Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Octopus Brain vs. Hamster Brain

Amy, who is going to manage the Milkweed Mercantile B&B, is also the Mercantile's graphic designer. We have a lot of meetings. At least we call them meetings. Sometimes our meetings are just an excuse to compare notes on Ecovillage life and our former camp counselors who are now psychics.

Meeting with Amy is anything but boring. Not only is she the most enthusiastic person around, she fills my world with new and interesting phrases. Take the concept of Octopus Brain for instance. Knowing that I am juggling the launch of not one, not two, but five new businesses (the B&B, the Cafe, the Store, the online store, and the Mercantile Artisan Coop) and watching me work my way through The Wall Street Journal, the PAII newsletter, Kitchenware News, Plenty Magazine and Saveur, and then talk with a sales rep from Pedro's (a very cool company making non-petroleum bike lube), she commented that I clearly had an Octupus Brain in order to handle it all without my head exploding (kind of like in the movie Scanners).

She said that she herself was suffering from Hamster Brain, which I think has something to do with running around and around on a little wheel.

Here are two of my recent favorite Amy-isms:
In a planning meeting for the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage retreat, we were trying to figure out just how much uproar would be created by bringing up a certain topic. Amy summed it all up by asking "is it a can of worms or a dumpster of anacondas?" Brilliant!
My other favorite is her insistence that "all donuts are vegan." She is made of what she calls a "certain flexible moral fiber," enabling her to breeze through life with a minimum of angst. Actually, that's not true. She's filled with angst. Fortunately it is all good-humored angst. The future guests of the Milkweed Mercantile are in for a treat when they meet Amy, Innkeeper Extraordinaire!

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