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.

It didn’t define who we were as a family, but it was a pliant witness to our own definition in southern California, the vessel we steered on paper routes in the San Fernando Valley, the commute to Riverside, then Anaheim Hills, then Cypress, the distance between contract work in City of Industry and classes in Irvine, the journey from Downey to anywhere. In some way, we were defined by how we interacted with the Los Angeles sprawl, how far across it we were willing to travel to grasp our ambitions.

It seems appropriate that the story of an immigrant family is not one of nobility but mobility, the nomadism etched into our DNA. In early morning hours of my childhood, my father would shine a flashlight on a driveway and me or Mikey would throw a copy of the LA Times into the target. Some people start all-nightering in college; I had my first when I was eight years old, in the bed of that truck, surrounded by newspapers. There was no air conditioning and no clock, one cupholder, and a radio with perpetually shot speakers, even after Scott and I installed a new pair (along with new headlights) in between oil changes at his house. Arguments over who would drive it and when were a feature of the thicker years of my sibling rivalry.

Angelenos are prone to defining others by the cars they drive, and at the University of Civics and Integras, the truck was an anomaly. Driving it in Orange County at odd hours of night inspired my dread of racial profiling — I have recently ceased the habit of checking my tail lights, but it was most often the falsified probable cause for traffic stops. I befriended different people, dated different women because of what I drove. If we are defined by the company we keep, the truck allowed a less materialistic conduit for my definition (that was inevitably inextricable from helping people move).

And as a family we also defined our setting. In its dents and leaks were scars of my father’s impulsiveness, my brother’s entropy, my workaholic fatigue. Depending on who was driving, the seat moved forward or backward, but the side mirrors always remained in place. Between classes I would recline in the passenger seat and take naps and awaken to find the windows fogged. In that passenger window, I could still make out the faint imprint of the original dot-matrix printed sticker. It cost my father around $11,000 when he bought it brand new in 1990. He named it Bear.

I remember the day I passed my driving test, that moment leaving Arthur’s for the Bell Gardens DMV where all those years of playing catch with a set of keys were rendered practice for that moment when two divergent schedules would make it necessary. I drove it to Las Vegas less than a month later, got a speeding ticket for going 101 mph downhill after the San Bernardino Mountains, and on the drive back home, called my mother on her vacation in New Jersey to explain why there would be a citation in the mail. The debt from that incident would deepen and lead to the start of the Spazowham Design Group. I remember picking up my father from work once after a long rush-hour commute and being angry with him for making me wait at the parking lot of his office, arguing with my mother about money and driving away. It was a vehicle of my rebellion.

I remember driving to Long Beach Airport with two suitcases in the bed in June 2005. This was the last day I would claim Bear as “my truck.” My brother called me today and told me the head gasket blew on his way to work last week. The repair would cost thousands of dollars, and he said it felt like putting the family dog to sleep. After I hung up the phone, my colleagues remarked it sounded like a pet had died, or a relative. But for an inanimate object, steel and plastic and rubber, it was special to the men of my family because in those 18 years of California traffic it seemed we spent more time with this machine than any of our friends, and perhaps with each other. It was a vehicle of our solitude.

From the Church of Christ parking lot next to that tiny Lindell Avenue apartment and the Corinthian on Florence, I moved about 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C. We’re a family awash in iPods with a son in graduate school. My mother no longer needs to work for us to make ends meet. We waste food. Over the post-mortem phone calls, I asked what’s next, if there’s another Bear in their future. Mikey’s buying his first brand-new car next week, planning to spend just a shade under $20,000. If we wanted to buy another Toyota truck, for another 18-year-run, we could.

If you ever want to quantify how far you have to go to make it in this country, for reference’s sake, my family put 258,346.6 miles on Bear. It was a vehicle of our social mobility, reminding us of where we started in 1990 as a young, fractured clan with a tenuous grasp of our new cultural context, of where we had been everyday in making ourselves (to a degree) a functional family at ease in America. Some choose to buy new cars to express their achievements to the world, to mark the level of success they enjoyed; I think we kept driving the same old truck as a reminder that we still have farther to go before we’re satisfied.

That, and to haul shit.

Packaging, no matter how sleek, is ultimately disposable, and laptop users who pay the premium for a portable computer already consider the investment of an additional piece of luggage that’ll keep it safe from office to home, subway to sidewalk, journey to destination (and that piece of luggage will have its own packaging, to be sure). The packaging and the messenger bag serve the same purpose for manufacturers and end-users respectively — to protect the computer from damage in transit — so if one designs a unit that serves both audiences, it’s that much less raw material consumed in the process.

And marketers also score a victory, a substantial one at that. It gives them more leverage because the product packaging, if used as intended, continues to promote the brand even after the owner calls it a day at the coffee shop. I find the prominent logo displayed on the bag problematic since it easily identifies it as the container of a computer, increasing its likelihood of being stolen and bordering on conspicuous consumption. I understand the compromise from a marketing perspective, but I advocate taking a more stealthy approach — one that HP has actually done with some success with its “The computer is personal again” campaign that shrewdly excluded celebrities’ faces from their endorsements. Screw the logo, let’s see business-class models shipped out in carbon-fiber or aniline leathers, student editions wrapped in cotton duck and wool felt, and of course, limited-edition collaborations — imagine Halliburton Zero × Lenovo ThinkPad and Mulberry × MacBook Air (Coach × Dell seems sadly inevitable) — stamped by the starchitect du jour, touted on NotCot, destined for eBay.

I expect the trend will continue, and though the HP Pavilion dv6929 in its aquarium-printed sling may ultimately be a middling computer in an obvious container, its precedent will hopefully (and I think likely) be followed in more sophisticated execution. Well, it better be, or else I’m going to end up with a bunch of crappy looking bags sitting around my apartment from computers through the years, given that’s the form computers continue to assume.

I think this is for me: Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.
—Carbon Copies by Nadine Jarvis (via The World’s Best Ever)

If you plan to outlive me, please do me this solid. Thank you.

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.

The more enlightening consequence of assembling the furniture was not the realization of how well I’d exploited the ill-used volume bordered by my living room floor and kitchen wall, but rather the fact that I own a copy of Blinking Lights and Other Revelations by the Eels. Hardly remarkable given I’m a dedicated fan, but I bought the CD in Montreal in September. Not only have I been living in this apartment for seven months with a disorganized collection of 300-odd CDs, but it’s disorganized to the point that an album four months in my possession has only now surfaced.

Incidentally, I’m rather enjoying the music. Well, to the extent that one enjoys the music of the Eels, I suppose.

To first judge a Green Apple, one must know the color of its covers—near-fluorescent green, and not in the sickly brightness popular in the early ’90s but visible from a distance nevertheless. It is a singular shade and remarkably easy to locate with only minimal ocular contact with the contents of one’s backpack. For this alone I might be thankful.

However, the interior pages—the actual writing surface of a Green Apple—is where a notebook transacts business, and this is where I am sold. The paper is thick enough and no thicker. I can’t quantify grammage, but it’s thinner than your average copy paper and thicker than onion skin and Bible stock—it happens to be the precise thickness that allows for but doesn’t necessarily encourage double-sided writing. Neither gel nor rollerball ink bleed through, and the pressure required to apply ballpoint leaves an invisible but tactile impression mirrored on the other side of the leaf.

When graphite is at hand—even hard, 6H graphite (though I hesitate to think there would be a moment in my life when that is the only pencil within reach)—the aforementioned grey rule lines (unlike the bright blue common of ruled paper) excuse themselves to the background of one’s visual field, respecting even the slightest pencil mark. It isn’t to the same extent as Tufte’s ghost pad (thankfully, not even close), which also makes it easier for one to render script to a baseline when necessary but doesn’t fuss a tendency to non-linear thinking.

The particular size is my preference (other sizes are available), which is portable though not pocketable. My thoughts tend to fit proportionally to the page—there isn’t an expanse of white space clamoring for unnecessary development or a mental curtailment brought about by the page’s edge. And I rarely want for a flat surface since it fits neatly on my upturned right hand.

And while I am a stickler for quality (and perfection when possible), my preference for Green Apples outweighs any erstwhile desire for Moleskine notebooks or the aforementioned ghosts—it is, to me, to someone who greatly values paper and engages it frequently, the perfect notebook.

Moleskine makes a wonderful notebook, but it’s too precious. The black covers are classy for bookshelves, though difficult to locate on sight in a crowded bag. And for my daily notes, I have no need of archival paper. While I would gladly take ownership of such a notebook if it were ever presented as a gift, I have no presumptions that my daily scrums with language and accrued information have any right to the same preservation as the thoughts of the absinthe-sucking artisans who made them famous. Archival paper is a resource of such expense (and these are some pricey pads of paper) that it on principle rejects mere musings and demands a proper composition or at the very least a thorough study, which I rarely provide (though that I would hesitate to use such a notebook says as much about my confidence in my intellect as my reverence for quality leaves). Some use Moleskines on a daily basis until the edges are rubbed and the pages are coughing charcoal when they are shut with force, and claim them to be as near perfection as only time in one’s industry can develop.

But there is perfection and there is perfection for application. Green Apples have neither legend nor history and consequently no air about them, which makes them much easier for me to toss and tatter consequent to daily use. The line heights are suitable, the rule colors ideal, and the paper thickness seemingly tailored to the parameters of my penmanship. And as long as travellers from Manila are accommodating my requests, I’ll never be without one. And as of this moment, I’ll never be without an answer to their inevitable question.