Yesterday: Kiteboarding. Beer. Late night with friends.
Today: Kiteboarding. Beer. Late night with friends.
More like this, please.
Category Archives: Life
Rhythm
May 6, 2008
97 Miles to Kentucky
April 29, 2008
While speaking to some friends recently I realized that I have been unnecessarily vague about our plans for the future. This ambiguity came purely by accident, and it will likely come as a disappointment to know that I have not been subtly manufacturing a story arc of impossible genius. Rather, it’s this damned fracturing of one’s online identity, shattered and cast across a dozen sites in the name of social networking, that’s rendered any loose shard near incomprehensible when considered absent its brethren.
It is in the interest of clarification, and yet still in convolutions such as these, that I write to you now, to let you aware of our current situation.
Indeed, Kate and I have settled on a graduate school. This coming August we will relocate to the bluff country of southern Indiana to attend Indiana University Bloomington. It is in this setting that we will eat at Chick-Fil-A, cultivate our southern drawls, and enjoy glasses of sweet tea that sweat in the late summer heat. Kate will pursue a Master of Public Policy with a focus on environmental issues, and I will be collecting syllables by going after a Master of Science in Human Computer Interaction Design.
My goal, ultimately, is to build kick-ass interfaces that are so beautiful they make people want to cry, perhaps similar to the way this turns me into a blubbering pile of snot every time I watch it. Kate’s goal is to work for a groovy non-profit that advertises in High Country News, perchance entertaining a position that keeps her above the poverty line. Our mutual goal is to move back to the West, the Pacific Northwest in particular, upon finishing our programs. This is not a goal so much as it is a promise.
And while it may be 97 miles to Louisville, it’s only 56 miles to French Lick.
Familiar
April 21, 2008
It’s been over a week since I watched Into The Wild, and the convolutions of my brain are still busy processing it. I was prepared to be consumed by a brilliant fire of jealousy, but in the end I was completely blindsided by the familiarity of the story. The parallels between our journeys, our desires to seek out new adventures, I realized that the differences between our individual experiences were only a matter of degree.
I am drawn to the story of Christopher McCandless not because it represents the extreme, but because it represents the familiar. As Krakauer states in his foreword, “…were it not for one or two seemingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April.” Though our paths were different, I believe McCandless and I pursued them for similar reasons, with similar philosophies and a similarly intense passion for life.
When they showed Emile Hirsch traveling through the Pacific Northwest, tromping around Sahalie Falls and McKenzie Pass, I felt a slight tinge as my life twisted in and amongst this work of fictionalized non-fiction. These are all places that I myself have visited, and at times while watching the movie it felt as though I was witnessing my own journey through the landscape.
While I haven’t enjoyed nearly the hardscrabble life as McCandless, I do have friends scattered throughout the world who are living out similar experiences. From squatting at Camp 4 and sneaking half-eaten meals from tourists, to shoveling snow at the South Pole, to spending a sleepless month exploring Alaska, my friends make it clear that McCandless is not alone in giving his middle finger to conventional living.
I’m currently rereading Into The Wild, and I find that Krakauer paints the story in a very eerie, very chilling light. In the movie, Sean Penn has made a great effort to capture that passion for life, that mighty yawp of existence that all who knew McCandless say he possessed. To that end, what Eddie Vedder has done is magic in its purest form, and the soundtrack for Into The Wild resonates to the very marrow of my soul.
Load-Bearing
April 10, 2008
After finishing some client work this evening I intended on watching Into The Wild, which just arrived from Netflix. For ten years it has been one of my favorite books (its challengers include Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rand McNally U.S. Road Atlas) and I have to admit I was a little bit apprehensive to watch the movie.
My nerves about it are prickly not because of the usual “OMG they better not ruine mine favorite Book!!1!” but because I’m afraid of what I might find out about myself. You see, aside from the whole “starving to death in the wilderness” thing (which I’ll admit has a fair amount of romance to it), I want to be Alexander Supertramp.
At least, I used to want to.
Or do I still?
My post-collegiate path has been a winding one, both of place and of being. The spring I graduated from college I skipped my graduation ceremony so I could leave Minnesota and start driving to Oregon just one day sooner. I loaded up all my worldly possessions in the Green Dragon Wagon, not knowing if I would be gone for three months or three years. In the end, I worked as a windsurfing grunt until I ran out of summer, a snowboard instructor until I ran out of unbroken legs, and a web designer until I ran out of Vicodin.
I stayed in Oregon for two years and lived in two towns, moving back and forth between them until I moved back to Minnesota to work as a wilderness guide. I took an eight-day Wilderness First Responder course. I met someone lovely. I spent three months growing a beard and living in the woods. That fall, my reintroduction to civilization involved getting choked up over such amenities as toothpaste and ice water.
The following summer I did it all again, only this time I was joined by someone lovely. I grew a beard. I stomped through Yellowstone for twenty days with five guys and three mohawks. That fall I moved back to Oregon as my love traveled all over the Western United States, living outside and learning about land rights and trying not to freeze to death. We reunited that December, though she was kind of freaked out that I had shaved my beard.
For 1 1/2 years now I have been planted in Hood River, working with the intertubes, kiteboarding during the summer, snowboarding during the winter, and occasionally visiting Walla Walla for some reason or another. In four months Kate and I will be moving across the country to attend graduate school at Indiana University, she to study environmental policy and me to study interaction design. After finishing my program I want to be involved in some Pretty Big Shit in my industry, which likely means I will no longer be taking three months off at a time to guide trips or teach snowboarding or fret about not having work during those unfortunate “in between” seasons.
Aye, and there’s the rub.
Part of me thinks that I’m ready to move on from this lifestyle. Another part of me fears that for all these nomadic experiences, for all this living in the outdoors, I have still managed to miss something, some hidden meaning. This elusive nugget of truth drove Christopher McCandless in his travels, and is what gave rise to Alexander Supertramp. I’m certain that Christopher would agree with me when I say that the logical conclusion of this journey is something besides starving to death in the backcountry of Alaska. What it is, however, I haven’t figured out yet.
I’ve changed a lot over the last five years, especially over the last two, and I’ve noticed my nagging sense of wanderlust begin to fade. With it I fear my curiosity goes as well, my unconventionalism, my identity. I speak of piling all my furniture on the front lawn and burning it, and people laugh as though I speak in hyperbole. I do, to be sure. But for me, owning more stuff than will fit in my car is painfully embarrassing, every bookcase and file cabinet a trophy to defeat. I have lost my mobility, but I have gained… what, a sofa? A coffee table? These are changes I have not been dealing with well.
It was in this context that I started to watch Into The Wild.
I got as far as the DVD menu. I watched it loop a dozen times. My vision blurred and my chest tightened. A dozen times Christopher burned his money, hitchhiked to Alaska, grew a beard, and posed in front of the bus.
I turned off my television.
Travelog
March 23, 2008
After two weeks of leading a jet-setter lifestyle, crisscrossing the country in economy class, and enjoying only the finest plastic cups of Canada Dry, I have returned home. Ahh, Hood River, where all the postal clerks know my name, I have the EDGE network all to myself, and there are no more than two places to eat in town.
Having flown on no less than eight flights and two different air carriers over the last couple weeks, I feel I am in a position to accurately report on the current state of air travel in our nation. Here’s the gist of it: Fewer flights, packed flights, longer flights. It’s a totally awesome combination, considering that you are free now even from the in-flight burden of consuming a bag of three broken pretzels. As far as I can tell, air carriers are running fewer flights to most destinations, and packing all of their remaining flights to maximum capacity. Every one of my eight flights was completely full, with additional travelers on standby in case of no-shows.
Now, a completely full flight takes a ridiculously long time to plane and deplane, so one would think that this, combined with a record number of delayed flights, would result in a cascading disaster of lateness. Not so! It seems the air carriers have taken into account the additional time it takes to load up all that extra meat, and have padded their schedules accordingly. If the flight before yours takes an abnormally long time to deplane, and your flight takes an abnormally long time to board, you’ll still likely arrive at your destination “on time”, as the travel times between cities have been arbitrarily increased to allow for these delays.
If your flight happens to board quickly, however, it just means more time sitting on the tarmac, waiting for your takeoff window. The good news is, this allows you all sorts of extra time to peruse Sky Mall, which currently features such awesome products as a colon-shaped brownie tray, litter boxes for one-legged cats, and Taylor Fay.
So where, you ask, did I travel during all this? Two weeks ago I had an incredibly early flight out of Portland, so I spent the previous night at the La Quinta near the airport to take advantage of their “Park and Sleep and Fly and Sleep and Park and Fly and Park” program. Thanks to an utterly bizarre celestial alignment I drove to Portland State University that night, and caught up with a Hopkins friend who I hadn’t seen in over ten years.
The following morning I flew from Portland to Dallas, met up with my cohort Jake Ingman, and flew to Austin for the SXSW Interactive design conference. For the next five days we drank obscene amounts of liquor, fed Mark Bixby obscene amounts of bacon, and occasionally talked about interactive design. We also cruised around in RVs and ice cream trucks, got kicked out of bars, rode giant wooden unicorns, and established Awesometown, USA (population: You).
After all that (there is a whole lot more to “that” than mentioned so far) I flew from Austin to Dallas, where I had a five-hour layover until my flight back to Portland. After reaching Portland I didn’t even bother driving back to Hood River, because the following morning I had to catch a flight to Minneapolis. Instead I once again spent the night in a king-sized Tempur-Pedic bed at La Quinta Portland, still confused, drunk and disoriented from SXSW.
I met up with Kate at the Minneapolis airport and we flew to Detroit, an airport that is so utterly dominated by Northwest Airlines that in the baggage claim they have a sign that says, “Lost or damaged baggage? Then fuck you!” We took a shuttle to Enterprise Rent-A-Wreck, who sent us away with a Grand Caravan and five children who needed a ride to soccer practice, and we then drove to Ann Arbor to visit the University of Michigan.
We spent the next four days in Ann Arbor, meeting with our graduate programs and eating Silvio’s Organic Pizza and wandering through cemeteries, until deciding that we just weren’t far enough south and needed to travel to Indiana. We headed back to Detroit and traded in the Grand Caravan for a Chevy Rollerskate, a deathtrap of a car that gets 32 mpg and would likely get lodged under an SUV in a crash, and drove to Bloomington to see what Indiana University is all about.
Indiana University is all about rain and “hoosiers”. We know what rain is, and there is apparently a lot of it. As for the hoosier, no one seems quite sure what to make of that. Fortunately Bloomington is wrought with delicious Thai and Indian food, which is simultaneously foreign and familiar for both Kate and I. Bloomington is also far enough south that McDonald’s has sweet tea on the menu, the student union has a Chick-Fil-A in the basement, and Kate swears that she will pick up a drawl if we happen to go to school there.
The sun shown beautifully on the Red Lobster the day we left Bloomington. Bound for Detroit to catch our evening flight back to Minneapolis, we stopped in Ypsilanti just so we could say we had been there (it’s called the Sufjan effect). From Minneapolis my flight to Portland was delayed, but by that time it was already so late and I had flown so much, that you could have told me our plane was infested with flaming poisonous snakes and tiny clones of Samuel L. Jackson and it still wouldn’t have fazed me.
Upon reaching Portland I took a shuttle to the hotel, thought wistfully of a giant Swedish mattress, but resolved to collect my Subaru and make the dark drive back to Hood River. Eight flights and two weeks later, I stumbled through my front door at two o’clock in the morning.
The Rivimino
February 5, 2008
A few years ago my friends and I discovered an odd car in a parking lot in Minneapolis, a strange-looking thing with custom tail lights, welded rails and an unpainted steel flatbed. We immediately concluded that this was perhaps the craziest, most brilliant, most ridiculous automobile we had ever seen in our lives, and so of course we had to take turns posing with it.
I posted the image to my Photolog at Brainside Out, and thought little of it until last month when I got an email from a fellow named Allen up in Hibbing, Minnesota. Allen found the car while doing a Google Image search for the coolest car ever where it currently displays in second place, in the company of Lamborghinis, ahead of the Batmobile, and behind the 92 mpg FuelVapor Technologies Alé.
As it turns out, Allen’s car is the Coolest Car Ever. He bought it after it had been rear-ended, and he built the flatbed instead of replacing the trunk like normal. He calls it the Rivimino, a contraction of Riviera and El Camino.
Cool, huh? Small world.
This is me posting to…
January 16, 2008
Things I Know I Know That I Didn’t Know I Knew Last Time I Was Here
January 15, 2008
How to dump my laundry basket full of clean clothes in the filthy, rain-sodden parking lot behind the Chinese restaurant.
How to change a tire in the cold, spitting Oregon rain, on the side of a busy Portland freeway.
Even though only one tire needs replacing, four-wheel drive cars need to have all of their tires replaced at the same time.
Siping.
Despite all my fuss and howling, ditching Sprint for AT&T is easy.
Despite all my hopes otherwise, I will hate AT&T just as much as Sprint.
I will hate, yes, but at least I will hate with an iPhone.
Eventually. For now, I realize that the RAZR phone is but the ultimate celebration of mediocrity.
I can wear sweaters.
My aversion to v-neck sweaters, however, is hereditary.
You can wash jeans inside out to reduce wear and fading.
Sled dogs eat High-Performance Sled Dog Food that comes in large silver bags decked out in checkered flags and florescent graphics and everything.
In the end, even High-Performance Sled Dog Food has to go somewhere. And boy does it ever.
The Ukraine is an off-the-chain vacation spot if you love being at the line where coal pollution and cloud cover meet, meet unflinchingly, and meet eternally.
I tire of my music collection, and even though I have a $15 gift card to iTunes I am wary of using it, for I fear I’ll simply end up with the same crap I already don’t want to listen to.
The two spaces that I insert at the end of a full stop are an anachronism, and one that is actually discouraged by a number of distinguished style manuals.
Oxford commas. I say unnecessary clutter, for the most part.
Tamagotchi
December 18, 2007
I realize now that this whole writing thing brings with it an alarming clarity of thought, something I’ve sorely missed since I stopped doing it on a regular basis. I make no promises, but indeed this would be a good habit to cultivate again.
Part of the problem is that while I have been writing, recently it has been reduced to short impulsive bursts of ill consequence. Despite my best efforts, my online identity has been scattered to the four great corners of the web, each one a series of fragmented imagery and slacker poetry completely lacking in depth and cohesion. This I hope to resolve at some point, with a dangerous and whirring brass contraption, spherical in shape and bisected by an angry equator of spinning gears.
It may be a time until I am able to realize that vision. Perchance I will soon settle on a reasonable equivalent, all stitched together with web-based APIs and a custom Ruby on Rails application. The end result for you, dear reader, would be a centralized place to keep tabs on yours truly, as endearing a proposal as that may be. For the time being, however, it would behoove you to consult the following locales. Note that if you find this old news, please count yourself among the savvy and move along. My readership regularly spans seven decades, so there’s a broad range of experiences that must be properly accomodated.
Daneomatic – Yes, you are here. This is probably the last place on earth where I think about what I’m going to say before I say it. Even then, I still don’t ponder long enough that it would actually interfere with anything.
Flickr – I used to maintain my own photo galleries, until I realized that such an activity could be much more fun if I farmed it out to a third party. I still take photos (more than ever, actually) and the better ones end up here.
Twitter – This is where I (among others) sputter about what I’m doing with such a diarrhetic frequency. Rather than encouraging a Hemingway-esque efficiency of language, I believe Twitter has done more to ruin my motivation to write than anything else. Why write an intelligent, well-reasoned article when I can just complain about it in 140 characters or less? All told, the idea of an indexed and publicly searchable database of my daily business kinda creeps me out, and thus my updates are protected.
Tumblr – Quite recently I began noticing a gloomy fog settling over the Twittersphere, with everyone constantly complaining about everything. I certainly was not exempt from this characterization, so I started sliding more of my knee-jerk kvetches over to Tumblr in an effort to boost morale on Twitter.
I’ve since realized Tumblr’s near-limitless potential for immortalizing the flaws of others, and so I’ve been capturing software bugs and interface gaffes as I encounter them. It’s a project similar to that pursued by my woodwind professor while he was in college, when he made a tape consisting of every chipped note and flubbed rhythm in every professional classical recording he could find.
Brainside Out – This is my business, which is currently in sleep mode. I wrote here for years, but this ain’t where the action is these days.
Vimeo – If I shot more video in my life, this is where it would be.
Facebook – My irrational animosity towards this site becomes more rational with each passing headline. I have disabled all email notifications and so I go for weeks without reading my wall or responding to friends, and I’ve earned myself a special seat of unpopularity by refusing to install any number of asinine applications. I do not categorically disapprove of Facebook applications, however, as My Flickr does a reasonable job getting my photos listed, and TwitterSync posts my Twitter messages to Facebook with some predictability.
That said, Facebook is like a digital pet that constantly needs to be fed, entertained and scolded. My only reward for this labor is that every so often, it shits itself in fury.
Rice Balls
December 17, 2007
We’re done. Kate and I have finished our applications to graduate school, all of our transcripts have been submitted, and our recommenders have completed their assessments of our qualifications. In the end we only applied to three schools, as the fourth school on our list made considerable effort to come across as an arrogant prick. It was as though they were doing us a favor in allowing us to apply to their school, and we should be so lucky that they were taking the time to communicate with us in the first place.
So now after four months on this project, averaging two hours of work every evening of every day, we now wait to hear back. Or at least, some of us are waiting to hear back. Kate was accepted to her program at one of our schools less than a day after submitting her application. I keep telling people that I’m involved in an abusive relationship, and my girlfriend beats me. Not only does she beat me by turning in her applications before me, but she beats me in getting accepted to her schools before me.
In other news, on Friday I finally got my car back from the auto body shop. They were having a hell of a time resetting the error codes in the system, so they had to take an extra day and drive it to the Subaru dealership in The Dalles and have them clear out the codes for good. While they were driving to The Dalles a rock got kicked up by another car, chipping my brand-fucking new windshield, and requiring yet another day of repair. I am becoming increasingly convinced that either my car or that stretch of highway is cursed, and I will never again be able to drive to The Dalles without suffering the consequences.
I went snowboarding at Mount Hood Meadows today, and had a splendid time scouring the mountain for something that was not ice. Conditions were fairly mediocre, as we only have a 50-inch base and we haven’t had a significant snow storm in more than a week. Ice and rocks aside it was great to get on the hill, and even though I loved driving the Ford Focus while my Subaru was in the shop, it’s nice driving a car to Hood that doesn’t leave me feeling terrified. Oh, Ford Focus, it’s sad and alarming how much you have in common with my old Ford Tempo.
There is encouraging news, too, on the knee side of things. I went riding at the mountain last weekend with my friend Joe, and on my second run I took a huge digger right on my knee. While it hurt like crazy I assumed I was just acting the wuss, and so I forced myself to keep riding on it for four more hours. By the time we got to the van it was feeling pretty tender, and I iced it with a ziplock bag of snow for the drive back to Hood River.
When I got home my knee had since swollen to the size of a grapefruit, to the point where I couldn’t even stand and cook dinner. It was all I could do to drop ibuprofen, ice my knee, and sit on the couch watching episodes of The West Wing. The injury has since matured into an impressive bruise that spans my leg, and I no longer look like I have the knee of a World’s Strongest Man.
