I’m kind of over the Passion Industry. What I mean by that are the coaches, self-help gurus, authors, bloggers and others who make a living convincing you that any dream can be made into a living.

Reality check: Most successful small businesses have more to do with meeting a gaping demand in a particular market (air conditioner repair in Phoenix) than the hard work and passion of the seller (baseball cards, hand-made necklaces).

The Passion Industry doesn’t say much about this, because telling people to have a passion for 24-hour air conditioning repair doesn’t sell books at stores with coffee bars. Instead, they talk about how you can accomplish anything if you just use the right niche marketing or sales techniques. You’re not selling baseball cards — you’re selling your expertise on baseball cards, giving the buyer a much better experience than if they went to your competitor!

Here’s what I’ve noticed about 95% of people who base their day-to-day work on their passion, and let me make the prerequisite Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That qualification:

They are indefinitely financially supported, in whole or in part, by someone else

Again, this is America and if that’s what you wanna do, you do it and everyone else can shut up. But the Passion Industry rarely mentions this, does it? They’ll tell you about the woman who successfully sells beautiful handmade hats on Etsy and gets all kind of buzz online, but not about her husband’s office job. Or the popular online guy who sells social media consulting — did you hear about his wife, the teacher? Or the people who have rockstar blogs and enviable lives, but fail to mention that home base is Casa de Mom and Dad?

Life without passion would be a mistake. But dive into it with eyes open, and be wary of the big industry that feeds on your dreams.

Metro light rail, this is hard for me to write.

I like you. I really do. I enjoy your crisp air conditioning, your clangy bells, the way you zip through that University-Stadium intersection like you own it.

I just don’t want to take you to work anymore, because I am a Wuss.

You are running one-car trains all summer to save money. You’ve got the taxpayer’s back. I respect that. Still, I don’t want to stand nostril-to-armpit with my fellow sweaty passengers when it’s 118 outside. Paying more for trains that run less frequently.

I don’t blame your business decision; it’s necessary. It’s proper. You’re keeping the train affordable for those who need it to be.

It’s just that at the end of the day, Tokyo Subway conditions are really taxing in the heat. Sorry. See you this fall?

Universe, I would like to ask you for a few things, as you do provide excellently to those who ask:

1. I need a wonderful, hard-working, honest, philanthropy-oriented web designer. Someone who believes in the cause and will work as hard as I do for it. Someone who isn’t there just for a paycheck, but for a passion. I promise to nurture and protect this web designer and be a great boss. Also, there will be regular trips to Pita Jungle for hummus involved, unless the designer hates hummus, like my weird husband.
2. I need an intern, a hard-working, smart ASU student who will give me 100% because this is the very first, very important step in his or her career. S/he is a maturing young adult, very serious about the job, doesn’t need micromanaging, takes initiative, wants to absorb the Internet world like a sponge. I will also feed this wonderful intern hummus.
3. I need my muse back. She has been battered very badly in a recent storm of anxiety, stress and poor sleep. Make her strong again. Help me feed her. Not hummus. Whatever muses eat.
4. I need to help a political candidate win an important election, or at least give it his or her best shot. I did not realize this until today, but it is a need.
5. I need to find my place. If this house is it, the bar behind my house needs to stop playing live butt rock on Sunday nights. Please, universe. This would help a lot.
6. I need my friend Moira to have a speedy recovery from her surgery tomorrow. Please send her good books and movies.
7. My brother is running an ad in a national magazine on Tuesday. Will you send lots of people his way?
8. I need to make music.

One thing I took from Australia was the aboriginal notion that one is born with a finite amount of energy. A spiritual idea, but if you think of mitochondria production and cell replication, it is probably true on a physiological level as well.

I am becoming aware that with as much creative energy as I have, I cannot be “on” at all times. I have a battery. It drains, goes dead. It must recharge.

Things that charge my creative battery: Travel, time off to knock around, introspection, yoga, exercise, breaking out of my comfort zone, nature, alone time, reading, watching TED videos, getting to help someone solve a problem in a new way

Things that drain my creative battery: Taking on too much work, stress, not meeting clients’ expectations and feeling bad about it, endless routine, fear that I will never “find my place”

What charges and depletes you?

I made up my mind in high school that I was going to become a genetic engineer. I’d work on important world problems like hunger and disease and innovating life. I wanted to invent inch-long grass that never needed mowing, stuff like that.

I often think back on how easily attainable that goal could’ve been… and why I didn’t do it.

1. Step One: Decide to become a bio-engineer. Pore through books that tell you that there are only two universities in the entire West that have bio-engineering programs: University of California at Berkeley, and Arizona State University. ASU? Wow, that’s in your back yard, and you can go there for free because your grades are high enough!

2. Step Two: Keep being told over and over by trusted adults that if you want to be a scientist, you’re going to need to take a lot of math. You hate math because your trig teacher believes that students should “teach themselves” and reads a novel at her desk while the other students sit on the tops of their desks, throw things at each other and loudly goof off. You are Serious, though. You have taken four years of math — more than necessary — because you hold on to this dream. You are getting an A despite having no real teacher. But so are a lot of people, because the district decided that math is Hard, so they dropped the minimum level for an A to 85%. Good thing you weren’t planning to leave the state, right?

3. Step Three: Go to a summer program before your senior year in high school. You have decided to study bio-engineering at ASU. Be told by a very well-meaning program counselor that bio-engineers design prosthetic limbs for people who have lost arms and legs. Ask the counselor what you should study if you want to do genetic engineering. The counselor will shrug and say “I don’t know, zoology?”

4. Step Four: Be told by well-meaning adults that genetic engineering is a very competitive and low-paying field, one in which you will never feel satisfaction in your work.

5. Step Five: Give  up. Major in journalism. Work in marketing. See how you went from wanting to work in a traditionally-male field to actually working in a traditionally-female field? Join a wonderful nonprofit that supports an *amazing* biodesign center and chafe at not sticking to your guns.

I’m far from distraught at how my life turned out — I work hard, put my heart into everything that I do, and invest myself in every organization that I work for. I’ve been rewarded for that, richly. But there are still nagging thoughts that I could’ve become a scientist, my childhood dream, if people hadn’t kept tacitly steering me away from it.

How to encourage more girls to become scientists:

1. Don’t tell them they’ll be paid badly. Few men stay away from math or science because of paychecks — they want to be the next Einstein — but I’d be willing to bet that most aren’t told they’ll end up poor.

2. Stop using The Threat of Endless Math Classes as a scary disincentive. Yes, you’ll probably end up using math at your sciencey job. Know what? I use it in my marketing job all the time, a lot. Math is life. It’s nothing you won’t be able to handle.

3. Don’t be all super-enthusiastic for girls who want to pursure math and science, then sit back and do nothing. We got a lot of cheerleading in high school to boost our self-esteem, but no real nuts-and-bolts tactics for becoming actual scientists. Take a girl to a lab and show her real live women working in science. I can’t think of anything more motivating than that.

Yesterday a reporter called me. He’d heard through a mutual friend that I was presenting at Ignite Phoenix 6.

First question: “Why are you doing this?”

And I had absolutely no idea. I had just remembered sitting in the audience at Ignite Phoenix 3 thinking, I could do that. And then I did Ignite Phoenix 4. And suddenly it’s almost a year later and I still have no idea why I’m doing any of it, but I need to give the reporter an answer. So as usual my mouth opens and I say something tactless:

“It’s like nerd prom!”

And then I wonder in my head if I should backpeddle — nerd is a pretty harsh thing to call a fairly cool group of people. But my rationale is like this: It doesn’t take much to be a nerd, all you need is a deep interest in something other than an Approved Normal People Topic of Conversation™. Which is more or less limited to the following:

• The experience of being So Drunk
• Buying things
• Your children and the things they do
• TV, and the people on it
• How About Those [$sports-team]
• Dieting and Working Out

If you have a deep interest in other stuff, you learn not to share it with the world, because the world still loves to piss on The Different.

Ignite plays a very important role, here: This is where The Different are allowed to come out of the closet in an eyeroll-free environment and use big words and technical terms and Twitter while people are talking. To me it’s not about passion, it’s about being allowed to be you for five minutes of your life.

That’s the nerd part. Now the prom part. I told the reporter that I found a new dress and some shiny yellow shoes, and it had been years since I’d had a reason to purchase something just to feel good about wearing it. You get to dress in your favorite version of yourself, and socialize with hundreds of people, and get really liquored up afterwards. That’s prom, right?

Plus it feels great to be on a stage, knowing that for once you’re not competing with 67 cute blondes who take singing lessons. In high school, I tried out for musicals, and it was always Get The Hell Off My Stage, You Dance Like a Clydesdale. (Not really. It was more like, “Ooh, Stacy, you should be in the pit orchestra! Go downstairs with the other homely children, please.”)

So  I guess to answer your question, Mr. Reporter, I do Ignite because these are my people, and I like having epic fun with them.

Dear judge who is making my friend’s life miserable:

You weren’t there the day that the bottom of my friend’s life fell out. I was. That was the day she found out her husband was having an affair, and he was leaving her for the other woman.

Their relationship was rocky when they married, but she was pregnant and wanted to “do the right thing”. She wanted her baby to have two parents.

Four years later, her husband walked out, and the dream was over.

Fortunately, my friend is a really amazing, strong, gifted, beautiful woman. She fell in love again and married someone who treated her little boy as his own.

Unfortunately, her new husband made the mistake of serving his country in the military, which meant being transferred to — oh god, wait for it — Oklahoma. You declared that military families in exotic locations such as Oklahoma are “unstable” and awarded full custody of the little boy to the father who left the family, and his live-in girlfriend. For a “family-values” conservative, you have a really interesting interpretation of which situation a child should grow up in.

This morning, you dragged my friend to court and told her that she needs to pay a ton of child support, because she made the mistake of going to college and bettering herself and thus makes more money than Father of the Year does.

I’m not sure why you think it’s more important that my friend’s son live in Arizona than with the parent who didn’t abandon him, but you’re being a hell of a role model for desperate, pregnant women who wonder if “doing the right thing” is indeed the right thing…

Have you become a fan of President Obama on Facebook? Add him. I’ll wait. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, fan him. It’s the most eye-opening thing you’ll do this year.

Ready? Ok. Today Chile had an 8.8 magnitude earthquake. It was one of the strongest quakes measured in the history of all recordings. Incredible amounts of damage to Chile, plus tsunami warnings up and down the hemisphere.

Here is a small but unfortunately too-typical sample of how Barack Obama’s fans reacted to the President saying that America stands ready to offer help:

• What about the American people who need help? Gee, thanks Mr. Obama. Feels good to know you care about us.
• WTF that would weaken our government to make us go into a deeper recession!¡¡¡!
• A silent killer is more dangerous than an earthquake.CUT DOWN CO2 EMISSIONS IN AMERICA AND YOU DONT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE REST.
• I dont want to sound sinical or anything, but we had an ECONOMIC EARTHQUAKE, and should be helping our own before we give away billions of dollars away to another country.
• Thanks mister president now let’s wait for the arrogant President of Chile to accept the offer

It pains me  to see how publicly stupid people are.

Maybe it’s because I recently went to Chile, but I’m appalled at how Chile is being treated like an alien planet with no human beings occupying it. In fact, it’s a real success story, and a beautiful place to visit. It’s sad that their momentum is being derailed by human tragedy.

At least there was this one guy, who got it right:

Non-Obama supporter here…I don’t care how broke I am. If my nieghbor looses their home in a disaster, I’m gonna offer anything I have to help them out. The same should hold true for a country that just experienced a freakin 8.8 earthquake!!! So kudos to Obama for offering.

You don’t hear about the true concept of peonage much anymore:

peon -  peons a : a person held in compulsory servitude to a master for the working out of an indebtedness

I’m not talking student loans, here — that’s an investment that appreciates in value.

Peonage is getting into debt you’ll never get out of.

Peons buy as much house as they can afford, whether they need it or not.

Peons buy Valentine’s Day presents they have to make payments on.

Peons buy luxury cars and expensive clothes and then ZOMG they can’t make the minimum payments because their salary didn’t increase exponentially! Life is not fair!

“Peon” used to be a pejorative phrase. You didn’t want to be a peon. Wonder when it became the norm…

As I read yet another article on the New York Times’ website, I count the days until I am required to pay for content.

Unlike many stompy people out there who will never, ever read the New York Times again because they’re charging for the content (and not just paper that it’s printed on), I am fine with a subscription-based model.

Subscriptions will once again make the news organization beholden to subscribers and not just advertisers. They’ll keep talented, hard-working journalists on the payroll for another day. They’ll keep those journalists working on watchdog stories and not just click-friendly puff pieces on the Gosselins and the local bar scene.

Subscriptions. Let’s do this.

Here’s what I DO NOT want to see:

I do not want to hassle with ANYTHING that keeps me from viewing the subscription on two or more computers.

I do not want to be pressured into any upsell/cross-sell “opportunities” as newspaper subscribers often are.

I do NOT want ANYONE calling my house asking me to sign up for the subscription, EVER. Another annoying thing newspapers do.

I do not want the New York Times to send me endless, ceaseless invoices after we’ve canceled our subscription. If we cancel, deal with it. In fact it would be great if they found someone else to be in charge of subscriptions before they extend their aggressive ineptitude to a savvy online customer base.

I DO NOT want to see bills at all. Just bill me until I tell you to stop.

I DO NOT WANT any marketing communications. Don’t subscribe me to 800 e-mails that I now have to opt-out of.

Will you subscribe?