The sight of cars spinning their wheels on moderate but icy hills was not uncommon – both Christina’s car and the rented truck were subject to acceleration without movement. Once moving, the pedal that would usually stop a moving car sometimes did not – in these moments, I reached for the parking brake. On the 395, passing maneuvers were rare, the use of hazard lights was frequent, and the flow of traffic on a four-lane freeway stayed consistently below 35 mph with all possible civility.

That civility was hardly limited to paved surfaces. While moving the bookcase into the truck, a neighbor of the seller offered a shovel to clear the bed of snow. The seller himself hoisted the piece into place for the road. We considered taping cut-up garbage bags over it and then decided not to – the air was sufficiently cold that the snow would not turn to water (and the bookcase wouldn’t soak it up) while we were driving.

And so, we made our way to Arlington and (with the better traction attendant to carrying a heavy piece of furniture on the back of a rear-wheel-drive truck) up the hill on Daniel Street to the front of Christina’s building. As we haltingly shoved the bookcase from truck bed to snowbank, one of her neighbors (en route to a party) offered a hand and very quickly the unwieldy piece of furniture was in her bedroom and closely matching the woodgrain of her folding bench seats. He took a beer in thanks and welcomed her to the neighborhood.

On that day when snow covered the lane markers and signposts and other artifacts of traffic law, we were treated to a climatized manifestation of the illustration of a street intersection in England from Jonathan Zittrain’s TED talk on random acts of kindness on the internet. His illustration was to support a point that in the absence of directives and laws, civility prevails (and therefore, Wikipedia maintains a reasonable standard of information quality).

Philosophy and human nature aside, civility indeed prevailed on that afternoon. And however you may disdain precipitation and bitterly cold weather, that civility may not have revealed itself – and we may not have had need of it and therefore a venue to appreciate it – otherwise. It’s part of the reason I love living in a place with a bit of a winter.

And in this weather, I learned how to use a parking brake and hazard lights as part of a driving routine, that wood furniture is better transported in snow than rain, and that strangers can be immeasurably helpful and civil and a default position of ’scared shitless’ towards unknown persons is sometimes untenable.

And on Sunday, I learned to never never walk barefoot in the snow.

After a euphoric 26, 27 so far has been a bit of a grind: while my new employer’s bureaucratic expansion and reshuffling has not diminished the pleasure I take in my work, last semester, I felt little traction with my academic pursuits, my health was inconsistent, creative output stalled.

Whither those mixes in progress, my untended portfolio, my old pencils? They’re everywhere but my fingertips.

And it occurred to me not long ago that I didn’t send a postcard in 2009, and in the year since I last travelled, I have misplaced my mailing list. In advance of a slate of new destinations in 2010 (Houston to meet Christina’s family, Italy and Mexico in the summer – exurbs and romance), if you derive joy from receiving landscape photos and gaudily filtered type on 4″ × 6″ cardstock via snail mail, let me know the best address where I can make your day.

Between travels, I’ll be making an effort to write here with greater frequency. Though I may only compose a few sentences at a stretch, I need to practice for postcards, need to reestablish my flow – the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that I exist.

And I need to remember I have a guitar and a promise to keep, and my fingertips have to make some undesirable noise before I can rock out again. Bear with me.

Consider: as workplace seniority becomes less valuable for employers and less likely for employees, the merits of working in one place from college till done are … what? As the pensions of generations X, Y, and so on hurtle towards a gauntlet of debt obligations, retirement as we know it seems less likely, and given our probable physical fitness (and my personal hope for mental fitness) in the years we will be considered elderly, we’re going to work when we’re older and probably be okay doing it.

This isn’t to say that retirement is impossible. In fact, I’m thinking I’d like to retire sometime in my 30s. And again in my 40s. And 50s – once a decade until death.

You can call it an unsubsidized sabbatical, because that’s what it is. I prefer to think of it as retirement in bursts: after saving and investing at a moderate to high rate for about eight or nine years, take 12~18 months off then re-enter the workplace. I would have to save more money to stay liquid during that time of unemployment (and hope for good health), but the tangible benefits of saving would be revealed to me sooner rather than later. Knowing I would be seeking new employment at least once every decade, I would be forced to maintain leading-edge expertise in my career(s). And, of course, I’d get to enjoy some rest and relaxation, to invest grand swaths time in pursuits other than, well, saving for retirement.

Among the caveats is that health care for the unemployed in the United States is a curious menu of undesirable choices (though continued residence in this country is not mandatory). There’s a possibility I’ll end up with a longer burst of retirement than I anticipate and run out of money before landing a new job. And though I’d like to raise a family, my savings rate would likely suffer under the fiscal weight of a household of more-than-one, the aforementioned curious menu would be untenable to my wife and children, and the discontinuity inherent to this approach would likely emotionally strain people around me (given they’re not also disposed to the idea). Institutionally, the structures built around the model of retirement at a later age – Medicare, Social Security, IRAs, the AARP, daytime television – reinforce the traditional model of working until the seemingly arbitrary age of 65 and thereby also burden younger working generations with the cost of elderly care.

Living as a 38-year-old with an ostensibly twentysomething physicality, I’ve clashed with this institutional structure, and though in 40 years (if it’s still around) I’ll be its benefactor, I desire more greatly to live independently of it and be less burdensome to youth to come. As a fan of retirement, however, this solution effectively uncouples long-term relaxation from aging. And by this retirement calculator (given an annual percentage rate of 7%), my first retirement at 35 is pretty manageable – even 32 is a possibility. So, to that end, among the things I acquired for myself on this birthday was an individual investment account – a few sound bets on blue-chips in a weak economy should make that 7% achievable.

I am also acquiring a new MacBook and hosting local friends for adobo on Saturday.

The day I turned 26 was conferred best day ever status by a confluence of events; the year since has been true to that rainy evening’s promise. Today can’t match it and few days in my life will compare, but I pause to recognize now the feeling of being loved and appreciated and the fact I have friends who write stuff like this. This will be the year I take up guitar and investing. In the meantime, Christina plans to lavish me with dinner at Restaurant Nora.

In McArdle’s case, US = profitable sectors of medical patients, while the movements towards single-payer health care (which I unequivocally support) mean that “US” will pretty much equal all taxpayers (with most of the burden placed on the very richest, if the House bill comes to pass). If all taxpayers have to foot the bill, medical innovation should gravitate towards those diseases that affect the largest parts of the population regardless of revenue potential.

In short, erectile dysfunction can wait while the development of a cure for cancer is subsidized.

I can’t think of a major pharmaceutical company developing drugs or a hospital that performs operations knowing that healthy people are (statistic goes here, help me out people) more productive, and in the case of contagious diseases, keep others healthy and productive as well. Goodwill and utopian notions of an illness-free society aside, there is an argument to be made that there are greater economic benefits in all manner of other private industries when people are healthier.

Good health, like sound education and thoroughly developed transportation infrastructures, is a veritable force multiplier, one that makes us more consistently productive and (even quantifiably) valuable. Better smiles lead to better paychecks, flu shots mean less sick days, less sneezing on the Metro can potentially save dozens of employers lost productivity. Any kind of public health care would actually spur entrepreneurship since health care would become a part of the byzantine process of self-employment tax rather than a separate byzantine process of applying for over-marketed insurance. I could go on.

Now that I’m done assuaging the capitalists I count among my friends, I believe that privatized health care (especially in the wealthy United States) is symptomatic of a culture that neither values sustained wealth over a quarterly economic outlook nor believes that health is a public good, and I think that’s contemptible. The degree to which various systems of subsidized health care address the public good – conceptually or in reality – I’m open to debate.

2. The Apple iPhone’s default software typeface is Helvetica.

3. The Apple iPhone is pretty much unslayable. It won’t matter what other touchscreen-based mobile network interfaces are developed and how much more feature-rich they are and on what networks they run, the iPhone will still be more desirable. I do not proffer an image of one because you, my reader, should know how it looks. It is one of the rare instances of a first-mover dominating a market space, and it’s a first-mover in a hardware interface, no less.

4. Why does the Eames Lounge Chair hold its resale value so well compared to practically every other lounge chair in existence? Of all the thousands designed, there are numerous more comfortable, more visually daring, more exotic in their use of materials. Despite this, the Eames still commands a premium.

5. The choice of Helvetica as the iPhone’s software typeface was a strategy to position the device not merely as the next step in a technological progression — the Motorola RAZR and StarTAC phones were groundbreaking but their cultural value was only set within the context of other mobile phones — but as the next milestone of the modernist tradition.

And in case you were wondering, yes, this has been a long week.

In case it isn’t obvious, I really like taking pictures of birds in motion.

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.

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

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

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

In the space of the last several weeks gliding recklessly above the clouds, papers and case studies and Movable Type templates disconnected from the earth, it was tempting to call that dinner a reprieve or a distraction. But these experiences are also indispensable for perspective, the necessary context for independent professionals toiling, certainly underappreciated and often alone, in a nigh boundless profession. That night, it was free range time (I once knew it as free-association hour), and while it lacked the structure and rigor of the workplace or the seminar, to deem it a euphemism for loafing is naïve and disrespectful of the range of thought and power of metaphors. In that alighting with a plate of Szechuan beef and three colleagues, with the yawning chasm between the day’s labor and my professional pursuits in full view, I remembered the relevance of these lofted abstractions, remembered why the work is worth it.

(I should note the word interdisciplinary peppered this conversation with unsurprising frequency.)