Are you of use?

More things to learn

Habits becoming your character

Goal doing

Success = Finished Goals

Damn you Milt and Edie for being so right. Why are you so cruel in your eight words? Because you probably know your audience. Struggling screenwriters pounding the pavement in Burbank sipping their coffee at Priscilla's wondering why no one will hire them and their half completed screenplays.

Who is the master sign maker behind the voice of Milt and Edie? Someone with a PhD in get your butt off the chair and finish that damn thing. Maybe it's a nagging mother. Or a stage momager.

That's what I picture now, a frustrated stage momager. Like one of those crazy ladies on "I Know My Kid's A Star". The signmaker at Milt and Edie's is actually making these signs for one person in particular that they are trying to motivate to finish a particular project.

Oh jesus, I got. It's actually an elaborate plan to motivate Axl Rose to finish Chinese Democracy. I think Geffen might be somewhere near Milt and Edie. What if they are hoping Axl sees the signs? Or maybe even he picks up his leather jackets at Milt and Edie's?

And did everyone hear about this? Dr. Pepper will offer a free can of Dr Pepper to everyone in America — excluding former Guns N' Roses guitarists Buckethead and Slash — if the band releases Chinese Democracy in 2008.

I hope I can get a can of the Diet Cherry Vanilla stuff. That stuff tastes like candy.

Be Good For Something

This is pressure. To not simply be good, but to be good for something. Look, Milt and Edie, it's hard enough to be good in this world. Seriously. I work hard every day on that one. Just yesterday I backed into someone's car and I had to make that age old decision to leave a note or not leave a note. I didn't end up hurting their car except I left a pretty dark mark on a nice white car. So I left a note and then got yelled at for leaving a note but I felt good about leaving note.

So let's talk about the note leaving incident. Maybe that was my moment to be good for something. I was being good for all the people who had bumped into cars and hadn't left notes. Or all the times that I had opened up my car door and scratched the other car and hadn't left a note (okay let's be honest that's more than I'd like admit, I'm a "wide car door opener")

Being good for something is more than just leaving a note. Parents have a reason to be good, they get to be a role model. I swear like a truck driver but when I'm around kids I try to keep my mouth clean. Kids have a reason to be good, because if they aren't their parents will punish them.

So without kids or without parents who am I being good for?

This in-between stage, when you aren't a kid and you aren't a parent is kind of an interesting moral time when you don't really have to be good for anyone. You don't really have to save money, you can go out all the time, you don't have to leave notes on cars, you can do what ever the hell you want, you don't have to bother to be good, let alone to be good for something.

Good thing Milt and Edie reminded me to think about being good for something. Or else I would have just rushed past that part.

Starting

Milt and Edie. How do you know so much about me and my inner soul? You look deep within to find the procrastinator inside. Staring down at me from a simple sign on the corner of Alameda and Pass Avenue. Telling me so much. Just start. Somewhere. Most likely right where I am. Brilliant.

No need to go searching for some complicated answer somewhere else, there's no long winded journey through therapy to find myself, my true self, my inner self, my authentic self. Why go through all that, spend all that time and all that money and all that introspection? When the answer is staring me right in the face. Right there. Right where I am. If I really want to get somewhere in life, I just need to start where I am.

Should Milt and Edie start their own line of cryptic yet inspirational T-shirts made up of sayings from their signs? Or inspirational posters like Successories? A friend of mine once worked in that store during college. I think she was actually quick demotivated working there. Surrounded by all that happiness and positivity all day made her want to smack a kitten at the end of each day.

There's this razor thin line between motivation and annoyance I've noticed. I've always tried to be positive and inspire people around me, but that can come off as super annoying some times. Too much cheerleading comes off as artifical. What's that from? Cynicism? Realism? Maybe there's not as much need for inspiration as I think?

I love the Milt and Edie signs. They inspire me and make me think deeply about myself for a couple of minutes when I'm at the traffic like at Pass and Alameda. And I wonder how many people in Burbank, who work at Disney and NBC, who work throughout Toluca Lake, at Bob's Big Boy, Priscilla's, Mo's, and Patty's are equally inspired and challenged.

Vividly

Now there's a word you don't see that often. Vividly. And I think that's even one of those words that if you say it too much it starts to lose its meaning.

I actually like the visual of this sign all the Ls in a row at the right. Vividly, Difficulty, Likely.

And it's a very staccato message. With the -ly at the end. Vividly. Difficulty. Likely. It kind of has a sing-songy thing going for it.

But back to the actual message. Do you want to know the funny thing about this one? I've started to pass out my Moocards. These are little mini business cards that you can print photos on. So I decided it would be funny if I printed Milt and Edit signs on the cards and passed them out like little fortune cookies to people. And last night was my first opportunity. So I passed this one out to a person who I thought could benefit from vividly realizing a difficulty.

And the first thing that my friend Cassandra said when looking at this card? "Why does it say a man?" That just cracks me up. I'm as much of a feminist as anyone. Seriously if you know me, I'm all about the women and the equal rights and equal pay. But if there's one thing I'm okay with, it's the quotes that say "man" in them. I'm not all about the need to "human" everything. I get it. I can make the leap from man to woman. It doesn't bother me. I've got other things to fight for like making sure that I get that dollar that my male boss is getting.

It was just so funny how I didn't even read that into the quote and that was the first thing that my friend saw.

Courage

This is another one of the signs that I'm not sure I understand what the sign maker was trying to say. Very zen like and philosophical but really, what the what?

I get the first part, it takes vision and courage to create. Create anything, writing, an album, a baby, a business, a mission statement, all those things take vision. The ability to see what people need that isn't out there and you need to provide it to them. The artist's third eye, seeing things differently. Apple's Think Different campaign.

But what about the second part? Faith and courage to prove? You gotta have faith, like George Michael says? Just as a little aside, I watched an episode of Eli Stone last night with GM and boy he looks rough. Drugs man, they don't do anything good for the skin.

Back to the faith. Actually the more I think about this quote the more I like it. That's typical of Milt and Edie. You start with vision, you end with faith but under it all is courage. Nice.

Dance

The funny thing about this sign was that it came in the middle of a very rainy period in Los Angeles. You can't really tell because of the blue skies behind Milt & Edie. But trust me, it's been raining more than usual in L.A. which is nice. I love the dry, clean, sparse feel you get from living in a desert...I've definitely got a little Howard Hughes in me, he loved the desert too...

But it didn't realize how much I missed the rain, even if only for a couple of weeks, until it started raining again in L.A. My windshield wipers didn't work of course because they dried out from never being used. And you can't see shit because there aren't any reflecters on the road. And everyone drives like crap because their windshield wipers don't work and they can't see shit. And the rain washes all the dirt off of the roads and makes it slick. See I bet you thought that everyone in L.A. couldn't drive in the rain because they were idiots. It's actually a combination of windshield wiper failure, lack of reflecters and dirt slicked roads. And everyone's a frickin' idiot.

There's definitely a lot of dancing going on lately in the rain though. It smells different in the city, like wet dog, but I kinda like it, mostly because I don't have live with a wet dog all year round. I'm sure if I lived in Seattle I'd just survive the storm. It's alot easier to dance in the rain when you only have a rainstorm once every couple of years.

I also like how we don't have hard pounding East Coast rain drops. We've got our own gentle Los Angeles varietal of rain that makes dealing with rain much more palatable and danceable. Plus we don't have lightning or thunder (I can never remember which) that's kind of weird, but I guess if you are a Southern California kid and you never grew up with it, you would never miss it. The sounds of rainstorms are muted in Los Angeles. The rain drops themsevles are muted.

We get rain-lite here and that's just enough rain for me to dance around and not feel too bad about the weather.

Journey

Okay this is one of my favorite sign posts so far. This is like a little message from the Fools Of Chelm.

But then it's also freaking me out a little bit. What if I don't know where I'm going? The problem is I don't know where I'm going half the time! I've got tons of directions that I'm going in, I'm not focused, I'm looking for a path in a million different places!

So that just means that I'm probably going to miss it when I get there. So I think I need to just take a note from Nissan's famously weird and annoying ad campaign and "Enjoy The Ride".

I kinda can't believe that I'm commenting on dry cleaning signs and quoting car company commercials, but maybe that's my path right now.

Friendship

Again once you start thinking about these a little too hard, maybe they fall apart. Because on the surface this seems like one of the sweet ones. It's a sign all about friendship cementing us together. Aw. This could be on a Hallmark card.

But what if sign maker was commenting on a loveless marriage? Where friendship was the only thing holding it all together. No more love, passion, romance, sex, intensity. All that couple has is friendship. And apparently rock hard cement.

Or if it is a couple of friends, really, that's it, that's all we have, friendship? Why wouldn't love also be the glue in our relationship? Or memories, that makes a great cement. How about common experiences?

I'd maybe take out the only. It seems so limiting.

Oh Milt & Edie, how you challenge my thinking with your deceptively simple signs.

Confidence

What the hell does this one mean exactly?

I like the first part, it's about spreading confidence. Positive, spiritual, easy to swallow, like "Pay It Forward".

But what is up with the "lack of confidence is contagious"? That's kind of a bummer thing to think about on my drive home Milt & Edie. So are you trying to tell me that every time in my life when I haven't had as much confidence, when I haven't felt like I've had my shit together, people around me were feeling it and feeding off it? My insecurities, which I thought that I was growing out of as a teenager but now just seem to be evolving into different things as an adult, leak into other people like .... I don't know... contagious viruses and colds. I was thinking something even more melodramatic because the sign put me in such a bad state, like I was leaking poison un-confident gas or something.

Jesus that's some heavy stuff.

All that from a dry cleaning sign. And you only have a couple of seconds to process it when you are stopped at a red light. That's why I love Milt & Edie. Cheaper than therapy.