As my conversation with Kristy and Patrick at the bar last weekend turned to politics, two other patrons within earshot expressed their disdain with icy silence proportional to our increasing application of decibels. It became clear that their body language was expressly directed at us, and we considered the possibility that continuing our conversation would lead to the necessity of physically incapacitating two men larger than either of us. In short, we began preparing for a bar fight.

Design is inherently a practice of problem solving, and the problem was that in a brawl of brutes, Kristy, Patrick, and I would not be favored against these two. (How many pitchers of Coors would I have to imbibe over how many decades to be at once that intimidating and pathetic? There’s a Fermi problem for you.) But designers never solve problems in vacuums (unless you’re James Dyson, but I digress). Our solutions must always follow contextual parameters, and if you’re resourceful, in those parameters lie the keys to those solutions.

I immediately surveyed the room for a pool table — none. No pool cues or balls. Cues can make clumsy weapons, but they’re effective for creating a defensive radius while employing a projectile offense. In any case, no need bring out the amphibious invasion strategy guide for a landlocked country.

Liquor bottles can be dangerous either as projectiles — they’re heavy enough to have a predictable trajectory — or lacerating weapons — though there’s a high likelihood of injuring oneself as well as an opponent if employing a bottle as a breakaway club. I wanted to harness a beer tap — solid wood and built to grip. It would be the closest thing to a Major League Baseball bat readily available. Patrick mused that one could brand an opponent’s face with the etched-metal Magic Hat #9 tap.

Kristy and I were working on wine, but Patrick had beer served in an acrylic pitcher and glass mug. Hold the bowl of the mug inside the fist (loosely so it won’t shatter) with the thick glass handle facing outward — aim for the teeth. With a hand wrapped in cloth napkins and holding the acrylic pitcher, one of us could distract with a splash of beer and follow it with devastating plastic battery. Aim for the neck.

The tchotchkes on the walls, the contents of the speed rack, lonely drinkers in dubious football jerseys, failing pickup artists, girls-night-out girls, bartenders and bouncers — all contextual parameters, all potentially problematic and indispensable to the solution. There was no way to consider all the possible outcomes and iterations and the half-price cabernet wasn’t a boon to scenario planning. Besides, I tend to favor diplomacy: solve the problem by negating its existence.

But Patrick and I agreed: we’d both, inexplicably, wanted to be party to a bar fight. These two guys with their asinine burger orders (just say ‘medium well,’ no need to explain the physical properties of charcoal) and jingoistic politics who’ve probably been in bar fights before have won some and lost some and lived to tell. Maybe they go out looking for a fight; maybe bad beer does that to a man.

For me, for as much as being a designer requires a thorough understanding of context, often in the form of immersion, it is also characterized by a kind of academic remove. It’s just research, just business. And so often, I just negotiate, compromise, move on to the next job. But one day soon, I’ll skip that diplomacy stage and just solve a problem in the thick of it — wield a beer tap, maybe kick some ass, maybe take a beer mug to the teeth. Because bar fights, day jobs, love — it’s all in the context. And soon, I’ll knock ‘em all out.

My four-year hiatus from academia is over. Half of my first class at Georgetown was an introduction to WordPress, the same software in which this is being composed. I’m still optimistic.

Between Once and Man on Wire, there’s an undercurrent in my choice of cinema this past weekend of little things — pop songs and filament-tied-to-an-arrow — urged by good-humored gamines and can-do cads toward the seemingly impossible. I’m not in touch with most of my mentors from five or six years ago (and in some cases not on speaking terms), but I sense they’d smile knowingly at the return on their investments of encouragement and time (if not straight cash), the dividends paid to progeny. I didn’t know then clearly who I was or what was next, but their guidance in entrepreneurship, design practice, and, let’s face it, psychological warfare — and away from hourly retail in indistinct suburbs, indefinitely — capitalized the belief that I was meant to transcend the path my history implied, make great art, write a killer thesis, see the world. And lately, though it’s been a difficult belief to sustain, I’m here. The band’s in the studio; the cable’s between the towers.

It’s daybreak, and it’s time to dance.

Forgetting where you’re from is like a cigarette. Maybe you give into it when you’re stressed, or when you’re drinking. And sparingly and very occasionally, it won’t be the cause of your downfall. But make a habit of it and it’ll lead to an internal growth of a foreign culture, one that you might not notice until it’s too late to stop it. And it’ll kill you.

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.

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.

No sooner after I finished repaying my undergraduate student loans did I receive the thick envelope from Georgetown—I’ll be starting work on my M.A. in Communications, Culture, and Technology in August.

Now the real debt servicing begins.

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.

Shing says there’s a special place in hell for people who shop for Christmas gifts exclusively at airports, but I’ve found airports are where I’ve received the most intense, truly full-bodied hugs. The ability to embrace someone as at an airport outside of the airport setting is not unlike the ability to cook authentic ethnic cuisine outside of its home country. On my visits to California, it seems every hug is an airport hug.

Holiday celebrations in the ceaseless glint of sun were imbued with the frustrations and physical improbabilities of bowling in a rowboat, and the ’storm of the century’ that threatened the late part of my stay hardly materialized. It didn’t rain on Thursday night, though I undertook my usual observances to tempt the clouds. The downtown skyline visible from Montebello as I headed north on the 5 indicated rain more than the Santa Ana winds that really cleared the last haze of 2007, and as Thursday settled bittersweetly into dry lavender darkness, I considered, as I had been for the dozens of hours spent in Los Angeles freeway traffic on my 17-day vacation—one day for each year of residence—how much I left behind.

My friends, you left me feeling deeply regretful, a shit, an ingrate, a damned fool. But I know that my leaving was in part responsible for the highs of the experience, concentrating years of friendship in a few evening hours, freeing those relationships of the loose grit of petty drama, overtaking the oxidized copper with a lustrous patina, sanding wood splinters into smooth recesses. So many friendships in stasis from my departure lent my stay the air of a parallel life I only in California donned as my own, felt but at a distance, as though images from a television that displays a picture not from an electron gun or liquid crystals connected to electrodes but from the light of a single candle reflected and refracted and refracted and reflected by thousands of swirling, rotating brilliant cut diamonds, a picture not simply vivid and clear but expressive, a screen that does not display scenes of tragedy but the toil of absence and loss, not smiling faces but deeply felt contentment and happiness.

And though by Sunday night, as it seemed respiratory illness struck down everyone I ever called ‘friend’ and the rain made concrete mirrors of freeways, I gave no thought to halting my revelry: damn the microbiotic gauntlet, damn the rain. Though we were be blind, nicotine-withdrawn, and chronically anxious, Pink’s and Pinkberry conquer all.

And to those who could not join us, to those who have not visited and to those who have no intention to visit, my orbiters, Capricorn girls, once-and-former ravimail clan, godbrothers, and aunts and uncles to my unborn children: here’s to another year of instant messaging and transcontinental distance, debonair charm and emoticons, postcards and ice cream. Restaurant Week lies ahead, as do an increasingly indistinguishable slate of concerts, weekends in New York, graduate school applications, and hot chocolate.

Wish you were here.