1. Rome is a city that stirs the blood, maddens and inspires. There are a few lasting achievements of art and architecture that seemingly happen but once a century (or two) in the course of human history, and Rome hosts an alarming concentration of them (for one, Pantheon).

Among the ephemera, that a bang-on shot of espresso is available at every level of food service from slouchy snack bar to white-tablecloth restaurant is as much a factor of training and equipment as cultural reinforcement; that even for those who can only spare 80 cents the quality of their coffee is not spared. Restaurant menus indicate when a dish includes an ingredient that has been frozen, implying that the remainder of the spread is fresh.

There are perhaps more marble statues, frescoed ceilings, and gelato shops per capita in Rome than anywhere else in the world, and while there’s more to the place than art and food, they’re a fine way through which to experience the city.

2. A worthwhile thing to do in Rome that no guidebook or blog told us was taking in the sunset from Giardino degli Aranci (Garden of Oranges). It is, true to its name, an orange grove on Aventine Hill (about a kilometer uphill from Piramide station) with a stone (marble?) balcony tacked on at the end. That balcony faces west.

When in Florence, order a steak.

3. Travelling in the 21st century continues to amaze me. Though supersonic air travel has been relegated to 20th-century antiquity, the Schengen Agreement, Euro currency, and global networks of cash machines, credit cards, and mobile telephony have all but eliminated logistical hassles for Americans touring much of Europe. I am not taking this stuff for granted.

4. My undergraduate Italian held up surprisingly well, and I still consider it a minor miracle that I was able to correct my error when booking our return trip to Rome from Florence at the S.M.N. ticket office without the use of English or incurring an additional charge. While at the post office, a clerk seemingly eager to speak some English bridged the language gap to scrounge up 25 stamps for international postcards. Occasionally, a combination of ambient English guided tours and Wikipedia on my BlackBerry enhanced our experience of a place.

5. As a meta note, this trip was my first vacation in a new place in over two years. The degree to which my creative output has fallen in that time has surprised and saddens me. I think it’s mostly a byproduct of being enrolled in school and in a relationship where someone else’s time is to be considered in equal measure as my own, but part of me also thinks that it’s because I haven’t been anywhere new to me in too long.

6. There is no number 6.

7. My failure to sell or even give away my tickets to The National concert on Sunday prompted me to attend the show on limited sleep immediately upon arrival in Washington. It turned out to be a wise play, as the show was spectacular and my sleep schedule was tuned perfectly the morning after. The first time I saw them, I was standing for the whole show and aside from the band and their instruments and equipment I remember the stage was bare. This time I was seated and there were lights and horns.

If there is a band for whom the placement of a grand oak tree on stage is aesthetically consistent with their music, it would be The National.

8. The use of clean as an aesthetic judgment bothers me. Cleanliness is distinct from organization, and that mere organization often presents itself as cleanliness is a given and the judgment provides little in the way of compliment or critique. Some alternatives are minimal, which reflects a position within art history, and simple, which indicates a composition with few moving parts or even one that has been inadequately considered.

9. I’m also growing increasingly wary of interesting as an adjective, mostly because it is subjective and also because it tends to describe things that really ought not be beyond the threshold of known vocabulary. I want to know how that interesting thing actually held interest, whether it engaged, stupefied, inspired, saddened. If all you can muster is interesting, either learn some new words or experience some new things.

10. Christina and I are planning our trip to Cuernavaca for Carlos and Ana’s wedding in July, so I can safely say that two years will not pass before my next vacation in a new place. However, my high-school Spanish is dustier than my college Italian, so negotiating the language gap could get, well, frustrating, with a high chance of gesticulation.

In the meantime, we will watch The New Pornographers, Passion Pit, and Tokyo Police Club in concert. And I will be starting at NavigationArts on 21 June, which is also the date of my 5th anniversary in Washington. And given I’m sentimental and wish to commemorate that event, I hope to publish another piece of writing – perhaps a list – on that date.

11. And therein lies an exotic destination, experiences of live music, and a pair of personal milestones to commemorate – creative inputs and motivation. I think I can keep this up.

The new mix was called The Alligator and The Owl. The new mix was (at least) two discs long and much less melancholy than any playlist I’d assembled before. And appropriately so – 26 has so far been the best year of my life, starting with one amazing day.

The first disc is done, and you can listen to it here as a single 74 MB mp3. Work on the second disc stagnated for months, and so did my writing practice. I’ve been trying to resume the latter; the former, I’m reconsidering.

Occasionally, Christina would suggest I finish the second disc. Last time we talked about it, she suggested scrapping it and starting anew. That’s probably what’s going to happen.

Though I completed this chapter of my pop music autobiography (20 songs, 80 minutes, mp3 for download) in late September, a few weeks into my first semester at Georgetown, only now in the more apparent denouement of my existential crisis do I feel compelled to write its intentions, framed in the context of two gifts I received in November.

When Indi greeted me a happy birthday, she told me she hadn’t yet sent out my gift, the Lost Buildings DVD. A copy of it arrived shortly before my pilgrimage to Fallingwater a couple weeks later, and I watched it with Shiella, Roanne, and Jerry in Pittsburgh the night before our tour of the house. When I called Indi to tell her about the trip and thank her for the gift, she apologized that my gift was still on her dining room table as she’d hoped to wrap it with a card before sending. The copy I received in the mail the week before didn’t include a receipt; the return address on the padded manila envelope was the NPR store in Chicago. I wondered who might have thought to order a copy on my behalf, who in the world would know how this slim volume occupied the intersection of my interests in architecture, the work of Chris Ware, and This American Life, know such an object existed, and feel inclined to buy me a birthday gift. It was a short list.

After some talk among friends I might have an admirer, I called my parents and discovered it was from them, something they knew I’d like from consulting my wishlist. I asked if they knew how it ended up there, and in the midst of explaining why I wanted it, my mother asked, Why does it matter? I began to think that document of stuff I want is like an answer key to a test, a series of questions about my taste, interests, and aspirations. The maxim it’s the thought that counts found relevance — though it’s a gift I love and something I plainly wanted, the material possession of the gift did not, as I realized gifts are supposed to, signify an understanding of the receiver by the giver.

The Friday after that road trip, I took lunch with Christina. Waiting for our table at a sofa by the bar, she drank a cup of tea and I ordered coffee. A waiter set a tray with a French press and accoutrements on the low table before us. At a break in our conversation, I leaned forward to add cream and sugar, and in my periphery, I noticed she was leaning too.I want to know you take your coffee, she said.

As it’s Christmas morning somewhere in the world now, gifts seem an appropriate subject. I wrote once that 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. And it could be my fault that it took so long to feel I was approaching what I wanted: although I gave away the answers, perhaps the questions were too obscure. Maybe nobody really got me because I didn’t give enough of myself.

After the Fallingwater trip, Roanne and I discussed the appearance of our mutual interest in architecture in the conversation that prompted the pilgrimage. I observed that I tend to conduct my relationships around a specific range of subjects and that conversations rarely extend into my other interests. We agreed that we owed it to ourselves to have whole relationships, to let networks mingle and see what happens, to make commonplace these moments we are at once comfortable and complete.

And I guess that was the existential crisis — the struggle to be comfortable and completely myself in an existence where so little of myself was applied, among people who really couldn’t be bothered to appreciate with half my zeal a building, public radio, graphic novels, road trips, and everything else. When I say it’s the thought that counts, I mean the thought is everything — a gift without it is scarcely a gift at all. Sentimental as it sounds, these may be the best we have to offer each other: the curiosity, perception, and memory of how we take our coffee, and the space where, without first asking forgiveness, we can be completely who we are.

To those who celebrate it, merry Christmas.

Please forgive the continuing election post-mortem.

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.

Hardly five days back from Port-au-Prince and I’m moving the one-quart plastic bag of liquids and aerosols from my rolling suitcase to my duffle bag and filling the rest of the space with clothes appropriate to the current Portland weather—a mild peak of 57 from a low of 52, intermittent rain. And when I return on Wednesday, I’ll have a mere 36 hours before I receive Eric for a two-week stay.

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.”

Mark Shepard: I recently spent the afternoon in a garden at my favorite watering hole in Brooklyn and sat next to a couple who were chatting. The guy was constantly shifting his attention between his conversation partner and his new iPhone. Now it’s common when talking to someone to glance away periodically at other people or things happening around you (I would suggest this is a fundamental attraction of urban environments), but what’s different here is that Mr. iPhone’s attention is constantly shifting between virtual and actual modes of presence. To me, the interesting questions are: What happens when the virtual and the actual are not understood in terms of a strict dichotomy but rather a continuity or a gradient? How might we design for scenarios like this?

Adam Greenfield: I think of what’s happening in this scenario (and I agree, this is an almost paradigmatic case) as a wholesale redefinition of adjacency.

—Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents.

While my visits to California aren’t rare, my two-week stay last winter has been the longest since I moved away, enough time to expand my itinerary beyond family and close friends to not only to visit with past acquaintances but, with some, to also superimpose physical, spatial relationships over evolving virtual relationships, adding dimensions of tone and motion to the plain text of emails. Enough time to not only gorge myself on the late-night fast food of my inner fat kid but to also pilgrimage to the Salk Institute, to deliver red velvet cake to the ailing, to dance at Harvelle’s on a Sunday night. To not only retrace a Los Angeles past but to discover the Los Angeles present.

And this is incidental music from that visit, that winter, the strangely progressive KROQ playlist as the sun rose over the 110 sound barrier just south of downtown on an early Saturday morning, the iPods of Murky Coffee baristas, tributes to Oscar Peterson, album cuts from second-hand finds at Lovell’s. It’s another chapter in my pop-music autobiography for download (and eventual plastic distribution), 18 songs over nearly 80 minutes, called (yeah seriously) Homewrecking.

My history aside (or probably integral), this isn’t so much about cuckolding as much as it is about a botched divorce from an entire status quo that’s willfully hurtful to the people who necessarily inhabit it. For as much as I fantasize of a life free from coding and production, the limits of my suburban upbringing, and geographic monogamy, there’s sense in sticking it out, building up savings, vesting in the retirement system, and earning my masters. And while it wouldn’t kill me to buck up in the meantime, I (more often than I’m comfortable) think I might regret this course of action in my financially stable but dreary future.

This unwillingness to make a definitive break, to recognize baggage as baggage, seems at odds with my personal crusade of reduction like an aerodynamic glider strapped to a bus. And it’s this imbalance of desiring, between that actual past of concentrated frivolity and the virtuality of distributed but stimulating relationships, a byproduct of that vacation, that’s been the motivating asymmetry of the past few months. That I find the affect-less timbre of Google Talk and Scrabulous conversations with old friends and distant acquaintances often more engaging than diurnal millennials in declining orbit seems a sign that the drudgery and dissipation of my days are just an indefinite prolonging of an even more vacuous existence.

I have this recurring dream where a close friend (likely one of you) and I find ourselves in a smallish, glamour-less room, low ceilinged and its floor dedicated mostly to a swimming pool, the walkable area of the space only a smooth but unpolished concrete border a couple feet wide. Oh, and the pool is filled with oranges instead of water.

I decide that the two of us should try to find the bottom of the pool, and you agree. Sometimes I dive in first and sometimes you do, and I wait at the surface for just a few moments.

“No luck. Your turn,” you say as you surface, and I dive in. I dig through oranges and more oranges and after a while they are colorless pebbled orbs, and soon after I can no longer sense the fragrance of oranges and dust. I wonder if you’re still at the surface, if you’ve left me here to dig through, if you could hear me if I called your name. And though I can still breathe and burrow, I push down oranges to pull myself to the surface and you’re still there. “No luck. Your turn,” I say and so you dive in again and I wonder this time if I’ll be able to hear your call for help, if you know to navigate by scent as well once you can’t sense light or sound or even touch, but then it all smells like oranges and dust. I wonder if you know which way is down. I pace the step-and-a-half between the wall and the pool’s edge, sometimes a few steps laterally, but always returning to the same position I stood so that when you return to the surface you won’t be disoriented. And this dive is longer than the first but you’re back. “No luck,” you say with bright diligence and so I dive in again, longer than the first time and deeper than the first time and so too the stream of thoughts of whether you’ve left the room or whether you’re bored or healthy or cursing me for drawing us into this task. First light then touch then sound then scent. I surface.

No luck. Your turn. It continues, each turn longer than the last. No luck, I’ve got nothing, no dice, keep digging. Your turn. It keeps going and it’s just oranges and oranges and oranges and dust. No luck, your turn. Pacing. No luck, your turn. Oranges and dust. And so on and never to the bottom of the pool. And then I wake up.

Some friends have tried to ascribe meaning to it, to re-draw the setting, but it’s resistant to change. It escalated in frequency in February and March, to the point where the imagined feeling of a pebbled rind of citrus fruit anywhere was enough to unsettle me, to provoke an involuntary twitch or grunt. Still, it never pitches me immediately into consciousness like a nightmare. Perhaps that’s the point.

There are very few things that sour my tone to a shade of violent: talking to my mother about money and anybody about the lack of support for a LAMP infrastructure at HIR are two of those; PC hardware troubleshooting is a third cause of stress, compounded by the occasionally attendant data obliteration. Through January and February, the former have been the subjects of too many conversations over the past couple months, and as I have calmed to the temperament necessary to produce prose, November’s on-board SATA controller went AWOL and took an extraordinary digital music collection as collateral damage.

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.

Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.

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.