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.

As the Broadway stagehand strike closed and I rushed the box office for a ticket to “Cyrano de Bergerac” last weekend (and will do the same for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” before too long), I was reminded—as I was more consistently my last weekend in California than even I have recently allowed my introspection to persist—the extent to which my life is a bento box. Fine company discussed why it’s been so long since I’ve cooked for more than myself in Washington, why I don’t share this meticulous presentation of delicious mundaneness, and what (or precisely who) could inspire me to set a table for two; because the answer to my lousy luck with single women (and predilection for dead-end romances) no longer seems to be a factor of BMI or psychiatric distress, or even my stultifying good taste.

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.

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.

On the flight back to Washington, I struck up a conversation with the gentleman seated next to me and when the discussion reached my job, he asked (and I paraphrase):

Do you think Republicans or Democrats use the internet more effectively?

“Neither,” I answered.

Let’s say the internet is a gun. Every politician knows what it is. Some have handled it, a few have loaded it, and some can even tell you its mechanics (it’s a series of tubes, right?). In the analogy, Howard Dean in 2004 came closest to inflicting injury and Ron Paul is waving one around in public this time around, but no politician really knows what it can do, its true potential for damage, the strategic considerations of its mere existence in a situation.

No one from either party has a killer instinct with it yet. They didn’t sleep with it under the proverbial childhood pillow; their blood doesn’t turn cold knowing the speed of its ammunition. None of them ever shot a man just to watch him die.

Had I visited Montréal when I was 19, buying too much second-hand music, attuned to markers of soi-disant hipness through vodka hazes, and leading a life of dissipation, dressed in dubious vintage, it would’ve been the place I would’ve liked to grow old. It strikes me as a stubbornly unique place, the one city in all of North America that acknowledges its European colonial heritage as integral to its identity — Vieux-Port cobblestones, haute cuisine, and all things vintage — under a Francophone umbrella. Aside from that, learning another language requires an investment of embarrassment and miscommunication, both of which I embodied excessively that awkward year, and the lazy passage of time in Outremont, Mile End, and Plateau would’ve synchronized to my innate rhythms before I accelerated them to workaholic speed.

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.

When I was first in Chicago, I was five years old, between a bus from Toronto and a train to Los Angeles — though not my official point of entry into the United States, it has defied its own insignificance — a mere fingerprint on The Bean, if you will — and, with Burger King French toast sticks, become an integral part of this immigrant’s narrative. My memory allows little more than that I was there, but this time, two days in the august company of squared-shoed and trapezoid-spectacled enemies of my enemies, I know to take pictures, to take notes.

Notes on An Event Apart, Chicago 2007.

“Dealing With The Both of You” by Jim Coudal was, depending on one’s ability to extrapolate useful information from sots and blood from rocks, either the total summation of An Event Apart or a phenomenally absurd rant. Local bar as “conference room B”? I get it, but this is not practical advice for people in conservative corporate environments who still are compelled to work creatively in order to support their families. Who in this context would seriously leave the office mid-day for a shot and a brew, even under the ægis of sparking productivity? Imagine this exchange:

“Honey, what’s the fifty-dollar charge at Neighborhood Pub on the 18th of last month?”
“That? I had a few beers because I needed inspiration.”

And I like I needed inspiration as a riposte for when the designer’s significant other leaves the designer’s unemployed verging-on-alcoholic ass for someone else.

Nevertheless, what I feel should have been expanded upon was that concept of eavesdropping, the idea that design is inherently social and (oh, this would’ve been an appropriate segue from Zeldman’s talk) while we all may not (want to) be drinkers and chain-smokers, we can still — even with families or uptight colleagues in tow — engage strangers and the unsuspecting public in developing our understanding of the social context in which our work will exist. And given that, the fact that I gained more from the individual seminars than the open bar in between its two days is a testament to the quality of the conference as a whole.

The two seminars that engaged me most were delivered by the two speakers about whom I knew the least — Lou Rosenfeld and Luke Wroblewski — rich in case studies and delving into facets of the field where there sadly isn’t much in the way of common sense, and completely applicable to present and future career development. I would have gladly alloted the latter presentation another half-hour or more (Luke unfortunately hastened his discussion of selection dependent inputs to not exceed his hour).

At the end of Lou’s presentation on Monday, I cornered him in the lobby outside the ballroom to discuss the application of his presentation in my workplace and the possibility of consulting my colleagues. When I revealed my employer to him, the discussion moved towards the state of information architecture on federal government websites — as we headed back into the ballroom at the end of the break, after he asked how long I’d been proverbially mining salt, he followed up with (and I paraphrase) “do you look forward to work when you wake up in the morning?” My incremental implementation of web standards and advocacy of accessibility and usability probably counteracts the few occasions I’m compelled to act immorally, and he agreed with me when I acknowledged that the impression these positive changes leaves in my present circumstance, however light, is made indelible in a way no other employer will likely match.

The rest of the conference had its highlights: the ethics of AJAX (Jeremy Keith), keyboard-navigable Google Maps (Derek Featherstone), and Dan, I believe in microformats now — time to get myself properly on XFN and cobble together a favicon for this place. In the company of a younger cachet of attendees (and presenters) at the Billy Goat Tavern, double cheeseburgers by the half-dozen. Derek also provided the oh shit jawdropper of the moment — before you click through, ask yourself the question: how does one semantically structure a crossword puzzle in HTML?

Chicago, as a city, is a fascinating read — I skimmed it briefly on a Sunday afternoon river tour — with all the tropes of American industrial cities for the last half century (including a present obsession with condominiums), colored by the permanent yet malleable memory carried by the survival of a tragic fire in childhood. I had a killer view of its outline from my 42nd-floor hotel room (your tax dollars hard at work) — it feels at once singular and indistinguishable, a Mies van der Rohe wet dream, like New York without the self-parody, like Washington without the dysfunctional grid.

I plan to return to there, to feel out more of the city than Wrigley Field (Cubs won), the Blue Line, and the bar crawl at O’Hare (actually, my flight today connects there), and I may have outgrown hostels for the B&B circuit.

Apropos nothing, when’s the last time you encountered Amish people at an airport?At any rate, my next travelogue will recap my coming time to Montreal (22 and 8, for those of you keeping score). Au Pied du Cochon, Librissime, Cluny ArtBar — good signs it will join Cambridge on The List. And three days of Chicago, two of An Event Apart — though they are but fingerprints on the surface of memory, that may be as much of an impression one may need to leave to be remembered forever.

On Fifth Avenue near 56th Street, New York.

What, I exclaimed. The British girl in the white sundress walking ahead of me turned around at my response and commented, ‘That is the most random thing I’ve ever seen.’

And doing better business than wakeful humans on the same block.