightly, and our homemade ice cream cakes were a staple on our birthdays. I had been making ice cream cakes for years and one night at a party, I saw strangers’ reactions to my cakes. They were going nuts for them, and I realized I could blend my two passions; Yum’s the Word, at least in concept, was born. The next big challenge was finding a venue that had a freezer. That was the top criterion, and let me tell you, a surprisingly tall order.

JB: Who are your storytelling heroes, and what story would you tell if you were sharing the stage with them?

RG: Excellent question! Mike Birbiglia is, hands down, my storytelling hero, and one of my dreams is to have him on Yum’s the Word. Since he loves junk food, it seems like a perfect fit. I would be torn between telling the story of when I thwarted my high school musical from backstage [JB note: Could. Not. Stop. Laughing.] and the story of getting pulled over in the Wienermobile and searched for drugs. I also love Ophira Eisenberg and Adam Wade for their ability to be funny and vulnerable. I’ve actually shared the stage with both of them and told those exact stories.

JB: Having commanded a Wienermobile, I can’t help but wonder if you still eat hot dogs. Yes? No? 

RG: Yes, we surprisingly rarely ate hot dogs on board, so I never got sick of them. I love hot dogs, and I’m still brand loyal to Uncle Oscar. After all, that job saved my life.

JB: What current project(s) are you working on? Anything we should be looking out for?

RG: Absolutely! This Friday, November 9th Yum’s the Word will be doing a benefit show for Hurricane Sandy victims at Webster Hall with musical acts Lachi, iPhonic and iLLspokinn. I’ll be hosting the whole night, and Yum’s the Word will be kicking off the event at 7:00 p.m. with hilarious stories from 30 Rock’s Sue Galloway, Adam Linn, Scott Whitehair and yours truly. We’ll also have a raffle, live auction and silent auction items including a signed 30 Rock script, a signed copy of Tina Fey’s “Bossypants,” a Moth prize pack and more. A portion of the proceeds will go to GOLES.org, which is a NYC-based charity doing tremendous work down on the Lower East Side to help those affected by the storm. It’s going to be such a fun event for a wonderful cause! I’m also going to be doing a seasonal storytelling show this winter. More details to follow at www.robingelfenbien.com, but for now, mum’s the word. 

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I really encourage everyone in the NYC area to go to the benefit Friday; not only will it be a great show, but I really respect its charitable nature. I’ll make it easy for you; you can reserve your tickets here! Oh, and be sure to get there early for a piece of Robin’s homemade ice cream cake and a balloon anima! Doors open at 6:00 p.m. You can also find Robin on Twitter and at shows around the city.

1. The Listserve is a massive e-mail list — a ‘listserv.’
2. Each day, one person is randomly selected to write one e-mail to the growing list. That’s the only e-mail allowed to be sent to The Listserve.
(And the winner’s e-mail address won’t be disclosed to the listserv — unless they want it to be.)
I’ve only been subscribed to The Listserve for one week and I love it. I implore you to sign up today; you really have nothing to lose and all the insights and wisdom and fun to gain.
[UPDATE: I no longer love this since word limits were expanded; the emails are sounding more trite in many, many more wasted words. But, there are occasional great ones.]

Narratively, a new digital publication devoted to original, true & in-depth stories about New York, is going to be big. They have an experienced team with fresh angles to journalism and a clear vision. I have often lamented how the news glosses over the most incredible human interest stories because there’s something flashier to be told; Narratively will return the focus to the minutiae that together make New York the best city in the world. There are certainly fun storytelling nights and blogs and exhibits and other fun outlets that celebrate the city and the people in it, but nothing to date that has used “new media” to tell stories and achieve scale.

To get this project rolling, they’ve gone the Kickstarter route. The benefits for donating are really neat, and I have no doubt that the content they will put out as a result will be fantastic. Help support this project today, and capture the stories of New Yorkers forever. (Is that too cheesy? I suppose that’s why I’m not a ‘real’ journalist.)

Required Reading for Today: Storytelling, Brains, and Saving the World

Telling Tales With a Tear and a Smile, New York Times, featuring my storytelling teacher Adam Wade, who is a Moth champion with unconditional love for all of his students and the art of storytelling. It’s incredible what power a good story can have on the audience and on the orator.

The Make-Your-Own Schoolhouse, New York Times, featuring the Brooklyn Brainery, a skill-sharing adult learning center for anything and everything, where I have had the pleasure of both taking and teaching courses. This model is going to spread, and the Brainery is on the forefront.

Nobody Goes It Alone, Huffington Post, written by Kirsten Lodal, a friend and mentor who is the Executive Director for LIFT, a nonprofit that I have been involved with since 2004. If you’re looking for a “wisdom” quote to inspire you and share with others, check out the last paragraph. Brilliant.

The joke was on me.

Rabbit rabbit and happy April Fools’ Day. In the spirit of jokes and fun, I share with defeat and enjoyment a prank that I fell for that lasted more than two months.

I worked in a cubicle crowded with case files, a collage of NY Post headlines, hoarded office supplies, a pink Disney princess clock won at the Bowery Poetry Club’s Drag queen Bingo, a nameplate reading Tobias Funke, the Internal Revenue Code from 2008, 2009, and 2010, my artful rubber band ball, travel scrabble, a whoopee cushion sound-imitator, 3 footlong pens, rejected holiday party invitations that didn’t meet regulations, and a WANTED sign for a stolen nerf football. As a paralegal specialist for IRS Office of Chief Counsel, I cared about efficiently getting all of my work done so that fun could be had at lunchtime and I could leave on the dot when my tour of duty reached its end. Needless to say, distraction was not welcome when there were tax problems to be solved.

The IRS Office of Chief Counsel was no different than any other work environment at least in one way: we had IT employees who could remote in to any computer. It was helpful on occasion and creepy at all times, because it felt like Big Brother was always watching, though maybe not for a reason. You would know that they were signed on because a small icon would appear in the lower right corner of the screen near the time, the screen would flicker ever so slightly, and the mouse would jerk just a little bit in one direction. 

I started to experience the mouse-jerk phenomenon without seeing the icon on the bottom of the screen, and I was thoroughly creeped out. It was possible I was just seeing things, but I grew increasingly paranoid that people were watching me from afar. Just like that, someone would know the typos I was making, the occasional Dictionary.com search, and the dumb emails shooting back and forth in a tangled web with nearby cubicles. It didn’t really threaten me - I wasn’t doing anything to be worried about - but it made me anxious. I even asked one of the IT people if it was possible for someone to sign into my computer without seeing the icon on the bottom of the screen, and they said no without even a twinkle in their eye. This meant they were doing it stealthily! I had to get to the bottom of this.

But I couldn’t. Nothing was adding up, and it wasn’t impacting my work too much other than distracting me for a minute and putting me more on edge. Typical for a worker in that office; no big deal. Whining and floating this by coworkers yielded only nonchalant shrugs and accusations of going crazy.

Folks, more than 2 months later, it was revealed to me by giggling coworkers in the neighboring attorney’s office that I had fallen victim to one of the oldest (circa 2003) tricks in the book: A wireless mouse was being controlled sporadically from less than 10 feet away. I was successfully pranked.

Interview with Jordie Poncy about his Life in MS Paint

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jordie Poncy, a friend of a friend who is very, very funny and earnest. He writes a blog called Life in MS Paint, through which he tells well-crafted stories using Microsoft Paint as his tool. I’ve never seen anything like it; he’s truly a master of his craft.

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Jen Bokoff: Your blog is amazing. I love how simply enjoyable and fun and witty it is. Where’d the idea come from?  

Jordie Poncy: Thank you! The blog kind of evolved to its current format. After college, my friends and I used to draw ridiculous pictures and email them to one another as a way to stay in touch (instead of working hard to build up a professional reputation in the workplace). For example, when our friend Jess got an internship at the National Institutes of Health, my friend sent around this picture of her accidentally pricking herself with a syringe of wolf DNA and turning into a werewolf:

(Jess had a blond ponytail in real life if you couldn’t tell from the drawing.)  I started posting some of my funny pictures on a blog. I really like comedic writing, so at some point, I decided to start using these pictures as a way to illustrate some funny stories from my life. The blog got a lot better when I started adding the writing. (You can see how bad the early stuff was on the blog.) I have always found MS Paint pictures pretty hilarious because they usually look kinda bad.  

JB: On a scale of totally made up to totally true, where do your stories and drawings fall? And do you and your friends actually resemble what we see in the drawings?  

JP: Believe it or not, the stories are actually frighteningly true. A lot of my comedy stems from having a sense of humor about the stuff happening around me. I like the idea that your average trip to the store can be filled with hilarious things if you’re just open to seeing stuff that way. I do usually add a few small details to punch the stories up a bit, especially if I think of a good joke I can’t resist including. As for the accuracy of the drawings, I’d say it really depends on the person. My mom looks EXACTLY like the drawings. Conversely, I can’t draw my dad at all. He always ends up looking all wrong. I’ll let you be the judge of how I draw my best friend, John:

     [Editor’s Note: WELL DONE!]

JB: You seem to really like the Pea Patch Jig. Explain?

JP: Ahhh, the Pea Patch Jig. What could be better than a kids book about a bunch of mice who throw a huge party in a garden despite a lurking murderous farmer? They jam to some bluegrass music and dance a jig while leaving their baby unattended. It’s a good thing too because the baby ends up firing a pea at a predatory fox using a straw as a blow-gun and saving the whole irresponsible family. Also, here’s a gem I found when I googled The Pea Patch Jig.

JB: What’s one of your favorite story and illustration combos, and what was your process for creating it?  

JP: I was really pleased with The Trouble with Pets is that They’re Always All Dead and Stuff. I love that it highlights some of the funny things about my family, and there are some pretty ridiculous images in it. When I create any post, I always write it in an email first. I write as if I were sending it to some of my funniest friends. By pretending that I’m emailing them, I can get into a really goofy frame of mind. Once I have written the story, I go back and create all the illustrations. Then I edit it after pasting it into the blog. Finally, I get mad at my friends for emailing me their reactions instead of commenting directly on the blog!

JB: Do you have any tips for someone who is new to MS Paint and wants to use it like a pro?

JP: No……………Just kidding. First, I would suggest investing in a good mouse (I can’t believe I just said that). Second, keep in mind that it’s easier to draw lines in the downward direction than upward. Third, I’d recommend just going for it. In MS Paint, the pictures aren’t supposed to be perfect. In fact, it’s usually the case that the worse the drawings are, the funnier. This is a case in which being a horrible artist can be a major advantage. Have fun!

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Make sure to check out Jordie’s fantastic storytelling at Life in MS Paint, and if you really like it, leave him an awesome comment. Bloggers get a kick out of those. [Editor’s Note: Trust me.] Also, enjoy his tags with each post; they are the most random I’ve ever seen.

[Editor’s Note: A few hours after a posted this interview, I was brought to tears by laughter. This is why.]

To radio listeners: I apologized in this week’s episode to anyone who felt betrayed. I stand by that apology. But understand that if you felt something that connected you with where your devices come from—that is not a lie. That is art. That is human empathy, and it is real, and even if you curse my name I hope you’ll recognize that and continue reading, caring, and thinking.
Mike Daisey, in a post on his website about the recent Apple story controversy on aired on This American Life

YouTube Seeks to Improve Nonprofit Videos

YouTube in recent weeks has turned its focus to helping nonprofits create more powerful, effective videos, with a new “playbook” guide and a chance to participate in a one-day video boot camp in San Francisco.

The free 24-page guide, “YouTube for Good,” helps nonprofits devise attention-grabbing names and code their videos’ descriptions to make them more visible to search engines,tell better stories, and use video as part of  broad campaign.

This is excellent. It drives me nuts when organizations have amazing tools at their fingertips but don’t use them well; this is a wonderful effort that both makes YouTube a more accessible tool to nonprofits and also improves YouTube’s brand from being just the source of LOL videos.

(via Chronicle of Philanthropy)

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