Will there be a Quirkyalone Day Party 2012?
Jan 19, 2012 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Uncategorized
Hi there,
I was just wondering if there will be an IQD party in the bay area for the upcoming IQD?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is, I am in the Bay Area this year on February 14 and I would love to do a party this year to bring together quirkyalones and quirkytogethers and yes even those quirkysluts on our special day. This will be the ninth annual Quirkyalone Day! It’s been celebrated in over 40 cities all over the world, and in the Bay Area, we are ground zero as the birthplace of the quirkyalone movement. I am open to suggestions about where, when, and in what way we should celebrate. Remember: The quirkyalone movement is a grassroots movement. Don’t ask when IQD is coming to your town—bring it there yourself.
Share your ideas in the comments. I will be percolating and if anyone wants to co-host, please send me a shout!
Pumpkin, Squash, and How to Use Your Intuition to Find Love (or a Lover)
Dec 14, 2011 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Dating, coaching
Coaching is about learning to tune into what you want, and clearing out the voices that tell you you can’t have it. This session my client didn’t want to talk about her career. That had been the primary focus working together. This time she wanted to talk about finding a new lover. So we switched gears for a session. Everything is connected. What we discover in her approach to looking for a lover could help us understand how she approaches moving forward in her career.
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Vulnerability is the key to joy
Dec 10, 2011 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Personal Growth, Video
Thanks to my friend Agnes for sharing this video with me. As I coach clients, and myself through my own life, I found two things that struck me in this talk.
1) Shame represents our fear of disconnection. We are ashamed by what we fear will separate us from others; we fear some part of us will be judged unworthy, I have always been fueled by shame in my writing–there is so much juice in our shame that helps us to connect with others when we express what we are ashamed about. My Quirkyalone book (and the quirkyalone movement) come to mind (expressing the shame of persistent singledom) and I have always found shame to be great creative fuel for connection with others. Expressing the charge we feel about our shame can be fuel for connecting in our relationships as well.
2) Vulnerability is the key to feeling more connection and joy. Being willing to be vulnerable and to invest in a relationship when you are not sure of the outcome is one of the characteristics of people who feel worthy of being loved–and feel more joy in their lives.
Stories this searchingly comprehensive don’t come around that often. The only omission is the quirkyalone movement! Alas! Still, this Atlantic Monthly cover story is a fantastic piece that provides the social context for the increasingly quirkyalone world in which we live.
CONTEST ALERT: If Life is a Game, How Do You Want to Play? Win free coaching with Sasha
Oct 10, 2011 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Personal Growth, coaching
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Do you want support to go after what you want in life? Coaching is a way to help you identify what you want, clear out what’s blocking you, and to go for it. I’m experimenting with a new adventure in coaching. We’re going to create a game based on your own life.
In addition to being a writer and a movement-builder, I’m now a life coach. I call it a turn-on coach. It’s about helping you turn on to your true voice and what makes you feel most alive. As part of this new adventure, I am sponsoring a contest. Three lucky souls who want to grow and support others in their growth will get to play.
CONTEST RULES
What you win: A month of play and coaching. I will choose three people. You will win three individual coaching sessions with me, and we’ll meet as a group in person to co-create a game that helps each person get what he or she wants. This is a commitment of time and energy. You need to be ready to jumpstart your own growth and to supporting others along the way.
Who can enter: Anyone who wants to get unstuck and go for what he or she wants. That could be: a new business, writing, being bold in everyday life, getting over your tired stories, telling people what you want. What you want is as unique as you. If you are fuzzy about what you want, that’s OK. Coaching helps you get clear about what you want.
Who am I?: My name is Sasha Cagen. I’m the founder of the quirkyalone movement and a turn-on coach. It’s all about turning on to what makes you feel most alive, in work, life, and love. I’m highly intuitive and help people tune into what’s authentically true for them. I stand shoulder to shoulder with you as you step over the clutter that’s holding you back. My coach training is led by the talented coach trainers Jeff Jacobson and Mai Vu, who have both served on the faculty of CTI, the largest coach training org in the country.
In addition to being a coach, I’m a writer. I’m the author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics (HarperCollins) and To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us (Simon & Schuster). I started the quirkyalone movement for people who prefer to be single rather than settle, published a nationally award-winning magazine To-Do List, co-founded a street fashion social network StyleMob.com and sold it to Glam Media, and traveled South America alone for sixteen months (read more at http:unplannedadventure.wordpress.com). I love travel, tango, and coaching others tune into what makes them feel most alive.
To learn more about me and my coaching, visit sashacagen.com.
How to enter:
1) Tell me what you want in your life and why you I should choose you.
2) Bonus points for being creative. Make a video and send me a link, send me a series of tweets (@sashacagen #iflifeisagame) or . . .
3) Send communication to sashacagen AT gmail.com.
Entries are due by end of day Monday, October 17.
I’ll announce the winners the following week and we’ll start coaching and creating our game thereafter.
Brazilian and Single? Today Is Your Day!
Aug 15, 2011 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Travel
Today is the official day to celebration singledom in Brazil. Feliz Dia dos Solteiros! I found out when a Brazilian Facebook friend posted a photo of himself cooking alone and called it his “Feliz Dia dos Solteiros” photo! I spent six months of 2010 in Brazil and can testify that there is a growing consciousness among young men and women who prefer to be single rather than settle for a lackluster (or untrustworthy) relationship. Brazilians are also driven by passion and that fits with the quirkyalone penchant for passionate relationships. My book Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics was released in Brazil. Here is the Brazilian quirkyalone twitter account which has inspirational tidbits from my book Quirkyalone in Portuguese. Love.
My friend Laura informed me that South Korea has a National Singles Day too on June 14. Single people get together on “Black Day” to eat noodles with black bean sauce.
Below are the blog posts that have generated the most comments:
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1. Sex and the Single Celiac
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2. Five Reasons to Travel Alone
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3. Antidotes to Online Dating
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4. Pumpkin, Squash, and How to Use Your Intuition to Find Love (or a Lover)
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5. Freshen Up Your Wild, Precious Life with Quirkyalone Day
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6. Quantify Your Self-Reflection with 750words.com
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7. Watch and Listen as I Get Serenaded by a Taxi-Driving Tango Singer
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8. Turned-On Women Get Organized
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9. It's A Movement
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10. CONTEST ALERT: If Life is a Game, How Do You Want to Play? Win free coaching with Sasha
Radically Honest Online Dating
Sep 16, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Dating, Featured, Quirkytogether
Welcome to the online candy store of love, our dystopic world of disposable dating. Internet dating can become an exercise in ego stroking and gratification, getting emails and winks about how pretty and wonderful you are. It can be a perpetual dip into window shopping for love, rather than a means to an end of actually meeting someone and patiently getting to know them. Find a flaw, and it’s on to the next person.
In cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, where online dating has been destigmatized, it’s easy to meet someone new for drinks, much harder but to build a relationship that spans longer than four dates. So perhaps the answer is not to shy away from online dating, but to transform it.
Perhaps one solution is Radically Honest Online Dating (RHOD). The idea came to me, as most ideas do, from a conversation with a friend.
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Dear Quirkyalone: Am I Too Picky?
Aug 31, 2009 - Written by Onely | Filed under: Dating, Featured, Single Life
“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It appears every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. Quirkyalone and Onely welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.
Dear Quirkyalone: Are single people over a certain age too picky? Is that so wrong? – Special K 
Dear Special K,
Here’s my short answer: No, and No.
But to be more specific:
First, I’d like to consider the phrase “too picky.” The way I see it, being “picky” is not in and of itself a “bad” thing, though our culture often seems to say so. Let’s say we’re talking about food: If you order the specialty burger at your favorite restaurant that comes loaded with toppings – in this case bacon, blue cheese, arugula, avocado, and mushrooms – but the taste and texture of mushrooms make you want to puke, it’s pretty reasonable to ask for the burger without the mushrooms. If you are too shy, uncertain, or simply unaware to articulate this taste, you’ll likely leave the restaurant dissatisfied and/or hungry.
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Zeitgeist | Imaginary Bitches (A Review)
Aug 28, 2009 - Written by Deborah Hymes | Filed under: Dating, Featured, Friendship, Movies, Pop Culture, Relationships, Single Life, Video
Choosing to remain single in a coupled world is sometimes a lonely gig, never more so than when all of your close friends are smugly cocooned in their couple-bubbles. It can make you feel like the last single person on Earth.
As once-single friends morph into couples, it often becomes irritatingly apparent that they no longer understand the challenges or perspectives of singledom. You sometimes feel like hitting them over the head, yet you still love them and yearn for common ground to maintain your friendships. This painful conflict is played out to hilarious effect in the engaging Web series Imaginary Bitches.
Eden is the last single girl in her circle of friends, refusing to compromise her standards simply to have a boyfriend. After an amazing date with a guy she really likes, Eden calls each of her friends to share her exciting news, but they’re only interested in talking about their relationships. Increasingly dispirited with each aborted call, Eden discovers, to her astonishment, that she has conjured an imaginary friend named Catherine—a friend who’s avidly interested in discussing all the details of Eden’s date.
But Catherine proves to be less a “friend” than a total bitch, with something nasty to say about Eden and all of her real girlfriends. That’s right, Eden herself is not exempt from Catherine’s bitchiness. Furthermore, Catherine is soon joined by a second imaginary bitch named Heather. The imaginary bitches quickly establish their presence in all of Eden’s relationships, leaving her to deal with the fallout even as they help her sort out her friendships and her love life.
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Why Do People Stay In Bad Relationships?
Aug 17, 2009 - Written by Onely | Filed under: Featured, Relationships
“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It appears every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. We welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.
Dear Quirkyalone,
When a woman is in a relationship with a guy who everyone else can see is treating her badly, what goes on in the woman’s mind that prevents her from seeing these very same things? How does she qualify staying with this guy and why? What’s behind the excuses she makes for him?– Bobby
Hi Bobby,
This is an excellent question indeed. While I can’t claim to be able to speak for the woman in question, I can offer a few theories (which, as a side note, could be applied to either men or women, as well as lesbians and gay men):
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Zeitgeist | Defending Marriage . . . and Singledom
Aug 13, 2009 - Written by Deborah Hymes | Filed under: Featured, Pop Culture, Quirkytogether, Relationships, Single Life
You’d think it was the first time anyone’s ever gotten a divorce.
Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent admission in The Atlantic that she’s divorcing her husband after 20 years (following her own extramarital affair) has ignited a firestorm of high-minded controversy debating the pros and cons of marriage. The story was picked up nationally, with nearly all the major news outlets chiming in online, on air and in print.
The particular point of contention is Ms. Loh’s theory that perhaps the reason we have a divorce culture is because we marry too often. Citing “all the abject and swallowed misery” she observes in modern marriage, she wonders, “Why do we still insist on marriage?”
Then she really gets down to it, ending her polemic with a
?>“final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.”
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The Truth About Me and Quirkyalone
Jun 21, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Featured, Quirkytogether, Relationships, Single Life
Transparency is a major buzzword in Internet circles these days. It’s about sharing who you are through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, enough to make you seem more real and a little vulnerable. Transparency is said to bring us closer together. In business and government, transparency theoretically makes institutions more accountable.
It’s strange to be a nonfiction writer who has always specialized in writing about culture through the prism of my own life now that everyone is sharing tidbits of their lives online. I’m suspicious of the belief that we should all be transparent. I know how carefully I and other nonfiction writers and memoirists consider which stories and details to share. We don’t tell them in real-time. It’s impossible to predict how careless sharing will haunt us in the future, whether in the workplace or a relationship.
But now I feel blocked, I decided to give the whole transparency thing a try. What’s the worst thing that can happen? If there’s anything I’m passionate about, it’s honest communication.
I have decided that it might be interesting to be more transparent at this moment about my tangle of ambivalence regarding quirkyalone ten years after originally writing an essay defining the term (and five years after publishing my book).
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