Quirkyalone: It’s a mindset

Happy International Quirkyalone Day from Brazil!

Feb 05, 2010 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: IQD

Happy International Quirkyalone Day, or, should I say, Feliz Dia Internacional do SoSingular! This year will be the eight annual celebration of International Quirkyalone Day, a holiday that I have grown to love dearly–for me, it’s on par with Thanksgiving as my favorite holiday. IQD is not anti-Valentine’s Day. It just happens to fall on the same day. IQD turns a cliche-ridden day of angst into a liberating opportunity to connect with others (or to celebrate alone). There are thousands of ways to embrace your life and your significant others, plural. Here are 10 ways to celebrate IQD.

Usually I throw a party in San Francisco to celebrate, but for the first time since launching IQD in 2003, I am on the road on February 14. I am actually in Curitiba right now, a Brazilian city famed for its progressive urban planning. On IQD, I will be in the mad sea of Carnaval in Recife and Olinda, Northeastern Brazilian cities. Recife and Olinda boast a wild and participatory Carnaval (that some say is the best in the country), featuring a wide diversity of traditional music and dance: samba, axe, the drum-driven beats of maracatu and fast-paced frevo. I’ll make sure to hold up a sign, Happy IQD!, at some point. Check back here for a photo.

Quirkyalone was published in Brazil with the title SoSingular. It’s actually my favorite cover of all the international and American versions. That photo of the girl on her bed–what eyes!–is just perfect. I am traveling with a copy to share and it’s a pretty fun way to learn the nuances of a language, reading my own book.

Oh, in Brazil, the Dia dos Namoradas (Day of the Enamored) is actually June 12. They couldn’t possibly celebrate romantic love during Carnaval. Toooo crazy. If I am still here, maybe I will start Brasileiro SoSingular Day on June 12. Book your ticket now.

Wherever you are on February 14, I wish you a fabulous Quirkyalone Day! Let us know how you will celebrate in the comments.

My Big Life Churn

Jan 12, 2010 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Travel

A preamble: First, apologies for the long gap in posts. I’ve been distracted from blogging by much tumult in my life, a combination of family stuff and a long-anticipated dream that has required much planning. As I post this, I am sitting in Logan Airport at the Fox Sports Box bar, sipping a Cosmopolitan and using the fabulously free holiday wifi provided by Google. I’m about to fly to Brazil for 4-6 (or really, who knows how many) months for a very unplanned adventure. Below is something that I wrote to explain this period of my life to myself (and others). In many ways, this is an extremely quirkyalone journey, but in ways that might not be immediately apparent. How much I will write and share online, I haven’t decided. Check this space, or my personal site. Somewhere along the way, or when it’s all over, I’ll be posting stories and reflections.

“For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.”—Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel”

I am officially in a “life churn” mode. When I’m feeling more Australian and mystical, I might call it my walkabout. I like the violence in the words “life churn”; there is something comfortingly accurate about the language. There is something violent in making big life changes. For me, that was disassembling my apartment of four years. My couch is scattered to the Craigslist winds. A friend is driving my Corolla “Martha,” and my belongings are in beautifully taped purchased boxes (a move so adult and unlike all my others) and squeezed into an 11 x 6 storage unit.

Three suitcases worth of clothes for all seasons are at my mother’s house in Rhode Island, where I am staging my vagabonding adventures. I obsessively compare flights on Kayak and Vayama. I’ve purchased way too many Lonely Planets, because it’s way too hard to decide where to go. For the next six months, I will mostly be on walkabout: so far the known countries are Iceland, France, and Brazil, but honestly anything could happen. That is largely what I am seeking: the unexpected.

My friend Chris coined the term “life churn” a few years ago when we were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We were talking about our respective homes, where we had lived since college graduation (New York City for him, and San Francisco for me) and whether we should move.

We’ve both been stay-ers for the previous ten years and wondered if we were missing out by being so faithful to one city. Chris suggested that life churns are good for you: they shake things up and get you out of old patterns and into new ones. It’s part of the whole “change is good” philosophy (or assumption). The term “life churn” sounded genius to me, and I filed it away as part of my private lexicon.

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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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Multitasking Dementia

Sep 01, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Personal Growth, technology

I had no memory of where I parked my car. Why? While I was parking the car, a friend called. Against my better judgment I took the call. I wanted to talk to him, and I found myself so engrossed in the experience of telling him everything that happened with our mutual loved one (who is suffering from cancer) over the last month, that I had apparently no memory of where I parked the car. All I could remember was the sensation of walking over a pedestrian overpass, and looking for the spa, where ironically, I was going to relax.

The theme of the day was multitasking. I blamed multitasking for the incident. I lost my car, but first believed it might be stolen. It’s always fun when those two questions obsessively course through your brain: Did I lose my car or was it stolen? After 30 minutes of scouring for it on foot, I flagged down a cop who amazingly helped me find the car by driving around with me. He was my savior. After thirty more minutes we found it. I gushed, “Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.” I think he thought I was the most tightly wound woman in San Francisco.

Some defenders call it, “continuous partial attention.” I think they are kidding themselves. Just that morning, I found myself unable to stop emailing while listening to an absolutely riveting KQED Forum radio show about our increasing propensity to text, IM, email, and watch videos while doing everything else. The Stanford study expected “heavy media multitaskers” to have special abilities, but instead, but all they found were deficits in their memory, efficiency, attention, and organizational skills, as compared to non-heavy-media multitaskers. HMMs have the illusion of productivity, but the brain’s switching costs, from emailing to IM to video to writing, are too high. The brain can only process one string of information at once.

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