Recently in long story short Category

gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian

was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument:

Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.

Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….

After I posted about that Louise Nevelson exhibit at the de Young museum and seeing the model for the sculpture near my parents’ apartment at 92nd and Park Ave in New York, my sister scanned and emailed me a photo of the four of us siblings posing in front of the sculpture, circa 1974.

(The image above links to a much larger version, not quite as cropped.)

From left to right, handlewise, that’s xifer, moo, xourmas, and xian. I’m making a muscle and entertaining xourmas. moo is, I believe, pretending to smoke a cigarette and not making a vulgar British gesture. xifer is looking stylish in her coat.

Yes, we really dressed that mod back then.

A week or so ago I posted a semi-whimsical question on Facebook:

Has anybody seen my bliss? I was following it but I think I fell too far behind.

(Hat tip to Joseph Campbell, pictured here, who seems to have coined the phrase “follow your bliss.”)

My friend Aldon Hynes wrote an interesting post, Following Our Bliss, inspired by this, saying, in part:

Christian has a good job. He’s published a book. He’s newly married. I would have expected him, of all people, to be keeping up with his bliss. Perhaps it is endemic of how hard it is to follow your bliss these days. Perhaps some of it is that people aren’t even sure what their bliss looks like anymore.

He then goes on to talk about his own various ups and downs recently and closes by saying

So, I’m not sure where Christian’s bliss has gone. Perhaps it is walking down the street, talking with my bliss, stopping to befriend a homeless man, spending a little time helping a teenager find her voice, and doing a little social networking to help other people find bliss that is more meaningful than talking about fashion, horoscopes and the desire to find Mr. Right in an Internet chat room.

Believe me, I am well aware of my blessings and how fortunate I am in my life, my love, my work, and so on, but I still wrestle - as probably many people do - with wondering whether I am engaged in the best possible uses of my short time here on earth. No doubt there is a grass is greener component of this, and not everyone is sucked into a higher calling. Some of just muddle through, trying to follow our bliss and sometimes losing sight of it around a corner just up ahead, but I think it’s probably that urge to thrive and grow that really matters.

Saturday

• Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park
• Work out with B at the gym
• Drop off shirts at the cleaner
• Start laundry
• Make pizza and salad
• Fix problem with misdirected payments to writer client
• See Michael Clayton
• Have a nightcap of Balvenie
• Move remaining to-do’s to Sunday or Not This Weekend

Sunday

• Make coffee, squeeze juice, scramble eggs, toast bagels, serve lox
• Skim the tv listings for TiVo
• Try (and fail) to get a haircut
• Coordinate move of East Bay for Democracy website
• Catch up on food diary
• Finish laundry
• Go into SF, deYoung museum, dinner at D & P’s

I was running a search on a labeled group of messages (from a mailing list) in my mailbox, looking for just the unread ones, but I was also doing something else at the same time (actually two or three other things, drinking coffee, firing up a YouTube video, looking for a file on my desktop) and I ended up typing “is:unclear” instead of “is:unread.”

But maybe a good email search could find the messages in your inbox that are unclear?

So, I’m back from the Dead Symposium at UMass (I’ll post my slides soon), and Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’m at the office now wrestling with my new MacBook Pro, trying to get everything possible onto it from my old G4 without breaking any of the new stuff. I think I’m almost there (knock wood), but it has put a crimp in my blogging.

There’s a backlog, though, and I’ll be working through it over the next few days. However, I’m also standing on the verge of getting serious about my next book and I’m not sure how that’s going to affect my blogging. The book will get precedence for daily writing, so blogging may turn into a blow-by-blow account of the process. I also plan to post my notes and drafts on a wiki site as a way of doing it in public and soliciting input along the way.

In the meantime, I was just down getting coffee in bldg B here in Sunnyvale and noticed the XM station on the TV overhead playing a David Bowie song they referred to as “quot;Heroes”quot; from the album of the same name. I don’t know if that was a typo in an HTML entity of if XM has its own crazy dialect for special characters but it looks like something got escaped and then didn’t get unescaped, which is a little bit how I’m feeling about that Dead conference I mentioned in Amherst.

In fact I’ve been trying to post to this blog nearly every day for a while now, with an emphasis on weekdays, but this has nothing to do with the month of November. As for the novel-writing thing, I’m punting. This is slightly to do with the nasty cold that has laid me up this weekend and made it fairly impossible to feel creative or have ideas or write anything substantial. But it’s more than that. I just realized that the timing isn’t right.

In terms of fiction I have my last novel still in my head, since it’s between first and second drafts right now.

And in terms of creative writing I still have a half-written memoir to return to that got shelved when I wrote my last nonfiction book.

And in terms of nonfiction I have a new book dying to come out of my head and that’s the real reason. I think I need to put my creative, extracurricular energies toward the new book on presence and devote my fiction-urge to getting the last novel ready for the agent-publisher mill or the dumpster.

So maybe I need to thank this cold for forcing me to rethink my priorities, but screw that. Not when I still feel like an assembly line for dead white-blood cells.

One last unrelated note. My birthday just passed and the ritual asking me of what I want for my birthday from family members is still going on, and I generally point to my Amazon wish list but it’s not exactly an easy link to remember, so I’ve added a button to my blog here and I’ve stuck it in this post as well so it will pop up in a few other places. This is not a gift-solicitation from readers but more of a convenience for me as I do the tiny bit of writing I’m bound to get to today before my next swoon.

I’ve discovered that it’s easy to remember the anniversary of your first blog post* if you’re as clever or random as I was and wrote it on your birthday. This then reminds me to crank out my yearly age-revealing, I’ve-been-blogging-since post.

And this is a special one, too, for what it’s worth. Ten years of blogging! Hard to believe. Well, and it’s sort of not true. It has been ten years since I started writing a daily journal (Peter Merholz hadn’t facetiously invented the word blog yet), but there are two gaps (or hiati as my Latin-loving friend might style them) each of at least a year, back near the beginning. More recently there are gaps of weeks, possibly even months here and there. Sure, when I started Radio Free Blogistan in 2002 I was lightly underemployed and able to post seven eight nine times a day, and over the years I’ve scattered my words onto many different blogs at many different urls, foolishly diluting my “personal brand,” so that perhaps you can say those days of many entries help fill in some of the gaps in those long silences, much the ways mountains are stripmined and leveled and used to fill in valleys.

But who cares? I’m still ten years older than I was the day I started writing Breathing Room at the tender age of 33 (I toyed with the idea of calling it “Outliving Christ”) and so I feel qualified to celebrate.

I’ve actually been enjoying my nearly daily blogging habit lately and I expect to keep enjoying it until the next major arbitrary event intervenes. Sure, for a month I expect to replace blogging with installments of a novel-to-be-named later, but to me this has always been about a daily writing practice and not so much about professional or career or geek or politics or I stubbed my toe and my cat barfed blogging, so if I do manage to do the NaNoWriMo thing, I will count that.

Those entries, by the way, won’t show up here. I have a tendency to write fiction that treads into NSFW territory, so I’ll post the entries at my no-holds-barred fiction blog - one of the few I’m still willing to maintain as a separate site - A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I’ll Never Read - which at the moment still sports the final installment of the first draft of my previous novel, For You, The Stars. If you want all your xian blogging or whatever you call it in one place, you can always follow it from monolog, where the novel chunks will show up alongside this more ordinary blogging.

And so, I’m 43 today, a prime number. My blogging is 10. I apparently was willing to letterspace lowercase letters and thus would “steal” sheep, as the saying goes, and breathing room was right-justified, horror of horrors, and it truly was handcoded daily - though I did eventually at least make a template - with an elegant little url structure, and so it still isn’t fully ported over here (and, no doubt, eventually into some future next blog of mine probably in WordPress). And I’m about to be late for my shuttle.

*I refuse to use that most hateful of all blog-derived words, blogaversary - or however you spell it - except in this disclaimer and even now I must take a deep sip of coffee to clear my pallette.)

Posting over low bandwidth. Consider this photo a down payment toward a great deal more imagery and tales to come.

This is one of the many artworks, most with religious themes, decorating the hotel I stayed in my first night in Oaxaca, the Hostal de la Noria.

UPDATE: (or del, I have to doublecheck that) thanks Alex!

Very late Tuesday night - in fact so late that it will really be very early Wednesday morning - I’m heading down to Oakland airport to hop on a Mexicana plane and fly to Guadalajara and then Mexico City and finally to Oaxaca. Yes, it’s the OAK to OAX run. Once there I will spend three or so days at a retreat, an unconference organized by Jerry “Sociate” Michalski. I wanted to go last year but couldn’t swing it, and I’m grateful to have been invited to participate. The best part is I really have no idea what we’re going to end up conferring about.

The other best part is that I’ve never been to Mexico before, and I’m excited and a little nervous (doing anything for the first time makes me feel that way) about it.

The other best part is that I’ll be disconnected from my electronic life. I won’t want to pay roaming minutes for phone or data so I’ll be just calling home once a day to check in with my sweetie, and checking voicemail intermittently. I may not bother looking at my email till I get back, October 28, and I’ll definitely not be blogging.

I always think it’s funny when people apologize for not blogging. “Sorry I haven’t been blogging lately - I’ve had a flare-up of sciatica,” or “Light blogging ahead - we’re planning to levitate the Pentagon,” or what have you. Isn’t even the briefest pause in blogging actually a bit of a gift to your audience, such as it is?

It’s not that I have any shortage of things to blog about. The Big Star show I saw this weekend illustrated with my blurry iPhone photos. That’d be good. Or a long screed about how you don’t design sites from the front to the back or the back to the front but from the middle (that is, the information architecture) both forward and back. Or my long-tortured draft about social web apps that don’t play well with email. How much I’ve been enjoying the Games for Windows the Official Magazine and Chowder Eating Society Radio Podcast show starring Jeff Green and his sycophants I mean friends I mean underlings.

No, but there will be plenty of time for that (except maybe the Alex Chilton post, which won’t be very current after a while).

I guess I did want to mention this brief hiatus though, hypocrite that I am, so everyone knows I did it on purpose, man! I meant to do that. I’m not losing my edge. Oh, no. (Though I did wake up this morning feeling pretty low and then forgot to pack my gym shorts before leaving the house - what do I do now? Ride the stationary bike in my jock? Wrap a towel around my waist like a Roman? Skip the workout? I really don’t want to. But that’s hardly enough material for yet another blog post.

Got to work, checked some email, decided to stop dallying and head to the gym for 50 minutes on the stationary bike. Suddenly realized I’d forgotten to bring a change of gym clothes to work today, like I usually do. Briefly considered skipping the workout. Decided instead to re-wear my sweaty clothes from yesterday. Went to the gym. Took my clothes out of my gym bag. They were still wet from yesterday. Actually, I’d say, at least in part, soaked. And, yes, kind of smelly.

I felt bad for the people around me, but put on the wet clothes, grabbed and towel, fired up the Games for Windows the Official Magazine podcast (no I’m not a gamer, but Jeff Green is a friend and his crew is very funny), and did my five minute warmup, my forty minutes of interval training, and my five minute cooldown. Then I stretched, went back to the lockerroom, and got those stanky clothes the hell off my body. Stuffed em in a plastic bag, hit the shower, and shuddered until the hot water made the willies go away.

There is a cycle I go through in preparing for a public speaking gig. The UED (user experience design) brown bag series at Yahoo! is low key in a way. We do it in a medium-sized room with hookups to remote campuses, such as Santa Monica. It’s “all in the family” and thus not as stressful as a large conference. But it’s also your peers and colleagues, so there is a desire to knock it out of the park and not waste anyone’s time.

I gave a talk earlier today on the current state of the Design Pattern Library, my role as its curator, and how my cow-orkers could get involved. (It was called “The Design Pattern Library Wants YOU!” and I probably won’t publish the slides outside of y! but the YUI Theater guys videotaped it and they are probably going to edit something together for the YUI blog, in which case I’ll surely mention that here.)

I think it went pretty well. About two days before speaking I get quite anxious, no matter how well I am prepared. I’ve been taught be speaking mentors to view that nervous energy as “excitement” and as a natural part and parcel of summoning up the necessary vim to get up in front of people and engage with them.

The talk really only came together in my head several days or so, although of course it gelled from a series of thoughts and ideas that I’m wrestling with all the time. I finally got the outline down on paper two days ago and spent most of yesterday putting together the slides, until the wee hours of the morning.

This meant that I really only got about four hours sleep last night, which is really not a good thing before speaking, but oh well. I ran out the door this morning in the rain and left my badge at home, the one I use to open doors and buy food at the cafeteria. I spent all morning trying to get a seven megabyte powerpoint file compressed, but whenever I put it on my PC and used the image compression features in the Windows version of ppt, it ballooned to 10 megs, so I gave up on that.

The talk itself went well, I believe. The room was full. The questions were good. I hit my marks and people laughed in all the right places. I’ll probable even be able to adapt some of my slides and talking points for a few conference gigs I’m hoping to do over the next year.

In the rest of the afternoon, I was sort of braindead. Fortunately, we had a big quarterly earnings report all-hands pep rally slash Oktoberfest party, so I was able to ride out the end of the day. Never made it to the gym, unfortunately, to pump out the lactic acid left making my muscles ache from my short night’s sleep.

Also, I lost my in-box zero state of grace that I’ve maintained for weeks now, so I’ll spend tomorrow trying to get that back.

Happy Birthday, Peter!
Originally uploaded by xian.

One of the highlights of last week’s trip to New York was when Peter, Sara, and the boys drove down from New Haven on Saturday. Pictured here from left to right are Caleb, Peter, and Sam.

Later, I’ll post more pictures to Flickr. This one was taken on the way back from the playground in Central Park near 96th, where we ourselves used to play when we were little. I’ve got a bunch of shots from later in the day at another, newer playground near, I think, 95th and Lex, where little Finn joins his big brothers on the roundabout before it gets too scary.

So anyway, today is Peter’s birthday and let’s just say he’s still in his thirties… barely. I’m a terrible birthday-present giver. I always leave it till too late, have trouble of thinking of something in time, end up just asking what they want, which puts the burden unfairly on the recipient and ruins the surprise, and then half the time fail to follow through after all. I still owe Peter some sort of oil vessel for cooking he requested like four years ago. I’m better at spontaneous gift-giving for what it’s worth.

So for now, let me just say, Peter, I’m inordinately proud of you, as a father, as a brother, as a husband, as a scholar, and as a man of faith. You were the real one all along.

I’m no fan of the term “fatblogging” but I do see some value in the idea of inviting accountability by applying the blog (in the sense of public log) format to a health and fitness plan, and reporting one’s weight to a globe full of strangers is surely one way to keep yourself honest.

Those who know me in the real world may know that I’ve been working out with a trainer since February, and those who’ve known me for a while are aware how unlike me this is. I’ve never been particularly athletic. I’ve avoided organized sports, especially since injuring my knee at age 15, and have never felt comfortable around gyms and locker rooms. But since reaching the magic age of 40 and seeing my weight riding an upward spiral, I finally realized that the years of benign (and less than benign) neglect had come to an end, bit the bullet, and started an exercise program.

Then a month ago, for complicated and yet uninteresting reasons, I was assigned a new trainer and this guy is really good. He and I have set some more aggressive goals and he has redesigned my workout program. I’ve been extremely diligent about it. I go to the gym five times a week, rain or shine. Most of the time I go to the fitness center on the “campus” at my job, but I also joined a local gym so I can get that fifth day in on Saturdays.

I feel stronger, healthier, more energetic, and also - quite frequently - sore. I’ve shed nearly 20 pounds while at the same time building muscle and discovering some muscles I never knew I had. I have more confidence in my physical self and I’ve even seen some improvements in my sadly degenerating knee joint.

This past week I was in New York for a conference and incidentally to visit family, and I had the best intentions in the world to keep up with my exercise program. The hotel we stayed at did not have a gym on the premises, but it did have a deal with a local gym. We arrived late Tuesday and I was too beat to go work out that day. Wednesday through Friday were packed solid with conference activities, particularly since I was volunteering and had to arrive early and stay late.

Saturday I totally could have gone to that gym, but chose instead to take it easy in the morning before checking out of the hotel. We spent the rest of the weekend at my parents’ apartment on the upper east side, where there are numerous gyms. I even researched a few within blocks of the apartment where for around $20 I could have purchased a one-month membership and worked out on Saturday and Sunday, maybe even on Monday morning before our return flight. But I did not.

I had my excuses. It was hot and muggy. We were busy. I was tired. And so on. It tells me that the routine I’ve established is a key part of my current program. Without it, I revert to old, bad habits. In the future, I’ll have to make a stronger commitment and find a way to hold myself to it. This morning I meet with my trainer again and I suspect it will be tough, both physically because I’ve been absent from the gym for a week, and psychologically, because I’ll have to tell him I’ve been off the wagon.

The good news is: I did a lot of walking, even in the strangely hot and muggy non-October weather we were getting, and I stuck pretty closely to my food targets. So at least there’s that.

I don’t plan to do a lot “health and fitness” blogging, but that’s what’s on my mind this morning and one thing I’ve learned about a daily writing practice (oh, yeah, I wasn’t able to do the daily blogging thing on my vacation either!) is to write about whatever comes up.

So I’m standing outside of the Parsons (I always knew it as the Parsons School of Design but at some point it got rebranded Parsons The New School for Design in line with all the other New School for… subschools), where we were putting on the IDEA 2007 conference this past week (which is why I haven’t been getting much blogging done although I have been taking a lot of pictures which I’ve been slowly posting to Flickr if you’re interested), trying to get some AT&T reception on my jPhone to return a call when two guys in suits with their arms literally around each other’s shoulders, laughing and schmoozing like the bunch of dyed-in-the-wool politicians I realize they are, as my brain sorts out the distinctions between these are people I recognize from my own personal life and these are people I recognize because the television has emblazoned them on my mind’s eye over the years, come bursting out of the front door.

It’s Chuck Schumer, I notice, the not-Hillary senator from New York and Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska or was it Kanasas, who is - I suddenly recall - president of the New School and someone about whom I’d recently heard rumors that he might be considering making another go of it in the Senate, despite his admissions of war crimes in Vietnam and his hawkishness on Iraq and Iran.

And I also find myself reflecting on how he used to comb his long receding bangs over his bulgy forehead but that somehow his time in New York had updated his fashion sense so that now he wears his gray hair (or toupe, who can tell?) in a modified Caesar cut, very short bangs brushed forward and it honestly looks much better. He is a handsome man after all.

By now it’s too late to snap a photo of the men, as Kerrey has slipped into a limo and Schumer has hightailed it down toward Sixth Ave and I’m talking on the phone anyway, so it would be kind of rude to put the call on hold just to take photos, but it occurs to me that maybe these guys were talking about said rumored Senate bid and if so was this supposed to be a sort of out-of-the-ways meeting, given that while this is the New School being Parsons and all, it probably isn’t the location of the office of the president of the New School but if so then wouldn’t they be more sneaky and less boisterous and buddy-buddy on their way out the front door?