This is a song about a bad girl,
Something that happened to me a long time ago.
Everybody was telling me how the little girl was running around,
But I had a head of my own,
And I just wouldn’t listen to nobody…
—Lee Moses, “Bad Girl, Pt. 1″
I’d never torn out a page of a Green Apple notebook before this trip, but if you come across two volumes in my archives missing pages, know that they are neither notes on an assassination nor the map to the holy grail, but leaves burned in service of a fire at Kalaloch, WA, the evening of 8 June 2008, cabin #15 overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I wondered briefly what ideas and sketches were supposed to fill those pages, now given to burn. In a way, I’d burned a lot of good ideas and better judgment to arrive at that cabin that night. Before I left for Portland, she told me that if I lived in LA, things might have been different. Of course.
As of Saturday, I’ve been living in Washington, DC for three years. For the last week in my duty as innkeeper and tour guide to Eric and Adrian, I’ve been compelled to articulate some things I truly love about this place. People here who know me as the ‘LA guy’ rely on my Google Map of Southern California, bars and bookstores and museums and the odds-and-sods of the 10-million-strong five counties marked up in nostalgia. There will come a time when I do likewise for the District.
But not yet.
As far as the rest of my recent vacation was concerned, this was a trip I could hardly imagine most of my friends enjoying in its entirety—equal parts downtown stroll, road trip, and nature hikes, with long pauses for photography and meat gorging. After the Hoh Rain Forest, I wondered aloud how trees on a sidewalk or an erstwhile park could compare to that experience of natural beauty, how the fields of conifers on either side of the highway which in the novelty of the approach were staggering to behold and mere logger fodder in the other direction. How does one go through something like this and mitigate their raised expectations?
For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great, okay. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste—the thing that got you into the game—your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that it’s still sorta crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit.
—Ira Glass
At An Event Apart, Armin Vit’s article on the lack of landmark web design and the circumstances that prevent it from emerging was alluded to wearily by a few speakers, like the practice’s frayed horizon: when it comes to web design it’s rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired. And I forget if it was Andy Clarke or Brian Oberkirch who casually suggested, what about Google Maps?
The success of Google Maps was not in its transformation of how we understood cartography but how we layered the interactive and collaborative properties of the web over it and in turn understood the web itself. Indeed, Mapquest and other sites served largely the same primary purpose as Google Maps with moderate aplomb, enough that their brand names are still relevant. However, Google approached mapping with lightness—an address need no longer be divided into its Postal Service-dictated taxonomies, a partial query could be deduced and the result could be instantaneously (and elegantly) navigated, panned and zoomed—and wit—the inherent flaws of its satellite view became a topic of humor, to say nothing of driving directions from New York to Paris. It invited these flights and accommodated them, to say nothing of self-location by satellites, as no paper map could ever do, as none of its predecessors on the web had the foresight to. Its collaborative tools have proven indispensable—for those who know me as the ‘LA guy,’ for people who will know me as the ‘DC guy,’ for two people in different cities to plan a visit to a third.
After my trip to Haiti, after the opening rounds of the House search analytics project, it’s been difficult to stay motivated through seemingly interminable production work. It’s even been difficult to be a code monkey for my own projects, where the rewards are solely mine.
Because that beautiful thing is the new standard. And it’s been easy to mistake the absence of that beauty in parts of my life and my failure to attain it in my work for my unworthiness of it, and it’s a hard habit to quit. How does one go through something like this and mitigate their raised expectations? For how many years?
Julie admired that no matter how improbably discouraging my failures with women, I never settled. Never took advantage of an orbiter, never desperately called a satellite a star.
With graduate school ahead, it’ll be at least three more years before I make that map of Washington, DC, three years for honing and reducing. Because if I can’t be desirable, I can be unfuckwithable. There’ve been ideas burning too long, stories and artworks and labors of craft and affection, all paper and no firewood. And though it’s summer now, it’ll soon be time again that I’ll need something to keep me warm.
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