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I met last night with two intelligent and creative people who are at the cusp of sprouting wings. How they are doing this is by the seat of their pants. One is helping the business world go paperless, with a little help from some online tools such as http://sproutsocial.com/, https://www.odesk.com/, http://www.lynda.com/.

What we all agreed on is in this brave new world the best asset you can have is to be authentic. And that’s not easy to do. To be authentic, you must have conviction that your unique voice and talents make a difference to others. So just showing up is no longer good enough. As Thomas Friedman writes about in this article, average is no longer good enough.

For those of us in our late forties and fifties, marching orders are to work towards the expression of our talents (learned and innate), but for children maybe it’s time to reconsider the cookie cutter education children are receiving in schools that educate to standardized test rituals. Imagine American schools teaching and guiding children towards their authentic self.

The Waldorf School teaches a child just this – to grow from within, to develop executive function, to ignite creativity, and to open their eyes to the world that is around them. I can’t imagine a better way to arm your child for a future where average is no longer good enough and everyone must be able to radiate and leave a unique stamp on this world.

We were running late to school this morning because I opened that great can of worms called my contacts and the lack of sync-ability with Outlook, Address Book, and my iPhone. The Apple rep told that I needed iCloud and I felt like yelling iWONT!

I’m sick of technology at the moment having watched T trying to recoup her back up from Carbonite and everything being all over the map, and me with this umpteenth round of contact losses. Big major pain in the petuti.

So we get in the car after Tin is dawdling his way to the truck and as we start driving, Tin says, “Look, the sun.” And sure enough in the thick of the clouds was a little bit of sun peaking out. He then said, “It’s a beautiful day.”

Okay – so he undermined my bad mood. But later I was speaking to parents about boredom and one told me that a visiting speaker at Waldorf had said that boredom is good for kids, because it means that something big is about to happen.

You can fill in the blanks there – because they have a rested mind, because there is space, because they have finished everything before and are ready for the new, because there was capacity to conceive of the new.

But the reason I’m writing about this is because boredom is good for adults too – and we don’t get a lot of it these days because of technology. Instead we are always fixing something or recouping, or backing up, or what have you. But to sit on the stoop, the couch, the stairs and just be bored – what a blessing!

So try to schedule boredom into your overwrought routine.

This morning I woke up filled with thoughts of work that were all tumbled and tossing. I got the dogs and headed out to the park for our walk and it had been raining, the skies were grey, and I was wearing a tee shirt – part of the unnaturalness of this winter in 2012 New Orleans. I looked up, pensive, and saw a break in the clouds and it formed an image that was strikingly the emblem of Wonder Woman.

I smiled.

In the park, I ran into a friend and neighbor, who I have been thinking about, and who I haven’t seen since last year. I was excited to see him and when he asked how the new business was going, I began chatting a million miles a minute. We had both been in the same funk, and I felt like I was on the other side and I was trying to describe it to him.

I was relaying a story about another friend and neighbor who had asked me something similar and how I had been trying to explain to her what I do and she said I need more corporate lingo in that elevator pitch and I told him I had stumbled across a woman who is doing exactly what my company is doing but she had the corporate lingo and it turned me off. He said that corporations like to have their world mirrored back at them, lingo and all. It makes them comfortable and gives validity to their universe. And I said that is why it gave me pause as to whether those types of large corporations would be the best clients. I had left that world of “bubble up” “circle back” and “transparent” behind.

But this isn’t the story. The story goes like this, I ran into a friend who I was happy to see, and after about ten minutes, my friend turned to me and said not in these exact words but close, “It’s funny I needed this time to walk alone and gather my thoughts and now here you are intruding into that because you’ve been talking a million miles a minute.”

He had just been telling me what I should have told my other friend who was coaxing me to make my delivery more corporate, and so since honesty was in abundance I told him that I was sorry, and that much in the way he had wanted a different experience with me than the one I was giving him, I too had expected a different experience.

I left him with a bumpersticker message – It will be okay. And he left me with one – people mirror what is inside of them.

Remember at the root of mystery is the metaphor of God* –

So do you want to make God laugh?

Make plans.

A friend told me his mother says this to him all the time.

*”God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.” Joseph Campbell

Listening to the Republican Response to Obama’s State of the Union and have to say, if anyone in that group could take Speech 101 they might not suffer so much from disrespect.

But now back to the President of the United States – he’s handsome, he’s articulate, he’s managing hope, he took his victory lap, his not so subtle jibes at the Tea Party and Romney and Congress and he still looks presidential and makes me proud.

The ca ca card placer in City Park has taken to political messages. Today placed on a fresh pile of dog ca ca was a card that said: Gingrich was here.

I was listening to Bill Moyers interview Louise Erdrich as I walked through City Park this morning with the dogs. As we crossed the always dangerous intersection of City Park and Carrollton, tourists from South Carolina joined behind me as I held my hand out to the oncoming traffic. One turned to me and said, “If not at a green light, then when would we cross?” Good question, I responded, then went back to listening to the interview.

I noticed as I was walking how the white geese huddled together, the black coots swam together, the cormorants perched together, the green-headed mallards congregated together on the Cajun Santa Claus still in the lagoon. It’s bird paradise right now in City Park, but more interesting is how birds of a feather flock together. And how appropriate was it that Erdrich was speaking about her fractured inner life being a Native American and a German, a writer and a mother, right at that moment.

Interestingly enough before she arrived at this conversation, I was thinking about my upbringing as a Spanish Jew and the language of Ladino because I had been listening to Tin speaking Croatian this morning and was smiling as I thought of what he told me the other day. I was tickling his naked body and saying, where did this little knee come from, where did this thigh come from, where did this shoulder come from and he said boldly, “CROATIA!”

And I thought about how he would grab from the cultures that Tatjana and I are bringing into his own cultural being and he would identify with parts of them much as I had identified as strongly with my father’s people because there is where I found as Erdrich calls it, my community and my peace and my language. Yet, at the same time, I had as strong a tie to my mother’s people and the country and landscape they were from. I see myself as one part cathead biscuits and gravy one part black beans and rice and one part kibbe.

But different from the fowl in the waters of City Park, I feel most at home in a mixed environment, with a Jew, a European, a Catholic, a Buddhist, black, brown, white, yellow and red skin, kinky hair, flaxen hair, curly hair, and still more types to come with languages running together like tributaries to the great unknown.

Tin and I had dinner last night sitting at the copper table in our latest LaLa edition, the Euro kitchen, and there we listened to Brazilian songs and spoke about how beautiful the language sounds and how musical it is at its core.

When I think of the worlds contained inside of me, I could burst forth like a cornucopia of rhythm, roots and riotous revelry – how grateful I am to be a gumbo gal.

Going along the same idea of these inane lists that keep popping up EVERYWHERE, I came across this one posted on the Waldorf School’s Facebook page and the final paragraph pretty much summed up the first few weeks of this year’s mental exercises for me:

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.

A friend of mine recently posted Rules Your Kids Did Not and Will Not Learn In School by Bill Gates on Facebook. Well actually several friends have posted it, but I responded to his because I didn’t like one word of it. It begins with Rule 1 – which says life is not fair, get used to it.

As a parent the thought of saying this to my child is absurd because a) I don’t feel that way, and b) I think it is wrong. Life is what it is and sometimes it is fair and sometimes not and sometimes it is overwhelmingly amazing and at times deeply boring in its rituals and ruts. But fair – that would not be in the vocabulary.

Rule 2 – The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. Really? I don’t think so. Self-esteem is something that comes from within and there is a way to teach your child to have self-esteem by nurturing their natural rhythms and quirky directions they might choose to follow and letting them know that the world accommodates a myriad of people types. And accomplish is an overused word of the 80s to 00′s. What I hope my child accomplishes is to love and be loved.

Rule 3 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. Really? I would tell my child that working for yourself is the most satisfying work you will do in this world, but since you want to be in a marching band – you have to learn teamwork and remember you are master of your domain, never anyone else. Especially a boss.

That is the first of the 11 rules on this faux chalkboard and I disagree with each one on here and could wax for hours about why and how wrong headed this entire list is, but suffice to say is I respectfully disagree.

Here’s a thought to take into this week – it’s Monday, you open your eyes, you are in a comfortable bed with relatively clean linens, you walk to the bathroom and the toilet is working properly, you brush your teeth with clean water, you head to the kitchen and begin your brew, you look out the window and maybe, depending on where you are, you see a bird in a tree. So begins Monday, not unlike many other Mondays of years past, but today is different. Today is very different.