You know the songs that make you want to thank the musicians? Anyone else have those?

Well this is one of mine.

Keep playin it goofy, Devendra.

Baby is track 3 on What Will We Be. Without a question mark.

Thought about posting Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.

Turns out I already have. It spurred a little discussion about mustaches. Which is often the goal on this blog.

This song works way better anyway.

Gamble Everything For Love is track 2 on Awake Is the New Sleep.

I think we were walking north on 18th St. 

We'd walked all the way from the ceremony grounds at The Capitol and cut through the grass halfway between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.  We passed swarming jumbotrons.  We jumped a barrier.  We high-fived a giant raccoon.  We did not buy a totally awesome but totally outrageously priced peace sign Obama button from an Asian hippie with dreadlocks.  We walked uphill against a trotting sea of latecomers.

And we kept our eyes out for the perfect street to take us back east to Union Station.

Giuliana: G might be our street.
Jake: G for Giuliana.
Giuliana: G for Good.
Jake: G for Gangsta.
Giuliana: G for God.

Neither of us have any idea what we were talking about.  But we laughed.  And took H instead.

After spending the past two weeks surrounded by our cousins and overflowing with the goofiness we inspire in each other, my sister and I decided last night that we need to keep heavy doses of uncontrollable laughter in our lives forever. 

No adult seriousness.  Never.

There is tragedy everywhere.  Tragedy in the mundane.  Tragedy in comedy.  And we should feel it and acknowledge it.  That's compassion. 

But there is comedy everywhere too.  Comedy in tragedy.  Comedy in pain and fear and death and anger.  And feeling that and acknowledging it is not taking things too seriously, remembering that, whether or not you take it as deep as Bill Hicks did, it really is just a ride.

We figure all we need are the right people around to help us find the funny.  And the occasional return to Step Brothers for inspiration.

Let's say there is a desirable and attainable and even archetypal psychological arc to life.  One running parallel to the ignorance to knowledge to wisdom arc. 

Does it flow from uninformed, giggly bliss to brave gravity?  Or does it flow from frustrated suffering to smiling, enlightened invincibility?

I think Steinbeck chooses the latter:

She went back to work.  "Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?" she asked.

"I don't see how it could be any other way," said Lee.  "Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time."

I support that choice.

A lot of people talk about the Jewish media, but the Mormon media is, like, so much better.

LIKE, so much better. 

I love it.

That's Jonah Peretti.  He presented this morning on viral marketing.

He thinks Judaism is a great religion, but he's unimpressed with its growth.  Population wise, the Mormons caught up in 2007.  And that's ridiculous.  In 1950, Jews outnumbered Mormons 11 to 1. 

What happened?

The Mormons went viral.  They baked evangelism into the Mormon "user experience," and they grew.  Judaism tried to grow with product quality and product quality alone, and, despite a perfectly solid product, they didn't grow.  They lost market share.  Lost it to institutionalized evangelism and a some stories about white native North Americans, a long winded angel, and a failed fortune teller with an exceptionally generic name.

And that was one of Jonah's points: study the Mormons; they're good at viral marketing.

Another point (one that really hit me hard given my recent thoughts about change, smiles, and rock and roll) relates to silliness.

In order for anything to spread virally, it has to be contagious, and Jonah believes, based on his own exceptional (and, apparently, originally, accidental) success at creating contagious content (Nike Sweatshop Shoes, The Rejection Line, Black People Love Us, Buzz Feed), that one way to get contagious is to get silly.

Focus on people that are bored at work.  Give them something that'll wake them up, something that'll snap them into action and inspire them to forward an email. 

Shock works sometimes.  Horror.  Nudity.  Kittens.  And silliness. 

Once again, I think of Stephen Stills:

Fear is the lock and laughter the key to your heart.

I think it's good when people step away for a moment from the intensity of their work and life and stop taking themselves so seriously. 

BusinessWeek's Election Blog just posted this.  About a softball game. And a metaphor.

If we're going to save the world and remain sane while we do it, we're going to have to be able to keep laughing.

Thinking about this and writing those last few sentences convinced me to search back into my email to find one of my favorite rock and roll quotes.

I found it, and I think the little bit of context from my email is kind of fun too, so I'm posting both.  It's fun to think back to more than a year ago when we were first considering the possibility of pursuing The Carrot Project (or whatever we were calling it back then), and, as always, it's hugely inspiring to read that quote.

"I'm working on these interfaces and adding text where text is due, and since I don't actually KNOW anything about what I'm writing, I'm just kind of being silly, and being silly has sent this totally excellent quote running through my head.  It's from Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young:

And laughter the key to your heart.

Man.

That's a line.

And this is one of the first times they ever played the song live...

David Crosby's mustache is amazing. Inspiring, in fact. If I ever become a
rock star, one of the first things I'm going to do is grow a mustache.

Then I'll learn Almost Cut My Hair and rock it hard at my next show.

I talked to the Nevinator last night about the future of the remnants of LanguageCalls, his day job plans moving forward, and what I see lying ahead for The Carrot Project.  Nevin's an unusual guy, but I'm glad to know him and have him in the carrot project orbit.

Overwhelmed by the document clutter on my desktop, a had a scan a few minutes ago for things I could delete or drop into folders.  I found a note titled Andrew Nevin Jan 13.  Given last night's call, I opened it up.

There were a couple of questions in there, a couple of ideas Andrew had given me back in January, and a two line dialogue I'd wanted not to forget.

Jake: What are you gonna do tomorrow?
Mimi: Get into as much trouble as I can.

Mimi died five days later. 

Hard for me to imagine a better granny. 

http://www.moreperfectmarket.com/2008/01/used-tissues.html

And hard for me to imagine a more characteristic joke.  Mimi was funny right through the morphine, right down to the very end.  It made things so much easier, knowing that she was still having fun.

Great to come across a little something like that.  I'm glad I wrote it down, glad I left it on my cluttered desktop, and glad the conversation with Nevin last night led me back to it today.