Are you stressed out and juggling too many balls in the air? Are you looking for a sense of calm? Do you feel like you need to tap into deep sources of energy, motivation, and talent?

Have no Fear, Clever Doc is here with some questions for you about the way that you are living your life. And maybe some suggestions about how to slow down and smell the roses.

Clever Doc is a good friend of OTBKB. Her real name is Linda Hawes Clever, MD, MACP. An internist, she is the founder of an organization called Renew. She is also an occupational health specialist with a national reputation for activism and for professional and community service.

Galvanized by the growing exhaustion she observed among fellow health professionals and inspired by the work of John W. Gardner, founder of Common Cause and former Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, Dr. Clever and colleagues formally launched RENEW in 2000.

Clever Doc wants to know: Is your daily whirl really just a whirrr of "doing something"? What about being effective? What about having some meaning and purpose? What about joy?

And what about when life delivers a knockout punch?

    I had a busy, busy, busy but manageable life awhile back, Then my parents died, our home was burglarized, cutbacks evaporated two jobs that I loved, and my husband needed life saving surgery. All in 18 months.   

    Eventually, I surfaced, looked around, and saw that I wasn’t the only one wondering how to do it all or, if not “all”, how to decide what to do and how to do it well.

    Many of us, whether 20- somethings or 40, 60, 80-somethings, wonder how to make it over the long haul. We have plenty to accomplish; plenty of reason to be creative, enthusiastic, focused; plenty of need to be resilient.  But how?

    Over years of learning and listening to groups that engage in “renewing,” I’ve found that a four-step process can get things rolling again.

    Step one starts today: Wake up and smell the coffee (at Connecticutt Muffin, Gorilla, or wherever else you go). Begin to notice how the people you care about are doing and feeling.

    Then ask yourself the first of ten questions. A new one will be rolled out every few days. Let them be an alarm clock.

    Keep track of your answers and your score. Leave comments here.

    THE FIRST QUESTION IS THIS:
    1.    How many times did you really laugh yesterday?
    0 (0 points)
    1 – 2 (1 point)
    3 – 4 (2 points)
    5 – 6 (3 points)                           
    6 + (4 points)

Was it just last year that Patti Smith performed an impromptu concert at the opening of the Brooklyn Museum’s Annie Lebowitz show?

Was that really just a year ago? Seems like ages ago.

Well OTBKB decided not to go to the opening (her loss big time). Luckily Brooklyn Beat was there and he wrote a nice piece about it. And then he started a blog called, Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn.

It was just a year ago that I attended a member’s opening at the
Brooklyn Museum and caught Patti Smith and band perform live. It was so
cool, bringing so much art and excitement together, that I had to do
something with it, which led me to write about the evening. I had
become familiar with Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and on a whim, sent
the report there. Fortunately for me, Louise Crawford of Only the Blog
Knows Brooklyn. com immediately responded to my story and posted it. I
was hooked.

Blogging has the immediacy of electronic journalism but,
since it is essentially a literary, or at least largely word-based
medium, it demands some reflection. All of that works for me. I wrote a
number of posts for OTBKB, and had stuff picked up by other blogs as
well, which is a unique experience to see your stuff out there and
wonder how it got picked up. People have many reasons to blog. I see
that some folks bring a strong current of interest in neighborhoods and
commerce, with a particular focus on real estate and development issues
and the like. Others focus on aspects of their world, however minute,
and manage to impart meaning. Blogging seems like an open book, and the
bottom line is whatever works for you.

Sitting in my Brooklyn dining room, I hear news on WNYC that wild fires continue to burn their way through Southern California.  500,000 have been evacuated from their homes, the largest evacuation in California history.

The Santa Ana winds are partly to blame.

The Santa Ana winds with their hurricane like speeds, the weather, and the dryness brought on by drought have conspired to make this a devastating natural tragedy the likes of which LA has never seen.

Joan Dideon wrote about the Santa Ana winds in her magnificent book of essays, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem." If it’s not in this collection, please let me know. Here’s an excerpt.

"There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension.  What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.  For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.  I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too.  We know it because we feel it.  The baby frets.  The maid sulks.  I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.  To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

"I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew.  I could see why.  The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf.  The heat was surreal.  The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather."  My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete.  One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

"Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland.  That is quite misleading.  In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes:  two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.  At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.  The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.  In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains…"

This from the Daily News:

On Tuesday, Puppetry Art Theatre’s Timothy Young uninvited dancers from
Scores who had signed on as volunteers for Saturday’s second annual
Haunted Halloween Carnival Benefit at Middle School 51 in Brooklyn.

Young
said he asked the strippers to stay away because he was afraid the Park
Slope school would cancel on him or sponsors would back out.

"It
was a small, insignificant part of the event," Young said. "I uninvited
them because I don’t want to compromise the event, the organization or
the school."

Young’s group is raising money for its work in
shelters, and volunteers were to help with a special pizza party and
costume giveaway for 300 homeless and hospitalized children the group
works with.

MS51 Principal Lenore Berner asked that the strippers
be excluded from the festivities, said Department of Education
spokesman David Cantor.

"It is not a school event," he said.
"Because many children will attend, however, the benefit is not an
appropriate venue for volunteers identified as adult dancers."

In
addition to dancers, Scores bartenders and office workers had planned
to attend, said Elda Auerbach, who does promotions for the club. Now no
one is going.

"I don’t want the charity to get hurt," she said yesterday.

The
revoked invitations came after yesterday’s Daily News reported that the
strippers had been invited. They were not planning to wear
inappropriate outfits – instead coming as fully dressed witches or
sorcerers.

This from New York 1:

Five people were hospitalized Tuesday after a car jumped a curb at a Brooklyn bus stop.

The crash happened in front of Borough Hall on Court Street at around 1:30 Tuesday afternoon.

Police say the driver only had a learner’s permit and was left
alone temporarily by a person with a license. The accident happened
when the person with the permit was asked to move the car.

Witnesses described a chaotic scene.

"She just started backing up and she couldn’t control the car so
she backed into a BMW,” said one witness. “She just started to put the
gear in drive, she started driving, and she hit a pedestrian."

As of Tuesday night, the police had not yet announced charges in the case and say all five victims have non-life-

A Brooklyn Life had this report from the Cobble Hill Cinema:

We saw the 8 p.m. showing of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited at Cobble Hill. When we exited the theater there was a verrrrrry long line waiting to get into the 10 p.m. showing. If a survey of the entire U.S. were to be conducted, I predict that Cobble Hill would come out as the most friendly Wes Anderson neighborhood in the country.

New York Metro reports that there was a vigil attended by 100 people for Craig Murphy, the cyclist who was killed last Thursday night.

More than a hundred people lit candles and walked in silence along Union Avenue Sunday night to remember the life and commemorate the tragic death of Craig Murphey, a 26-year-old man who was killed when his bicycle collided with a truck last week.

Murphey, who worked with the West Harlem Action Network Against Poverty and founded a scheme to bring fresh produce to low income communities, was remembered as “iconic” and “unique” by his friends.
“He always put people ahead of himself,” said friend Greg Bersnitz. “People often talk about doing that. But he lived it.”

Following the procession, Murphey’s friends gathered around a ghost bike memorial at Ten Eyck Street and Union Avenue, near where he was killed. They laid candles and flowers and told stories about Murphey’s life — frequently bursting into laughter followed by tears.

The Daily News reports that Mark Morris Dance Group offers dance classes for those with Parkinson’s Disease. Here’s a quote from the article:

Over the next 75 minutes, teachers Leventhal, John Heginbotham and Misty Owens got their dance students out of their chairs and put them through their paces. There were demi-pliés at ballet barres, modern dance and tap steps, and marches across the studio floor to the strains of “Seventy-Six Trombones.” The group also did moves from the company’s own repertoire.

Hepcat talked to the great Volvo expert, Lorenzutti on Douglas Street, and now thinks that Goldie can be saved. Lorenzutti says that the car just needs a new gasket and he can do the work.

What that means is that we are having the car towed from Ft. Lee, New Jersey to Douglas Street at a cost of $275 plus tolls and tax.

Then we’ll see what Lorenzutti can do. If it’s super expensive we will probably pass.

Hepcat is quite agitated about all of this. He’s not sure if he wants to THROW more money into this 20-year-old car. Goldie has been an incredibly reliable, great car for the ten years that we’ve owned her.

I first saw her driving down Greene Street in SoHo with her old owner with a For Sale sign on the window. I ran after her and at the stoplight told the owners that we were interested.

A few days later, Hepcat took a bus to southern New Jersey and picked up the car from the owners.

It’s been ten good years with Goldie. Hepcat and Teen Spirit drove her cross country country in the summer of 2001. And what an adventure it was: they drove Goldie to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, the Warhol Museum, the St. Louis Arch, Denver, Colorado, the Salt Flats in Nevada and the beach at San Francisco and many other places in between.

Hepcat’s mother and sister drove the car east a few weeks after 9/11. Because of the New York plates, they were cheered all the way across the country.

But she seems to be on her last wheels now.

It may be time for a new car. Not a new new car, of course. Hepcat only buys used cars. But something a bit more up to date.

What cars do you like?

Read Seeing Green on the tragic deaths of two bikers last Thursday.

“Since then it appears that the issue was not as clear; maybe he was not going the wrong way at all. Mea culpa on this level. Certainly one respondent to my comment on OTBKB did not agree with me:

in any case the point being made by transportation alternatives, that we need more protected bike lanes, remains valid. and chandru, while i agree that there are many cyclists out there who endanger themselves with their riding habits, your “no-helmet” stance will always make you vulnerable to such accusations. regardless of whether the driver or the cyclist was “at fault”, one of them is dead. he was someone’s son, someone’s brother, many people’s friend, and he was only 26 years old. that is deserving of outrage.

In defense, firstly, I did not mean to minimize the tradegy of the accident, but an objective look at the cause requires you to not assume the vehicle was automatically at fault.

As one who cycles a lot and grew up cycling in India (if you can cycle there, you can cycle anywhere,) my point, which got lost, is that if (as I often do) you travel the wrong way on a street, it’s your responsibility to watch out for traffic that has the right of way. I often stop completely if I see a vehicle which, in my judgment, is not going to be respectful of my space. While my comment may seem intemperate, it was also a response to the many comments (say, on streetsblog)which suggest that any accident is always the vehicle’s fault. Many cyclists commenting there also exhibit a level of entitlement (especially towards pedestrians) which I am sure makes it easier for them to see slights in every vehicular move. Many also talk about doing 15-20mph on Manhattan streets; this is close to being suicidal by anyone. Bikes just do not have the stopping power and margin of safety that makes them safe at this speed in traffic, bike lane or no.

Fostering a us-vs-them attitude does no one any good.”