The first point, typed by Roanne in reference to yakitori quail eggs in bacon, was quoted for humor as my GTalk status. No more than a few minutes passed than Christina seized on this, argued the second point, and added that by virtue of the quail eggs being wrapped in bacon, this was in fact a burrito-style food. An hour-ish later, Patrick chimed in that mini foods taste better (Matchbox sliders, please), and (in a telling example of how much overlap there is in this arena) cited “mini burritos” as evidence. James then followed with his assertion, which I admit is the most specious because it refers to specific ingredients instead of a type of preparation and there would certainly be substantial evidence against it in food from other cultures.

Content of the four arguments aside, what I find amazing about them is that they took place in four different conversations with four people of whom only two know each other and that the original argument only had to exist in my GTalk status in order to spur three additional conversations, parrying a varied range of perspectives in the manner of IRC while enjoying the intimacy of a phone call.

More amazing: yakitori quail eggs in bacon are sufficient evidence to support all four points.

This is required viewing for anybody who confuses sporting a lapel pin for true patriotism (nicked from The Daily Dish). I question and doubt my government because I want it to be better, because its impact on the world is undeniable. All those baseball games where people stood respectfully and listened to a celebrity of dubious talent sing the national anthem were just practice for this moment. Eddie Izzard said about the American national anthem: “70% of what people react to is the look, you know, it’s how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say.” But that crowd on St. Mark’s Place knew and believed 100% of what they were saying. The awkward pause before ‘banner,’ where the crowd collectively catches its breath to belt out the last three words of that phrase, gives me chills.

Courtney took this picture of me in the crowd at James Hoban’s. Even if in the future I am happily married with five children, this past Tuesday may still be one of the top 5 best days of my life.

And just as 25 years and 364 days is just a night of sleep away from 26 even, I know that though the president-elect is now preparing for the quantum leap into residence of the Oval Office, the deep, fundamental flaws that bore this cynicism and disbelief have yet to be addressed. The ecstasy that washed over crowds was just rain water; the ground supply still needs to be cleansed of its bitterness. Until then, I still worry. I’m always prepared to be let down, to be told I’m wrong again, to be part of a minority stewing over beer and waiting for vindication.

I’ve been listening to “Changes” by 2pac pretty much constantly since the morning of 5 November. My iTunes library is rarely sorted by artist, but that morning, it was, and this song was at the top of the list. I remember riding around Irvine with Rishi and Ky Vinh, this song blasting and us commenting in between laments about our respective existential crises that it was still relevant in 2005. That two lines of that song — and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president — were rendered moot in one night is why St. Mark’s Place burst into song, why I can’t stop grinning, why I stick my tongue out at the sky not to spite the heavens but to catch a drop of rain.

I’m at war with acronyms.

I took the occasion of Shing’s visit to see the Natural History Museum and Folger Shakespeare Library (Macbeth—with magic by Teller—looks interesting) and inject some culture in her life, as well as five pounds of chicken adobo, French toast, bacon, shots and pickles, and tea. We shared a beer and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at the edge of the ice rink in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. At the Jefferson Memorial, she disparaged the lighting squares; I noted the consistently mis-kerned Os.

The state of California is back in full force, giving a majority of its delegates in the Democratic primary to Senator Clinton and demanding a few hundred dollars from me in alleged back taxes—my usual snark is useless here.

I’m considering the contents of my go bag.

Recent expenditures are running higher than I’d hoped, largely due to home improvement expenses: I ordered a daybed, had a few prints professionally framed, and am still in a painting mood (though not necessarily a sanding-and-taping mood). I’ve taken receipt of my bicycle, severely in need of a tune up, and am working on lighting my living room. Over the weekend, I sanded and stained the baseboard CD shelves I cut from tongue-in-groove flooring last month.

And whither my visit to Cuba? The only itinerary certain so far is New Orleans in April for An Event Apart (AEA), though I haven’t set booked a flight. A five-day in Portland and Seattle (possibly Vancouver as well) this June is still in exploratory stages. I have my lawn tickets for Radiohead at Nissan Pavilion 11 May, but I’m considering hustling those for a Saturday pass to All Points West (APW) in August. Pretty good chance I’ll be in New York this weekend too.

My graduate school applications are done, and for that, I entered my undergraduate transcripts into a spreadsheet line-by-line, calculated the fluctuations in my cumulative grade-point average quarter-to-quarter. I relived every class I took at typing speed—I’m sorry I was such an asshole Fall 2002. Six years ago, I wish someone had pulled me aside and said something like this:

That’s the difference. Between caring and judging. That’s it.

If If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats and this article on the Leica M8 in the New Yorker are, respectively, film’s wake and eulogy, this article (and the paper it references, Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing) are why we should be mourning.

In Downey, I browsed some old prints my mother left on the pullout of the McDowell-Craig in their custody, each no more than six inches on the larger edge, each set no more than 30 deep. Most of the pictures are from the Manila days, earlier than I can recall, and it occurred to me that someday I will be the custodian of these pictures of myself once the people who remember the events they depict have passed. And then, they will default to portraiture, and their only relevant context will be the names and lifespans and heirs of their subjects.

Okay, maybe no heirs.

But to answer, or rather, address the question of one’s later remembrance of themselves, I’m considering what I really lose when I forget something—one of your birthdays or phone numbers or license plates or favorite movies or food allergies. When or if I lose the person with whom these memories are associated—and not necessarily to death, but these days, to distance and the passage of time—what is worth preserving about their place in my past? In those relationships, what I learned and where I derived joy, surely. And since none of these repeated sequences hold more than an incidental place in those relationships, why does the modern interpretation of memory favor their preservation?

Memory should be more than memorization, more than the rote and the verbatim and the relentless production of dendrites. And the first step of changing how one remembers, the first step of changing anything, is forgetting.

Related, via Coudal: Photos of the Taliban, from a time when photography was illegal in Afghanistan. The slideshow interface doesn’t allow one to simply flick through, but the context the audio provides is indispensable. And via kottke: Richard Watson’s extinction timeline.

Clearly, I have an urgent need to reread “Funes the Memorious.”

My project starts on page 242, and yes, I’m aware of the (at least one) typo in my contribution and the first thing I’ll do when I return home tonight is check the proofs and either drink in self-loathing or quiet celebration. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful tome, 631 perfect-bound pages, and I’m honored to have contributed six of them.

The trade edition run of 2,500 will be available November 2007. Please see the official page at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, the Digital Art Publishers catalog, or the (presently outdated) Amazon.com page for ordering information.

From my visit with Ky Vinh last year came the recommendation to practice French in Montréal, though the temptation of fluid conversation in English proved overwhelming. I watched Cinema Paradiso at the end of the World Film Festival, tracing its weft and weave from college courses in Italian, my recent familiarity with a French phrasebook, and visual cues — following enough to make me want to understand it now. Sean recounted his screening of Babel in Poland without English subtitles for a section of the narrative in Japanese sign language. And while Star Wars III: Backstroke of the West is the stuff of legend, I personally had the surreal experience of watching “King of the Hill” dubbed en français.

In Chicago, I met Santiago from the University of Minnesota when he ordered a Boddingtons, and we discussed our respective months in the nations of our ethnicity — for him, Madrid. I asked him to advise me a course of activities from the perspective of a Madrileño, and he noted how bullfighting and flamenco as activities of upper-class Spaniards had gypsy origins. We discussed the beauty of Barcelona, the Catalan language barrier and how it stunted his exploration of the place. He had been working with the education-abroad program on campus and had been struggling to quantify travelling’s value in business. I told him: being in a place where one’s language is useless forces one to rely on context to exist and broad, universal gestures to communicate. These experiences where one is forced to rely on fundamental design principles — color paradigms, pictograms, and the like — not only underscore their importance but, and perhaps this is more important, endow one with a unique empathy for the people who rely solely on their consistent implementation for survival.

The father-and-son proprietors of Botines are Catalan. Sean’s description coincides completely with my opinion of the place, so I’ll simply quote it here: “the amazing curiosity/junk shop on St-Laurent, north of Mont-Royal. This is one of the most amazing stores in the world (and ridiculously cheap). I don’t remember what it’s called, or EXACTLY where it is, but if you walk north from Mont Royal on the east side of the road, you’ll come to it in a few minutes. There’ll be some lame stuff outside – bicycle helmets, used books, but STEP IN.” They speak Catalan to each other and communicate with customers in French and English, and they moved to Montreal when the son was one year old.

Over dinner conversation last night, someone else at the table had taken meetings at a Korean company that were simultaneously translated, and he marveled at the translators’ ability to receive one language as input and instantly produce another language — words, inflections, gestures — as output. He noted that once the translators understood the jargon they were repeating, they may very well have been able to add to the discussion in their own right.

The relationship between nationalism and language is a strange beast to me, partially because I hardly feel a sense of belonging anywhere my midland American accent is inconspicuous (and often enjoy places where it is scorned), but mostly because my professional calling has forced me to inhabit a staggering degree of nations. I’ve worked almost entirely in the United States, but producing work for musicians, artists, merchants, universities, and politicians has required me to learn their jargon, to trace the weft and weave of each profession, and pay attention to context. I picked up The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana at Indigo on Sainte-Catherine while looking for postcards, and the plot of it seems appropriate for the situation where I now find myself: an antiquarian book dealer loses his memory and the plot of the novel concerns its reconstruction from childhood onward, reliving the protagonist’s youth as a series of illustrated books, dusty encyclopedias, and pop songs and Fascist anthems on Tuscan radio. Regarding memory, I have the opposite problem, but I’m beginning to realize how my identity now is a sum of cultural experiences and the language I speak is its consequence.

By the way, I am firmly in the Saint-Viateur camp as far as bagels are concerned. Their sesame bagel is possibly the best food value in all of North America — I would love to pit its minimalist greatness against the myriad zings of a King Taco carnitas burrito that entertain the tastebuds. I can’t relive my 19-year-old existence with my 24-year-old knowledge, but it’s possibly more fun to revisit that reckless existence knowing I can afford the cuisine.

In other news, hardly two weeks passed that I was back in Washington — my Chicago trip was just three weeks ago and I’m currently reporting from San Francisco (well, Milpitas, but I was there earlier today and am returning tomorrow), and with not-one-but-two round-trips to Los Angeles in pre-production, a New York daytrip the week after next, and a day in-transit to Manila early 2008, it’s tempting to measure my life in boarding passes, foreign currencies, and postcards sent. And though it’s my spoken ambition to calibrate my existence to the basic unit of a transcontinental flight, my worst-kept secret is that I’d like to land somewhere and know, quietly, sincerely, that I’ll be understood.

Though I’ve never been the subject of a documentary, I’ve felt and have been subject to this disappointment. But I understand it better now, the production of information assemblies not in service of an agenda or argument but simply to provide reportage on the human condition.

Also, it’s worth seeing just for the TSM Smart Breaker sequence. Seriously.

So in ten days, I will be—though not without some effort. From the Pepco site where I track my account online, I finally located information on green power two branded websites away—through the DC Public Service Commission and then through the ostensibly separate Pepco Energy Services site (although Pepco will still be my electricity provider, though I’ve switched service plans). If this isn’t part of an effort to prevent residential customers from choosing renewable energy sources, then this is classically bad web design.

The first place I looked on the first Pepco site (and the only one I knew at the time) was under ‘Safety & Conservation,’ which turned out to be useful information like a refresher course on turning the lights off when you’re not in a room where there’s abundant sunshine filtering through a window and why you shouldn’t execute electrical outlets with Super Soaker firing squads, but didn’t answer my inquiry. The answer was (still reasonably intuitively) located under the heading of ‘Choices & Rates.’ Then it got dicey.

Choose the state—fair enough, since different laws apply. My first inclination here was to rifle through the column of links that appeared below ‘District of Columbia,’ which were illuminating insofar as deciphering the bill I paid blindly in my monthly ritual, although in fact, the pertinent link to follow is in the ten-pixel tightly-leaded Arial content of the landing page, one that leads to the aforementioned DC Public Service Commission site, then to Pepco Energy Services. The latter site is nothing special—a perfunctory electronic brochure—but its failure is that it functions like an eCommerce site insofar as it uses terms like ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ but doesn’t visually cue the visitor (no global shopping cart link?) to expect the process when selecting their service options. I could go on, preaching how design can save the environment.

I watched An Unreasonable Man on Saturday night, met Ralph Nader, bought his book. And for as much as Democrats, liberals, and just an assortment of sane people have branded him the scapegoat for the horrors that have befallen American politics the past six years, consider that the official margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes, which was less than any candidate for any other party received—blame could just have easily been laid on the doorstep of Pat Buchanan. I’m not sure whether or not my mother blames Nader for the second Bush presidency, but when we discuss the 2004 election (which any Democrat should’ve won considering Bush’s miserable first term), it irks her that I don’t blame Karl Rove or swift boat veterans but web designers.

There’s no math on how much the growing internet-usage habits of Americans affect how they respond to politicians—I would know because I sought it out, and with contacts at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and FirstGov, attempted to parse it from pre-existing statistics. We came to no conclusions, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. Not only is internet usage de rigeur, but broadband internet usage is becoming a norm as well—it’s not enough that it’s a phone call away, but it must be always available and always fast. And as it replaces television and print media as sources of news for the American electorate, who’s to say that an accessible and substantive issue-driven website for Gore in 2000 doesn’t pick up 538 indisputable votes in Florida? Again, I could go on, preaching how design can save the environment, prevent war, and save lives.

The New York Times ran Paula Scher’s graphical analysis of the two presidential campaign logos from 2004 that showed just how little analytical thinking was done by designers for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, and I wish I still had access to the two 2004 campaign sites to perform a similar dissection. Nevertheless, my first thought at the 2004 election results was not oh, Nader again—actually, it was cold, dread-driven escapism, spiked by one of the most surreal Irish drinking songs ever—but it tempered to, what the hell could each of us have done in 2000 and 2004 to have made sure George W. Bush would not be president?

For me, a better website is a start. Powering my dropped-ceiling condominium with renewable captured methane gas is something, too.