Friday Menagerie: Collection #10

The “Friday Menagerie” is a handful of links & tweets & other goodnesses from around the web that I gather throughout the week and then corral into a post. Stuff I loved, found fascinating, got a kick out of, etc. Please to enjoy!

Night Links

• The key to being a good dancer? Simple: A “varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.” So concludes a team of psychologists who studied what made men’s move-busting attempts attractive to heterosexual women… and also made a rather humorous dancing avatar to demonstrate.
• “Fear means it isn’t happening,” writes Julien Smith. In his post about what fear means, he points out that if you’re afraid of something happening, then that thing is not actually happening. If it was happening, you’d be reacting to it, doing something about it. But if you’ve got the time and mental space to fret over it? Then it’s probably not occurring. “If it’s happening, you deal with it. If you’re just worried, you’re already probably doing fine.” Whoa. True–but I never realized that before.
• Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care for many years, caring for patients who’d returned home to die. She distilled her experience into the five most common regrets she heard her patients mention–every one of them hit home with me. Which ones strike a chord with you?
• “No one has an opinion until someone else has an opinion” and “Remember, this is what you wanted” are two of the eight pieces of advice Gretchen Rubin shares from her sister. They’re good. I wish she hadn’t used 3 of her 8 on Los Angeles-specific advice, but the other 5 are still good even for non-LAers.
• Creative burnout is a fact of life when you work daily with creative pursuits. So what do you do about it? Ali Hale & Thursday Bram asked 30 people that question, and compiled the responses into a great post, The Truth About Creative Burnout. Lots of fantastic perspective and advice. And yours truly shows up at #14!
• Chalene Johnson works out with me almost every day. Not in person–but on DVD. She’s the bubbly blonde star of the Turbo Jam videos, which I absolutely love. She’s also a powerhouse successful entrepreneur with very full typical days. What I like about this post is the honesty: she doesn’t pretend to work some mythical four hours a week, or to spend most of her time kicked back with her feet resting on piles of passive income. She works hard, and she works a lot. If you’re under the impression that self-employment success automatically means short days of little work, or if you fear that you’re doing it wrong if you’re not to that point, this is a nice reality check.

Tweet Home Alabama

• If you change the word “wrong” to “different” the world becomes friendlier and far more interesting. @lizstrauss
• Dear Supreme Being, why did you make me care so much? Why couldn’t you have made me more like that guy at the DMV? @sparkyfirepants
• I’m not man enough to do anything. Good thing I’m plenty of woman. @kyeli
• Fear is an insufficiency of curiosity. @cathduncan
• Your fashion choices, your words, your decisions–all need more BALLS. @julien
• Good advice helps you find the solution to your problem. Great advice helps you find you were solving the wrong problem. @hotdogsladies
• As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is. -Ram Dass @SuperSpiritGirl

This Week’s Jukebox: Summer Slipping Edition

You can visit the Friday Menagerie Jukebox playlist anytime, all week long!
If you’re viewing this in a feed reader, you may need to click through to see the videos.

This week’s lineup consists of songs that I associate with the first breezes of autumn, and the waning days of summertime, when you can first start to feel summer slipping away and autumn preparing to unfurl. Hence, the Summer Slipping Edition of the Jukebox.

01. Night Moves by Bob Seger

02. Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd

03. American Baby by Dave Matthews Band

04. Summer Breeze by Seals & Crofts

05. Summer In The City by The Lovin’ Spoonful

06. Summer Nights by Richard Marx

07. The Boys of Summer by Don Henley

Image credit: Summer Wasting by Stathis Stavrianos | CC License