I always get these words mixed up!
You Know What a Blog Is, Right?
It's a conversation nobody wanted to have with you. --Michelle Wolf
This house was for sale in Yuba City, CA in early 2016. It has since been renovated and, to my mind, destroyed. I hate it. Sob. 😭
What are people made of? Mostly water but also... fat, bones, muscle, organs, hair, skin, nails... all kinds of fun stuff.
But what are those things made of? At a microscopic level, those things are made of MOLECULES.
Did you know we were only able to see molecules directly for the first time in 2009, with an advanced electron microscope...
Charles Sweeney was my neighbor across the hall in a 20-studio apartment building in San Francisco's Mission District in the mid-2000s. Mr. Sweeney's real last name was "Soini" (of Finnish origin, I gather from the fact that there is a town in Finland called Soini, and a right-wing Finnish politician with the same last name) but the only person I ever heard say it pronounced it Sweeney, so that's what it is to me.
When I left my apartment on Valencia Street of 12.5 years, I was terrified that I was making a huge mistake. I just couldn't stand it anymore though. There were many positives about that apartment, and the longer I lived there, the more memories I made there. But being below someone who had parties several nights a week and who really was a dick about it, it genuinely made my life kind of hell. Plus the noise. The nutty people. The filth. The decay of the apartment itself. But that view, and so cozy & charming, and the location was great in many ways ...
Yesterday I applied for many, many jobs. Afterward, I felt like Steven Jesse Bernstein's party balloon, so I took a nap. Later, I went for a long walk along Valencia and things were wet from the rain earlier.
Today I went sailing for the first time in ~16 months. Winds were at 15-18 knots. It was COLD. It was raining! And still, it was so awesome. And I survived :)
Today a friend surprise-invited me as a guest to their members-only club where fancy people conduct business meetings over hard liquor and cigars. There's a billiards room, a putting green, an ascot and pocket square lending library. You can cellar your own wine there. One of the rooms has a Devialet Phantom. I learned the purpose of a smoking jacket...
I've started a second freelance job, as I wrap up work on my current freelance job. It's like a whole other job managing all of the details across two totally different work environments, people, project managment tracking. I don't mind it too much. The flexibility and the variety are positives.
In other news, I went hiking at Dawn Falls in Marin and it was lovely. I also went on a long Saturday afternoon walk at the Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park, which, by the way, if you didn't know, is free for San Francisco residents. I'm sure they'll put my $8 to good use.
I made this! I decided that I like the vertical calendar style better than horizontal because this way it looks like a beaded curtain, which is something Erté used a lot in his work, and as might be expected, I'm a big fan. He also used a lot of fans, for the record. Not sure how many records he used...
I designed for myself a "wheel of the year", which is typically a pagan calendar. However, I want a "calendar" just to indicate the seasons and their transition dates, perihelion and aphelion, as well as a REMINDER: Total solar eclipse in 2017!
Since it is definitely not listing the pagan holidays and focused on actual astronomy, I am calling it Anni Rota - which is Latin for "year rotation/wheel".
The whole point was to keep my hand in the game so I could get back into it when it was time to rejoin the life of working folk. The great purpose of my life when I entered this year was my job. Then my job was eliminated, so I explored, trying different projects and contract work. But, I found that my next great purpose was to be with someone I loved, for many hours and days, as he journeyed to the end of his life. People almost universally expressed gratitude, admiration, respect, and seemed to believe it was some kind of sacrifice on my part.
Though I was hired as a web developer, with the assumption that I'd do some graphics production, design, copy writing and editing, backend administration, front end development - I am spending a lot of time looking at Google Analytics. Last week we enjoyed a nice spike in traffic due to spammers in Russia. Thanks guys, but I put you and your comrades in a Segment filter where you sit lonely and sad, not tainting my important graphs and charts.
Once upon a time, I was mesmerized by a Yearly Sun Graph. It has data points for sunset, sunrise and daylength as well as other astronomical minutiae. After staring at it long enough, I noticed a pattern in the difference between each day over the course of a year. The length of time added to or subtracted from a given daylength changes. And, not only does the length of time change, the change itself changes.
Today I went to work! I met with my team at 9:30 and then we went into an office. I took notes, had meetings, made spreadsheets, sent emails, did research. What a lovely day. Also, we spent 40 minutes in line at Freshroll in order to get our lunch. It was great being downtown with all the other working folk. You know, it's still novel, though I've already had enough of herding onto the stairs for transit. I look forward to riding my bike.
Here's my advice: Unless someone explicitly asks for your advice, do not offer advice. Maybe not even then.
This is a tabula recta. It's for cryptography, specifically, the polyalphabetic Vigenère cipher, aka le chiffre indéchiffrable.
My niece took a Women's Studies class in high school and asked me to answer 7 questions about equality and feminism.
This is what I'd suggest:
- Group like items
- Get stuff off the floor
- Throw away garbage
- Even if you don't clean your dishes right away, put them in the kitchen in or near the sink
- Clear surfaces as much as possible & intentionally place a few nice things on those clear surfaces, but...
- Also, have places where messiness is OK - like I have a big table that has a bunch of shit on it and it's my desk and computers and art supplies and notebooks and stuff and it's never clear and that's how I like it.
I'm taking college classes. Last semester I took Statistics. Straight up bragging: I got an A. I wish I was kidding when I say that class almost crushed my will to live, though. It was so confusing, the material so obtuse, the concepts so vague... there were many times I actually just gave up and broke down crying. I don't know that I ever felt so stupid, and I mean to use that awful and harsh word. I missed the tiniest details as often as I missed the most obvious differentiation. It ground my confidence to a fine dust.
I had an abortion once. Was it something that I wanted? Not especially.
I waited 40 years to watch the sequel to The Post but all I got was tedious clerical tasks, anachronistic office furniture, and more Nixon.
Honoring and exploring the adventurous life of a great contributor to the art of cryptanalysis and a hidden national hero.
"Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings."
That which doesn't kill you can make you stronger, and funnier, too. This hilarious and horrifying tell-all leaves no shudder-inducing tale untold.
Via my long ago cohorts, Annie Owens and Attaboy at Hi-Fructose, please note this cool approach to comics by Shintaro Kago.
Here's my somewhat lousy photo of an original Bil Keane comic at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
The Ace Hotel in New York City had an exhibit called, "The Smallest Mollusk," but can they beat this?
Last night I watched The Maltese Falcon for the first time. A few things.
A children's book on Amazon so enchanted me with its artwork and whimsical title that I decided to buy it even though I'm a grown up who doesn't have young children. This led me, as Amazon does, to other children's books with delightful drawings. I bought a total of six books. My favorite illustrations, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, are for The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles. It has an upbeat, cute story, but the imagery is the most appealing part to me. It is especially delicate with jewel-like earth tones that somehow look light and airy. Magical stuff.
In Big Magic, Liz Gilbert describes ideas as practically tangible entities that float around like dandelion spores, looking for a place to germinate and grow.
The day after my 10th birthday, I was out on the patio looking around our back yard, appreciating the lazy summer day and the heady smells of yard and garden harvest, grateful to be unburdened by school. A tingle of anxiety nipped at the edges of my moment, though. Fifth grade would be starting in a three weeks. The battle of school clothes shopping would begin again. New desk supplies would be obtained, but would I be able to wrangle a Trapper Keeper or have to make do with Pee-Chees? Would I score the amazing new Eraser Mate pens or be stuck with old fashioned Bics?
Feelings, am I right?
I'm in therapy, so once a week I talk to a professional thought and feeling person about my thoughts and feelings. There is some really basic shit that I have not had correct for most of my life. I've been operating from some incorrect assumptions, but I've been lucky to have the opportunity to learn and grow and keep most of the people in my life who need to be there.
Actually, this is just pull quotes.
"...I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."
"Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about."
"I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what I was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day."
After 12 years and six months in a studio apartment on Valencia Street, in San Francisco's Mission
Tl;dr To avoid breathing toxic metal salts, use filtered or distilled water with ultrasonic, cool mist humidifiers. No, really.
If you put on an album you've never heard before, maybe check the song list before getting into the shower.
Two letters written in 1939, just days apart, from a young woman to a man over 100 miles away, let us look into their lives and an urgent mystery.
From REAL SIMPLE Special Edition: Understanding Mental Health, December 2022
Optimism is a key ingredient to living a satisfying life. Here's how brain chemistry and lifestyle shifts can lead to a sunnier outlook.
MENTAL HEALTH is on everyone's mind, and for good reason. The pandemic and its many related challenges have led to a continued global surge in symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
A short and true story of cascading circumstances, cause and effect, and the adventures that followed.
A tale about the joys and perils friendship, the elusive crown of self-esteem, and blindly trusting others where you would not trust yourself.
Last week, on the day it was released, I bought Rebel Girl, at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and I could not have been more excited. I'm nearly done. Maybe another 30 pages, but I need to get this out because I can't stop thinking about it.
Some recent learnings, better late than never.
I spend more time than I would like lamenting in my mind about how my life is not as awesome as I want it to be, or not as awesome as it used to be.
Some important things to keep in mind though is that my memories of my life being awesome are deeply modified by time and the retelling to myself of what was.