There were my brown years, the days I resembled UPS livery. And overlapping that time in my work were the purple days (months, rather, just after the oranges), which yielded lilacs and aubergines and ubes and all shades between. Not that any of this work was published as intended, because unfortunately, the stigmas associated with the hue outweighed in the eyes of clients what I felt was its singular grandeur. Because I never considered colors property, I never thought that gays or monarchs exclusively claimed purple, and damn those (lots of people) who thought otherwise. My own interpretation of it — assertive as cardinal without the abrasiveness, cool as cobalt without the inertness — is what I ascribe to its users, and more specifically, wearers.

And soon, they’ll be everywhere. There is a fourth thing about the sign, that the wearer has considered all of this and then embarked on finding it in their size and clearly didn’t give up as seasons passed and it still didn’t materialize. And this could be that season when it does, trendy as it may be. But as seasons pass, there’ll be other colors and so many aubergine overcoats will remain closeted and the status quo will re-emerge, and those just-so strange souls will make themselves known, on bicycles, cigarette in hand, as dry ochre foliage rains around us.

And in the meantime, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to introduce myself to strange women.

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.

And this seems to be the prevailing pattern for 2008: travel somewhere new, host an old friend (or my mother, as the case was in April). After Eric leaves, I’ll be back in Manila for most of July until the beginning of August, and I’m planning trips to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur during that stay.

Then it’s All Points West, UX Week, and orientation at Georgetown. So much for those unaccountable weekends of concert-going, movie-going, museum-going, and other-country-going, binge drinking to the last. So much for open tomorrows.

I’ll keep my comments about my trip to Haiti brief, and first, yes, I actually was there. Except for my colleagues, it seems my updates about a new passport picture and maladrone were all taken as groundwork for an elaborate ruse, and although there were moments even I didn’t believe it was happening, it did. I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the country, let alone the city of Port-au-Prince, as we were largely confined to the hotel and the tony hillside during our three-day stay, conducting transactions in American English and dollars. Ultimately, we were there to do a job, and after my end of that was torpedoed by possibly the most ill-conceived website launch I’ve witnessed, I’m told we still fulfilled our symbolic purpose, which I have to convince myself counts for something. And as a natural extension of the fact I rarely parted with my DSLR there, I assumed the role of delegation photographer—there’s ample evidence I am not making this up.

Nevertheless, given the thesis I’m planning to write, it was a fruitful trip for my personal academic purposes. And though our itinerary was narrow, we made the best of it, three single guys on straight cash per diem. Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, and I know, I know, I know…

Apropos today’s itinerary, man, is romance in the 21st century a weird beast or what? Sure, good things happen to me when it rains, but whither tornadoes?

“I know you say there’s no-one for you, but here is one.”

Why should it matter that I’m borne on a crest of denial, was my frequent reply. In my grown-up shoes and somber coat, I have sufficient cover to effect my desired changes to political infrastructure, inconspicuous to eyes that falsely discern my appearance as agreement to a status quo. And I think those effects, though lesser than curing epidemics and famine, to improve others’ lives are worth pursuing despite the New Year’s Eves spent jilted.

Nevertheless, it seems an especially appropriate discussion now in the afterglow of “Cyrano,” where in the last act the troublesome loneliness has soured the titular character’s idealistic mischief into proselytizing bile, and in anticipation of the final season of The Wire, a narrative that more than any other I’ve encountered addresses quixotic workaholics on the fringe of the clusterfuck of American politics (myself among them) with the notice the job will not save you.

And maybe we’ll have this conversation again, perhaps after a road trip to Arcosanti, St. Vincent at the Rock and Roll Hotel, Charmaine Clamor at the Brooklyn Public Library (she actually performed at Roscoe’s in Long Beach, of all places, last week), visits to theatres showing Persepolis, There Will Be Blood, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the purchase of the perfect slouchy chair, and every single-serving of acculturation sequestered in lacquered walls, another lonely lurch into evening. And perhaps I’ll think differently of my social austerity, perhaps I’ll reconsider the merits of my lonely pursuits, though I somehow doubt that my presence will intersect with what (or precisely who) I might find equally compelling.

I spent parts of last weekend visiting with former professors in galleries, with Heather at her studio, partaking in the lives of artists in Los Angeles, confronting my talents for discourse and composition, in diminished though ample effect, on a now dusty mental periphery, a few hours’ intersection with a road less travelled. And though I now find myself approaching drawing and bookmaking less as a compulsion than a personal restoration, it, like the unrequited-love flip-side of the workaholic cycle, exists in a state of disrepair proportional to my increasingly cynical intellectual trajectory and, however coldly, given to the past. To restore that disposition to unrequited love—I don’t know.

Rushing box offices of Broadway theatres in snowy weather after The Rings of Saturn and a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger on the Chinatown bus to New York is the kind of activity enjoyed regularly and solitarily, because although I know some who would hypothetically (and only occasionally) accept the invitation, no one ever does by dint of geography or financial or physical restraint. And though it is ostensibly a whimsical weekend, it is wholly representative of what I demand of a prospective romantic partner, and not simply to tolerate it or to even partake in the itinerary enthusiastically, but to augment it (I don’t mean simply an order of fries) and bind the experience as much to her self as I have to mine.

The job will not save me. And art may not save me. And graduate school may not save me (I, coincidentally, am satisfied with my surprisingly above-average GRE score and have shifted my attention to the qualitative components of my applications). Travel, literature, films, and music may hardly pose an obstacle to labor-borne damnation, however noble its effects. And for as much as they/you worry, I sometimes wonder if even my closest friends are up to the task.

One topic I’d considered for my thesis is the relationship between savior culture and nocturnalism, or how the latter allows a critical detachment from the former, and specifically, how an increasingly globalized workforce acting on behalf of disparate time zones will affect the practices of monotheistic religion and executive political power. It strikes me that the ability to believe in a savior, and consequently, in the concept of monogamous love, is subliminally reinforced by the association of consciousness and animation with the single, blinding illumination of a medium-sized star. For nocturnals, however, light is artificial and distributed, its position—overhead on planes and buses to guide one’s reading or a single spot to illuminate an actor on a dark stage—directed by purpose. Or it is reflected in the moon, which itself guides the tides, or conveyed over exponentially notated distances by gas giants.

This is hardly a tidy argument, but I feel that my nocturnal experience constantly reminds me that life is as much due to that overriding source of illumination as a series of functional relationships, and I burn my candle at both ends not as much for my benefit but to be a beacon to those arriving at the same understanding. “Is life just a miserable series of let downs or what,” Mani texted as I was leaving Los Angeles. Single servings in lacquered walls, it would seem. My reply: And I could hardly ask for better friends to share them.

In late September, I confronted the option of starting a new job closer to my ideal career (on the present web design trajectory) in the city that, from the south where I’d been raised, physically and metaphorically represented the north—San Francisco—with necessary salary and benefits accounted. And, though I lost some sleep to its consideration (and some leave to the interview process), it was an easier decision than I’d expected: I chose to stay here. Having recently taken occupation of an apartment on Capitol Hill and a niche at the office as the idealist who writes snarky memoranda, I’ve come to an understanding with this city—an understanding that includes a pay increase and support through graduate school including tuition reimbursement. Beyond these material benefits, however, I’ve also brought more weight to bear on this spring-board job—applying my zealotry to research projects and finishing what I started on House.gov—and, with a master’s degree likely added to that load, jacked up the elastic potential energy of my résumé. Furthermore, re-arriving at the terms of a permanent settlement is a process I have no desire to undertake, in spite of my fondness for the city itself—when I’m done here, I intend to be through with geographic monogamy.

And that seems to be the iconic story of the past year of my life: passing through airport security, re-examining and sometimes very nearly attaining what I love, and, in the wake of each round-trip flight, reducing my ambitions to mere “acceptable eventualities” and rendering past victories pyrrhic. What once appeared as solid ground years in every direction I find myself re-mapping as mediocrity’s quicksand, and as each day forth has been another step to avoid that weak terrain, I find myself on this long stride—25 hours till midnight (24 songs, 79:45)—reconsidering the circumstances (an absurdly prolonged and subsumed existential crisis, now at mid-life) that have lent the recent passage of time such a tenuous, deliberate pace.

The 24 songs here are vignettes from other playlists—a week of being a passenger in the rare left-hand driver on the A11, work music from sleepless weekends spent on the design of my portfolio site, songs that accompanied the constant re-arrangement of furniture in my new apartment, timely incidentals from jukeboxes and FM radios, and the late-summer North American travel spree—so there are obvious gaps and spared puns (previous drafts followed ‘Ooh La’ by the Kooks with ‘Ooh La La’ by the Faces, expanded from ‘California’ to ‘Look Inside America’ to ‘This Bitter Earth,’ and were bookended with ‘1234′ by Feist and ‘Hotel Yorba’ by the White Stripes with ‘1, 2, 3′ by Camille betwixt, for instance, and I resisted the temptation to arbitrarily include anything by Joy Division). Nevertheless, it has an arc, and at the ends of this final draft are direct references to two films (both with 1970s UCLA pedigree)—Harold and Maude and Killer of Sheep—that approximate the yang and yin, respectively, of my defining films of this past year (if Stray Dog closed with a pop song, that would occupy a place here for similar reasons; I must acknowledge Rushmore’s impact though the aforementioned theme was cut).

And though at the end of the arc, as at the end of this year, the past looks worse for wear and the future seems a museless exercise in sociopathy where my passions are reduced to hobbies, I still have to plant my advancing foot somewhere. And though I no longer have a destination in mind, my itinerary has a few broad parameters: to leverage my existing resources to enliven the journey and to take each step with relish. Some of it may manifest itself as a community of like-minded people with whom I would embark on my graduate studies (hopefully) or a series of occasions to distribute correspondence of increasingly exotic origin, some of it is just a matter of dimmer switches and potted plants and steps trod on sidewalks hither among the glamour of city girls in winter.

The sentiment from Geek Love (though I haven’t had sex with Siamese twins) seems appropriate here: “And I’d figured I’d come to the end of being amazed. Run out of it, like you’d run out of sugar. But when I saw you lovely girls I thought to myself, maybe there’s more to life yet.” However, unlike that hedonist singularity and the allegorical novella of the first part of this narrative, Every day is a song for a holiday, this shift to a more optimistic brand of fatalism is borne of a series of events, of seemingly unassociated verbs, nouns, and a mass of adjectives. But by giving them sequence and contexts, it is my hope that, for you as they have for me, from these passages might emerge a story, like a footpath on a field of grass between two buildings, a patchy and unsanctioned route of convenience through a verdant square, inaccessible to official cartographers and for that belonging more to its travelers.

I lost a third apartment yesterday to “an earlier application” (though I admit this time I actually believe it) and let another promising lead evaporate today. What’s strange is that as I am more deeply in the market for rentals, I’m finding that the pursuit of a decent apartment and a significant other are fraught with similar pitfalls—problematic conformity, lowered expectations, and of course, dealbreakers.

Unlike the glossy-covered books of listings akin to the trendy bump-and-grind clubs, Craigslist is the neighborhood singles’ bar of rental listings, a casual parade of random availabilities that while skewing away from the primped uniformity of managed properties is not itself immune to them nor does it discriminate against the ugly duds turned away elsewhere—namely, it’s where I’ve been looking most often. Between that and a professional (I’ve been in contact with real estate agents, though not matchmakers), I’m optimistic that by 30 June—a scant month—I’ll have scaled what I didn’t think but am quickly realizing is my preposterously high standard.

Condominium developers like fashion magazines are almost comically misguided in their impressions of what a young, affluent professional (such as myself) appreciates. Substance before style please, and no, having a hot tub doesn’t count.

My personal taste errs towards the eclectic, the urbane, and occasionally a little dangerous, grounded in an understanding of the pulsating collective unconscious of streets and neighborhoods, from which one has learned, of which one has enfolded into their style the manifest affectations of that pedigree. Hardwood floors and exposed brick of Victorian rowhouses and poured concrete of Bauhaus apartments reflect the kind of dignity borne of travels and tragedies which I prefer to the passing confidence that comes from fresh paint or new shoes. Carpet is for suburban girls.

Ethically, moreso than environmental responsibility, I value a sense of economy (and naturally, the former extends from the latter) and compact simplicity. Can we agree that the kitchens of efficiency apartments would be better served by compact bottom-freezer refrigerators than the 18 cubic-foot baseline that Americans observe, that better use of the full-size space with the water hookup below the counter will be made with a ventless washer-dryer than an automatic dishwasher? That closets need not be a meter deep? That lighting that is not itself architectural be recessed?

And while it seems contrary to my aforementioned ethics, I favor flourishes of rococo aesthetics in equal measure (if only for their distinct contrast to functional modernity), and I abhor fluorescent lighting, compact or otherwise—liken it to my preference for a woman who regardless of whether she’s a smoker isn’t above having the occasional cigarette. Sometimes, wrong is beautiful.

I hesitate to choose a residence for its community amenities, I avoid dating women for their social affiliations, and I wish both would stop their respective advertising of such. I crave the challenge of the expectations that come with high ceilings.

Above all things, I desire a sunny outlook—that the lenses and portals through which one glimpses the world passing are trained not on the dumpsters and the detritus of civilization but on trees and sidewalks and public spaces and people making do. That within is not merely warm and well-lit, but that the hottest days seem cooler. I’ll still travel and try to snatch memory from the sky, tucking it away in long-exposure photographs, in the company of someone about whom I could write a novel. But I want the walls where I hang those pictures to not be the cheap eggshell of rental-unit white, the desk where I draft the manuscript to face someplace more inspiring than the construction of ruins in waiting.

Above all, deft aplomb.

For all of my life, I’ve been fortunate to have a roof over my head—this recent stretch reminds me that there are lessons one can only learn when they have nowhere to run when it’s raining.