i started a little side project this month called “The One Hour Essay Project.”

it’s goal is to provide a structured space wherein people can spend one hour a month writing their response to a shared prompt, and then benefit from the feedback and discussion that is generated by others’ essays and comments. the essays are posted anonymously, and the short time limit is intended to both keep people from worrying about getting things perfect and make it easy to scrounge up time to participate.

i thought of the idea because i had too many things on my list of stuff i wanted to blog about, and never enough time to tackle the ones that i thought deserved the most attention. because you notice that most of the posts that get through are about food or random activities, right? ;)

anyway, it’s just getting started, and there’s a lot i want to to with the site, but the first batch of essays is up at: http://www.onehouressayproject.com if you want to drop by and check ’em out. i won’t tell you which one i am. :)

i’m not sure yet how i’m going to handle recruitment and registration. it seems like there is an upper limit to how many essays are absorbable, but we might be able to break it into clusters or something… the response this month was already more overwhelming than i had anticipated, and only half of the people who replied ended up submitting, so i’m blessed with a healthy batch of guinea pigs, and i’m excited to see where it leads. drop a comment if you’re burning to play along and i’ll see what i can do. :)

i’m not in west virginia right now, nor will i be in san francisco next weekend, nor will i be in tahoe the week after that.

those parts of the skeleton kind of collapsed.

shrug

reconstruction in progress.

but there IS a harry potter party next weekend. we’re having a wake! we just don’t know who it’s for…

busy times since my last post. my mom just left this morning after a visit of a week and a half, and we spent some time romping around oregon and some time just hanging out in my apartment, which was nice. my unexpected unemployment was a boon for the visit, as it felt pretty much like a bonus vacation in my own town.

during one particularly memorable trip around the city we ended up down on the banks of the willamette, talking to a guy who had constructed a hurdle course for himself out of driftwood, and watching the boats go by. i walked down to see what the hurdle guy was up to and he chatted with us between circuits until we eventually had a whole conversation going about life, literature, and the similarities between the south and italy, which i found very amusing. i poked around on the bank as my mom and he chatted their own topics, and i ended up taking on a small cleanup project because i was overwhelmed by the amount of plastic that was washing up on the shore. but that’s a whole nother post. i think i’m making an art project out of it.

for this post, i will just say that i ended up wading in the river up to my waist and failing to keep my skirt dry, which also meant that i failed to keep my cell phone dry, though i didn’t realize this until we started walking back to the MAX and i was feeling around in my pockets to assess the damage. my phone ended up fritzing out a bit as a result, and for three days went into “car kit” mode, which the internet tells me is a secret LG code for “damn fool got this phone Wet – not covered by warranty!” it also meant that i could only talk on it with a headset, which was pretty damn annoying because i don’t have one. so i spent a few days in text only mode.

eventually it dried out and started working again, but the battery now runs down very quickly and it still seems a little flaky, so it seems the time has come to explore new candidates for cellular companionship. it’s kind of funny seeing as i had been considering hopping on the iphone train as a celebration of my new employment, but then decided against it as a recognition of my new unemployment and the fact that my phone worked just fine, so now i don’t know how to interpret the signs. when i told all this to erik, he said “visual voicemail!!” but i am resisting such temptations, at least for the moment…

anyway, that was a bit more detail than necessary, but moral of the story is: good week! sorry if you couldn’t call me!

on sunday i turned 28 years old, and my mom and i took a lovely daytrip through nearby outdoor oregon. we drove up the gorge and hiked the little 2 mile loop at waclella falls, which was bustling yet agreeably less overcrowded than multnomah falls, and quite enjoyable – an easy yet engaging meander through the gorge that leads to a booming faucet of a waterfall. waclella pours forth from the cliffs into a deep, luminescent pool: large enough to feel somewhat imposing yet with enough of a rocky rim to allow you to get in close, breathe in the spray, and lose some time in the thundering stillness. thanks to mikey mike for the tip, received on saturday as we helped to celebrate sue’s promotion to the role of stay-at-home mom. yay sue and verl and full summer weekends!

after the falls, we kept driving east to hood river and watched the windsurfers for a bit, then came back via mt. hood, stopping for some roadside cherries and driving up to the timberline lodge above govt. camp for the views. the day was obligingly clear, unlike last time i drove through the forest, and hood showed itself off quite nicely. my camera battery was dead but my mom took some pictures. i’m trying to talk her into putting them on flickr, and i’ll let you know if i succeed.

in other birthday news, i would like to officially welcome brandon bartee to the world, and say that being born on a sunday, july 1 at roughly 11 at night is a pretty good deal, or at least it’s worked out well for me so far, and i’m honored to share such statistics with the first child of one of my dearest friends. it’s a crazy but beautiful place you got yourself into, kid, and i hope i get the chance to help you figure some of it out. :)

first off, it’s kind of fun to have your birthday smack dab in the midst of a season of barbecues, fireworks, and strawberries, so live it up!! this year, you should probably just focus on not letting the fireworks freak you out, since you’ll get them on your half birthday as well (don’t worry, i don’t expect you to do the math yet, i’ll just tell you – your half birthday is new year’s day!) so i advise learning to embrace them. it’ll suck for a while to have your birthday in the middle of the summer because a lot of your friends will be on vacation, but trust me, it’ll all even out. your parents have a full six months to recover from christmas and you get solid summer and winter gift seasons, so it’s a pretty good deal.

i told your mom i would look up the story of canada day, which actually occurs on our birthday, and for some reason i had this idea that it had only happened since the 80’s, even though canada is older than that. turns out it has only been called canada day since 1982, before which it was known as dominion day, and not that widely celebrated. apparently the alliterative appeal did not outweigh the awkwardness of cheering on the idea of dominion, so better to have the holiday only one letter away from a popular brand of ginger ale. this is actually a rather telling illustration of the difference between our nation and our neighbors to the north. i imagine that americans would get a kick out of a holiday called dominion day.

instead, however, we have plain ol’ independence day, and that will always overshadow your birthday in good ways and bad. people will already be committed to parties on the nearby weekends, but there will also often be a long weekend, and sometimes you can get bigger parties out of combining the two, which is a score.

on the whole i think it’s good to be prompted to contemplate our country’s growth so close on the heels of contemplating our own, but i also think it’s good to not cram too many topics into one blog post, so this morning i will end my birthday missive and leave us each to our own pursuits. you take milk; i’ll get strawberries.

well, i didn’t know what it was going to be like to come home from bonnaroo, collapse on the floor, and wake up to the reality of not having guaranteed gainful employment.

now that it has happened, lemme tell ya: it is bliss.

i got home so late on tuesday that some would call it wednesday, missed the chance to take the light rail from the airport so had to spring for a cab, enjoyed the door-to-door service, performed aforementioned collapse onto the floor, and embarked upon the rest of my week with no schedule to keep but my own.

for the past two days i have slept, unpacked, cleaned the house, cooked what could be salvaged from the fridge (an adventure which included the preparation of what is possibly the best tomato sauce i have ever had the privilege of bringing into the world), listened to music, walked around town, talked to friends, sorted through bills, and charted the first steps along the path towards the next income horizon.

i will save the details for another post because i’m making a website that will explain the idea more fully than i care to right now, but here’re the basics: i’m making lunches. for the people in the office where i used to work. and it’s hella fun. there are few things in this world i love more than playing with food, and right now i’m looking at a world where i get up, take care of myself, find and test recipes, assemble menus, play on my computer, make people happy and healthy, and spend the rest of my time as i wish.

feels good, people. feels good. now we just need to see if i get enough takers to pay the bills for a while.

happy official summer while we wait.

today i got some news that is very likely going to sound a lot more out of the blue to you than it does to me, but that’s just because the situation has been so weird and wishy washy that it hasn’t seemed worth writing about it.

now here it is, though, and no sense beating around the bush: my job is ending in two weeks.

as my supervisor was kind enough to state very clearly, this decision is not at all a reflection upon my performance over the last few months. it just turns out that shifting the design culture of a large company from the inside out requires quite a bit of a political maneuvering, we hit a few snags that were a bit larger than anticipated at this stage of the game, and, well, i’m the temporary contractor who wasn’t really planning to stay with the company that long anyway, so it makes sense that i’m the first (and hopefully only) casualty of budgeting rearrangements.

honestly, a lot of me feels relieved. i first heard that this might be possible about a month ago, but it was always at some unknown future point and it was never clear how real the threat was and it was impossible to really do anything with the news other than use it as ulcer fuel or ignore it, and so i did my darndest to do the latter as much as possible. but it still took its toll, as there is only so much patience i can muster for showing up at work and not really knowing if there is anything to do other than watch meetings be postponed and stretch simple tasks out over several days to fill the time. especially when i can think of lots of other things i want to be doing.

which leads well into the next reason i am not devastated by the development.

one of the major questions that i hoped to answer by taking this job was that of whether i am in a headspace for longterm full-time employment right now, and the past three months have provided quite a bit of useful data that has begun to suggest an answer quite a bit earlier than i anticipated. i have learned that there is a lot to be excited about in the professional design world right now, and i enjoy being a part of the conversation about where things are going. at the same time, however, i have learned that i still basically think of myself as a student, that i have Lots of stuff i want to work on for my own reasons that have nothing to do with any company that i know of at the moment, that the travel bug has not left my system, and that i am increasingly convinced of the merits of finding ways to work for myself.

with all that crystallizing in my head, i was honestly starting to get a bit antsy, and once it became clear that it was possible the job might not last the full 9 months after all? well, let’s just say i had no difficulty coming up with ideas of what i might like to do.

the anxiety, as usual, will hinge on money. the last month of my travels and the first month of my move and transition to employment put me once again in the red, and i had been employing a strategic approach to paying that back over time because i thought that my income was assured for a while. so it’s frustrating to have to deal with that. but not unmanageable. and i am hereby stamped as genius for adhering to my policy of sinking money into camping gear instead of furniture in an attempt to limit the number of things i will have to store, sell, or give away before i am able to uproot myself again.

on that note, look at what else i did today!

those wheels are tiffanie’s bike, which she lent me, and which i will now perhaps return. the thing that should jump out at you about the fact that you see those wheels is not really the bike, however, it is the fact that my new tent? it’s like one big window. this is nice in circumstances such as the present where it is pitched inside where there is little crosswind and you are still inside a sleeping bag for some reason. it is also nice, however, when it is inside your backpack weighing securely under 5 lbs. even with the rainfly and footprint, or when it is pitched outside in the summer and you want to separate yourself from bugs but not from breeze or scenery. and summer is the season which is about to be upon us. and did i mention that i might have more free time?

so yeah. options abound. and it is somewhat symbolic to me that i decided (and it was a somewhat spontaneous decision as well) to go ahead and buy the tent today of all days, with timing such that i was actually in the process of erecting the last major component of my bare bones self-sufficiency kit right when my phone rang with news to suggest that i might not want to buy the few pieces of furniture that i had decided to splurge for after all. i might have hesitated tomorrow, and i have many days ahead of me to decide if i want to trade it in for the other tent i was considering that is a fair bit cheaper. but today? today i just kept clicking the poles into place. i felt the metal bend, watched the fabric billow and tighten, listened to the silence on the phone and the buzz of the world out the window, and said: “oh. ok. how much time do i have?”

so here come an interesting two weeks, folks. on we go.

for several years now i have been telling myself that i should start practicing some kind of martial art, because it seems like a good synthesis of many of my goals. i like the combination of balance work and mental focus and flexibility and strength training and interacting with other people. i have been doing more yoga and keep humoring the thought of doing tai-chi, but the challenge and interactive nature of structured combat still feels appealing. and the self-defense part is a nice perk.

at some point this desire began to take a bit more shape and i decided that i should try out aikido, because it is a very go-with-the-flow kind of martial art. it’s a lot about learning how to fall down, and most of the fighting is quite literally rolling with the punches. it also, however, teaches you to play with swords. so that seals it in my book of cool things to do.

i never really had luck with finding a combination of momentum and opportunity to get started with this goal, but after settling in a bit here and starting to think more about exercise, i decided to search for aikido lessons, and it turns out there is a dojo quite literally 5 blocks from my apartment! and they have a beginning class that is only a few weeks long that teaches you the basics so that you can decide if you want to join and do more! and one of the classes started tonight and we are not traveling for the next few weeks so i can go! woohoo!

i got there a bit early because even though i told myself it should only take five minutes to walk there, i wanted to make sure i could find it. turns out it’s right next to the shoe store with the free beer and donkey kong, so that’s a good block. i walked in and it smelled like sweat, but in a fresh healthy way, and there was lots of light and people were running around sweeping the mat and chatting and folding up their outfits, for which i do not yet know the official names. it was a bubbly, happy scene. people had clearly been working hard, and they all knew each other, and they smiled at me and the guy leading the class recognized that i was new and asked if i was there for the beginner’s class and welcomed me and gave me a form to fill out. i filled it out and talked with the guy next to me who was putting on his shoes and said he’d been coming there for 7 years. i felt good about the decision to come.

after things were swept up and the class that just ended was leaving, they let us on the mat and we stretched and i bounced around on the fun springy ground. there were only a few other beginners, and one guy who has only been around for a month and wanted the extra practice. that was nice. we all got attention and there was plenty of room.

all we did tonight was learn how to bow, practice falling and standing up a little bit, and a little bit of basic footwork. it was fun, though, and it felt good, and the instructor was friendly and good at teaching, and the other people were nice. it was also an awesome feeling to put my shoes back on, chat with my new classmates, and strike out into the night to find my house waiting only a few blocks away.

all in all, a very exciting addition to the map of my neighborhood, and there is class on monday and thursday nights for the next few weeks. i’m excited to see where it leads.

i spent most of the day in mcminnville at the ufo fest, which is a pretty big deal in the world of ufo fests, which means there were more people than when i have a bbq, and fewer than when i go to a sporting event. apparently there were also fewer people than usual this year because it was cloudy and threatened rain. given that this is oregon, however, this logic does not strike me as very powerful.

tiffanie and i met up with victor and his friend jonathan. it was fun to wander the streets together and make mischief, and there were plenty of people (and pets!) to make for some fun pictures, so you should check out the set i made on flickr if you’re hankerin’ for alien parades or shiny green glasses.

i had the idea the other day of several people pitching in and buying or renting property in a range of locations, and then sharing them all.
so everyone can broaden their sense of home without needing to afford/support (you pick your politics) a model wherein a person has more than one residence.
and someone is always there to water the plants.
:)

who’s in?

last week i was pretty socially overwhelmed.
i don’t regret it at all, but there it is.
i came home with my head spinning, and i didn’t know what to do or say or think or feel.

yesterday and today i spent all by myself, with a bit of outside IM contact because i like my friends and always feel a bit weird when i put myself in a little bubble.

i slept quite a bit, and read quite a bit, and scribbled a fair bit to no conclusion.

now i am sitting on my floor, eating bagel chips and drinking wine, and my room is tidier than it has been in a while, with some pictures starting to grace my walls. i went on two walks today, one of which led to the purchase of a can opener (because i was stunned to discover that i didn’t have one when i went to make some hummus) and a coffee grinder and some food for the week, like the aforementioned bagel chips.

the second walk had no real direction, but i ended up going to music millenium and buying a new richard shindell album and an old pink floyd album and two postcards for my wall. what i was actually looking for was this album, but apparently i am too hip for my own good, and i’m going to have to order it online because i have yet to find it in any stores, and i want to actually buy it even though i already have several of the songs because it deserves my money.

anyway, now i feel myself reaching some kind of equilibrium, and i am hopeful that my anxiety and i are learning to communicate a bit better.

i am glad that tomorrow is sunday, and i look forward to what it will bring.

Two years ago in Portland I first experienced the craziness that is the annual meeting of the Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery in Computer-Human Interaction, otherwise known as CHI. My time there was dominated by my participation in the Student Design Competition. Erik, Matt E., Will and I wrote a paper, tossed a hacky sack around to get our game on, talked up our poster, and cheered for our friends. We also felt the floor shake at the Crystal Ballroom, followed Matt’s bloodhound nose wherever it led, danced in a metal bar, left some beer for the housekeeping staff at our hotel, and walked back across the bridge at 2 in the morning after the trains had stopped running. Those were good times, and they all live in my head, as those were the days before my blog was born. Ahhhh….

Last year I was a student volunteer in Montreal, and I got a new camera right before the conference so I took a hella lot of pictures. I also blogged about it some (scroll down past this entry). It was a very good time, and it was perhaps the point wherein the idea that I was becoming a part of an academic and professional community much larger than myself first sunk in.

This year was a test of sorts. I have graduated. Traveled around. Worked in hotels and bars. Formulated new ideas about the scope of my work. Taken a consulting job. Moved to Portland. It wasn’t until quite recently that it was even clear that I was going to be able to go to CHI this year because it was uncertain whether my company would pay for it. And it was strange to not be a student. It was strange to be able to go just for the sake of going and seeing what I saw.

Most of what I saw were people. Dear old friends whom I have been away from for too long. Glorious new friends who remind me that you never know what gifts lie around the next corner. Acquaintances and colleagues who charm me and inspire me and make me glad to be doing what I do.

I have come to an interesting sort of peace with conferences, in that I find them to be very stimulating spaces even though I am often not that interested in the details of the presentations that I see. Somehow the energy is contagious. The sense of accomplishment gets under my skin. The newness of the place and the excitement of networking and the break from routine puts me in a different zone, and I have some good ideas.

This year I took very scattered offline notes, but then a comment from Erik prompted me to come up with an idea for an online prompting/drafting/notetaking system to allow me to build my thoughts up as I go. So I’ve been working on that some, and I hope it bears fruit soon.

In the meantime, here are some highlights from the land beyond words: