Swaying for Hundreds of Years

A few months ago I wrote about an ambition I would never come through on. While it remains true that I will likely never build a sea (or other) kayak on my own, I do a) think that as far as palindromes go, this one's a nice one, and b) find their craftsmanship admirable and elegant. So when I learned that Nick Schade has a kayak in the permanent collection at MoMA, I was not surprised, because Nick Schade is, from my research, kind of the best.



Furthermore, the kayak above sells for more than $20,000 and was also featured in Wired Magazine. The same article points out that "these kayaks have hulls that are stronger than fiberglass and as tough as carbon fiber."

So while I may never acquire the skills, tools or materials necessary to build a sea kayak, I have managed to develop a deep admiration for the craftsmanship involved. It is interesting to know what other people are doing, and really, really cool to see that somebody's out there making it his life's work.

That I were on my skateboard

I've secretly been back on my skateboard again. Well, secretly between you, me, and the powerful publication and syndication tools made available to me by Google's Blogger. I'm not thinking about writing right now. I'm thinking about the fact that it was almost 100 degrees today in Michigan (well, 93), and that it would be a good time to find an abandoned lot and practice.

The thing that stops me is last fall's broken wrist, cause mentioned above. My left fibula and tibia, to be exact. And that I am sill recovering; case-in-point I was unable to carry my own weight (pun!) yesterday as my roommate attempted to solicit my help while putting in the air conditioning.

The other thing that stops me is that while I want to be good, or at least better at skateboarding than I am now (I can stand up and move around, but not very fast and I still don't know how to stop and I still flail my arms around wildly if I start going too fast or just generally freak out), I am also aware that I am a 26-year-old woman. No amount of funky glasses, cargo shorts and Converse All Stars can change that fact. This would be a pretty sweet fuckin' age to skateboard if I already knew how to skateboard, but I'm old enough to know how dumb it is to try, and right now my brain is worth more than my bank account (thank you, Master's Degree).

Yet sometimes when I'm at the edge of being awake, I'm reminded of the dedication with which I used to spend my final waking hours when I was fifteen, learning how to snowboard. I knew our local ski hill so well that I would practice mentally (with 311's self-titled album in my Sony Discman) until I fell asleep at night. I never became all that good, but I became comfortable, well beyond proficient, to the point where I believed that snowboarding was certainly the best feeling on earth, and true I was still a virgin, and I had never been in love or passed a major test that I thought I might fail, but in retrospect I don't think I was that far from the truth.

learning the instrument as one goes on

Following the mighty path of my fore bearers, I have completed the create your album meme/challenge. You may now complete your own by following these directions:

CREATE YOUR BAND NAME & ALBUM COVER:

1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations”
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

A Curious Paradox

So today I learned the news that Iowa Court has voided the gay marriage ban, to which I responded with a profile update along the lines of "Woo! Iowa!!!"

Such a statement incited questions from my peers, and one friend asked if we would be getting married now (he was referring to me and Silvia, my girlfriend). It's funny, people have been asking us if we plan on getting married, which is PREPOSTEROUS because we live on different sides of the country, have never lived close to each other, and we're both in our early- to mid- 20s. And we're both wobbly on the idea of committing to anybody right now. That said, I know we both love each other a great deal.

Anyhow, I find it curious and pleasing to the soul that so many people, some of whom have never met a gay person before (or realized an acquaintance was gay), are asking me when we're going to get married. It seems that people believe that because Silvia and I found each other out of all the people in the world, we must surely plan on being together forever. Like, our relationship must really be serious because we're willing to be out and gay because of it. But the fact of the matter is that Silvia and I are both out and gay-- neither of us plans on having boyfriends again, and both of us feel pretty at ease in public being gay. We would be dating women with our without each other, and I didn't magically become gay for silvia (hee hee). I mean, how "out" I feel like being varies day by day, but for the most part, people know I'm gay and I expect them to treat me normally. Therefore, it is mostly not seen as a big deal.

There's this sense, and I think it's a good thing, that gay people have gone through a lot in order to be with each other. This is undoubtedly true. I love my girlfriend, but we are at the same place in our lives as our straight peers who probably don't face the same level of "when are you getting married?" It's a strange little paradox that suddenly as a gay person I'm feeling more pressure to marry than a straight person would. Or maybe the world is getting normal enough now about gay people where suddenly I'm getting a sense of what it would be like to be straight. I can't say I'm sure which it is.

The funny thing though is that if we did get married, I can imagine our party. There would be a lot of drinkin' and dancin', good people from varied walks of life, a kick-ass locale, a shit-ton of fun. But that's a party for people older and wiser than Silvia and me...

Ambition #2: Machu Picchu

Do you remember early January, when I mentioned that I was going running every once in a while? Luke & Brian (two of the Bird People) even came over so we could begin running. The reason I started running again, and was excited about it, was because we had spent the prior evening drinking Woodchucks (erm, well that was just me) and looking up both Mayan and Incan lore and history on Wikipedia (don't make fun, this is what the Bird People do on a Friday or Saturday evening, especially after an exciting recent visit to the Field Museum, which had featured a monumental exhibit on the Ancient Americas). As we all have dabbled in some form of running, and have all at least accomplished a 1/2 marathon, our discussion reasonably shifted to the altitude of Machu Picchu, and how Inca runners transferred information between posts. Or something to that effect.

We stumbled across this. That is, Inca Runners, a service that offers altitude training in the Andes on the Inca Trail. The Machu Picchu trail offers a week of runs at up to 7 miles daily-- at Andes altitudes, this is only for dedicated athletes. But we're all like, "Hell, yeah! Let's run this bitch!"

Okay, so my post a few days ago got me thinking about the obvious quick dissolution of this ambition. We trashed the goal within the month. It was treated as ridiculous, a joke, from the beginning. Certainly we're all pretty busy. I don't know what Brian and Luke are doing now in terms of running (they're more serious runners than I am), but I got busy.

But hey, the sun's out, the sky's blue, and it would be a really good day for running. Maybe I will lace up this afternoon, grab my iPod, go and dream again.

Hej!

I'm sitting in my class, and we're reviewing Web Analytics, so I decided to check mine while I was at it, and noticed a surprising amount of traffic coming in from Sverige. More specifically, I noticed that traffic coming in from How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons.

I greatly enjoy HTLSi1000DL, mayhaps due to the fact that I was an exchange student in Bromma, Sweden in the late 90s, and went through many of the same lessons of your referring blogger.

So welcome. I don't have any difficult lessons for you today.

Ambition that is not supported by skill or by the ability to envision systematic implementation is idiocy. Or at least that is what spending too much time as an Information Masters' student might lead one to believe. However, I am nothing if not ambitious without the ability to execute.

About a year ago, I decided I would build a kayak. This event was to take place sometime in my lifetime, and I was about to move into a place with a backyard, so this was good. I researched kayak construction fairly extensively (the authoritative source appears to be The Strip-Built Sea Kayak by Nick Schade).

Wanting to build a kayak stemmed from my desire to construct something that was the nexus of utility and design, to really make something, to have something tangible that marked that time period of my life.

I suppose my lifespan should instead be measured by haphazard and wreckless ambition.

The other day my roommate asked me "how do font designers do what they do?" As in, how do they translate the image of the font they envision into a codable piece of information? I didn't know, but I immediately felt like I wanted to find out. I asked my mom, the typographer. She confirmed what I had vaguely suspected, but she's not a font designer, so she didn't clarify: fonts are designed in illustrator as vector files.

I have no training in Illustrator, nor any experience in typography. To design a font would be a fool's errand at best, stupidiful at the worst (yes, it would be so dumb that the derogatory term for my prospective task doesn't even make sense). Yet there comes that ambition, daring me to figure out how to make it happen. The sheer scale of the task, the research involved, the skill needed to be developed, this is what draws me toward ambitions like these. It's the idea that I can, with the proper application, still accomplish anything.

My life can be measured by a series of failed ambitions. And this is not a bad thing. It speaks of the mind's will to put ideas into action, which is one of the most remarkable aspects of life on earth. No, a pile of failed ambitions is nothing I fear. If I manage to record 1/3 of them, I'll be happy. Some of my happiest and most fulfilling moments have been the nights I couldn't sleep because I decided I was going to make a movie (11th grade), learn a foreign language (10th grade), write a comic strip (6th grade, and again in 2006), start a T-shirt company, etcetera, etcetera.

I actually think I'm hitting my stride in Human-Computer Interaction, too, because it's an avenue of channeling my ambition to do exciting things into a tangible and cost-effective format. If I believe that something is important enough, I can effectively communicate how and why it could be used, and having that perspective is useful.

Be prepared to hear of more unscalable projects from Yours Truly in the coming years. Maybe I'll figure out a way to pull something off, but if not, I bid you "Go Not Gently."