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Past Week's Offers | March 2010 | February 2010 |
Most of us are familiar with "the butterfly effect," which the intrepid Wikipedia does an exemplary job of describing as: "a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system." The layperson's description may be closer to: the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in South America can impact the atmospheric events around the world. There are plenty of examples of the butterfly effect in physics, but we are more familiar with the use of the butterfly effect as a device in fiction. Popular movies like It's a Wonderful Life, Brazil, and Run, Lola, Run use the metaphor to show the fragility of our reality, the importance or perhaps the lack of importance of our anguished-over or even frivolous choices. TV shows like the Simpsons use the device for humor and hidden meaning. Books about time travel tackle the idea of changing the future by going back to the past.
For the past year and a half, I've been involved with negotiations to sell my father's farm, a small parcel of land smack dab in the middle-of-nowhere Minnesota. I grew up there, and grew restless there, and was then presented with selling the property in the midst of this recession where foreclosures that are in better shape than my family farm populate the market and can be had for not very much. Its been a dispiriting challenge resembling nothing if not herding cats. Just when I think I've got all the cats (agent, lawyer, banks, buyers) in the bag, one escapes and gives me a long, red and angry scratch in the process. And that's not even considering just the emotional upheaval that comes from deciding to sell a home where I spent my childhood, a farm that has been in my family for many generations. While our memories don't reside in the places we once lived, it is difficult, to say the least, to lose the those representatives of the past.
On a less sentimental note, this herding of the proverbial cats has challenged my negligible ability to negotiate.
I was about 18 months old when I had my first sip of coffee at my own baby shower (I was adopted, so my birth party was a bit belated). Apparently my father's cousin, Beryl, who was nicely referred to as eccentric, held the white ceramic cup, the kind so often found in Lutheran church basements, up to my lips. My mother retold that story every time I, as a child, begged for a sip of her coffee, for just a splash from the pot, blaming Beryl for my early taste for coffee. While I don't remember that specific incident, I have a plethora of memories in which coffee plays a bit part. My parents drank Folgers, and in the empty metal cans, we collected food scraps for the dog in a can kept under the sink, stored a handful of bullets for our one old shotgun in another kept in the broom closet, gathered stray color crayons in another when the appeal for keeping them tidy in their Crayola boxes wore off. When my mother hosted Bible study or Ladies' Aid luncheons, she took her collection of ornate and mismatched cups and saucers, accumulated from years of travel and inherited from family members, out from the hutch where they were displayed, hand washed them, and served coffee to her guests, quite decorously, in them.
The smell and taste of coffee flavors my memories of my childhood, just as it accents my mornings now. No doubt you have similar memories.
My brother had a theory: there are three kinds of people in this world. Music people. TV people. Book people. And, he went on, if the person you are in a relationship with happened to be a different kind of "people" than you, well then, that relationship was doomed. At the time, he had just left a long-term relationship and reasoned that she was a TV person and he was a music person, so the two of them simply could not have lived together in harmony.
Best to get this out in the open since I'm following in the footsteps of the inBubbleGuys who brought a lot of their love of baseball to inBubbleWrap: I'm a sports fan. I doubt I'll write about sports often, but I probably think about life in sports metaphors more often than your average nerdy female bookworm. But I grew up sitting alongside my dad and brother every Sunday afternoon watching the Minnesota Vikings, or even more memorable to me, listening to the Twins broadcasting through our house via my father's bedside digital clock/radio late into the quiet country nights, the sound of the bat and the crowd, the voices of the commentators underlined with the crickets' rhythmic chirping.
Oh the pressure of assuming the mantle of inBubble curator! I assure you that I understand the significance of my new role. To put your mind at ease, I will tell you that I was responsible for the hiring of both inBubbleGuy and inBubbleBrother. I hope that fact, at the very least, gives evidence of my good judgment, my level of taste. I will also tell you that I have the utmost respect for their writing ability, but even more so, their love of a good story, which I believe is the engine that powers inBubbleWrap (you know, other than the free books). As the voice of inBubbleWrap, I hope to tell you some good stories. I hope to put some good books into your hands and, by extension, put some good information and ideas into your heads. (Now if only I can come up with a clever inBubbleMoniker and I need your help, so click through to the end to find out what you could win by submitting your suggestions.) So, let's get on with the giveaway and my first post, shall we?
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"We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week." —Bob Slydell, Office Space
We resurrected this site just over a year ago. Like a Phoenix, that mythical firebird in Patrick Lencioni's short fables, inBubbleWrap gloriously arose from it's own ashes, took on a human form, and spread business books like seeds to the four corners of these United States (except in Hawaii, Alaska and, strangely, Arkansas—where state lottery laws forbid our offers. What do you have against Ram Charan, Arkansas?).
We started this site back up again in an attempt to give away each of the books reviewed in Jack and Todd's 100 Best Business Books of All Time. We weren't able to get them all, but the ones we could get, we have given away. All except for today's offer, Warren Bennis's On Becoming a Leader.
